To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.
Edit: for example, after I downweighted the current subthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29914127 became the top subthread. Talk about from one extreme to the other...
Users might be ok with some extra fee for conveniences like trust and the ability to easily unsubscribe. Let the user pick and let Apple compete for those sales.
It’s completely reasonable that side loaded applications should not be entitled to use regulated payment services.
Edit: Even Android will not entitle side loaded apps for Google payment processing. Android and iOS are literally identical in this regard.
To ask you the inverse question, in what way is any of this "nearly identical" to Android sideloading which allows indefinite sideloading via any delivery method, including installation of 3rd party stores, with no more than a click on an approval prompt from the user?
It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
Anything that can run LLVM can side load.
When you personally limit sideloading to be "I compile the app and manage a personal security chain to keep it active" it may seem wild, that's not what the vast majority of Android sideloading/3rd party stores is though. Xcode, beyond requiring installation, requires a macOS install to run it on. There are other ways to compile iOS apps, each even less accessible to users or distribution by companies. And again: the obvious statement that the vast majority of revenue generating apps on the App Store are not open source.
Even amongst the Android tech nerds 3rd party stores like F-Droid are popular because users don't want to compile their open source apps constantly... and there are even less requirements around compiling Android apps than iOS apps!
> It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Not true, sideloading apps on Android means loading them from a different source not disconnecting them from Google services or the Android ecosystem as a whole. It of course allows for that if it's what you're after but it's not limited in such a scope.
> Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
On Android sideloading is being able to pick which app sources you trust, even if that means "not Google". That could mean "I compiled it myself on an air gapped computer" to you, "I loaded it from a 3rd party store" to another, and "I downloaded it from the developers site" to a third. Which you personally choose is irrelevant as each user gets to pick their allowed sources so it can fit any user's need.
I've never heard of this being possible.
You can install any app you compiled with your own key and it lasts for 7 days before requiring it to be recompiled.
This seven day lie/conspiracy/flat-earth is disappointing.
A far bigger limitation for me is the three-app provisioning limit. There isn't any way to work around it[1], and if you do want to do serious sideloading you almost certainly will need to upgrade to a paid developer account.
[0] Specifically iOS only allows app provisioning over USB or Wi-Fi, not locally. Locally installed software cannot actually communicate with the remote debugging daemon. You can work around this with network extensions, but you don't get to use them in dev-signed apps unless you have a paid dev account that's been approved by Apple to use them.
For the record, that isn't to make sideloading harder; that's because Facebook went and shipped a spyware VPN with their enterprise cert.
[1] Personal experience time: Even when jailbroken, and with AltDaemon and Immortal installed, AltStore still bumps up against the three-app limit.
But that everything they charge money for, they _must_ allow alternatives to exist. If they want to charge a large fee for getting on the App Store, they must allow alternative app stores. The problem is not that they charge money, but that they use their massive user lock in to force people to pay for these services to exist in the market.
And yes you do have choices. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers out there. Can I install Ford UI on my Tesla? Do you think those companies won’t make you use their own payment processing once apps become prolific in car UIs? Can I hail Uber with the Lyft app? Why are they locking me in to only using Lyft on the Lyft app? Can I buy PlayStation games on Xbox?
If you’re against all of it fine, but let’s not pretend Apple is doing anything out of the ordinary here.
And even so, many of these “issues” are not problems on Android right? You can use 3rd-party app stores and so forth right?
I’d also suggest.. why does the scale issue matter? I prefer that Apple enforces Apple Pay. I prefer that Apple enforced Sign In with Apple. That’s why I buy an iPhone. If those things bothered me I’d buy something else.
I switch between Windows, Linux, and macOS with regularity and while there are platform-specific services, the mobile platform is considerably more walled off. Mobile storage stagnated for years while the apps and any captured media became larger, really pressuring you to use their cloud services in a way I've never had with a desktop. I can store data on a NAS and access it pretty easily with any of the desktop platforms. I'm not sure how someone is supposed to be able to be able to migrate off iCloud when moving to Android without involving a non-mobile computer. It doesn't appear to be anywhere as easy as copying files from one SSD to another or using AirDrop/SMB/NFS.
The iMessage thing is another layer to this. You may not want to call that lock-in, but there have been extensive threads about this topic recently [0][1]. The Epic lawsuit surfaced some emails that strongly suggest Apple views iMessage as a way to lock customers in [2].
Regardless, the original point is switching platforms isn't going to happen without a fair bit of cost and likely some social upheaval. Switching platforms is technically an option, but it's not a realistic one for many. I don't think it follows that if someone has stuck with the same platform for several years that they tacitly agree with all the policy decisions made by that platform.
[0] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889492 [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29851317 [2] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753014
What's illegal is anti-competitive use of monopoly market position.
Some textbook rulings will apply, since Apple exces admit that if they do no constrain downstream, no one will use their 30% markup product. So consumers could be better off by definition
although Apple will argue that they will charge more to downstream producers directly, but this is also difficult to argue (they can do this anyway and extract rents from consumers and producers at the same time).
If you have a monopolistic platform market on which you also produce, it seems rather hard not to get sued
It’s exactly the same dynamic as in net neutrality.
The different here is that Nintendo is not a 3 trillion dollar company, that owns 50% of a massively important market in the US.
Yes, anti-competitive practices are allowed if you aren't a huge company.
Literally it is the law, that if you become a big enough company, and have enough market power, then certain actions become illegal, that were not illegal if you weren't as powerful of a company.
> that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.
It actually literally does mean that they are entitled to that.
For the same reason that 3rd party web browsers, were entitled access to windows users (and before you say it, yes I am aware that windows had a larger control of the market than apple, and it is not literally the same in every single exact way, but the same principle still applies, just in a smaller amount)
This is why we talk about Tesla direct sales all the time. Because we are moving car sales to the apple model.
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if a customer already purchased a ford car, and then tried to fix the car with a 3rd party repair person.
There are literal laws about this, for cars, that require ford to provide manuals, to 3rd parties, and require ford to sell replacement parts for 3rd parties to repair cars from.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...
For example I have no problem if a third party store forced one payment option only, but only allowing one store and one payment option is just milking your market position/rent seeking.
See that’s _exactly_ the problem I have. I don’t want to use your shitty payments system that’s likely less secure than anything Apple is doing. Allowing a single payment source that’s not Apple would directly harm consumers from a security and privacy perspective.
I do not use Apple at all. Somehow I am not feeling "harmed".
I might reconsider my attitude when / if I can have phone as a generic computing device where I can download and install whatever I need without much hassles and where I can distribute my applications without needing to sacrifice a virgin first.
Apple's attitude of "we know better than you" is the really shitty thing here.
Can you imagine being a student and being told you have to install this app from a third party store?
That’s just a terrible model for user safety and security.
But I think we should be able to agree that demanding 30% of nearly everything and completely banning any sort of alternatives is extremely overbearing and ends up taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people struggling to get by.
I also kind of like the idea that something like that happens, except games all caps must use Apple‘s system and pay the 30%. That’s not as fair, but might be workable.
If I had my way over all of this? Do you know what I really want?
No consumable in-app purchases. Period. Outlawed.
One of my favorite things about the early iPhone was the incredible games that you could get. Now there’s almost none of them, the developers of practically abandoned the platform. The only ways to make money are ads and consumable in app purchases which are just complete scams. Like $1000 buckets of Smurfberries.
That’ll never happen. But I wish it would, because it would bring back the great games.
On that note, I hope FedNOW works well enough to become an alternate PoS payment method[0].
0: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
We also have the insurance component: Say some famous musician and a few influencers decide to launch a new music festival, get a lot of money paid to their festival-making company, and then, due to mismanagement, fail to have a working music festival. Most of the people that paid with credit cards will ask for refunds, and will get them, even if the festival company goes bankrupt. Some of those people managing transactions hold the bag, and end up losing millions in refunds. There's also a wide gamut of fraudulent operations that will try to extract money from the system, either by posing as merchants, or as customers. Some of that fraud is also eaten by the companies that handle the transaction.
So while fees could go down in a world with little fraud (and they do, as companies that are large enough, and have sufficient controls, end up negotiating serious discounts), it makes sense for fees to have a flat base and a percentage base, even if the entire system between you and your customer was just attempting to break even. The right percent though, barring the most fraudulent of environments, has nothing to do with a 30% cut.
And the banks that issue the cards are the ones that pay points/get interest, not Visa. Visa simply processes the transactions. If you noticed, your "Visa" card has a bank issuer, like the Capital One Quicksilver card (which uses Visa network)
The cost of running a transaction network has nothing to do with credit card points, insurance, chargebacks. Those are all handled by other parties.
What you are basically trying to do is visiting a vip club (user-value wise) and then making it open to every crap dj out there, because otherwise it's "unfair". Why don't you just go to a regular one then? It is the same as this vip would turn into in a heartbeat. And where should other members who liked it go after that?
- SDK / iOS updates
- Bandwidth to upload the compiled app to their phone
- Support from Apple
- Hosting / security of aforementioned
- etc. etc.
Who pays for all of the infrastructure of the App Store and the Apple SDK then?
Granted the SDKs would probably be much less comprehensive if there were no 3rd party apps but Apple advertises how their hardware can be used incl. by 3rd party apps and providing the libraries to access that hardware is expected by users (even if they don't think about this, most people expect Snapchat to access the camera).
Bandwidth/Hosting is covered under the $100/yr but if it wasn't, they could easily charge devs for tiers of downloads. Most of the support I'd bet is on the consumer side which wouldn't apply if there were other payment processors.
Is that valuable enough to charge 30%? I don’t know but it’s certainly not outside what seems reasonable by orders of magnitude to me.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that they are a monopoly and should be forced to allow alternate app stores or payment processors but it’s not what they are charging that puts me over the line.
Most likely the non-Apple route would be cheaper to the consumer and get 90% of the traffic for that reason alone. If that's the reality, does that not imply that Apple's practices harm most consumers? Seems self evident to me that they do.
Besides, there really should be some common spec/mechanism to manage subscriptions from any vendor.
Then a one time purchase app just makes a lifetime subscription for the same price and cuts the fee from 30% to 10%.
Well then I have good news for you: Apple forbids you that option.
I'm okay with them enforcing app store policy guidelines etc. I think what they're doing here though is just a racket.
They may have deluded themselves about this (seems that way from their comments about it), but I think most people outside of Apple see it for what it is. You can make a good argument about app store rules being in the interest of customers and chosen by customers. You can't really make a good argument for the profit grab they're doing here, it's just abuse.
Here I fixed your quote.
Including in everything is the $750M bonus Tim Cook received[1]. We've seen that exec comp is inversely correlated with performance[2] and buy backs only cause greater equity packages to be issued (doesn't reduce the dilution)
[1]: https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_apple-ceo-brings-home-750-mill...
[2]: https://archive.fo/uSTWs - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/business/stock-buybacks-t...
[3]: https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...
What’s really interesting to me is that moves like this are the embodiment of the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News for years. For a long time it felt like every HN thread about pricing or salary negotiation was full of people insisting that you needed to “charge more” in every conceivable situation.
If you made a thing that was producing a lot of money for your clients, you needed to “charge more”! If your customers weren’t complaining and leaving, you needed to “charge more”!
Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move, HN reaches for the pitchforks.
It’s interesting to see how clear-cut this dichotomy is depending on who the reader thinks is being charged more.
"Tech Immigration" is largely H1B immigration is prefectly valid to be opposed to H1B while being pro immigration.
H1B is a predatory program designed to lower wages and put immigrants in a terrible stop when in comes to the immigration status, i.e the employer holds not only their income, but their ability to remain in the nation in the palm of their hands. This created a toxic and coercive relationship with the employer.
At the same time a correction to this program, and a correction to the low skilled workers is simply allowing more open immigration, if you want to come here to work you should be able to.
The alternative is a sane program that is detached from your employer’s whims and provides you some stability and control. As of this writing, that program in the US is called a green card. But don’t get me started on how hard that is get.
I want to be clear no where did I say anything about "open borders", I said "more open immigration"
I do believe in some controls on immigration, security controls as an example. However I also believe it should be vastly easier than it is today, order of magnitude more open than it is today.
With that in mind, consider also that 'and according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or cofounded 55% of the United States' billion-dollar companies.' [1] It's not a zero-sum game, and stapling would-be founders to companies they would rather not work at for decades (H-1B for Indian born folks) hoping to get the freedom to found the next unicorn is quite a waste of time, talent and their risk-on years.
As an aside, it's interesting that folks want high wages, high disposable income, low inequality, low prices and low inflation all at the same time. I strongly suspect that these are fundamentally incompatible goals. Feels like, at most, a pick-two kind of thing.
[1] https://hbr.org/2021/08/research-why-immigrants-are-more-lik...
I may have done the same! Parent and gp are scrubbing any nuance and leaving cartoon version of arguments, then fighting that strawman. Not all immigration is the same, IMO, sameness is a requisite for arguing the only "rational" positions can either be pro-immigration (all of it) or anti-immigration, which is absurd and reductive.
This is not about Apple charging more - it's about Apple charging for something they did not add any value to. This is closer to Oracle's billing tactics, that rightfully get pilloried on HN, the only difference is I'm yet to encounter anyone on HN defend Oracle's billing practices.
It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services. To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
I do agree with you that most people will see their lives improved when compared to the country they immigrated from. However, the abuse does exist.
The complaint isn't that H1B should go away. It that it needs reform.
Facts, Reality, 1000's of people that have exploited by the system and talk about their experiences publicly just like your fellow commenter that seems to have had a different experience than you.
>>Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.
2 things can be true at the same time as well, it could very well be a boon for the person, but it could also artificially stunt their growth due to the restrictions placed on them by the program, I am not sure how anyone could honestly argue that is better for the immigrant to be locked into their employer, and for the employer to have the power to deportation over their employee.. Or honestly argue that would not be abused by less than ethical employers of which there many.
You may have found a good one, I can assure you not everyone does
>>It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services.
That seems to be a huge leap based on an assumption that does not track with reality. I am unclear as to what would prevent highly educated people from immigrating to the US with more open immigration, but how H1B does not?
>>To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
Does not serve my interests at all really. I am not impacted by immigration one way or the other.
I am sure a large part of it has to do with the fact that until certain points in the process, you cannot change your employer without restarting the process, so a lot of people just stay without making a fuss about it.
Edit. Regardless, as it stands, the current H1B is indeed a broken system ripe for exploitation.
Of course there is abuse. Even systemic abuse. This goes both ways though. For instance, Indian applicants can wait for over a decade for green card, we're talking completely americanized, fluent and self sufficient people, often with high positions at companies. People who did everything right, by any standard. Are these people abused? Perhaps, but if so, it's because the US government refuses to acknowledge them as permanent residents, which they clearly are for all practical purposes.
Alternatives and improvements to H1B is important, but suspiciously few in this community were interested in such a discussion at the time. Imo, parent comment is spot on that this is one of the hackernews dissonances.
I have the opposite view and don't believe they are diametrically opposed. I see many legitimate reasons to cap unskilled immigration while seeing virtually no good reasons to cap skilled.
You'll need to ask patio11 for comment. He might have had some disciples regurgitating it, but he's ultimately responsible for this viewpoint. (Not saying I entirely disagree...)
And here's a comment with more; it has definitely been a theme:
Imagine a web developer gets hired to build a landing page for a product. Yes please, charge twice as much for your work, sure. But say they tried to charge an ongoing 30% of all future revenue for that product. Do you think HN would be behind that?
Actually many people do just fine without Apple.
However if many players decide to get out from Apple ecosystem, it'll be Apple that'll change stance here.
That makes it unlike either a one-time or a flat maintenance fee.
Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.
Apple views the iPhone as a sovereign territory, not just some generic compute resource. They can delete accounts, block access to the CPU, and charge whatever taxes they want. It's their land. In their minds, you're blessed to have the opportunity to be on their platform. Your users are strictly on loan from Apple, and you're going to pay for access to their customers. Your app better behave.
The market evolved into the shape that it did because Apple had a great product, a fun evolution of iPod, and a simple and compelling UI. Microsoft missed the shot, Android took time to get its act together.
None of this was a bad deal for developers at the time, but now there's no way to avoid it. We're now living in a sort of North Korea. Entrenched, with no way out. Over half of your potential customers don't have other devices and you can't reach them any other way than going through Apple.
It sucks for small companies in tech having to carve out ever smaller pieces of the pie. Year by year the market shrinks because the giants take it, tax it, and ration it out. If we'd have known then what we know now, we would have bought up every first generation iPhone and buried them all in a ditch.
iPhone is compute, but they'll be damned if you do anything that threatens their dear platform and profits.
We should push for our legislators to require open installs without an App Store. Customers already pay for the device. They shouldn't have to pay additional taxes for us trying to develop for them, trying to survive in this already hostile market.
That wasn’t always true of phones (pre-iPhone smartphones), PDAs, games consoles, workstations, or some mainframes. Platform owners requiring license fees for on developers on their platform, using their dev tools, was not invented by Apple.
Since you’re talking about web, if you want to be on Shopify’s or Salesforce’s marketplace, you need to share revenue too.
But you are right, HN used to be about the little David entrepreneur. Since ~2012 it's all about "fuck making a startup and go work for The Man"
It’s a different thing entirely when you’re the sole gatekeeper between hundreds of millions of customers and anyone wanting to sell them apps and digital services.
It might not qualify as monopoly in the legal sense, but you’re still being a bully, abusing a position of power in the market.
"Charge your customer more for your work" is VERY meaningfully different from "Charge someone else's customer more for someone else's work, because you own the storefront for someone else's business".
Sure, building the storefront is hard and high leverage. But figuring out the moral answer to "who reaps the rewards" is an entirely different journey.
Apple in that regard is holding them hostage.
Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.
As of September of 2021 in the US[1], both Apple and Google's mobile app payment policies have converged[2] as Google mandates that all app developers use their payment platform and only their payment platform, along with mandating a 15% to 30% cut of all app payments. I believe Google's policy matches Apple's when it comes to this example.
[1] https://fossbytes.com/google-mandates-android-apps-to-pay-30...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
> Android has always allowed people to get apps from multiple app stores. In fact, most Android devices ship with at least two app stores preinstalled, and consumers are able to install additional app stores. Each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features. This openness means that even if a developer and Google do not agree on business terms the developer can still distribute on the Android platform. This is why Fortnite, for example, is available directly from Epic's store or from other app stores including Samsung's Galaxy App store.
The implication is that apps can choose to only publish in stores with more favorable IAP terms, not that each store is somehow eligible to a fixed percentage of the $120/yr fee for a costco membership that may or may not have originated within the app store's ecosystem. Otherwise, at a cut of 30% per store, an app would owe platforms 120% of subscription revenue to be on merely 4 stores, regardless of how the customer converted.
When you raise your prices on your own work, there’s usually an implied alternative like not hiring you. We know there’s no such thing when it comes to iOS.
Creating and providing access to a lucrative market is valuable. What's the moral imperative for allowing others to provide access to the market you created or reduce your fees, both of which would reduce your profits for the benefit of everyone else who is trying to increase their profits?
I think it's disputable. It would seem to be adding about the same amount of value that the Windows store does for Windows users. How much is that?
It is simple not at all comparable in quality to the app store on iOS.
Apple, much like the solo developer, is looking out for its best interests and what will help it continue to grow.
There is a difference between a pricey product and a high taxes.
This sort of cognitive dissonance is pretty par for the course for communities like this.
- If you are to build a product with similar quality to Xiaomi's, it has to be priced higher than Xiaom's, because unless your production/sales volume is on par with Xiaomi, your production cost is very likely higher than Xiaomi's. Customers will prefer Xiaomi's product because it is cheaper.
- If you cut down production cost by bringing down quality, you might be able to price the product in Xiaomi's price range. But customers will still prefer Xiaomi because it has better quality for the same price range.
1: https://www.gizmochina.com/2019/11/28/xiaomi-ceo-says-that-g...
From that angle, it’s easily worth a 30 % fee. Not because it costs that much to run it, but because it creates that value.
It's also tricky to change the status quo since at this point a huge chunk of their revenue is the AppStore, and any serious change in the 30% will impact that greatly, upsetting investors. Once you take the step forward, it's very hard to take a step back.
And distributing a mountainous pile of cash to shareholders. In FY2021 alone, Apple repurchased $85.5 billion dollars worth of shares and spent $14.5 billion dollars on dividend issuance. That's 1/10th of a trillion dollars per year in distributions. [1]
Buffet alone collected almost $1B in dividends since taking his position. [2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/03/apples-3-trillion-market-cap...
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
Why would Apple agree to having its intellectual property being used for free? As long as you have an app on the App Store taking payments, Apple is still entitled to take a commission out of that regardless even if IAP is optional.
Even after the Epic v Apple court case, Apple unfortunately still wins. Don't like it?, Maybe use PWAs or failing that build an alternative. Good luck.
Edit: To clarify further, I'm not saying "the status quo is fine", I would be in favor of legislation that would force Apple and Google to allow alternative app stores as first class citizens, but in the world we live in, I don't think trying to extract profit out of the platform you built is that crazy, this is what every big corp does.
You could almost argue that it's worth 30% for the initial discovery in their app store (meh), but I just don't get how anyone could think it's fair for Apple to take 30% of a subscription, when developers don't have a choice but to use the platform.
What I mean is that this is not something exceptional, literally every single billion dollar tech corp operates this way, the only way you accumulate insane amounts of profit is by cynically examining every possible angle to extract more revenue from the business.
"Competitive capitalism" is the one which is generally best for consumers, as businesses must compete, which drives down their margins (thus passing savings to consumers).
"Free market capitalism" is effectively hands off. Monopolies can form, and without any regulation it can become quite bad for consumers. Typically monopolies rarely form, but obviously in areas like utilities it happens quite naturally.
Most people strive for competitive capitalism, when used colloquially, IMO. In the general case they are one in the same, but owning whole platforms that are broadly used is new territory, where it bleeds into anti-consumer impact IMO
I daresay a lot of people here owe their careers to the actual (and aspirational, especially considering the site sponsor) gatekeepers collecting rent, too.
Sort of, it would be just business if developers were allowed to release and install apps from somewhere else other than the App Store, and if there were allowed to use any type of payment system they wanted to, or even the mere fact if there were allowed to tell users to go somewhere else besides Apples IAP system to make a payment. It's monopolistic and anti-capitalist if you compound all the facts together.