Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

I promise you that Apple does not give a shit about the revenue from the developer program.

It's not just about the revenues of $100/year. It's also the revenue from 30% sharing of profits. And most importantly, it's the bigger revenue generated from having apps that work only on iOS, which drives users to buy iPhones and iPads.

A PWA app isn't going to generate any 30% revenue share for Apple since no one is paying for it in the PWA case and thus likely won't be paying for it in the pure app case either.

Why would no-one be paying for a PWA? There are countless paid-for services available via web apps.

Providing even a free native app via the App Store to access a service with a subscription model becomes a very risky proposition given Apple's rules, though.

Can you give a few examples of paid-for PWAs? Sure there are websites that are paid-for, but I've never seen a paid-for PWA.

I'm posting pseudonymously here, so please forgive me for not citing personal examples, but the normal web apps for accessing quite a few popular services are now PWAs. Spotify famously started looking into using a PWA after some issues with Apple regarding the cut taken with a native app. Uber is another well-known example.

Financial Times[0] is a PWA and with a paid service option.

[0]: http://app.ft.com/

(Looks at home screen) Slack, Jira, LastPass, and Netflix. All Native apps that are free via the App Store, and all with the subscription model that I pay for. And for most of those I can’t even buy the subscription from inside of the native app, so Apple gets no money from these

And for most of those I can’t even buy the subscription from inside of the native app, so Apple gets no money from these

This is where things get pretty shady with Apple's terms for native apps and the App Store. Take a look at Spotify's experience for a different version of the story.

Exactly. The app store's gross revenue was $54 billion last year. [1] Apple has a very strong incentive to make sure the only good way to deliver apps on iOS is the app store.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-...

Interesting numbers. I see, "gross revenue" means:

> In the last reported year, customers spent an estimated 54.2 billion U.S. dollars on on in-app purchases, subscriptions, and premium apps in the Apple App store.

So, roughly 30% cut goes to Apple - which is around 16 billion; and developers got the rest, around 38 billion.

With PWAs, 100% goes to developers. As you pointed out, that's a threat and motivation for Apple to continue racheting up their closed ecosystem, and keep PWAs crippled on Apple devices.

Yes, and they shouldn’t be taking a cut. Their services initiatives are bad for them and the users of said services. But as someone who did two tours in their services arm, it is overwhelmingly likely that the reason that WebKit is making these changes is their stated reason of making Safari more resilient to the attacks on their users vectored in by web badness.

Does Apple also not care about the huge cut it takes for everything sold via the App Store?

As lliamander said, if they don't care, why not make it free? I don't for a moment believe the argument about creating a barrier for negative actors. They could still screen apps before allowing them into the App Store, and if that mechanism is working reliably then the charge is unnecessary as a deterrent, while if it is not then the financial deterrent isn't going to be enough to stop a lot of people willing to make these kinds of apps anyway.

I think you missed the "requires Apple hardware". I know that rich Americans think everyone has Macbooks, but that is not the case.

They care about they revenue they get by making people buy the hardware that gives them access to the developer program.

Then why not make it free?

That's easy. It adds a hurdle for people who make malicious or fraudulent apps. It's not free, but neither is it MSDN levels of absurdity.

I'd counter that: make it a one time tax, like the Play Store. Is it reasonable that I need a Dun and Bradstreet number to write an application for my computer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com