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

Their yelp reviews are completely unreliable, everything is 4 or 5 stars. I'm used to Chicago where even a great restaurant can have 3 stars because everyone is so picky, and the 4 or 5 stars are reserved for the truly extraordinary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

People don't care unfortunately. Services are convenient and offer a better bang for the buck in the sort term. At some point though you lose your job and your music library is gone, you have nothing to watch because everyone streams and thus the movie/show selling market was never forced to solve it's copyright issues. You have no car because it was leased and you have no place to stay because the landlord kicked you out when you missed a rent( and buying an apartment or a house is crazy expensive across the board for some reason I still don't understand).

>Do we want to live in a world where every device is a black box that's only reparable by "authorized" personnel, where some hobby-level engineering skill won't help you prevent a 1$ dishwasher repair from costing 100$? Where every appliance comes with a plan, favors a "platform" and will make your life a headache if you disagree, serves you but also who knows how many other masters and economic agendas, and inexplicably goes dark because bankruptcy, bugs, hacks, your guess is as good as mine?

We need to find a way to make manufacturing electronics cheap. The cat is out of the bag and electronics and software will become part of everything. Maybe a smart fridge is a stupid idea now but it might make sense in a different context. I think Japan has been big on various home automation for many decades now before sv decided to reinvent the wheel but the cases I read about were much more respecting and user-controlled.

>Constant wariness and justified cynicism are exhausting and dehumanizing and will do their part to sap an entire society. We know how this goes in the case of corrupt illiberal states, but ending up in that same place via a corrupt corporate culture/state is also possible, happening as we speak even, and halting that should be seen as another layer of defense for the liberal order.

There is no liberal order anymore. Have you noticed how everything today is tense? Like every interaction has to be within very narrow and at the same time arbitrary limits? How everything even slightly political turns into a shitshow and not just online. Everyone has to be super careful of his/her personal ratings and there is no room to vent off and do your own thing because if society finds out it will tear you apart.

Services are indisputably a good thing and they are absolutely the way forwards. There is no reason for anybody to own much of anything and with global middle class approaching 4 billion it's simply not possible for the extremely wasteful concept of "ownership" to survive. Metering is the only way forwards besides catastrophe.

> Already, I mistrust non-OSS computing devices with their mystery-meat forced updates and non-removeable apps and barrage of legal agreements.

You've stumbled upon the actual issue which is nothing more than compelled business (in Europe and Asia) and what I guess the US calls a "coercive monopoly" [1]. The fundamental problem with Apple's App Store is that there is no reasonable alternative. Individuals and businesses which purchase IPhone devices are forced to do business with Apple if they want to actually utilize those devices to their full potential. Similarly developers who wish to provide services around IPhones have no choice but to do business with Apple.

> We know how this goes in the case of corrupt illiberal states, but ending up in that same place via a corrupt corporate culture/state is also possible, happening as we speak even, and halting that should be seen as another layer of defense for the liberal order.

Ironically, if you want to see a government who gets this "right" take a look at China. Chinese governments have moved aggressively to prevent monopolies and the laws were modified ten years ago to draw a clear distinction between a market (where all businesses interact freely and there is fair competition) and a platform (where a single business dictates virtually all the economic terms). This, along with the relaxed IP framework, is why the Chinese market is much more competitive and dynamic than anything else going on out there. At this point I don't think anybody seriously expects America's ultra-right-wing Supreme Court to break Apple's monopoly, but earlier this year there were a lot of indicators suggesting that Apple's coercive practices were not welcome [2]. (Though this issue might solve itself if Apple's market share in China continues to plunge.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercive_monopoly

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/business/china-apple-app-...

Someone above mentioned due process. I second that. What we have right now is no where near robust enough.

So, I will have a friendly conversation with someone. The human means, ways, methods work well and are time tested, production proven.

5 stars, unless it is really bad, and they do not have some cause for that being the case.

Honestly, the income is thin, many of these people are working their asses off, and is that not harsh enough?

Not much to like in all of it.

Uber can press a button in response to a strike and send out a push notification to potential scabs offering a bribe to cross the digital picket line. The strikers both don't know and can't efficiently tell who scabs are, and as such can't put pressure for solidarity on them.

It's also unfortunate that web pages have the disadvantage that they have the browser UI around them, so it reduces the space available to the page versus an app, and web pages don't have permissions that apps do like sending notifications. Some people view this as a good thing and I tend to agree, but it's still a big disconnect that my weather app can send me a notification saying there is a tornado in my area whereas a weather website needs me to actively be checking it.

I can't help but think of a platform like that but international and for all jobs. Hellish reality.

Because the problems that need to be solved aren't technical ones and won't be solved with technology. They are meatspace-based cultural, economic and social problems.

Not sure how to get general users to rate with 1-star = bad, 3-stars = ok, and 5-stars = great. Sounds like a social engineering problem. It may be more reliable to use trained evaluators, like the system used by Consumer Reports or the Michelin Guide.

Companies in China do fine without the Google App Store.

Ideally, the 5-star rating system should work like:

  - 1-star means Awful
  - 2-star means Bad
  - 3-star means OK
  - 4-star means Good
  - 5-star means Excellent

  - 1-star means Couldn't be worse
  - 2-star means Awful
  - 3-star means Bad
  - 4-star means There was a problem
  - 5-star means OK

Being more accepting of 4-star or 3-star ratings is not sabotaging competitive market forces; it's trying to use the 5-star rating system like it should be.

Now Apple doesn’t need 30%, but they’d lose huge amounts of money at 5%. A more reasonable guess at App Store break-even is that it requires at least 10%.

https://solecollector.com/news/2014/12/how-much-it-costs-nik...

Which is why the article emphasized Netflix trying to get customers to sign up through their web site, and not the app.

Other than inventing the modern phone, writing the operating system and developer tools, running the store, manufacturing the phones people are consuming Amazon's product on and convincing people to buy them...you can argue about what's "fair," but Apple's certainly adding value.

Steam is almost exactly the same way because it's not like you can take your Steam purchase and use it without Steam. Yes, you can buy DLC and other add-ons directly from the publisher if you wanted to but that's moreso because of how the publishers have created their products rather than how Steam works as a platform.

As for your Amazon example, Apple does absolutely add value there. They manage and keep track of all your purchases and payments so that there's a single, unified method for both paying and resolving issues. Additionally, since Apple functions as the payment processor, you're also paying for the security functionality. The only reason you have to make a purchase from the Amazon website is because Amazon wants to control the purchasing and doesn't want to pay Apple for their payment processing.

It's just a difference of whether you prefer the consistency of the experience that Apple prefers at the expense of other companies or whether you prefer to deal with several different experiences that could potentially open everything up for fraud and problems. People who aren't as tech savvy or who don't want to have to wade through a bunch of BS just to make a purchase may prefer Apple's method. Others may prefer digging through and doing all that in order to have a broader pool to choose from.

I like having all my subscriptions in the same place so I can easily see what I'm paying and cancel.

A. You can choose to buy an Android phone like 80%+ of the smart phone world.

B. You can buy content outside of the Apple store and use it within the app (Amazon, Udemy, Spotify, Google Play Music, every video streaming service, etc.)

It seems unreasonable to me that Apple should get a cut of my Amazon Video purchases.

They don't, in fact you can't buy Amazon content within the app.

But Apple doesn't have a majority of market share (by number of devices), so, in my opinion, antitrust regulators have completely discounted their behavior.

On the other hand, the experience of using Apple Pay is miles beyond Google Checkout/Wallet/Pay/Android Pay/whatever marketing's new name-of-the-week-is, and only allowing One Blessed Way of taking payment on Apple devices is a big component of that. Having one consistent flow that I can execute in three seconds from muscle memory really does make buying-from-random-apps-and-retailers experience much nicer and more predictable than it is on the web and on other mobile platforms.

I suspect they'll either put a limit on # of free keys or start charging per key, something like 5% of your listed retail price.

No one can launch a competing app service on iOS. Apparently you can on Android, but I'm not sure why no one succeeded yet. Maybe the same reason as no one succeeded yet replacing Steam either, you need some kind of critical mass and that takes time to build.

That’s the value add IMO, not the aluminum case, the Apple logo, or anything else. A locked garden isn’t perfect, but it’s better than an open sewer.

I’m getting very tired of the phrase “de facto” bandied about in front of monopoly as a way to use the latter word in a way that has no legal or technical merit. Words have meanings. Apple has a walled garden which competes with similar products, it’s just that Apple’s is better in many ways. They have a valuable audience, they don’t suffe from the security issues of their competitors, and that may make you want to use them. So use them, or don’t, and accept the trade-offs.

Don’t like Apple? Try android, their competition in the same space.

Google copied Apple?

The fee is paying towards the development of Android. Your comparison of "same services" isn't remotely valid.

The entire platform the app runs on was created by Apple. The hardware, the OS, the programming language, the SDKs.

Thousands of APIs used to build the apps, maybe a million pages of documentation on those APIs.

All the toolchain to develop, build, test, and deploy apps for purchase in hundreds of countries including customer profiles, billing, and support.

Billions of dollars of iCloud infrastructure for backend services to support everything from push notifications, data sync, backup, automatic updates, etc.

Then you get into the actual app store and you have all the work that went into the UX there for discovering, installing, buying and reviewing apps. In-app purchases and subscription services to support different business models. Family sharing, parental controls, parental approval requirements for kids’ phones.

I could go on for hours and probably still miss huge swaths of functionality that Apple invested millions of dollars into, just so that you could pull up chair and with a few lines of code start writing an app that can reach billions of devices.

Not to mention all the marketing and training and support Apple does to prime their customers to be big users of the App Store.

Yeah, and the bandwidth to download the app as well.

Personally I think 30% is a steal for what you get in return.

Oh, and I’ll just add one more thing; you can distribute your app for free and you pay Apple nothing (or nearly nothing) for the benefit of all their hard work and infrastructure and support.

Yes. That's why they cut out remote control purchasing feature from their iOS app, to avoid hypocrisy charges and to avoid the sticky situation where a steam app tried the same (letting you make microtransaction purchases by remoting in to your phone or something).

Same as why Epic dropped their marketplace cut down from 30% something like one week before their "30% is unfair" press campaign which in turn was used to take the spotlight off criticism of Fortnite's release on Android as a timed exclusive with Samsung's new flagship.

Most console games are still sold retail because people want the ability to trade them in. In the early 2000's high speed internet wasn't ubiquitous and most software was still being sold in retail.

The app store narrative has been 'look at how much better developers have it than the old days of retail' when the reality is most of the smaller developers could never realistically sell through the traditional retail channel anyways. (there was a lot more to it than the larger cut involved) The other reality is that mobile devices are locked down in ways that PCs historically have not been (i.e. difficult to impossible for most end users to install software outside of the app store) and the only realistic option they had was to go through the platform owner. (i.e. Apple/Google/Amazon/Microsoft)

So the app stores have been a net positive for small developers? How many people are (or should be) paranoid about downloading software from a random site and then putting their credit card information on the same random site? How many that are willing would even go through the trouble of entering their credit card number as opposed to just authorizing the payment through Apple/Google?

Console manufacturers have also demanded a cut of software sold on their platform since the mid 80s. You couldn't sell a game on a console without having signed code on the cartridge/disk and I believe most of the console makers forced you to use them for manufacturering..

Price is purely a function of supply and demand. If app makers decide that it's not worth the 30% cut that Apple charges to reach the < 20% of phone users that use iOS, they either can increase their price or not sell on Apple platforms.

But realistically, the developers who are making the most money are the ones doing in app purchases for coins, loot boxes, etc. It's not exactly costing them anything to "produce" more coins.

Only if people would find and download your app somewhere else. This works for fortnite because they have the brand recognition and fanbase who will seek it out elsewhere. Even then it might be a barrier.

For smaller apps there's little chance they'd be making as much money or ever even be found if they weren't on the app store so the 30% maybe a fair price to pay vs nothing at all.

Seems like a trade-off where any app developer can self-publish yet there are still a lot of apps available on the play store.

Android is obviously a larger ‘strategic’ play so I would argue that should be excluded and Google Play Services are also likely to either be ‘strategic’ plays (ie Apple offers music, so do we; Customers want movies, let’s offer them too, etc) or potentially revenue positive.

If Google’s and Apple’s accountants can setup magical tax systems across the world - they could also provide some useful data points about the true costs of running their App stores.

As a specific example, I’d be interested to know, what the hosting and bandwidth costs are for the App Stores (likely heavily subsidised given both Apple and Google run cloud platforms including hosting).

At the moment, there is next to no transparency except the “30%” cut and some high-level info in their quarterly financial reports.

And I don't think you are actually disagreeing with your parents at all. Because all the services they provided and as you have listed are now considered as standard. That is like accepting credit cards and cashiers in Retail stores. They are not providing enough useful valued ON TOP of the standard expected.

Microsoft failed to establish a healthy developer community and had to close the whole smartphone department because nobody wanted their phones. Windows Phone was a very good operating system and had very high quality hardware but because the apps were missing, people bought Android and iOS.

But without the app stores and tools, developers won't get their apps to their customers.

My gut feeling based on how search and navigation is structured in the play store (a few broad categories, no option for sorting, seemingly arbitrary "algorithmic" surfacing of apps) is that crippling navigation in this way is probably better for their bottom line (in the short term at least) and for gathering ad revenue. It mirrors the way a lot of social media apps are displaying seemingly randomly ordered content mixed with ads (facebook, snapchat for a while but they seem to have given you back the ability to know you've seen all your friends stories for now).

From an end user perspective it's awful, but I assume whatever metrics they're using tell them it's a great idea.

If you have an ad-based model, there's less of a reason improve those other systems, since the store might be able to extract 75% of the value created if you get developers bidding against each other to buy visibility. But it sucks for everyone except the app store owner.

I think OP's complaint is that it feels like Apple isn't actually maintaining "the centralized software distribution channel." Apple built something that's good enough, and is in some sense holding their users hostage.

Users would like the ability to buy apps. Developers would like to sell to them. But Apple has created a system where both parties MUST go through Apple. I think this is really key. I don't see a reason why the iOS App Store has to be the only place to buy apps other than that Apple makes more money that way.

What incentive is there for Apple to add new App Store features, improve search, etc.? They've built a system where they're the only option. It doesn't take much to see how this is bad for consumers.

Clearly Apple is providing some value through the app store and deserves a cut, but why 30%? If there was some competition Apple may be forced to lower their rate, but as it stands they can charge whatever they like. It's not a market rate, its whatever Apple can squeeze out of developers.

Well, the counter to this is that it is not Apple's userbase. Apple doesn't own those phones. Consumers do, because those consumers paid for them.

The alternative isn't "don't build for this market". The alternative is doing exactly what these companies are doing, and building their own marketplace/appstore/distributing on their own website like Fortnite does.

People have the right to install whatever they want of phones that they own.

It's called "rent-seeking".

It's quite frankly an obnoxious, Apple has to control everything, replacement for all of the other various startups who were creating marketing channels for developers to reach new users.

The search was crap, the recommended apps were crap, the way the data was presented is horrible, etc. I didn't downvote you, but it seems obvious to me that their tools and design were not intended with UX in mind, but profits.

Getting the App costs you a 33% tax over not having the app in this circumstance.

You absolutely can release Android apps without going through any app store, and if you go through an app store, it doesn't have to be Google's. There are different pros and cons for Google's store, handset maker’s stores (e.g., Samsung has their own), other stores (e.g., Amazon's), and direct distribution of your own apps without a store.

The issue is that the play store is shipped as the default and many people do not know there are other options.

Also the friction of buying is lower. I’m not going to put my credit card information in every random website. I will keep a credit card on file with Apple and just use my fingerprint to authorize the purchase.