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Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

appfairness.org

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Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#621

Post by vorpalhex »

ta8964586 wrote: post #508
candiddevmike wrote: post #62

Device freedom is a must. Any device should be completely controllable by the end user. There's two parts to this to me: app stores and the data collected by the devices. Users should have the freedom to install any software on their devices, period. Users should also have the freedom to stop all data collection by these devices. This applies to all electronics--video game consoles, TVs, printers, who knows what else…

Genuinely curious, how would you give users "the freedom to stop all data collection by these devices" without some kind of walled garden. Is the solution something like flatpack for all apps? but then how do you make sure all apps don't just refuse to work without permission to collect data or manage to collect information without users knowing? You can't force developers to be honest about what their app does witho…

You can monitor what calls an app makes. LittleSnitch on Mac is an example example of this.

There are going to be nefarious actors who still manage to bypass it, and there are going to be risks outside of a walled garden - and that's a meaningful choice we can provide users.

"Hey, you can stay inside the app store and get these promises, or you can install what you want and risk X, Y and Z."

Android does this.. decently well. There are issues with the google framework, but otherwise it's functional - my elderly family doesn't need me to reset their phones every month, yet I can sideload all my games and FOSS apps.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#622

Post by headmelted »

zepto wrote: post #522
kodablah wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments. Exclusive? Why can't I write an app store?

For the same reason you can’t build a phone. You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

But that's not anti-competitive.

All manner of well-funded corporations would be able to start app stores on mobile, and several (Epic, Valve/Steam, Microsoft) would start app stores the second they were able to.

They'd also be competing for software - as there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed in those 30% margins.

The competition, which would be fierce, is more than enough to solve the issue of price fixing.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#623

Post by fanatic2pope »

nicetryguy wrote: post #75

I'm surprised at all of the negativity here. The changes proposed would be great for developers, even if (most) of the companies involved are shady, their reasons are selfish, and the obvious "astroturfiness" of the website is laughably dissonant and reeks like a dirty think tank that hasn't been cleaned in months. Apple has no qualms about absolutely screwing developers historically. I'm happy to see some pushback.

Support for Epic never took root on HN because techno-entrepreneurs see themselves not as mere fart app developers but as temporarily embarrassed billionaire monopolists.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#624

Post by bogwog »

zepto wrote: post #529
bogwog wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Being able to sell on more than one store is a massive advantage. Besides the obvious lower risks and lower fees, you can also benefit from better exposure and discovery (two things that are terrible on the app store and google play) especially in niche stores.

Being forced to sell on multiple stores and comply with multiple sets of store rules just to access the same set of consumers is a massive disadvantage. There will be greater risks. It’s conceivable that fees will be a little lower, but this will only benefit larger developers who can absorb the increased costs of dealing with all the stores. It will be nothing but destructive for smaller developers.

There is so much wrong with everything you're saying, but I am not going to spend the time to point it all out, especially since you seem to have thoroughly convinced yourself that these assumptions are true.

But I'll just point this out:

> sell on multiple stores and comply with multiple sets of store rules just to access the same set of consumers is a massive disadvantage.

The only way this might be a problem is if all of the 1 billion+ iOS users were your customers, because then maybe some of them might decide to stop using the appstore completely, and maybe that'd happen instantly over night. Then maybe you'd have to publish your app on a second store (which would mean selling your app for a second time to those users who decided to leave the app store and never look back).

But regardless, if you have 1 billion customers, supporting a second or third for 40th store is not going to incur any significant costs. In fact, it might even lower them as most competing stores would likely distribute to both Android and iOS at the same time (Google Play would undoubtedly start selling iOS apps). Plus there will 100% be third party services for managing store pages across all the stores out there for a nominal fee (or even for free).

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#625

Post by lotsofpulp »

mardifoufs wrote: post #590
lotsofpulp wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the problem with analogies. It fools people by falsely parading as a valid argument. Edit: The use of a life insurance salesman as an example is hilariously appropriate given the scam that whole life insurance is and how many people are fooled into buying it.

Im curious, how is life insurance a scam? Yes investing the money is probably better, but insurance is a hedge against the risk of not having saved enough because of an early death. I'm not familiar with the life insurance industry though, so I'm maybe missing something!

Insurance is for minimizing losses you can't afford. Term life insurance is good if you have dependents and their life would be negatively impacted by the loss of your income. There is very little profit and commission in term life insurance, so life insurance salesmen will push whole life.

Whole life insurance is rarely necessary, and extremely expensive compared to the alternatives. See links below.

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/what-you-need-to-know-abou...

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/debunking-the-myths-of-who...

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=57154

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#626

Post by judge2020 »

bogwog wrote: post #608
judge2020 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-epic-games/apple-sa...

I don't see how that's relevant. Epic isn't suing Apple so that they can have exclusive rights to open a second app store, they're suing to allow third-party app stores in general. If Epic wins, they aren't going to be part of a small group of store owners; anyone would be able to open their own competing store.

So if Apple had entertained the original pre-lawsuit request, would epic have fought until Apple allowed app stores other than Epic and Apple existing?

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#627

Post by crazygringo »

revel wrote: post #441

To me this seems pretty straightforward. App Stores are directly tied and bundled with the operating system. Within the device universe there are basically 2 choices of operating systems. This is an extremely concentrated industry with an extremely high HHI. Apple and Google favor their own products and discriminate against competitors and have done for years. They also extract rent from other companies forced to use…

> To me this could not be more clear.

The difference was that Microsoft monopolized the PC OS market.

Apple does not monopolize the cell phone OS market.

Consumers still have total choice between Apple and Android, so it's not an identical situation whatsoever. If Macs had had 50% market share way back when (instead of what, 5%?), Microsoft would never have been in legal trouble for bundling IE.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#628

Post by munificent »

hrktb wrote: post #356
munificent wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are almost always a source of distraction, people start to argue about the analogy itself instead of the topic at hand, which is almost always completely counter productive. My experience is that this is very true among a certain group of people, particularly literal-minded software enngineer types. But it is much less true in the general population where a single good analogy can accomplish more than pages of…

> a single good analogy can accomplish more than pages of prose I think that's where the danger lies. In the end we are not explaining much, just passing a vision of the issue in terms of good/bad/meh depending on the analogy we choose. That's also how we convince people a lot of stuff is just "against freedom", or "big acting selfishly" etc. As you say it accomplishes something, people take a position very quickly.…

I think what you're noting is that analogies are powerful tools. They can create a deep visceral association between A nd B that strongly affects how someone feels about B based on their existing feelings about A.

Like any powerful tool, it can be misused. But it can also do great good when used well. We live in a world surrounded by fiendishly complex systems with layers of abstractions and deep chains of emergent phenomena. Our primate brains aren't geared to process the consequences of our actions in a space that far removed from the forests where we evolved.

Analogies are one of the best tools I know to let us do that. But we do have to be careful about which analogies we choose to believe.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#629

Post by zepto »

Apocryphon wrote: post #536
zepto wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being forced to sell on multiple stores and comply with multiple sets of store rules just to access the same set of consumers is a massive disadvantage. There will be greater risks. It’s conceivable that fees will be a little lower, but this will only benefit larger developers who can absorb the increased costs of dealing with all the stores. It will be nothing but destructive for smaller developers.

This is scaremongering. Android has alternative app stores and most apps don't bother releasing to them. iOS would not fragment overnight into dozens of app stores if it was to become open. Likely the majority of apps would still target the App Store, with a handful of major competing stores. These competitors would be incentivized to attract developers, otherwise they would end up with the same lack of apps that kil…

The handful of competitors would be multi-billion dollar corporations, e.g. Epic, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.

The incentive for developers is as always, customers. The stores would be incentivized to acquire customers. Developers would be forced to support any store that had more than a few percent of customers.

Acquiring customers can be done without giving good terms to most developers. All you need is a small number of exclusives. Epic has their own content, and the others would be able for trivially bid foe the top apps. Facebook and Amazon would simply extend their existing iOS apps into becoming stores, and presumably Google could do this with Chrome for iOS, which they’d trivially market via search results.

There is no reason these stores would need the long tail of apps as long as they had a few very popular ones, and that would reduce exposure for the long tail that did remain in the Apple store.

Your point about standardization of store rules isn’t obvious - what industry do you think this compares with?

There is no reason to think that this would do anything to democratize the industry, indeed it would be likely to have the opposite effect, of increasing barriers to entry for smaller developers.

My position isn’t extreme in the least. It is the obvious extrapolation of the behaviors of current players.

An extreme position would be the emergency of a utopia of developer centric stores all bending over themselves to make things better for the little guy.

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