Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> 100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that's like money you wouldn't notice if it got lost in your pockets

For someone who is making money from it, sure, but that's exactly who this isn't about. The way they get screwed is by the 30%.

A fixed fee -- in any amount -- is screwing the people who aren't in it for the money. Because to begin with, it's not just the fee, it's the bureaucracy that comes with the fee.

You're a kid and you want to make your first app, but you don't have a credit card.

You live in a poor country and maybe the amount you can lose without noticing when you're rich isn't the same there. Or even if you can get the money, you may not have a first world bank account and the conglomerate isn't set up to take the local currency.

You're a desktop developer and you're willing to make a simple mobile app and give it away for free as long as it's not a bother. The money is nothing but the paperwork is a bother so you don't do it, and now the million people who would have used that app don't have it and have to suffer the spam-laden trash alternative from someone who is only in it for the money.

And suppose the amount is as trivial as you propose. Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?

>And suppose the amount is as trivial as you propose. Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?

Reminds me how in the 1970s and 1980s there used to be these ads in the back of magazines in which a person who supposedly became a millionaire sold pamphlets for $5 telling his secrets to success. The obvious question was why such a successful person would need $5 from poor people (unless that was one of his secrets to success, I suppose).

You bring up several important issues and I agree with you 100%. A lot of good application/utilities in the past were from engineers who needed the tools themselves, developed them, and then released it open source.

But I can also see the clutter argument. Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.

It feels like we had a good system, but then lost it. I have no idea what it takes to get it back.

> But I can also see the clutter argument.

I don't understand the "clutter" argument at all. What does it matter if there are a billion apps? You already need a functioning system to show the better ones at the top whether the worse ones are 50% of the total or 99%.

On top of that, this isn't about their store anyway. They're charging this fee to the people not using their store.

> Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.

The big problem with all of these is that they're charging too much. Apple takes 30% because they ban the alternatives. People only use Windows because they have dependencies on legacy software distributed outside the store, so Microsoft can't ban that or there would be no reason to use Windows. And when you don't have to use the vendor's store, they can't even get away with charging 15%, because it turns out platform stores are actually worthless.

Because people want platforms to provide both of two separate things. First, they want the long tail. They're a chemist or a mechanic or a photographer or a farmer and they want that half-finished app some grad student in Minsk wrote ten years ago that does the thing only people in their specific sub-specialty care about. And second, they want a curated list of apps so that when they're looking for a messaging app or a finance app it only shows the ones that don't steal their contacts and sell their financial records to data brokers.

The problem with platform stores is that they try to do both things at once, which isn't possible. Either the store has everything or it doesn't.

What you actually want is for there to be stores that only contain the curated stuff and simultaneously a reasonable means for ordinary people to install things from the long tail. Because sometimes you don't know which one to trust, which is when you want the store, and other times you know exactly what you want to install because this time it's your field and you and your colleagues are the experts, even though the store has no means to vet an app their reviewers don't understand and only 100 people in the world are using.

You can have a platform that gives you each one via different but each widely used paths. What you can't have is a store that curates the long tail.

> Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?

Because the store gets spammed by million of bot applications ? Having a small fee for store review is probably a decent noise floor.

You can still develop apps on your devices without a dev license - the week long cert is annoying, they probably want to avoid people side-loading via this mechanism (which I am against FWIW).

But you can develop on your devices without paying 100$/year

> Because the store gets spammed by million of bot applications ?

They're a search engine company. They can't figure out how to put real apps on page 1 and spam apps on page 500?

Also, then why are they charging the fee if you use someone else's store?

> the week long cert is annoying, they probably want to avoid people side-loading via this mechanism

It seems like you understand their underlying motives, so then why are you defending them?

But this isn't about the store. It's about being able to install apps even without going through the store.

I'm not talking about putting the App into the Store, just installing it on my phone.

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