Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#471

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

zoomablemind wrote: post #468

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what a respectful and user-controlled smart household appliance looks like and how it's built Connected straight to your smartphone without a server in the middle or not connected to the internet at all. E.g. make your bathtub automatically fill up with water at your preferred temperature on a specified time every day and then maintain that for x amount of time. Flush it automatically after that time if you haven't…

Nice to peek into personal preferences. It seems a lot is revolving around immediacy, basically small mundane actions treated as time-wasteful. I find all of the seeming incoveniences are often interaction points, chances to bump with the world around us. Ran out of coffee? ... hmm, dig out an old stash of tea (it may even taste better), or stop by a coffee house, maybe meet a love of your life, or just live a 'diffe…

It really depends on the person I guess. For example I live close to the sea so I get to swim a lot in the summer. As a kid we didn't have air conditioning in the car so when I arrived I was super hot and I jumped straight into the water. After we got an air-conditioned car a bit part of the appeal went away. Nowadays when I go to the sea I make sure to turn the air conditioner off for the last few minutes before I get there to get some of the extra satisfaction.

Notice that e.g. on the coffee example I specifically didn't suggest ordering coffee automatically for you or something. I buy fresh grinded(is that the right word?) coffee myself that I buy from a local coffee shop so all I would want is a reminder-maybe a specific text file where I input the stuff that I need to buy and the coffee machine adds coffee on it automatically. Then I can sync that file to my phone when I go shopping( maybe a couple of QR codes?).

Anyway the point of home IOT for me would be to get ease the mental load of keeping up with the house and maybe save some time with e.g. the bath tub( maybe if you decide to connect the system to your smartphone with e.g. a key exchange via lan you could tell the bath tub to extend the time that it keeps the water ready).

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#472

Post by clarky07 » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #386

buboard wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple made $11 billion from apps in 2017. I doubt they spent more than $1B on app distribution. You d have to add research costs to go up to 10%.

I guarantee they spent more. The host over 2 million apps, in hundreds of geographic locations. With updates, they are distributing billions of releases and updates a year. And some of those apps exceed a gigabyte in size. Outside of raw bandwidth and storage costs, someone has to run those tens of thousands of servers across the world, and manage development of the distribution software. Then you need sales and mark…

>And they are all in Cupertino

Do you have a source for that? I'm 99.9% sure this isn't true. I've had apps rejected where the screenshots had non-english characters in the status bar, and rejections because the app had no daily content because they were testing at like 3:00 am our time and we publish our daily content around 10:00 am.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#473

Post by clarky07 » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #84

jimbokun wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, if you already have a subscription for Amazon Video through the web, then download the Amazon Video app and login to your existing account, Apple doesn't get anything. Which is why the article emphasized Netflix trying to get customers to sign up through their web site, and not the app.

Correct. Apple gets a cut if a customer subscribes through the in-app one-click subscription, which is extremely convenient for any iPhone user (and thus app publishers) because it’s a single click rather than having to insert credit cards, 3D secure and whatnot. In this case the cut is 30% on the first year and 10% afterwards. If the user subscribes through the website, Apple gets nothing. I find this fair. What is…

it's 15% in future years, not 10%.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#474

Post by kyle-rb » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 1:18 AM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #470

kyle-rb wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Case in point - where's the competitor for the Mac App Store on macOS? There's not. Users have to do all the legwork themselves. Yeah, double-clicking that DMG and dragging the .app 30 pixels to the Applications shortcut is a lot of work. >That's literally no different than side-loading your own apps. Yup, clicking and dragging is the same as configuring a different machine to properly build and provision.

Stop being obtuse. People have to find the software they want first and then download the DMG from somewhere which usually involves ignoring a billion fake "DOWNLOAD NOW" buttons. The App Store is a trusted platform with literally one click find an app and one click to install. You're being purposely disingenuous.

What? First of all my main argument was that installing outside the App Store is much easier on MacOS than it is on iOS.

Second: many, many sites host their own DMG downloads, with zero fake download buttons. I don't think searching for an app's website on Google is significantly harder than searching for an app in the App Store (also I'm not sure typing in search terms is "one click", but whatever). I'll admit that using the App Store is slightly less work to install stuff, and somewhat more secure.

But from a user standpoint (I use a Mac with one or two App Store apps and dozens of DMG-installer-based apps) it's not a huge difference. And from a developer standpoint, that's not worth 30% of my revenue.