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Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference. Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
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One is a general computing device and one is for a specific task (gaming).
That seems rather arbitrary. I'm not doing any general computing on my iPhone, I'm just browsing Hacker News and watching YouTube. If your contention is that the phone is capable of doing more than those two things, well, isn't the Xbox capable of doing more than just gaming?
The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those ex…
They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate. It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0,…
Does this mean Apple will have to give up their % fees or that they have to allow third party app stores in the US? And when does that go into effect?
About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?" Excerpt from the filing: "In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompe…
> About time. Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it? If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide i…
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Get ready to answer why an iPhone is different than an xbox
Consoles are sold at-cost to consumers, or sometimes even at a loss: https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-loses-up-to-200-on-ever... iPhones are sold at a _premium_. If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552
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As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that (1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14…
It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that. I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
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Well, yeah. It would have shown that their commissions are nothing but rent-seeking.
Exactly my point! This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!" Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market. Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity. (Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberti…
Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference. Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner. As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.