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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

Here's my "old-timer" take on the 30%:

I used to develop games and apps for MS PocketPC. Our users could install apps straight from their PC to the PocketPC.

But guess how apps were sold: through portals. These portals also took around 30% (Handango and PocketGear were the biggest ones back then).

We were also selling straight from our website, where we could have had 0% cost. But guess what: We wanted to reach top 10 on Handango, and the best way to do that was send our customers through Handango. Once in the top 10 (front page), it would multiply our sales. So even on our own site we choose to 'lose' 30%.

Just take a look at Steam: it's PC games! You can sell all those things straight to the consumer. But developers still choose to give 30% (or how much is it now?) for the exposure.

Conclusion: there will always be some party taking around 30%. Why? Because it's well worth the 30%

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It's really not just about the 30% here though.

It's the 30% + being feature/speech-restricted by Apple while also competing with Apple in Apple's app store which holds half the US audience captive.

Third parties can't even make a browser that gets set as the default that opens hyperlinks. They can't replace iMessage or the phone dialer. They can't even use a browser engine other than the one that Apple restricts them to. They can't make political apps. They can't offer porn apps. The list goes on and on and on.

Furthermore, smartphones are way, way, way more ubiquitous and important to society right now than those devices ever were back in the 90s and early 2000s. Imagine only being allowed to shop at Walmart or Target with no other choice anywhere at all. If that ever happened in the real world and those companies were acting like Apple is, things'd change real quick.

>Just take a look at Steam: it's PC games! You can sell all those things straight to the consumer. But developers still choose to give 30% (or how much is it now?) for the exposure.

What's your opinion on the following:

* pay-for-play "acceptable ads" in ABP

* having to get a EV code signing certificate ($300+/yr) to bypass windows smartscreen warnings, which are enabled by default

Are they acceptable? Are they a net good for consumers? They're all examples of optional programs that clearly provide value to the buyers (otherwise they wouldn't be buying it), in exchange for a payment to the gatekeepers. This is basically the same role as steam (or the portals). However, I have a feeling that most hn readers would not have a positive opinion of either of those programs.

I also don't like gatekeepers. But it just seems it always evolves to that.

My point was not that I don't mind gatekeepers, but more that if you get rid of the platform gatekeeper, you will end up with the "customers" gatekeeper. In the end for us developers or customers it makes no difference.

$300 should not be a problem for someone who sells proper software. Such $100+ gates keep a lot of the crap out.

> having to get a EV code signing certificate ($300+/yr) to bypass windows smartscreen warnings, which are enabled by default

Windows was a malware disaster before measures like this were added to the OS, so I would argue this (and other warnings preventing people from randomly clicking and installing things) are a net good for the consumer.

You also technically don't need an EV cert, you can get a regular code signing cert (it will just take longer to build your reputation).

Totally - the argument isn’t anything to do with developer’s not paying the 30% - it’s that a whole load of parties want to run their own stores without having to maintain the platform.

What "platform" is it exactly they don't want to maintain?

iOS and Android + Google Play Services is probably what they are referring to.

If epic doesn’t need a platform, there are OEM’s who will make them a bare metal smartphone.

Everything on top of that is the platform on top of which they are building their system.

Anyone who thinks the App Store is just stripe plus a file server simply doesn’t understand what is involved.

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