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We had a paid chat app for social media celebrities/models to earn money chatting with their fans years back. Apple argued that despite a human being doing the

by pentae 7y ago

We had a paid chat app for social media celebrities/models to earn money chatting with their fans years back. Apple argued that despite a human being doing the work it 'took place in the app' so that makes it a 'digital service'. That means we had to accept IAP and of course pay them 30%. Made it impossible to to pay our influencers fairly. One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API. After explaining they were the same as you can find in the Instagram app we were told we had to actively censor them anyway. Shame on us for not being as big as Instagram, right? After a year of making less margin from our own business than Apple they concluded paid chat was no longer appropriate for the app store and decided to just put us out of business one morning. Meanwhile, tons of other apps with the same functionality and far more sexualized are alive and doing well. It can't be easy making every developer happy while curating the tidal wave of apps coming in each day, but it was a really soul crushing experience for us.

LeoTinnitus 7y ago
Your comments about you not being as big as Instagram are the reason I really hate apple. I've noticed their push for only the top of the line apps or their own stuff for years and it has completely soured me of them. They only cater to people with money. Apple crushes innovation worse than government regulation right now. All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Android it kinda exists but Google takes the "promote the moneymakers more" approach. I just wish apple would stop being a SAAS model company and return to making great hardware again. The simple fact alone that it took them 5 years to remove butterfly keyboards from the market along with 3 years to even acknowledge they were broken and offer free repairs shows they don't care about their users at all.
- clairity 7y ago
  > "All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore." not discounting apple's hand in all this, but that's mostly an instance of the caveat emptor problem (and paradox of choice too)--how do you know who to trust in a market? not that it's always right, but apple and many consumers use size as a proxy for quality, a good enough, but probably not optimal, result in most cases. conversely, it's hard to evaluate small developers with no reputation. then you bring in reviews and review sites, and the additional trust issues around that. any curation is bound to be imperfect (because humans and our systems are imperfect) but no curation at all is often even worse (paradox of choice and all). the path to a better system is not trying to get it exactly right the first time but having swift and visible procedures when it's wrong.
  - willis936 7y ago
    One example that is burning in my mind the past week: VNC Viewer iOS 3.9.0. A VNC client is so trivial to make, there is no good reason that the app store shouldn’t be flooded with free, or at least low cost, good solutions. When I look, all I see is VNC Viewer, bad choices, and expensive choices. Real VNC decided to make VNC Viewer iOS require the user to watch an ad prior to connecting to a non-Real VNC server. How did we get here? Because Apple assumed the big players will behave better. But they won’t. We don’t expect them to because they have weight to throw around. Apple’s strategy is not trying to maximize the user experience. It’s not even trying to keep the user experience acceptable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196
    - clairity 7y ago
      i doubt apple is intentionally stifling competition there, but rather, there's not enough market opportunity to drive costs down via competition. as a result, real vnc is acting like a monopolist in their little corner of the market. it was that way for windows desktops 10+ years ago, when i last really used a vnc client.
      - bionoid 7y ago
        Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose. That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue. I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?
        7y ago
- scarface74 7y ago
  So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Overcast is the most popular third party podcast player on iOS and it is written by one person. David Smith has made a living on the App Store for years as a solo developer. But how is the power law that you see in the App Store any different than in music, books, podcasts or on the web?
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    >So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? Like Firefox and other proper browsers (not just Safari reskins)? ;-) And other stuff like emulators and on-device development environments, software under GPLv3 and others.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. It’s not exactly winning over hearts and minds on the other platforms where it’s available - Windows, Macs, or Android. And “successful” as in “makes decent money”. It’s the authors choice to use a license that’s its incompatible with Apple’s policies. You are free to have open source software and publish it on github and run it on iOS. Also if you are the legal rights holder of the emulated system, you are free to distribute your emulator with games - see Sega.
      - Iolaum 7y ago
        Firefox is doing a lot of innovation in the privacy sector. One extreme example is the TOR browser.
      - izacus 7y ago
        > I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. So basically you'll just be moving the goalposts until you prove Apple is the only innovative company around? Right.
- m_ke 7y ago
  Yeah and their new curated app store makes it impossible for people to find anything that they're not promoting. I have a health app and it takes me 5-10 minutes to find the health and fitness section now to see what the top apps are.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%? If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure. Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers. That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
        jedberg 7y ago
        > How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out. > Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find." > Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products? They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down. Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front. But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion. [0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/
- lancesells 7y ago
  I don't feel the app store promotes only major corporations. I don't check it all that often but those editorials seem to have plenty of independent apps.
  - LeoTinnitus 7y ago
    To which someone got paid for somewhere along the line to go "hey lets curate this!"
- rexf 7y ago
  Constantly seeing Apple Arcade (their paid service) at the top of the App Store app is annoying, unfair, and unnecessary. They even have a 'sign up for Apple TV+' at the top of the Settings app IIRC. Apple already controls/owns the ecosystem. There's no reason they need to spam the system with ads for their own apps/services.
  - LeoTinnitus 7y ago
    Yeah seriously. Also they've messed with the podcast app so much I can't use it anymore. They only promote those that pay them basically. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "new" podcasts? It's virtually non-existent on their app. 7 years ago, you could filter by new and you had a larger variety of categories. Now, if they aren't doing an ad ready 10 times per 1 hour episode, it's not at the top page.
- thelittleone 7y ago
  I was an Apple fanboy for 15 years. But they seem to be doing their level best to alienate pro customers. Over the last five years I’ve endured a comedic run of Apple Hardware failures (a catastrophic failure at least every 6 months). The response from Apple suggests this is nothing exceptional or that they simply just don’t care. I believe it’s the latter, I mean they’ve got billions of other customers. This arrogance that inevitably festers when a company is on top for so long. But history has shown companies like this fall from grace once a critical mass of once devoted customers go elsewhere. I hope I’m wrong and Apple wakes up before this happens. I thought there was no alternative to the Apple ecosystem that wouldn’t drive me crazy (Windows) or cost me in productivity. But with my 2017 MacBook Pro dead (again) and no access to Apple service due to Pandemic, I took out an old Thinkpad T420 and installed Linux Mint. It installed perfectly, the keyboard is epic compared to MBP and I’m productive. Now I’m happy because I have an effective alternative to Apple. Once my MBP is fixed I will sell it. And wave goodbye to Apple.
  - indemnity 7y ago
    Apart from their phones, they make little I want any more. I built a Ryzen desktop a while ago, since there was no way I was paying what they want for an iMac Pro or Mac Pro, and I needed a decent GPU, lots of cores and memory and no thermal throttling. Switched to Linux with a tiling WM (bspwm), since I’m a backend engineer (Go/Rust), not iOS. I also have Windows 10 installed, and honestly, it’s fine as well with WSL2. Apple needs to realise Swift is not going anywhere except for the iOS/macOS niche, and consider general developers again, but so far Microsoft is doing a much better job of that, and I don’t hold out much hope, Apple have missed their window and are returning to their closed off locked down comfort zone. Not really sure they left, but it seemed like it for a while. My MacBook Pro is gathering dust.
    - 9oijrefw 7y ago
      Apple has a history of changing its name multiple times. At some point in the near future it will only be logical to rebrand as iPhone.
    - DeathArrow 7y ago
- tim333 7y ago
  Kind of ironic given their past "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes..." messaging, though I'm not sure that was ever real.
- voicedYoda 7y ago
  My mbp is 9 years old and still doing relatively well, however it's nearing it's end of life and my replacement of choice is system 76. MS is an ok alternative, but unnecessary. And osx no longer innovates. They just hoard and protect their own interests.
adrianhel 7y ago
That's anti-trust at its worst. Sue Apple.
- toxik 7y ago
  Apple is so due for antitrust it’s ridiculous. Google too.
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    People say this often but Apple only has about 20% of the smartphone market. They don’t have anywhere near a monopoly.
    - toxik 7y ago
      The tactics Apple employs are so outlandishly anticompetitive it’s almost comical. Sure, it’s not a smartphone monopoly, but in the iPhone app market, Apple reigns supreme - and it is a tyrannical reign.
      - hurricanetc 7y ago
        It's a real stretch to suggest that Apple is a monopoly because they control their own platform. By that definition anyone who has a closed platform is operating a monopoly. Is Netflix a monopoly? Fiverr? One of the principles of competition law is prevent a company from abusing a dominant position or to prevent a company from obtaining a dominant position through abuse. Apple does not have a dominant position.
1123581321 7y ago
Did you have an option to require account management on the website like Netflix, Hulu, etc. do to avoid the IAP fee? It’s not clear to me if small companies are allowed to do that.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Yes any company is allowed to do that. You can buy Udemy courses outside of the App Store. You have to buy access to ACloudGuru outside of the App Store.
  - saurik 7y ago
    No. So, first off, even when this is allowed, the UI experience sucks, as you aren't allowed to help the user make the purchase from the app: the user has to go hunting on Google for the idea they can make an external purchase. > Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase. But like, while you might think it is allowed--due to the existence of some apps like Netflix and Udemy--those apps are in explicitly exempted content-catalog oriented product categories, such as movies and online education. > Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video, access to professional databases, VoIP, cloud storage, and approved services such as classroom management apps), provided that you agree not to directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods are not designed to discourage use of in-app purchase.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      It’s not just those. I worked for a B2B company before where we had contracts with major hospitals. You could download our app “for free” but you had to have an existing deal with our company. There are also apps like Office, GSuite, and those from Adobe where you buy your license out of band.
      - 7y ago
echelon 7y ago
Apple does not deserve their unfair market position. They are bleeding small businesses dry and if they continue this, they need to be broken up. Same with Google and Android. They can't make a phone and simultaneously control the app distribution. Things didn't work like this in the 90s and 00s. I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry. The government should mandate that apps work on all platforms, with the onus being on platform owners to make it work.
- paulgb 7y ago
  > I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry. I'm hopeful about this too, but it seems Apple is consciously avoiding cannibalizing their developer program by giving too much API access. For example, despite Web Push being a standard for years now and supported by desktop Safari, not only is it not implemented on iOS Safari, other browsers are seemingly prevented from implementing it. Whole classes of PWA are eliminated by not having notification access (e.g. turn-based games).
- scarface74 7y ago
  So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace? Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store? Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands? As far as things didn’t work like this is in the 90s, Atari had its own digital store in the 80s where you could buy games and have them downloaded over cable to a cartridge.
  - echelon 7y ago
    > So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace? People should be able to run their own distribution. It's the Internet and it's a simple problem. Companies need to stop dipping their fingers in the pie and offering little in recompense. > Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store? There are three major gaming consoles, PC, mobile, self-distribution... lots of platforms with which to gain distribution. There are libraries and frameworks that let you write the game once and publish it to all platforms. Gaming is a small sector compared to everything we run on our phones. Movies, finance, communication, dating. Apple and Google tax all of the commerce happening there. I'd much rather give that money to the government instead of helping these two build a deeper moat. > Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands? They do this at a loss to aid negotiations for pricing and ensuring they get enough stock. It's complicated.
scarface74 7y ago
We had a paid chat app for social media celebrities/models to earn money chatting with their fans years back. Apple argued that despite a human being doing the work it 'took place in the app' so that makes it a 'digital service'. That means we had to accept IAP and of course pay them 30%. Made it impossible to to pay our influencers fairly. Or you could have forced users to subscribe outside of the App Store on your own website.....
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pentae 7y ago
  You must have missed the part I said where Apple deemed paid chat "inappropriate for the app store". And maybe it is. But that wasn't the point of my post. I'm not looking for solutions, i'm sharing my experience. But thanks anyway
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So your paid chat app wasn’t appropriate but dozens of free chat apps were? Are you sure that it was big mean Apple and that your business couldn’t find product market fit?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tpush 7y ago
      Do you always have to be so condescending and aggressive to everyone who shares negative experiences with Apple? Seriously.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        I’m just pointing out that people love to blame the platform owners for their own business failings - especially seeing similar apps have been successful on the same platform. Would you also blame the console makers if you had a game that failed?
qppo 7y ago
Was your paid chat app used for adult-content creators to charge customers for private sessions?
- pentae 7y ago
  No. We had to actively prevent adult content creators joining to stay compliant with the app store guidelines
  - qppo 7y ago
    I feel like what you're talking about gets really close to the Roth test and I can see how that might be a factor for Apple pulling your app but leaving others. There's a lot of amateur porn stars on social media that call themselves models. There's a lot of models that aren't. I don't know how you create an app where people pay money to chat to models with racy instagram photos and discriminate between who's making pornography and who's not.
    - pentae 7y ago
      Our app was quite clean and not taken down due to adult content creators, it was specifically the paid chat functionality they took issue with. And hey, I get it. It was a bit borderline. We took a risk with the business model. But that wasn't my issue it was the 30% fee that really killed us - bending the spirit of the rules to call a humans time chatting somehow a 'digital goods/service' to catch us in their IAP web. This stopped us from being able to pay our creators fairly and caused us to make less than Apple did from our own product after we paid creators. Creators expect more than the 70% so it makes it almost impossible to run this type of product/service on the app store.
Zenst 7y ago
"One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API." So outside Apples wall garden or the great firewall of Apple as you could liken it. I can understand that aspect as it would allow somebody to change the pic on Instagram and that would then come across upon their platform so the potential for something lewd and some media outlet would have the headline "Apple has dildo's showing on an their site accessible to children". So proactive PR management in some way but certainly a scenario that could play out and can appreciate that aspect. Equally, as a developer using public API's, I can totally appreciete the perspective that Instagrams T&C's wouldn't allow anything bad in this instances, and feel that censoring was already done and having to censor an API content when if that was needed then Instagram would alreay have that in place would make any dev grown in angst. However, does appear that a censoring API setup for some public API's is a market that could be tapped. So whilst it may of seen bad on the face of it, it shows an opportunity awaiting to be tapped and with that - how did that all pan out (how did you solve that issue)?
mrfusion 7y ago
Btw why hasn’t that business idea caught on more? Lots of people would love to talk to celebrities and celebrities like money. So why isn’t it a thing? I bet lots of us would pay $20 to talk to Linus or guido for 5-10 minutes. Or a couple bucks for a quick text chat.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  I’m guessing that celebrities can get much better rates than the $120 - $240 per hour you’re suggesting. I’d be surprised if even niche YouTube ‘stars’ couldn’t do better than that. It seems like it’s a business model that doesn’t scale well.
cageface 7y ago
The app store is a fools' game. Build your business on a platform you control. As developers we should all be cheering for the open web and doing what we can to support it.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  If your app is a hardware intensive game, how is this going to work? Not everything can and should be an web app. And I say this as a web developer, having worked in the past on games, mobile apps and desktop software.
  - cageface 7y ago
    Not everything can and should be built on the web, of course, but I would not build a software business of any kind on the app store. If I were to do games I'd target consoles or Steam.
hurricanetc 7y ago
I had a similar experience except it was Google. Google outright killed the app and punished our developer account while Apple happily let it continue. We tried distributing the apk and going through Amazon but it was fruitless. So now it’s just iOS and we have to explain why over and over and over again.

by pentae 7y ago

LeoTinnitus 7y ago

Your comments about you not being as big as Instagram are the reason I really hate apple. I've noticed their push for only the top of the line apps or their own stuff for years and it has completely soured me of them. They only cater to people with money. Apple crushes innovation worse than government regulation right now. All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Android it kinda exists but Google takes the "promote the moneymakers more" approach. I just wish apple would stop being a SAAS model company and return to making great hardware again. The simple fact alone that it took them 5 years to remove butterfly keyboards from the market along with 3 years to even acknowledge they were broken and offer free repairs shows they don't care about their users at all.

clairity 7y ago
> "All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore." not discounting apple's hand in all this, but that's mostly an instance of the caveat emptor problem (and paradox of choice too)--how do you know who to trust in a market? not that it's always right, but apple and many consumers use size as a proxy for quality, a good enough, but probably not optimal, result in most cases. conversely, it's hard to evaluate small developers with no reputation. then you bring in reviews and review sites, and the additional trust issues around that. any curation is bound to be imperfect (because humans and our systems are imperfect) but no curation at all is often even worse (paradox of choice and all). the path to a better system is not trying to get it exactly right the first time but having swift and visible procedures when it's wrong.
- willis936 7y ago
  One example that is burning in my mind the past week: VNC Viewer iOS 3.9.0. A VNC client is so trivial to make, there is no good reason that the app store shouldn’t be flooded with free, or at least low cost, good solutions. When I look, all I see is VNC Viewer, bad choices, and expensive choices. Real VNC decided to make VNC Viewer iOS require the user to watch an ad prior to connecting to a non-Real VNC server. How did we get here? Because Apple assumed the big players will behave better. But they won’t. We don’t expect them to because they have weight to throw around. Apple’s strategy is not trying to maximize the user experience. It’s not even trying to keep the user experience acceptable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196
  - clairity 7y ago
    i doubt apple is intentionally stifling competition there, but rather, there's not enough market opportunity to drive costs down via competition. as a result, real vnc is acting like a monopolist in their little corner of the market. it was that way for windows desktops 10+ years ago, when i last really used a vnc client.
    - bionoid 7y ago
      Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose. That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue. I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?
      - 7y ago
scarface74 7y ago
So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Overcast is the most popular third party podcast player on iOS and it is written by one person. David Smith has made a living on the App Store for years as a solo developer. But how is the power law that you see in the App Store any different than in music, books, podcasts or on the web?
- m4rtink 7y ago
  >So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? Like Firefox and other proper browsers (not just Safari reskins)? ;-) And other stuff like emulators and on-device development environments, software under GPLv3 and others.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. It’s not exactly winning over hearts and minds on the other platforms where it’s available - Windows, Macs, or Android. And “successful” as in “makes decent money”. It’s the authors choice to use a license that’s its incompatible with Apple’s policies. You are free to have open source software and publish it on github and run it on iOS. Also if you are the legal rights holder of the emulated system, you are free to distribute your emulator with games - see Sega.
    - Iolaum 7y ago
      Firefox is doing a lot of innovation in the privacy sector. One extreme example is the TOR browser.
    - izacus 7y ago
      > I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. So basically you'll just be moving the goalposts until you prove Apple is the only innovative company around? Right.
m_ke 7y ago
Yeah and their new curated app store makes it impossible for people to find anything that they're not promoting. I have a health app and it takes me 5-10 minutes to find the health and fitness section now to see what the top apps are.
- scarface74 7y ago
  So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%? If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure. Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers. That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
      - jedberg 7y ago
        > How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out. > Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find." > Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products? They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down. Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front. But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion. [0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/
lancesells 7y ago
I don't feel the app store promotes only major corporations. I don't check it all that often but those editorials seem to have plenty of independent apps.
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  To which someone got paid for somewhere along the line to go "hey lets curate this!"
rexf 7y ago
Constantly seeing Apple Arcade (their paid service) at the top of the App Store app is annoying, unfair, and unnecessary. They even have a 'sign up for Apple TV+' at the top of the Settings app IIRC. Apple already controls/owns the ecosystem. There's no reason they need to spam the system with ads for their own apps/services.
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  Yeah seriously. Also they've messed with the podcast app so much I can't use it anymore. They only promote those that pay them basically. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "new" podcasts? It's virtually non-existent on their app. 7 years ago, you could filter by new and you had a larger variety of categories. Now, if they aren't doing an ad ready 10 times per 1 hour episode, it's not at the top page.
thelittleone 7y ago
I was an Apple fanboy for 15 years. But they seem to be doing their level best to alienate pro customers. Over the last five years I’ve endured a comedic run of Apple Hardware failures (a catastrophic failure at least every 6 months). The response from Apple suggests this is nothing exceptional or that they simply just don’t care. I believe it’s the latter, I mean they’ve got billions of other customers. This arrogance that inevitably festers when a company is on top for so long. But history has shown companies like this fall from grace once a critical mass of once devoted customers go elsewhere. I hope I’m wrong and Apple wakes up before this happens. I thought there was no alternative to the Apple ecosystem that wouldn’t drive me crazy (Windows) or cost me in productivity. But with my 2017 MacBook Pro dead (again) and no access to Apple service due to Pandemic, I took out an old Thinkpad T420 and installed Linux Mint. It installed perfectly, the keyboard is epic compared to MBP and I’m productive. Now I’m happy because I have an effective alternative to Apple. Once my MBP is fixed I will sell it. And wave goodbye to Apple.
- indemnity 7y ago
  Apart from their phones, they make little I want any more. I built a Ryzen desktop a while ago, since there was no way I was paying what they want for an iMac Pro or Mac Pro, and I needed a decent GPU, lots of cores and memory and no thermal throttling. Switched to Linux with a tiling WM (bspwm), since I’m a backend engineer (Go/Rust), not iOS. I also have Windows 10 installed, and honestly, it’s fine as well with WSL2. Apple needs to realise Swift is not going anywhere except for the iOS/macOS niche, and consider general developers again, but so far Microsoft is doing a much better job of that, and I don’t hold out much hope, Apple have missed their window and are returning to their closed off locked down comfort zone. Not really sure they left, but it seemed like it for a while. My MacBook Pro is gathering dust.
  - 9oijrefw 7y ago
    Apple has a history of changing its name multiple times. At some point in the near future it will only be logical to rebrand as iPhone.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
tim333 7y ago
Kind of ironic given their past "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes..." messaging, though I'm not sure that was ever real.
voicedYoda 7y ago
My mbp is 9 years old and still doing relatively well, however it's nearing it's end of life and my replacement of choice is system 76. MS is an ok alternative, but unnecessary. And osx no longer innovates. They just hoard and protect their own interests.

adrianhel 7y ago

That's anti-trust at its worst. Sue Apple.

toxik 7y ago
Apple is so due for antitrust it’s ridiculous. Google too.
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  People say this often but Apple only has about 20% of the smartphone market. They don’t have anywhere near a monopoly.
  - toxik 7y ago
    The tactics Apple employs are so outlandishly anticompetitive it’s almost comical. Sure, it’s not a smartphone monopoly, but in the iPhone app market, Apple reigns supreme - and it is a tyrannical reign.
    - hurricanetc 7y ago
      It's a real stretch to suggest that Apple is a monopoly because they control their own platform. By that definition anyone who has a closed platform is operating a monopoly. Is Netflix a monopoly? Fiverr? One of the principles of competition law is prevent a company from abusing a dominant position or to prevent a company from obtaining a dominant position through abuse. Apple does not have a dominant position.

1123581321 7y ago

Did you have an option to require account management on the website like Netflix, Hulu, etc. do to avoid the IAP fee? It’s not clear to me if small companies are allowed to do that.

scarface74 7y ago
Yes any company is allowed to do that. You can buy Udemy courses outside of the App Store. You have to buy access to ACloudGuru outside of the App Store.
- saurik 7y ago
  No. So, first off, even when this is allowed, the UI experience sucks, as you aren't allowed to help the user make the purchase from the app: the user has to go hunting on Google for the idea they can make an external purchase. > Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase. But like, while you might think it is allowed--due to the existence of some apps like Netflix and Udemy--those apps are in explicitly exempted content-catalog oriented product categories, such as movies and online education. > Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video, access to professional databases, VoIP, cloud storage, and approved services such as classroom management apps), provided that you agree not to directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods are not designed to discourage use of in-app purchase.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    It’s not just those. I worked for a B2B company before where we had contracts with major hospitals. You could download our app “for free” but you had to have an existing deal with our company. There are also apps like Office, GSuite, and those from Adobe where you buy your license out of band.
    - 7y ago

echelon 7y ago

Apple does not deserve their unfair market position. They are bleeding small businesses dry and if they continue this, they need to be broken up. Same with Google and Android. They can't make a phone and simultaneously control the app distribution. Things didn't work like this in the 90s and 00s. I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry. The government should mandate that apps work on all platforms, with the onus being on platform owners to make it work.

paulgb 7y ago
> I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry. I'm hopeful about this too, but it seems Apple is consciously avoiding cannibalizing their developer program by giving too much API access. For example, despite Web Push being a standard for years now and supported by desktop Safari, not only is it not implemented on iOS Safari, other browsers are seemingly prevented from implementing it. Whole classes of PWA are eliminated by not having notification access (e.g. turn-based games).
scarface74 7y ago
So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace? Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store? Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands? As far as things didn’t work like this is in the 90s, Atari had its own digital store in the 80s where you could buy games and have them downloaded over cable to a cartridge.
- echelon 7y ago
  > So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace? People should be able to run their own distribution. It's the Internet and it's a simple problem. Companies need to stop dipping their fingers in the pie and offering little in recompense. > Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store? There are three major gaming consoles, PC, mobile, self-distribution... lots of platforms with which to gain distribution. There are libraries and frameworks that let you write the game once and publish it to all platforms. Gaming is a small sector compared to everything we run on our phones. Movies, finance, communication, dating. Apple and Google tax all of the commerce happening there. I'd much rather give that money to the government instead of helping these two build a deeper moat. > Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands? They do this at a loss to aid negotiations for pricing and ensuring they get enough stock. It's complicated.

scarface74 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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pentae 7y ago
You must have missed the part I said where Apple deemed paid chat "inappropriate for the app store". And maybe it is. But that wasn't the point of my post. I'm not looking for solutions, i'm sharing my experience. But thanks anyway
- scarface74 7y ago
  So your paid chat app wasn’t appropriate but dozens of free chat apps were? Are you sure that it was big mean Apple and that your business couldn’t find product market fit?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tpush 7y ago
    Do you always have to be so condescending and aggressive to everyone who shares negative experiences with Apple? Seriously.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I’m just pointing out that people love to blame the platform owners for their own business failings - especially seeing similar apps have been successful on the same platform. Would you also blame the console makers if you had a game that failed?

qppo 7y ago

Was your paid chat app used for adult-content creators to charge customers for private sessions?

pentae 7y ago
No. We had to actively prevent adult content creators joining to stay compliant with the app store guidelines
- qppo 7y ago
  I feel like what you're talking about gets really close to the Roth test and I can see how that might be a factor for Apple pulling your app but leaving others. There's a lot of amateur porn stars on social media that call themselves models. There's a lot of models that aren't. I don't know how you create an app where people pay money to chat to models with racy instagram photos and discriminate between who's making pornography and who's not.
  - pentae 7y ago
    Our app was quite clean and not taken down due to adult content creators, it was specifically the paid chat functionality they took issue with. And hey, I get it. It was a bit borderline. We took a risk with the business model. But that wasn't my issue it was the 30% fee that really killed us - bending the spirit of the rules to call a humans time chatting somehow a 'digital goods/service' to catch us in their IAP web. This stopped us from being able to pay our creators fairly and caused us to make less than Apple did from our own product after we paid creators. Creators expect more than the 70% so it makes it almost impossible to run this type of product/service on the app store.

Zenst 7y ago

"One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API." So outside Apples wall garden or the great firewall of Apple as you could liken it. I can understand that aspect as it would allow somebody to change the pic on Instagram and that would then come across upon their platform so the potential for something lewd and some media outlet would have the headline "Apple has dildo's showing on an their site accessible to children". So proactive PR management in some way but certainly a scenario that could play out and can appreciate that aspect. Equally, as a developer using public API's, I can totally appreciete the perspective that Instagrams T&C's wouldn't allow anything bad in this instances, and feel that censoring was already done and having to censor an API content when if that was needed then Instagram would alreay have that in place would make any dev grown in angst. However, does appear that a censoring API setup for some public API's is a market that could be tapped. So whilst it may of seen bad on the face of it, it shows an opportunity awaiting to be tapped and with that - how did that all pan out (how did you solve that issue)?

mrfusion 7y ago

Btw why hasn’t that business idea caught on more? Lots of people would love to talk to celebrities and celebrities like money. So why isn’t it a thing? I bet lots of us would pay $20 to talk to Linus or guido for 5-10 minutes. Or a couple bucks for a quick text chat.

mr_toad 7y ago
I’m guessing that celebrities can get much better rates than the $120 - $240 per hour you’re suggesting. I’d be surprised if even niche YouTube ‘stars’ couldn’t do better than that. It seems like it’s a business model that doesn’t scale well.

cageface 7y ago

The app store is a fools' game. Build your business on a platform you control. As developers we should all be cheering for the open web and doing what we can to support it.

DeathArrow 7y ago
If your app is a hardware intensive game, how is this going to work? Not everything can and should be an web app. And I say this as a web developer, having worked in the past on games, mobile apps and desktop software.
- cageface 7y ago
  Not everything can and should be built on the web, of course, but I would not build a software business of any kind on the app store. If I were to do games I'd target consoles or Steam.

hurricanetc 7y ago

I had a similar experience except it was Google. Google outright killed the app and punished our developer account while Apple happily let it continue. We tried distributing the apk and going through Amazon but it was fruitless. So now it’s just iOS and we have to explain why over and over and over again.