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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

A store owner is not obligated to give you free placement on their shelves.

What stores take 30% lifetime subscription royalties for products sold on their shelves?

Can you imagine if Best Buy required Apple to add "Best Buy Payments" to MacOS so that Best Buy could collect a 30% fee on top of any services subscription that Apple sells to that MacBook user? All for the privilege of selling their products through the BB stores.

Apple isn't marking up a product for resale in it's retail environments. It is, in many cases, forcing its developers (who provide their valuable products to Apple for free, after paying Apple an annual fee) to completely rearrange their business models in order for Apple to collect a huge portion of their revenues, entirely on their terms.

It doesn’t matter. These are the terms of the store. If Walmart makes clear an expectation that you have to have an office in Arkansas in order to sell an item in their store, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your item is rejected from their store if you don’t build that office. There’s no expectation that you’d have free placement, certainly.

As for your Best Buy example, Best Buy can make that demand, but Best Buy would lose more from not having Apple’s products than Apple would from not being placed on Best Buy’s shelves.

I agree completely - Apple can have whatever terms it wants within the bounds of the law. And app developers have every right to complain about those terms, loudly and in a sustained fashion, if they wish.

The second part there is what a lot of people seem to have difficulty accepting.

It’s easy to accept that you have a right to complain. But after ten years of perfect clarify about how Apple intends to play this, your supposed outrage that the iPhone is still a walled garden seems willfully thick.

I’d be so impressed if one of you would just head over to Android and make a non-iPhone app that took the world by storm. Prove to us all that the 30% is a bad bargain, that Apple needs to change, that your software is valuable even without their store.

I guess it’s disheartening to see instead just another set of entitled complaints and dubious concern over end users, most of whom have no idea your $10 app exists and never thought about it when buying their $1000 phone.

I was complaining ten years ago too. Time doesn't make problems magically go away.

But, it's also becoming more and more critical as phones take an increasingly central roll in our lives.

Companies have certainly complained, loudly and in a sustained fashion, about dealing with certain brick-and-mortar stores over the years.

(Apple is in a frustratingly unique position compared to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, et. al., of course, in that the App Store is the way to get applications onto iPhones.)

And customers aren't required to only shop at a single store. If the store doesn't have what I want, I should be able to go to another store.

And you have that option.

Your Apple hardware is your Costco Membership Card. You aren’t able to buy Sam’s Club products using your Costco membership, and Costco’s under no expectation to make them available to you.

But I can buy a fridge at Costco, buy food from Sam's Club, and still store my food in my fridge. I don't have to throw out Costco's fridge in order to buy food elsewhere.

Your fridge is compatible with any food.

Your iPhone is not compatible with any software.

Some things are compatible and some things are not.

Edit: “Compatible” is not about the tech in this case (the binary would theoretically run) but about the terms of your agreement with the manufacturer.

If you buy a Costco fridge and with it a contract to only store Costco-sold food in it, then you have a better analogy. 80% of the world seems to prefer the AnyFood Fridge, and for some reason 20% buy the Costco with the agreement.

Sorry, I don't understand where you're going with this. There's an updated Hey app on the developer's computer which is compatible with my iPhone, but Apple isn't letting me install it.

Edit response: How many people do you think read the agreement they signed with Apple? How many realize Apple is increasing the price of software by ~30%?

Nonsense. The App Store is the Store. For god's sake, it's literally called a store. This couldn't be clearer.

You don't need to muddy the waters by making a ridiculous analogy that somehow equates a computer to a membership card (of all things!).

The computer is a computer. Full stop. There is a store on the computer. There should be other stores on the computer but they're not allowed because the people that make the computer are partaking in anti-competitive, anti-consumer shenanigans.

This store owner bans other stores (markets). That's anti-competitive and would never be tolerated in meat space.

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