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Comment by cafed00d | Hacker News Reader

> There is absolutely no reason apple should receive a single cent if you're publishing outside of their store

This is a really bad take.

People do not merely pay for the rearrangement of atoms into what ends up being their phone.

The software is critical and deserves all the money earned to make it happen. Apple still stands up all those servers, engineers, and operations for apps priced at $0 -- at min-cost to the developer (before you start: no, $99/year covers zilch; $99/year is a mode of spam prevention dev account creation).

It is unreasonable, nefarious, and even grand theft for anybody to make money on the phones and refuse to pay for the services that made it possible: the software engineering into Swift, Xcode, CoreOS, Darwin, FoundationDB, Data Centers, the engineers on on-call rotations, and who knows whatever else. All those things don't come for free. App developers who make money off the ecosystem should be held account to pay up.

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What servers, engineers, and operations are needed to sideload an app?

How did literally every OS before iOS manage to provide all of that for free, then? (Not counting game consoles, which always had a very similar distribution model, but importantly were often subsidized by their platform operator, and I hope nobody is claiming that iPhones are loss leaders for Apple.)

In my view, SDKs for third-party app development aren't premium/value-add services, they're a core OS functionality. Few people would be happy with an OS that can only run first-party apps.

The only things incurring costs to Apple scaling with the number and popularity of third-party apps that come to mind right now are malware protection and push notifications. If Apple really thinks that baking these into the device price would break their bank, I suppose they could always make an iCloud subscription mandatory for that type of service.

> Not counting game consoles, which always had a very similar distribution model, but importantly were often subsidized by their platform operator, and I hope nobody is claiming that iPhones are loss leaders for Apple

Sounds like you're proposing one of two possible business models: 1. Pay a fixed price for the device at time of purchase that includes costs for services used in the future 2. Subsidize the physical device in favor of pricing the services at a margin to recoup costs for the device

Blackberry for 1. or Amazon Fire Phone for 2.

Why force some other company (Apple) to bend to your will?

> Why force some other company (Apple) to bend to your will?

Because they exist in a stable world created by rules, governments and people, and ultimately we the people get to decide how they should behave.

> Why force some other company (Apple) to bend to your will?

Was today the day you learned about governments and laws?

Oh give it a rest, they charge a fortune for their handsets and have gross profit margins of 44%.

They charge what the market will pay. Should they make a gross profit of 4% ? How about zero?

Sure, why not?

Oh you give it rest please.

You need to learn how much software & operational upkeep costs factor into those “44% gross profit margins”

I'm also in the minority for thinking if what apple charged wasn't worth it, then no one would pay it.

What did it take it the bad old days to actually get your app into consumer hands, a publisher and a retailer who if you were lucky decided to do a deal with you and then you were given a small percentage cut.

I think this is a bad take. The idea that the device manufacturer is owed a cut of all third party software sold for it is a new one. Apple never would have asked for a cut of all Apple II software sold in the '80s because that would have been preposterous.

If I buy a piece of hardware, I can do with it what I want. It's mine, I own it, and everything on it. Nonsensical "terms of service" be damned.

It’s completely different when you have networked hardware. IMHO it’s the equivalent of road taxes to make sure there aren’t any giant potholes swallowing up 18-wheelers and bicycles alike and that your bridges are still standing when you drive across the water.

It’s a never-ending uphill battle against entropy and unless you do it, you’re guaranteeing major problems.

They're free to charge for their networked services if they want to. Doesn't change the fact that the end-user bought & owns the device & they should be free to use it as they wish, potentially without using those networked services and instead opting for an alternative. Their choice. Not yours.

There’s no equivalent to coloured diesel for electronic devices, unfortunately. So everyone has to pay the tax even if you’re not going to use the roads, to complete the metaphor.

Like I said: they’re not buying a simple rearrangement of atoms. Heck they’re free to dunk those atoms they paid for into baby oil. Nobody cares.

Nobody is entitled to dictate what _software_ should be on the device. If end-users have the right to _software_ then that right cannot be selectively applied in the case of phone or laptops: it should fairly applied in all cases: including your refrigerator. Why doesn’t the government compel Samsung to enable Spotify & third party App Stores on those devices?

You own the hardware - not everything on it.

Should you have control of everything on your own hardware? I think yes, but that’s a different thing.

Yes you do. You bought it. It's your property.

The wall socket in your house is completely your property too. Yet, you don’t have a right to demand the socket company to put a semiconductor chip in it, along with the installation of an OS, along with an App Store and tools that allow you to download Netflix directly from their own App Store.

> Swift, Xcode, CoreOS, Darwin, FoundationDB, Data Centers, the engineers on on-call rotations, and who knows whatever else.

Their tooling is absolutely terrible by any modern standard, there's a reason why I'm using Flutter...

Devs target iOS because of its userbase and certainly not because of the quality of the dev environment

I don't think that your argument is sound.

For example when is the last time my customers paid for Ruby, Python, Linux, PostgreSQL? The list can be very long. Companies paid people to work on those technologies, they are not only free labor.

In the case of Apple, they developed those technologies to control the platform. They already got a very good return. It is fair to ask developers to pay for the Apple services they are using (cloud services, messaging?) but it would be even fairer not to force developers to use Apple technologies, starting with having to use Macs to write apps.

> For example when is the last time my customers paid for Ruby, Python, Linux, PostgreSQL?

Well, those examples are cherry-picked; ergo, I present to you a picking my own cherries: Companies pay for MATLAB, Windows and MongoDB. I will concede this list not "very long". But length of lists shouldn't really matter here right? I mean, one example of MATLAB vs. Ruby/Python is good enough to make a point via counterexample.

The point I'm making is: It would be immensely unfair to expect developers to force MATLAB engineers to submit to whatever business model the devs want instead of the other way around. Companies that develop technologies own the right to price it however they please.

Competition in the free-market ensures companies do not employ price-gouging tactics.

> Competition in the free-market ensures companies do not employ price-gouging tactics.

There is no competition here, by Apple's design. You cannot publish an app to an iOS device, fully paid for by the user, if Apple doesn't want you to.

Competition exists in the phone markets. Competition exists in the open standards based web apps market.

all those things should be paid for when you paid for your phone.

or if they didn't provide all that tooling for you to make apps, they wouldn't be able to sell any phones because noone can make apps for them...

So your phone should come with a lifetime license for all its software for free ? What about new apps and features ? You can currently get everything in the iOS ecosystem on an iPhone 11 that you paid for how many years ago?

It is funny to see people on HN arguing against paying for software. Of course software should be paid for, unless you want everything included for free - which means outsourced to India.

They used to charge money for iOS updates. Why don't they go back to that if it costs them so much.

Yet somehow all of those things preexisted consumer devices that prevent sideloading.

In fact it still works on Android, Windows, Linux desktop, etc.

Well then there's your answer: devs who believe iOS App distribution doesn't work as well as Android, Window or Linux should build their apps there.

Why does the existence of a competing alternative need to force the company in question to adopt the alternative strategy?

I'm not sure I understand the segue you've made here. But, it would be absurd to suggest that Google is entitled to charge a fee for every app installed installed from F-Droid.

Your original claim was that a device owner downloading an application from elsewhere somehow means that Apple could not afford to provide basic development tools. This is demonstrably false.

In any case, most of these outside apps have tended to be free, so if anything sideloading should reduce burden on their servers, which seemed to have been part of your concern.

There is technology that goes into ensuring an app runs on a device — the dynamic linked libraries being present, the compilers adapted to the specific instruction set shipped on that device’s chip, the algorithms, ci/cd pipelines, that go into ensuring all that language design, debugger tools, profiling and performance tools, and then the online infrastructure to support things like backups, iCloud, cross-device sync, device to device transfers on upgrades/new phone purchases. Yeesh the details!

“Afford to provide basic development tools” is a conniving way to put it. Forcing a company via legislation to fund, and develop tools is more like what’s happening.

What’s happening here is a couple of greedy app developers want to skimp out on paying for the nitty gritty details of making a customer experience actually work.

So, yeah, pardon me for inaccurately categorizing them all as “server costs” — I definitely misused that word — but there’s no way in hell you can expect all of the other tech to come for free or even at a price that the _developers demand the tool maker to set_

All this litigation, back-and-forth is going to tarnish the user experience.

DLLs preexist the iPhone by a long time. The implication of your argument is that Google is bankrupt because of F-Droid. Again, all of the big companies (Apple included) were shipping those things before the iPhone came along and blocked sideloading. In fact, those other companies still are provided those things (Apple included if you consider the mac). Some examples (non-exhaustive), since you are ignoring it:

Microsoft: Onedrive, VS, VScode, C#, Visual Basic, .NET (upto and including core), windbg, MSVC, Windows, Windows app stores, etc

Google: Dart, Go, Android Studio, Android, Google Drive, Google Play store & services, etc

Apple: xcode, objective-c, cocoa, llvm, lldb etc all preexist the iphone as well

The facts are: 1. Device owners should be able to install programs onto their phone without any interference from Apple. 2. Apple allowing this will not significantly affect their ability to remain profitable. 3. Most smartphone devices (Android) already do allow this.

Correct, people buy a phone for the branding, and the software. Apple should be sponsoring the development that drives their ecosystem.

> $99/year is a mode of spam prevention dev account creation

Why is it a yearly fee if it's supposed to prevent spam accounts?

> Why is it a yearly fee

I do not know. My hunch is because it's easy. All I know is: Twitter/X is facing a crisis of spammy accounts and their mitigation strategy has been to require new accounts to submit payment info for the X subscription service.

Google Play also has a spam prevention fee. It’s a one-time fee of $25. After one year of no bans, how likely are you to be a spam account?

Sounds to me like you're arguing for a CTF for Mac and Windows development as well!

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