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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

No, there's no sweetheart deals. The 30% is applied very consistently to alls apps, big or small. YouTube Red, Spotify, Netflix, Epic are examples of large apps that are/were affected by the 30% cut.

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Amazon got a special deal.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/apple-con...

Don't all subscription services get 15% after the first year? Is Amazon getting that from the very first year, is that what's different here?

That's correct. It's a very big difference if you think about it. Under the normal arrangement, a customer has to retain for 12 months before the 15% rate kicks in.

Depending on the product, you could be losing a significant portion of your customer base before then. For example Netflix, known for insanely good retention, loses nearly 40% of customers by month 12. [1]

[1] https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/netflix-disney-plus-app...

It doesn't sound like its only Amazon. According to this article:

"The agreement with Amazon is similar to a program Apple announced earlier this year letting select developers avoid the 30% fee in exchange for integrating with certain features. Amazon is part of that program."

"select developers" could be only amazon

Right, only select partners get the sweetheart deal. Like Amazon and Spotify who build integrations with Apple TV.

This is prima facie distinct from a negotiated deal in that apple created a category for amazon, announced it publicly, and have other minor companies in that category too.

Clearly for amazon, but not the same as any hypothetical negotiated private side deal with facebook.

Makes you think, why aren't more players trying to get in the phone space just to disrupt that shit. Google did with Android, I think Mozilla and Facebook had a mozillephone and facebookphone at some point as well no?

As funny as it sounds I think Tesla has enough brand recognition and tech chops to pull something like this off.

I also had the hope musk would launch into that market and directly confront apple and google. But even for him, that would be a very very wild bet.

It's hard, look at microsoft/windows phone.

My bet is that the market is now ripe for another mobile platform. The problem is you don't spawn something like out of thin air, and many big names have failed in the past (amazon, intel with tizen, firefox, ubuntu, microsoft, etc..)

Still, now that mobile hardware comes close to being commoditized i think there's hope, maybe from an unexpected place (like the open source community ? one can dream..)

A 3rd platform will likely come from Huawei. They have the resources and the incentives.

Suddenly the fog lifts. Now I understand the fascist shenanigans targeting the manufacturer of my crappy mobile phone. Trump administration does Cook's bidding just as it does Zuck's...

I don’t think Apple has been at all happy with escalating tensions with China.

I don’t think anything coming from china will replace apple and google in the west. The focus is on privacy and openness, and china companies clearly don’t qualify.

I agree, I don't think they'll gain much traction in the west. However, they'll still have access to, and be competitive in, the massive markets of China (of course), south east Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Combined that's over 3.5B+ people.

Trying to compete with the most highly valued company in history and with the company that owns one of the most ubiquitous aspects of people's lives (Google the search engine), what could go wrong?

Because the real market for these systems are users. Users don't care about any of this.

To an extent, users care. Android users use Android because either it's cheaper, it allows side loading or front loading apps the apple bans, or for reasons unrelated to the software experience (tv commercial, carrier forced, etc)

Because users like Apple's policies.

Most us of don't want a recreation of the web where companies try to "optimize" the subscription cancellation experience. Or to have multiple app stores each with exclusive apps being sold at a premium and having to manage payments separately.

Apple's rules do have a lot of real benefits for users and so you have to weigh that up against the interests of developers.

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