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Ahh the app store. It's just like the internet, except the websites are mini apps, and a mega corporation gets to control whats on it. And takes 30% of everythi
by pentae 9y ago
Ahh the app store. It's just like the internet, except the websites are mini apps, and a mega corporation gets to control whats on it. And takes 30% of everything you make. Brilliant.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago> And takes 30% of everything you make. Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero? Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something), but will not pay for web sites. Third-party advertisers might pay, if you're lucky, and if you don't mind treating your users as a commodity, but the users themselves will not.
- lj3 9y ago> but will not pay for web sites. Subscriptions to web-based services don't count as paying for web sites?
- artificial 9y agoHow many people would you say subscribe to something they pay for online? For example news? The pool of subscribers for magazines and news is an ever shrinking pie. I know of no one in the last three jobs that maintains a subscription that’s under under age 40.
- Frank2312 9y agoNetflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions. Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for. If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it. Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoThey're also not exactly something a developer can launch and start making money off of. Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?
- klez 9y ago> Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird? I don't do that on the app store either. And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?
- eitland 9y agoI happily pay for games and apps, including upgrades if they are valuable to me. I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.
- skinnymuch 9y agoFlappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoWhat makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule? There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.
- vonmoltke 9y agoThe number of apps in all app stores combined that are profitable from store sales is also likely a rounding error.
- skinnymuch 9y agoHow many apps are profitable and of those how many are made by independent people?
- iand 9y agoHere are some of the online services that I subscribe to, delivered over the web: Github, AWS, pinboard.in, spotify, ancestry.com Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.
- peteey 9y agoNews is free on the web and free as an app. You are not making a distinction. I paid nothing for my NPR and BBC apps.
- thrill 9y agoThe BBC is fully funded by the government (i.e. the taxpayer). NPR claims they are minimally funded by the government but sure does fight hard to keep that supposed 2%. But the main point is that someone else had to pay for what you espouse as free.
- DanBC 9y agoAbout a quarter of its revenue comes from BBC Worldwide selling BBC content to markets outside the UK.
- eitland 9y agoHappy blendle user. Love to be able to pay for quality content. Same with Spotify. Both models are OK with me. What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.
- addicted 9y agoAnd all those magazines and newspapers also have apps, yet that hasn’t somehow led to floods of money pouring into their coffers.
- untog 9y agoThis feels like kind of an aside - do those under 40s you know readily pay for news apps, but not for web subscriptions? If not it's not really related to the issue at hand.
- elif 9y agoConfidence in news is also an ever shrinking pie. Not a great example.
- alkonaut 9y agoThe only way people would pay for web sites in the extent they pay for apps is if it’s as convenient. I don’t want to log in to get the paid benefits for example. I don’t want to enter my cc details to pay the subscription if it could be avoided by “the store” already knowing it, and so on. In the end reality is that I just pass on buying subscriptions and would probably prefer buying subscriber access to a website if they made an app facade for the site that handled payment and login. The UX of web sites and subscriptions is that bad.
- EADGBE 9y agoWith Stripe's integration of Apple Pay/Google Pay are you more willing or less willing to pay to use a web site?
- zeveb 9y ago> Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero? There's more to the Internet than websites. Believe it or not, there are lots of protocols out there, not just HTTP.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe parent explicitly said "websites".
- danpalmer 9y agoAhh the App Store. It's just like the Play Store, except no viruses, far fewer scam apps, and there's a legitimate and thriving market for paid apps.
- Accacin 9y agoBut they remove any apps that might show boobs?
- mcny 9y ago> But they remove any apps that might show boobs? We are not much better, sadly. https://floens.github.io/Clover/gp_unavailable.txt https://floens.github.io/Clover/gp_unavailable.txt
- vinay427 9y agoThe app stores you mentioned are inextricably to their respective operating systems. The problems with the Play Store are a compromise I'm willing to deal with so I can easily install apps using alternative app stores or none at all.
- phoneboy 9y agoThe store is their way to control their ecosystem, has nothing to do with the OS. This effort is a power-play against decentralized apps that threaten the centralized platform model.
- vinay427 9y agoYes, but my point is that the Play Store inherently allows for competition and limit's Google's control because they chose to develop it on a platform that allows for competing app stores and sideloading. Regardless of Google's choices in managing the Play Store, that stark difference between Google's approach and Apple's approach remains.
- 9y ago
- artificial 9y agoWhich internet are you on that requires 30% of all made on it? If news is any indicator the vast majority of people have no interest in paying for and even reading the content - the headline will suffice. Curation has its merits, for example not nearly as many trojaned clones. Ransomware does not exist. Ahhh users, bless them. The public daily demonstrates a lack of interest in owning and operating a well maintained and updatable/ed device.
- nullbyte 9y agoHe's saying that the app store takes 30% of your earnings.
- jmull 9y agoI'm not sure why anyone argues against Apple's 30% cut like this. It's app developers who make the determination whether the cost is worth the benefit. As you point out, there are alternatives. Why do you think developers have massively and overwhelmingly opted-in?
- vetinari 9y agoExactly, similarly, I'm not sure why anyone argues against the troll watching the bridge. It's the travelers who make the determination whether the price is worth crossing the bridge. After all, there are alternatives to bridges, why do the travelers opt to pay the fee? -- Obviously, /s
- pjc50 9y agoPlease explain how developers can ship native iOS apps outside of the store?
- cma 9y agoBecause of network effects outside of anyone's control?
- djsumdog 9y ago> are alternatives Are there? Really? No, they're not. No one who isn't in tech is going to install F-droid. Few people will uninstall untrusted sources, or even know what that is. Fewer Apple users than ever jailbreak their phones. For over 90% of the market, no, there are no alternatives (other than a mobile website). Due to the non-standard nature of ARM and SoC/binary drivers, we don't even have a real alternative OS for old Android devices that's universal like most Linux distros on the PC in the 90s (although PostmarketOS is making some huge strides in this area). 30% is an insane cut. Bandcamp sells music with a 15% cut, literally half of Amazon/Google/Apple. I always prefer it because I know the band gets more money and I get a higher quality version of the song without a patent encumbered codec (FLAC and OGG downloads are supported). But no, there are no real alternatives. AppStore/Play are bastardizations of the software repo concept from Linux. If Google Play was a real package managers, it'd keep standardize shared jar files across apps (dependencies to reduce massive app size) either by mirroring maven repos and signing dependencies or creating their own system, and they'd also allow for easily adding 3rd party app trees. Both Apple and Google are closed walled gardens, where everything you need has to be contained in your bloated package, and where their corporate overlords get final approval of what is in and out.
- pastastickers 9y agoAnd how much does it cost to build and maintain your own domain, storage, delivery/updates infrastructure and billing system? Oh, and how about marketing for your app?
- jbigelow76 9y agoThe app stores market your app for you? Ha!
- pastastickers 9y agoApple’s ‘App of the Day’ featuring boosts downloads by 1747%, games by 792%[1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-featuring-boosts-downloads-by-1747-games-by-792/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-feat...
- jbigelow76 9y agoSure getting featured helps, just like if a fashion designer has a celebrity photographed in their clothes, they will probably see a temporary bump in sales. Getting featured on the App Store is one time, possibly incredibly beneficial, event, but it is not a marketing plan.
- Veen 9y agoAsk developers how much difference being made a featured app makes to sales. Apple recently radically redesigned the App Store so that it could more effectively promote apps.
- tw1010 9y agoAnd the incentive/risk tradeoff is too much in favour of the former for optimistic entrepreneurs to ever think they'll be affected by something like this.
- mherdeg 9y agoThe ebb and flow is kind of neat to watch. (1) Load AOL and visit keyword "UBER" to get started requesting a car now! (2) Type UBER into your web browser location bar then hit control-enter to visit http://UBER.com/ http://UBER.com/ and get started requesting a car now! (3) Load your app store and search for "UBER" to get started requesting a car now!
- squarefoot 9y ago"except the websites are mini apps, and a mega corporation gets to control whats on it" There is more to it. Using apps instead of websites we're killing the whole concept of making information and services available using a standard protocol. That's like going back over 30 years, even before gopher. Then there is the cloud->mainframe similarity, with data and services being moved somewhere into the net where the user has no control over his/her own data, and the whole email/usenet->social media migration which puts private and public communications in the hands of corporations having no intention of guaranteeing interoperability with competing systems. Basically the industry screwed 40+ years of IT development, not just in a technical way, but they did it behind shiny graphics and animated emoticons, so nobody really cares.
- phoneboy 9y agoThat's why we need decentralized solutions that break the hold the current centralized platforms have on us.
- ethbro 9y agoThe problem wasn't that we didn't have decentralized solutions since the 1960s -- it was that we've never figured out a way to make hosting your own environment as easy / cheap as using an externally managed one.
- s0adex 9y agoNot every user is smart. That's why there is a necessity for centralized/trusted solution. I wouldn't sleep well if I knew my mom could install a malware by mistake on appstore. Unfortunately, life is not this simple and every path there's a toll.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- m12k 9y ago> Using apps instead of websites we're killing the whole concept of making information and services available using a standard protocol I think the interesting thing to note here is that for most end users a standard protocol is not nearly as appealing as a standard user interface. Like how most iOS apps follow common navigation paradigms, so users don't need to spend time learning each new one. And how people tend to prefer buying things on Amazon instead of any random webshop. And how WeChat has almost become a little web of its own with custom chat UIs for e.g. ordering pizza. If open software for consumers is ever to stop being beaten by these walled gardens, it needs to get a ton more UX people involved and focus on the end user UX, not just the technical implementation.
- gpmcadam 9y agoAhh the race track. It's just like the highway, except the roads are smaller and a corporation gets to control who drives on it. And they make you pay to use it. Brilliant.
- debt 9y agoIt's supposedly more secure than the normal internet. But ya figure for a large company of creative geniuses they could figure out how to democratize security so that the whole system isn't wholly owned and controlled by a single entity.