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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

And if your unlisted app does in-app purchases, you still have to pay 30%, right? Apple used to justify that cut by saying "we deserve it for bringing all these users to your app via the app store catalog", but that's not a valid claim for unlisted apps.

Apple must be forced to allow installing iOS apps from arbitrary sources, signed with arbitrary keys. This is the only way. Or are they afraid that if they do allow that, then the app store would have to truly compete with "just host a self-signed .ipa on your own server" on its own merits?

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Apple still runs the infrastructure for handling the unlisted app, like storage costs and bandwidth costs. I believe unlisted apps still have to go through review, so there's human cost in that as well.

Which has to be covered by the $99 / year developer program fee, in aggregate.

Sure, a few apps will cost them massively more than that, but most will take five minutes of reviewer time every six months and a few gigs per month (or year) in download bandwidth.

Are you trying to decide what revenue goes to cover which cost for a company worth $3T?

And by the way, they have so much money sitting in banks doing nothing, they could as well just start giving everything away for free and it'll last them for 20 years.

If they were a charity or non profit sure. But why on Earth a for-profit company, whose reason for existing, by definition, is to make money, would give away money?

Because it has already made several orders of magnitude more money than an amount it would know what to do with?

I don't understand this whole idea of keeping on increasing your profits when you already make enough money thousand times over.

Employees and other shareholders benefit when the value of the company increases. Why is that hard to understand why they'd want to increase profits?

Employees get their salaries either way. Shareholders? They do nothing useful for the society and won't be missed. The way I see it, companies literally ruin the world for mostly imperceptible, and mostly abstract, benefit of the very few.

> The way I see it, companies literally ruin the world for mostly imperceptible, and mostly abstract, benefit of the very few.

How do you build a car without a company? How do you get 100 people to work together? How do you get components, carry out testing, and still keep people "fed and watered"?

The only other answer I have ever heard is "the state".

I don't mean "don't earn money at all and go full communism". I mean "stop making active steps towards increasing profits when your income already covers your expenses ten times over". I also meant "for-profit", and probably publicly-traded, companies specifically. A company doesn't have to be of this type. There are privately-owned companies that build products people genuinely love. There also are nonprofits.

Privately owned companies merely enrich their owners. If anything they are more likely to prioritise profits.

Large charities accumulate wealth endlessly through active fundraising despite having enough to cover their costs for over a decade.

The issue isn't the collective fiction of the "company", it is "humans" and an inherent greed and self centredness (imo)

I must be some wrong type of human then.

If you think Apple employees are fixated on their salary, you don't know enough Apple employees. It's all about the stock grants that vest over 4 years. When you get enough of those overlapping and the stock has the growth of Apple, the only thing that matters is stock, not salary. The salary pays for your rent, food, shopping, car in the bay area. The stock builds your wealth.

If the salary pays for literally all your expenses and you also probably have some left for savings, then what's the "wealth" for? As someone who has never owned any stock, I'm genuinely curious.

I’m sure Apple’s shareholders would love your argument.

It's not like two Steves started a company and one said hey we've got lots of cash let's spend it or do non-work cool stuff but the other went like keeping being greedy for more money.

It's simply a publicly traded company (like many others) with shareholders and stocks and people are expecting the value to go up.

Usually this kind of unchecked "growth" at all costs is counterbalanced by competition. Competition is what keeps companies from abusing their position. There's no competition in iOS app distribution. This is where antitrust needs to come in — urgently. This capitalism is broken, we need a new one.

No one forces anyone to buy or use an iPhone (or Android). Why should a private company has to allow conpetition on their own platform for their own hardware?

Sigh. Here we go again.

Could you please try looking at this from the developer perspective?

You mean from the perspective of learning a language they invented (swift) so you can publish apps on a distribution channel they built? to users who feel safe and secure giving you money via their credit cards because of Apple's brand? so you can sit there and collect money on something with zero marginal cost?

I am a developer. Been one since I was 12 years old writing x86 assembly code. Published apps on disks and distributed them at the local video rental store. The market size was probably 2000 people in my town. Let me tell you that what developers have access to today.. built on top of Apple's ROI machine, is incredible. From this perspective, for every $1 I make, I am happy to give apple .30 of it. The total pie is astronomical.

It's fine that you do need the services provided by the app store. So of course do keep using it. But not all developers need it. Some already have an audience they gained by other means, and/or would gladly do their own marketing and distribution, and to them, the app store and its rules, especially the ones that pertain to UGC, are just an asinine barrier they have to clear every time they release an update.

What I'm trying to say that it's nice to have a choice. You know, like on macOS. There's the app store if you want it, but you're also free to DIY the distribution of your app if that's what works better for you.

Yep, you've correctly identified the problem!

this reply is brilliant, well done.

No.

I'm just saying that the cost of the average app developer team is likely offset by the income Apple makes from the average app developer team.

Whether that's how they spend the money, I have no idea.

I don't need to know how they spend it to guess that the costs and income probably roughly balance out.

A free (ad-supported or fully free) app that's very popular and updated frequently (requiring more reviews) would cost them a lot more than an app that has in-app purchases but only gets updated once a year. Yet the latter app would earn them more. Something doesn't add up here. And yes, that $99/year developer account fee, it exists.

I don't think the math is that hard.

Apple uses paid apps to subsidize free apps.

Yeah won’t someone think of the $3.50 in storage and bandwidth.

And a $15/hour reviewer who has no idea what they're doing spending a minute looking at your app.

I hate this argument. Ok, so they think they should be paid for that, fine. So, what if I want to do all that myself then? Oh, no? They won’t let me?

It’s not compensation for services rendered, it’s a toll or tax on their platform, regardless of their services offered.

If they do that, Facebook is pulling their stuff from the App store and remove every privacy feature Apple demands, then have you install it from their servers.

It is a problem, but the real problem boils down to services being able to mandate what client you use. Solve that, force Facebook and every other service to work with 3th party clients, and we can free the app store.

And the solution to this particular problem of Facebook tracking the crap outta everyone should be technical not organizational. Apps are already sandboxed from the system and each other. For example, each and every API apps could potentially use to share a tracking identifier with each other should be put behind a permission that an app can't get the current state of.

> but the real problem boils down to services being able to mandate what client you use

The underlying problem is that these threats to third-party client developers have teeth. The US government would happily enforce them it seems, paid for by people's taxes. In a saner world, a Facebook lawyer trying to sue someone who built a better Facebook app would be laughed out of the court building.

As developers , haven’t we settled that the endless permission dialog boxes are a security risk and not a solution?

I'm not suggesting adding more permission dialog boxes. The way I see it is more along the lines of what Google does with Android: anything that would return a unique identifier (IMEI, serial number, Android ID, MAC addresses) returns either random data or zeros. And, crucially, it needs to be such that the app can't know whether it's getting real or fake data.

Android has already proven that this won't happen. Google has enough scary dialogs in place to make it impractical for anyone else to compete at scale (including Amazon and Epic).

Android also doesn't have the same privacy requirements the iPhone has.

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