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People were building and distributing software for decades without giving apple 30%. It's just a phone. Smartphones existed before the App Store, too. It provid

People were building and distributing software for decades without giving apple 30%. It's just a phone. Smartphones existed before the App Store, too. It provides useful services but it's not the virgin mary and it's not some profoundly new invention: They just did a bunch of things previous apps had done, did them well, and slotted them all together. Things that existed before the app store: * Store performing payment processing (steam, for example) * Same storefront for purchase and install * Automated updates * User reviews * Content submission and distribution (steam again, along with basically every other app store) * Code signing Things that appeared other places around when the app store got them, if not earlier: * IAP * Subscriptions It's totally reasonable for Apple to put all this stuff together and decide it's a good enough package to charge you for it. It's also totally reasonable to think 30% is too much, and to think it's absurd that everyone is required to put up with their arbitrary rule enforcement. If you're paying Apple for a service it's not "entitlement" to expect it to actually be good.

enos_feedler 7y ago
Required to put up with arbitrary rule enforcement? You think I walk out of the store with a case of beer for the price I want to pay? That's just called business. You list a bunch of inventions here but that isn't want creates value for end users. It costs money to put this technology into the hands of end users which are the costs I highlighted. Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  "Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit" is a big statement to make without a foundation behind it other than "it cost them money". R&D for an automobile costs a lot, especially if you factor in the decades most manufacturers have spent refining their manufacturing and technology. Does that mean Ford should be able to legally require me to buy all parts and service at authorized dealers only? Because most countries' laws disagree with you for reasons I think should be obvious. Hardware with bundled software has for whatever reason escaped the realities that apply to physical goods so far, even though it has obvious problems. Now we have tractors that refuse to be repaired without dealer authorization (yay DRM) and we have app store lock-in where anyone who wants to install apps on their phone has to have daddy's permission. If that's the ecosystem you want, so be it, and it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to charge for access, but that doesn't make it good. If you love the free market you should love the idea of a paid product needing to live up to its cost.
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    Yes, if Ford believes that their customer's independent decisions about parts and service could lead them down a path that makes you more sour about Ford as a brand and degrade/ruin your relationship with Ford as a consumer. This could easily happen in the wild west of unauthorized parts and service. I think the laws are wrong in this case and compromises a company's ability to maintain that brand relationship. Are there undesirable consequences to this? Yes, but they can be sorted out one-by-one.
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    Separating the layers of hardware and software, for whatever reason has escaped the realities that a product doesn't draw arbitrary boundaries between these lines. Why is this particular interface so special?
sosborn 7y ago
> People were building and distributing software for decades without giving apple 30%. Did you develop on those older platforms? Dev kits and licenses were often crazy expensive.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  Exactly, the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega. I would be curious to know from someone with experience how much % of revenue would have been allocated to licensing + all costs just to get someone to slam your cartridge into their system and press start. EDIT: for an addressable market that was much smaller in scale.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    The cost of licensing, manufacturing, cert etc in those days was quite high, yes. To be fair they were offering many services for that cost that you couldn't get elsewhere at the time. These days publishing on consoles is much cheaper and in some cases they've waived or eliminated many of the fees you used to have to pay for. In the XBox 360 days the certification process to push a build to consoles could itself cost you upwards of a thousand dollars depending on the circumstances, though it's my understanding that the fees would be waived in some cases (for bug fixes, etc). This was largely a necessity to prevent a broken build being shipped to 100k customers (because in those days it wasn't reasonable to expect everyone to download a 1gb patch), not as important now. Steam is the best 1:1 approximation to the App Store and it predates it somewhat. The comparison isn't exact since they don't lock down your PC but they offer most of the same features.
    - enos_feedler 7y ago
      I understand your comparison from how the underlying product is realized but I am looking at it from the value delivered to a software shop. Whether it's Nintendo, Steam or iOS, the value delivered is the same: I give you docs, guides, etc to construct a program against an abstract target. When you are done and press the "ship it" button, an opportunity now exists, in the real world, for people to buy your thing and for you to keep some money. Regardless of how the platform achieves this, the value is the same. You get to focus on building your product and collecting money. What I can't wrap my head around is why developer's are judging the affordability or fairness of this when the fractional cost may not have changed since the 80s/90s.
scarface74 7y ago
You never tried to sell your software in physical stores did you or in digital stores run by the carriers? In both cases they took close to 70%.

enos_feedler 7y ago

Required to put up with arbitrary rule enforcement? You think I walk out of the store with a case of beer for the price I want to pay? That's just called business. You list a bunch of inventions here but that isn't want creates value for end users. It costs money to put this technology into the hands of end users which are the costs I highlighted. Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit.

kevingadd 7y ago
"Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit" is a big statement to make without a foundation behind it other than "it cost them money". R&D for an automobile costs a lot, especially if you factor in the decades most manufacturers have spent refining their manufacturing and technology. Does that mean Ford should be able to legally require me to buy all parts and service at authorized dealers only? Because most countries' laws disagree with you for reasons I think should be obvious. Hardware with bundled software has for whatever reason escaped the realities that apply to physical goods so far, even though it has obvious problems. Now we have tractors that refuse to be repaired without dealer authorization (yay DRM) and we have app store lock-in where anyone who wants to install apps on their phone has to have daddy's permission. If that's the ecosystem you want, so be it, and it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to charge for access, but that doesn't make it good. If you love the free market you should love the idea of a paid product needing to live up to its cost.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  Yes, if Ford believes that their customer's independent decisions about parts and service could lead them down a path that makes you more sour about Ford as a brand and degrade/ruin your relationship with Ford as a consumer. This could easily happen in the wild west of unauthorized parts and service. I think the laws are wrong in this case and compromises a company's ability to maintain that brand relationship. Are there undesirable consequences to this? Yes, but they can be sorted out one-by-one.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  Separating the layers of hardware and software, for whatever reason has escaped the realities that a product doesn't draw arbitrary boundaries between these lines. Why is this particular interface so special?

sosborn 7y ago

> People were building and distributing software for decades without giving apple 30%. Did you develop on those older platforms? Dev kits and licenses were often crazy expensive.

enos_feedler 7y ago
Exactly, the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega. I would be curious to know from someone with experience how much % of revenue would have been allocated to licensing + all costs just to get someone to slam your cartridge into their system and press start. EDIT: for an addressable market that was much smaller in scale.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  The cost of licensing, manufacturing, cert etc in those days was quite high, yes. To be fair they were offering many services for that cost that you couldn't get elsewhere at the time. These days publishing on consoles is much cheaper and in some cases they've waived or eliminated many of the fees you used to have to pay for. In the XBox 360 days the certification process to push a build to consoles could itself cost you upwards of a thousand dollars depending on the circumstances, though it's my understanding that the fees would be waived in some cases (for bug fixes, etc). This was largely a necessity to prevent a broken build being shipped to 100k customers (because in those days it wasn't reasonable to expect everyone to download a 1gb patch), not as important now. Steam is the best 1:1 approximation to the App Store and it predates it somewhat. The comparison isn't exact since they don't lock down your PC but they offer most of the same features.
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    I understand your comparison from how the underlying product is realized but I am looking at it from the value delivered to a software shop. Whether it's Nintendo, Steam or iOS, the value delivered is the same: I give you docs, guides, etc to construct a program against an abstract target. When you are done and press the "ship it" button, an opportunity now exists, in the real world, for people to buy your thing and for you to keep some money. Regardless of how the platform achieves this, the value is the same. You get to focus on building your product and collecting money. What I can't wrap my head around is why developer's are judging the affordability or fairness of this when the fractional cost may not have changed since the 80s/90s.

scarface74 7y ago

You never tried to sell your software in physical stores did you or in digital stores run by the carriers? In both cases they took close to 70%.