Developers revolt over Apple's new app store rules

I like your takes on this.

To me, theres two issues:

1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.

2) taxes, is you want to line apples 30% up with those, are just part of business. No, you cant write off the 30%, but if you want to keep adding 250million new phones to your potential customer base every year.... wtf, pay up and be happy? To be fair, taxes arent the same - taxes take money out of an economic system usually based on economic activity to make currency actually worth something. But they kind of are the same in that they keep the infrastructure that lets you reach customers going.

I guess we can move to the windows model and place the burden on the customers, pay your $99/yr for updates or whatever, but then youd have ... like no one buy the phone.

Apples stance is - if you generate economic activity on the phone, you should have to pay to upkeep the roads that keep the phone working. I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.

But, for little Timmy to buy diamonds in a mobile game from an alternate store he would have to install the alternate store then "borrow" his parent's credit card to register with the new store.

If "little" Timmy is pulling those sort of shenanigans then I suggest his parents have bigger problems and they probably won't blame Apple at all.

Cause and effect. The why’s matter not to me, the end user.

> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.

This is just such a radically different way thinking about platforms than the way that I think about them. It's like saying that I owe Facebook for the privilege of talking to my college friends because "they're not my friends, they're Facebook's users and I've been given access to them."

It's hard for me to debate something like this because it's just so fundamentally incompatible with my basic axioms about how interactions work online. The idea that platforms own their users is just not how I see the world.

> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.

If every single developer jumped ship off of iOS, iOS would stop existing. We only have to look at Windows Phone to understand what the difference is between a platform with developer support and a platform without developer support.

The reality is that Apple and developers have a mutually beneficial relationship and they are more like partners than customers. If Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, etc all stopped working on iOS, iOS users would jump to Android. Heck, look at the most recent Vision Pro launch, in which I saw users complaining that Apple even gave iPad developers the choice at all of whether or not their apps would be supported on the new device. The users want the apps.

So this is something that users care about, and users pay Apple handsomely for the privilege of accessing developers on iOS. That doesn't mean developers should pay literally nothing, but this is a relationship. The argument that developers are just customers always strikes me as vaguely Comcast-y -- saying that Net Neutrality is unfair and that websites are leeches if they don't pay for network access. No, your customers are there because of us. Customers are paying for access to a service that allows them to access the stuff that they actually care about -- apps, movies, books, the ability to talk to their friends, the ability to transact online, the ability to browse websites. And this gets back to the disagreement on axioms above, but to treat those customers primarily as if they're just resources to be locked down and resold for even more profit -- I just don't think it's a healthy place for a platform to be in.

> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air

Funnily enough, iOS launched without an app store entirely on the promise of using web apps for all of its functionality. We weren't using the term PWA back then, but it's notable how different iOS's approach to application development is today than what it was when iOS launched. And notable for Apple's continued direction as the company appears to be actively reducing PWA functionality in Europe in response to increased browser access.

What we have on the web is effectively what Apple hates -- a completely Open, device-agnostic ecosystem of apps that is much more difficult for any one company to lock down or extract rent from. But Apple didn't always hate that principle, when iOS originally launched they were all for it; and in fact Apple looked at the web as a key strategy in differentiating their devices -- by offering developers a way to target their devices without development kits, exhaustive agreements, or commissions.

Over time that became less valuable to Apple, and it became increasingly important for Apple to distinguish between web capabilities and native capabilities.

Is that change fair, are they entitled to do it? I don't know, but it's not the direction I want the computing industry to go. How we deal with Apple's increasingly hostile approach to Open Standards, user freedoms, and market competition is an open question, but it seems clear to me that we should be trying to deal with it at the point where Apple is threatening to go backwards on web standards in response to regulation that opens them up to browser and ecosystem competition.

If cookie pop-ups are not the intent of the law why does the EU website use them? https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en