Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

Also, you literally are Apple’s product to their iOS developer ecosystem, in the sense that developers fork over 30% of their revenue to Apple for access to you.

View on HN

On one hand, it's argued that Apple has an incentive to act against their customers because they want to sell apps on the app store.

On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).

I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.

We just need to look at how they handled the San Bernadino shooting and requests for a phone unlock to find a supposed "lying dormant cyber pathogen".

Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.

Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).

This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.

So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).

It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.

> and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).

It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.

Given that vbucks are just made up and have no marginal cost, Epic can say whatever they like about how much less they can charge for them.

It doesn’t mean anything at all.

I'm saying that Apple was going to get shafted on payments and making money from Epic anyways if they left it up because Epic was charging $2 less when paying directly via a card and bypassing in-app purchases.

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/the-fortnite-m...

Apple would have been shafted if they left it up because then all enforcement of their rules would be up for grabs.

Anyone who wanted to flout any rule could claim Apple was playing favorites with Epic.

It has nothing to do with being screwed out of $2 per purchase of in-game currency.

No, that's not right. The app is the product, the customer is the buyer of the app, and the split of revenue is 70/30 (or 85/15 for small devs).

Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.

As always, just follow the money.

On the other hand, devs wouldn't be able to sell to iPhone users if there was no iPhone, or no App Store, or the appleid.apple.com identity verification system, or iOS 14, or anything else that is paramount to devs even having those users as customers in the first place. In this scenario, the iPhone is the product and the App Store is a feature of the iPhone, and the fact that it moves money around (or doesn't, most of the time) is irrelevant.

Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).

Whether you consider the developers a customer of Apple paying for distribution, or a supplier to Apple who takes a cut, is ultimately a semantic distinction. But the conflict of interest it creates — that Apple retains a monopoly on how software is distributed to a device that you ostensibly “own” and sets rates to optimize for their own gain - is the case regardless of the semantics we use.

(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)

When you go into a grocery store, do you consider yourself the product and that the food producer has purchased access to you from the store?

If this is true about Apple, it is true in any retail situation.

It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.

What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.

When you are paying, you are the customer

It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.

Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.

The product in this case is the platform more than individuals.

This is absolutely true. Both companies play the game of selling customer acquisition. But we seem to be generally more okay with middlemen squeezing a two sided market. Sometimes. If it’s DoorDash or Amazon then public opinion seems to go the other way.

But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.

No, devs don't buy customers from apple. Customers buy apps, and Apple takes a commission. No money flows from Developer to Apple (apart from to 100$ annual fee if you want to be anal about it).

No they buy access to customers. You can't sell to Apple's customer base unless you give them 30% of gross. The world where Apple charges that 30% commission to the devs after the sale or collects it from the customer during the sale is irrelevant. We fork over a lot of money to Apple for the privilege of selling to their customers.

I think that nowadays most profitable software is cross-platform and is also available on other platforms, thus their developers see access to the iOS market as added value rather than their primary customer acquisition channel.

Well, you can't sell peaches to Walmart customers without Walmart taking a cut either. But we don't say the peach growers are buying customers from Walmart, do we?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com