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Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

429 points by twapi 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago
Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious. Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam). It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. The other suggestions are also really good, I'd love to be able to pay for big updates (though I personally don't really mind subscriptions for apps I regularly use). I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible. Coming from the android world there is a very high bar for a native app for me. I tend to assume the app is garbage if it could have been done just as easily as a web app.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I find this surprising and it makes me wonder if native android apps are just bad? The difference between a native iOS app and a fake app that's really just a wrapped web page is obvious. Native apps are a lot faster. It's possible there is some selection bias here and you only notice the web apps when they're bad, but I really don't think this is the case. Native apps just seem categorically better. If Facebook pouring immense resources into it couldn't get web based mobile applications to be good, it's probably because the technology just can't compete with native.
    - thrwaway69 6y ago
      More money doesn't mean good web app though. Most big websites ironically google's doesn't follow their own accessibility, speed, UX, UI, inclusiveness etc guidelines they recommend for getting into search results. They are also the biggest abuser of UA agent while chromium team is trying to get rid of it. There are so many things they get wrong that they preach or push themselves. Also, there are technical limitations especially around tracking lol. Web apps can't run processes in the background or access your files without your consent everytime.
    - jollins 6y ago
      Facebook was pouring resources into their HTML5 mobile apps ten years ago. I’m not saying web apps on mobile feel native now by any means, but I don’t think that’s a good example of a big company trying and failing anymore.
      - sutterbomb 6y ago
        But what makes you think html+js+css performance have improved enough over native in the subsequent years where this isn’t relevant?
        jollins 6y ago
        The Facebook html5 example predates react-native and all the other under-the-hood features and apps powered-by-JS that people don’t notice now.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Native > web in general, but most Android apps are freemium garbage designed either to get you spend money on IAP, or as a vector for getting you to run a bunch of advertising SDKs, which promptly proceed to exfiltrate everything they can about you. This shifts the balance, because finding a non-crappy app on the appstore is so difficult that it's much safer to go with the web app.
- qppo 6y ago
  This bothers me on all search. Search for <model> <year> of any product on google, 50/50 shot its a different company's item in the first (few) places. Search bribes are user hostile but developer necessary it seems.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Yes, but Google is an advertising company, Apple didn’t use to be.
- intopieces 6y ago
  Apple should wind down their ads system (iAd) entirely. Advertisements are antithetical to what Apple stands for - privacy, premium experience, doing the right thing for users. They should lower their cut to 10% (not to 20, as the article states) and start offering curated experience bundles like they do with AppleTV.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    iAd is dead. These are search ads.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Yeah I agree (at least on the ads piece, not sure about the rest of your comment) - I think the ads are an unnecessary dilution of their brand. They can help developers with ad discovery in a bunch of different and better ways that are less hostile for devs and users.
    - thunderrabbit 6y ago
      *app discovery Thank you for the funny typo "ad discovery" "We curate the finest ads for your consumer experience.."
      - fossuser 6y ago
        Ah yes - my bad, too late to edit :) Ad discovery is more Facebook and Google’s business.
  - pvg 6y ago
    iAd was shut down years ago. Tracking ads might not align with some of the values Apple espouses but it seems a bit of a stretch to say a company famous for its ads (and often lowbrow-dismissed as 'just marketing' entirely) and advertising are 'antithetical'.
    - intopieces 6y ago
      I'd say ads inside apps is antithetical to Apple's brand. Does anyone like those?
- sixothree 6y ago
  I'm sick of this. I'm so, so sick of this. I swear every time this happens, I think "oh, there is no app by that name" and then I have to double check make sure I really used the right search term and that the result is actually a first party app. If I were searching for a genre such as "podcast" or "camera" app, I understand seeing paid ads. But when I search for a specific name, I see absolutely no reason whatsoever there should be an ad above my results. There has to be a better way.
  - californical 6y ago
    Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term
    - leonidasv 6y ago
      You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not. It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.
      - im3w1l 6y ago
        How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      > will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Exact search results are getting bumped by paid ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483101
- rexf 6y ago
  App Store search results aren't very good. Instead of trying to improve the interface or results, they added app search Ads to monetize their poor search functionality. Also, the App Store has prominent ads for their in-house services (Apple Arcade apps).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    The entire OS has ads for their services :/
- akira2501 6y ago
  > It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. It's an old-school protection racket, particularly because they own both sides of the deal. "It'd be a shame if anything happened to your app store listing. But, you know, if you just pay us $5/mo we can make sure that doesn't happen to _you_."
- seltzered_ 6y ago
  > It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. This. I've experienced this exact problem in helping elders install commonplace apps like Gmail.
  - briandear 6y ago
    Why wouldn’t they just use the native mail app?
- tempestn 6y ago
  This is also very frustrating with branded searches on Google. It's basically extortion, where you have to buy the ads on your brand or someone else will. They excuse it by pointing to how cheap it is on a PPC basis, since the clickthrough rate and resulting quality score is so high. Great, you're only extorting a nominal amount. Thank you.
lancewiggs 6y ago
A great list. Also: Capping in-app payments (I’m targeting games here) at a certain multiple of cost price, or a fixed amount for free apps, would fix the absurd gaming mechanisms aimed only at extracting more money rather than great gameplay.
- mod50ack 6y ago
  It's a bit sad. I feel like mobile gaming is in large part dead because of these stupid pay-to-play games. Back in the early days of the iPhone, even the iPhone games were one-time $2 games (and good for that!), while you had the DS where games were $20+ (often more). Now mobile games of quality are mostly dead.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Apple Arcade was supposed to fix that - it’d be interesting to read a blog post from a developer in that ecosystem to see if it’s actually working.
    - the_lucifer 6y ago
      The problem with Apple Arcade seems to be stemming from the lack of a deep gameplay experience. The games although devoid of micro-transactions and other predatory practices are often very simplistic and feel like made for gaming sessions in transit. Another drawback seems to be lack of controllers that make some games hard to play. This is yet another issue to be addressed by Apple-- They did add in DualShock and XBox controller support but that doesn't mean a lot unless users have access to those consoles in the first place, further solidifying Apple Arcade's place as a on-the-go gaming solution.
  - unix_fan 6y ago
    unfortunately, the market isn’t willing to pay for high-quality games.
    - wmf 6y ago
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
All these great things that would reduce Apple’s profits. I’m not even sure it’s too unfair since developers know the state of things going in. It can also get a bit worse since so many developers continue to put out high quality apps despite it all.
saagarjha 6y ago
The survey was great, because it hits basically everything that developers hate about Apple: * Search Ads * Documentation * App Store Review Guidelines * Codesigning * Apple Developer Forums * App Store Review The only thing missing is bug reporting, and I stuck my response for that in it anyways when they asked what was wrong with their developer tools ("Respond to our feedback!"). Sadly, I think the results of this survey are anonymized so thoroughly that they disappear entirely before anyone at Apple can get to look at them. (Supposedly the forums are getting revamped in a week for WWDC. I don't have very high hopes, sadly, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.)
cglong 6y ago
The original source is here: https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312 https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-shipley-every-year-i-fill-out-this.html https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-shipley-every-.... Some people may find the latter easier to read though.
howon92 6y ago
Interesting points. I disagree with one of the points that argues Apple should favor the “real apps,” which I assume refer to native iOS apps. Users don’t care what stack developers use as long as the product does its job and developers for sure want to reach as many users as possible regardless of what platform they are on. Also, companies with more resources will be better positioned than indie developers to make native apps for multiple platforms, so it wouldn’t benefit the author too. So who really benefits from this?
- fastball 6y ago
  Also worth noting that Steve Jobs' original plan for the iPhone involved making web-apps first class citizens, with access to system notifications, etc.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Push notifications were introduced after the iPhone SDK, weren't they?
    - fastball 6y ago
      Yes?
  - toasterlovin 6y ago
    Also worth noting that Steve didn't want to make the iPod available on Windows. Sometimes the guy was just dead wrong...
    - stuartd 6y ago
      [flippant] Even Christ stumbled
- dceddia 6y ago
  Pretty much the only time I care about whether an app is “native” or not is when I have to update it. The CapitalOne app is awful about this. Every month or two (which is roughly how often I open the thing), it requires an update. Not a suggestion. Not coming soon. Refuses to login without updating first. The download is 375mb. Three Hundred and Seventy-Five Megabytes, for an app to display credit card balances and pay them. It’s a nice app. Really it is. But forcing a 375mb download every month or two is extremely frustrating when I just wanted to check a balance real quick.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
One nit to pick, Slack on iOS is apparently fully native: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459 I think this shows, in my opinion, how little native vs. web/electron actually matters to overall quality. You can generally make a smooth, fast, bug-free app on any platform. Or not... I used to use the Android version and I was never quite sure whether it was native or not. I couldn't think of a way to tell.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Slack on macOS is Electron. Slack on iOS is native, and their app wasn't actually all that bad until they redesigned it a couple months ago and made it really, really bad :(
  - m-ee 6y ago
    I’m still not over the fact that notifications on my phone don’t clear when I view the message on my computer, and this is by design because of some other big fix. It’s been almost a year https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dfmuhj/issue_with_ios_notifications/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dfmuhj/issue_with_io...
- twhb 6y ago
  You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app. Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a good app in many dimensions; I didn’t mean to say that an Electron app can’t be good in some ways, even in the most important ways, but rather that Electron introduces flaws that prevent the app from being good in all ways. In particular, while faster than most Electron apps it’s still sluggish on old devices. It still loses track of files when renamed unless you do the rename through Visual Studio Code. The UI elements aren’t as polished as native let alone consistent with it, settings aren’t synced and backed up to iCloud, system-wide keyboard settings aren’t obeyed, Quick Look previews aren’t provided, etc. All of these problems were either introduced by Electron or made more difficult by it.
davidajackson 6y ago
>Lower the cut you take from 30% to 20% I agree with this. I think there are probably a lot of app ideas where the margin is small enough that 30% probably prevents them from even being started. Also fix app review. It's so arbitrary, it's like playing a game of darts.
MintelIE 6y ago
I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian or OpenBSD. Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going, they will support and then drop some technology on an apparent whim. I've had serious issues when they dropped WebObjects, Java as a first class Cocoa development language, and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple. The promise of ZFS on OS X made me buy a Mac Pro, and then several months later they just dropped all mention of ZFS on OS X. I'm not going to stick with a company which is so secretive about what they are going to do, failing to even publish roadmaps for their customers and developers. Mindshare among the tech geeks is how OS X took off. Now they're losing it - many developers I know are moving away from the platform too.
- josephg 6y ago
  They bailed on zfs when oracle bought sun. The semi opensource license sun distributed zfs under wasn’t good enough for Apple, so (I assume) they wanted an explicit license. I assume Oracle tried to milk as much as they could from Apple and apple walked. From what I understand, a lot of apple engineers were really disappointed about dropping zfs. It’s sucks they can’t talk about it.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  yes... all this churn, and what do we get for it, we can loose our old apps, customers can get upset, devs large and small look for shortcuts because thier investment (obj-c, appkit, uikit, swift 1 - 4, 32-bit, etc etc) is obsoleted... it just reduces the number of viable apps... isnt the whole point of apis that they abstract the machine/os underneath so we dont have churn so much? i know windows isnt the best thing ever, but lots of older apps just work, and i feel apple (and all of us) would be better served if they at least wrote better abstractions to support older apps (32bit runs in compatibility mode, etc)
  - chiefsucker 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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linuxlizard 6y ago
"Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago." Aw. I love their software. Omnigraffle is my platonic ideal of great software.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wilshipley 6y ago
  Thanks! -Wil
alexashka 6y ago
One day it'll dawn on people that we should provide infrastructure that guarantees safety and freedom, not walled gardens that provide safety and freedom only if it also happens to be profitable for somebody. There seem to be enough people who don't see this as self evident and are motivated to try and create their own walled gardens in the hopes of becoming the next rent seeker overlord. These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. It reminds me of children who beg their parents into buying them a toy they want. It makes me sad for both the child to be stooping to such a level but even more so for the parent, for letting the child end up in such a situation in the first place. I don't know, is begging trillion dollar companies to provide basic functionality not in conflict with having an iota of dignity?
- arvinsim 6y ago
  > These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
- zadokshi 6y ago
  We already have laws for this. Look up what “anti trust” is. The real question you should be asking is “why are anti trust rules not functioning properly” or why aren’t they being applied for this generation?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexashka 6y ago
    I'm well aware of the reasons why. I'm simply using baby-steps to get others to inch their way towards realizing it, instead of naively hoping Apple or some other entity is their mommy/daddy figure that needs to be pleaded with.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Right now new versions either have to be made into all-new apps, or we have to give away all new versions for free. There’s no way to charge an upgrade free. If I buy a Mac or iPhone from Apple I can trade it in towards a new one when I upgrade, but users can’t do the same thing for software. All the developers I know are suffering right now because Apple has prevented us from offering special upgrade pricing. It’s completely unsustainable to ask developers to continue supporting their apps but also to forbid them from charging for upgrades. I don't understand. Aren't freemium apps allowed on AppStore? There are lots of apps with in-app purchase upgrades.
- frenchie14 6y ago
  There's a model for going free -> paid. There's no model for going App V1 -> V2 with payment.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    There's nothing stopping you from shipping V2, but keeping the new features locked behind an in-app purchase.
    - greysphere 6y ago
      (1) This is difficult. You have to support multiple versions within the same executable. So there is an economic barrier. (2) And sometimes, it is impossible. An example is supporting new iphonex+ aspect ratios. There's no way post-launch to 'go back' to the old scheme or go forward to the new.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Could you have subsequent versions as individual IAPs, like DLCs for software?
- deleted 6y ago
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- 6y ago
danielrhodes 6y ago
I was curious about the arguments for not including upgrade pricing on the App Store. Apple maintains that upgrade pricing is a relic of shrink wrapped software and subscriptions are better. I lean softly towards Apple on this one. A few reasons I can think of for why subscriptions are preferred over upgrade pricing: - The app developer can keep making money over a longer period of time. - Generally means somebody can try out software first before committing, whereas upgrade pricing implies you either have to commit before trying it or nothing -- there are no demos on the App Store. - Subscriptions also mean a developer does not hold out new features or bug fixes for customers unless they upgrade -- it incentivizes developers to keep working on an app and maintain a relationship with customers. This is especially true as the app needs to be updated to be compatible with new devices and OS versions. - Potentially lets customers choose feature sets in the app. This is a good thing as it means developers can broaden their market to customers who want to pay less for fewer features or more for more features. It doesn't lump everybody into the same bucket.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  There's a lot of arguments one way or another - but the killer deal-breaker for many of us is the feeling of being held hostage: once you stop paying subscription, you typically don't get to "keep last paid version" - you loose application, and any files, data or artifacts that you created with it or would open/manipulate with it :-/ The other aspect is just how well we each feel we can keep track of and be disciplined with dozens of subscriptions. I'm the other way around from you - I'd pay $5 for an app without blinking, even to "try it out"; but I hesitate to "commit" to $3 a year, let alone $3 a month, for something new.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    I think the way Jetbrains does it is ideal - every chunk of 12 months you pay for with your subscription gives you permanent use of that version.
    - electricviolet 6y ago
      But this only works if you're releasing a new version every subscription period -- and in that case, it's equivalent to upgrade pricing.
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AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Why do app developers accept the app store... It is a amazing programmers organize so well for open source but can't organize for basic policy like resisting these ridiculous terms.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Because they want to shop software for the billion iOS devices out there.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Serious question: how else would they be able to get their product into the walled garden that is iOS? It's basically play by their rules or be left out of the game entirely...
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    So leave them as well. And when enough will do this Apple will wake up, but will be too late for that.
elagost 6y ago
Every year, it becomes more and more obvious that Apple cares far greater for money and numbers than developers or customers. Any criticism thrown at the company goes into a void, they don't communicate about any issues or feedback, and they continue to take away useful features and replace them with either nothing, or something nobody asked for. I used to really like this company.
- KarlKemp 6y ago
  Every year for 40 years running...
tln 6y ago
> almost 1% of our profits The article says 1%, his tweet says 1/3... but that seems low! Apple's cut is 30%. To only take 1/3 of profits, costs must only be 10% of revenue... cost of support, advertising, AND development.
znpy 6y ago
So the author has felt mistreated for a number of years, filler a form for a number of years and nothing changed? All I can think of is the following quote: «Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results».
- _ph_ 6y ago
  If a goal is worthy, one should keep persue it. It often takes preserverance to achieve an abitiuos goal. Don't let people win, just because they are stalling the discussion.
e40 6y ago
As a new user to iOS (on Android since the OG Droid), I totally agree. I had to post on /r/iOS to find a Solitaire game that didn't have ads. I looked and looked and I couldn't find Solitaire City. It's not even ranked in the top 200 in its category. I tried like 20 Solitaire games and they all sucked or had ads. Terrible ads. Honestly, I was shocked. I thought the App store would be better than Google Play Store, which I didn't think was that great, but I could usually find paid apps without ads. Btw, I totally agree with his asks for the App store.
reeddavid 6y ago
I'm not an app developer, but I am equally frustrated as a user on several of Wil Shipley's key points: 1. Ads for competitors. Sure, show me ads. But don't replace my exact match with an ad that takes up the whole screen. As a user who searches for apps, I find this outrageous. If the App Store was solely an advertising network I would understand. But Apple takes a 30% commission! Get out of my way and let me find what I'm looking for, then take your commission. 2. Upgrade pricing. I'm tired of abandoned apps, especially those I paid for initially. I don't expect developers to work for free (nor do I want to have 100+ subscriptions). Let me upgrade to major new versions. 3. Subscriptions for everything. Ugh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to buy something outright and use it for its useful life. There are many apps I never use because I don't want yet another subscription, but I would have happily purchased. 4. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't. EDIT: I see trials have been possible for 2 years! I had no idea. I guess I haven't encountered any, which seems odd. As a user, I feel that Apple has created a race to the bottom and they've made the app ecosystem way less valuable to me. I would be happier if upgrades and trials allowed me to spend more money to get more valuable iOS apps. Instead I regret some purchases, avoid some purchases, can't tell how much apps actually cost, have to find new apps when old ones are abandoned, and don't trust that I'm able to discover and buy the best apps.
- vageli 6y ago
  > 4. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't. I would be surprised if Apple didn't have in place a policy similar to the Google Play store (and others, like Steam), where you have a limited amount of time (a couple of hours) during which time you can "return" the software and not incur the cost.
schappim 6y ago
For those who don't know Wil is behind Delicious Library, and prior to that co-founded and headed The Omni Group in 1991. He's also won 8 design awards!
api 6y ago
The App Store sharecropping model is bad enough, but it adds insult to injury that app stores (ALL of them!) are so absolutely horrible. The search functionality is terrible. Discovery is terrible. The developer experience is terrible. They're just total amateur hour. For something Apple and others want to push it really seems like they're not putting any resources into making them not suck.
jennyyang 6y ago
The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING. Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us. Google does exactly the same thing. If we organize as a large enough group, they have to listen. I firmly believe what Apple does is anti-competitive and they need to be regulated firmly by the government. I also think Google and Facebook need to be firmly regulated by the government as well. Apple needs to allow other people to create their own App Store or they should be regulated by the government. We need to organize as a group of software developers and sue Apple and lobby our politicians, because that seems to be the only way Apple will listen. I also agree that subscriptions are NOT the way to go, and having paid upgrades are the best way to go. Driving down the costs such that things are freemium has ruined our industry as far as I'm concerned. I want to pay good money for a good piece of software, but even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days. This needs to stop otherwise iOS app development will become the sweatshop of the 2020s.
- slimsag 6y ago
  > even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days In my experience, this is not really true - most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. The last 7 apps I downloaded on iOS wanted a $5-10/mo monthly subscription, and I literally _cannot_ purchase the app. And I'm talking about really basic zero-infrastructure apps: - 2 transcriber apps that use iOS's native speech recognition functionality only (no server). - A Snapchat equivalent that puts beards and other funny things on a picture of your face. - A photo collage maker. - A photo effects editor. - An app that turns live pictures into gifs (really?)
  - musicale 6y ago
    > most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. Yes!! The App Store search function is useless. I want affordable paid apps without ads, subscriptions, or IAPs.
    - 6y ago
musicale 6y ago
Wil Shipley is an excellent developer and his points are excellent as well. Agreed completely about ads in the app store - they are basically worthless and often very annoying and spammy. I particularly concur with subscription vs. upgrade pricing. I utterly despise subscriptions, and I want to have the option to pay an incremental fee for an upgrade if I want to rather than having to purchase a new version of the app!
musicale 6y ago
> Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago Which was during the coronavirus lockdown and associated unemployment and economic upheaval. In addition to Omni group seemed to be on something of a downturn (personally I recently gave up on Omnigraffle because 1) I was tired of the upgrade pricing and 2) simultaneous cross-platform multiuser editing is currently more important to me than a rich feature set and beautiful UI.)
chrisseaton 6y ago
> I’ve literally never met one person who has enjoyed subscribing to software and losing access to it once they stop paying. You can meet me - I much prefer subscriptions. Pay while I use it, like a service, rather than pretending to 'buy' it which was never really how it was anyway. I don't mind losing access if I'm not paying any more. If want to use it again, I'm happy to pay again. What's the problem?
- wilshipley 6y ago
  Nice to meet you. -W
ericflo 6y ago
People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation. The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Basically what I'm saying is, we need to nip this in the bud, or indie development is over.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  The "don't call us, we'll call you" model already exists in the form of game consoles. Nintendo is probably the most restrictive in this way. If you don't have a pile of money for the development equipment, don't bother calling.
  - toast0 6y ago
    I don't think this is as true for Nintendo anymore. The switch store is full of tons of stuff. Maybe they're not letting everything through, and they certainly aren't letting everyone make physical games, but the digital store seems like it must not have a big filter.
    - the_af 6y ago
      I don't own a Nintendo console: what's a physical game and how does it differ from a digital game?
      - Larrikin 6y ago
        There are some games where you can't buy a physical cartridge and Nintendo actively encourages players to buy digital versions of games that are stored on the switch by offering a discount. Personally I refuse to buy digital versions whenever I can after what happened with the Wii, but some titles I can't actually get.
      - toast0 6y ago
CharlesMerriam2 6y ago
I buy an app on my iPhone once every couple months. I simply cannot find anything. I cannot buy. The 'freemium' games hide. I want: - games that offer a single purchase, or a one time upgrade for full features without ads. Yes, some people will buy the 'bucket of coffee beans' upgrade. I won't. I don't want to search through twenty games that offer it. - productivity tools that do something useful. My phone is stuck in 2001. Universal menu ordering? Teach me in two minutes? Manage my contacts to call people I haven't talked to in a while? Anything? - privacy. Why does the Peet's Application in the background still get updated location services, draining my battery? When is the microphone on? Who is really calling me? Seriously. A business model based on "the other players aren't doing well either" seems excessively fragile.
paulvorobyev 6y ago
>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam, etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But, again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App Store’s policies. Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago. NO! Stop giving Apple more reasons to ruin the web. The browser lock-in on iOS, poor support for modern browser features, and lack of any native interfacing is beyond unforgivable. For Apple, the web is a second-class citizen and it's bordering on lunacy to suggest otherwise.
- cancerSpreads 6y ago
  I consider it bad capitalism to give Apple money. It's like buying BP after the oil spill, but Apple has been destroying the tech environment for 20+ years.
- flatiron 6y ago
  Genuinely interested how you think their WebKit (which they started from KHTML back in the day) implementation has “poor support for modern browser features” I agree with browser lock in though. But I feel that iOS is so successful that they don’t treat the web as a second class citizen. It’s just WebKit...
  - realusername 6y ago
    I'm a web developer, Safari mobile feels honestly on the borderline of being abandoned, every time I look at their new Safari release, there's a least a minimum of 6 to 8 years of lagging behind Chrome and Firefox (and that's just the features we're talking about here, not basic layout, forms & css bugs they still have...). I generally spend as much time to fix Safari mobile as IE11
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
jayd16 6y ago
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Can't this be done with a non-consumable in app purchase? Is that against the TOS?
StillBored 6y ago
This ad/keywork thing on iOS drove me nuts for the few months I actually was using a iphone (before switching back to android). If I search for "RDP", I don't want to see a bunch of proprietary desktop sharing applications, VNC applications, etc as the top 10-20 hits. I want to see applications that support the RDP protocol.
chadlavi 6y ago
I agree with all of this, but isn't it possible to charge for updates via an in app purchase?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Then you’re shipping every version of the app at once, I guess?
  - chadlavi 6y ago
    No. Let's say I'm on version 9 of my app and I release a new major version 10. I think I could use in-app purchases in a new pushed version 9.1 that allows all the people who already have the app to purchase the upgrade to 10. Everyone who buys the app brand new now gets version 10, without that in-app purchase to upgrade to 10.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Right, but if someone starts at version 3 they need to always be on version 3 until they pay…
      - chadlavi 6y ago
        That's the whole point the linked post makes--they wish it were easier to make that happen. Updates represent labor. It's fair to ask users to pay for that labor.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Possible but poor experience for devs and users. The app will have to contain the full working functionality for every major release, and seamlessly handle upgrading it internally. This is counter to how almost all applications are actually build and released where you only run the artifacts for the current version.
on_and_off 6y ago
Strongly agree with most of the points, but not all. Disagreements : - App updates. I think that the subscription model would be pretty good for apps actually if you could have a micro transaction system. Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). Selling apps for a one time fee does not fit that well in this model. A nominal fee for app updates kinda solves part of the problem .. you just hope that your users love the new feature enough to buy it. It feels a lot like for a lot of apps that would just lead to feature creep instead of good design. I have been hoping to see a micro-subscription model emerge for a very long time. Unfortunately I don't think customers want that and Apple/Google don't seem super interested in pushing it either (Google kinda has that with Google Play Pass, but in typical Google fashion this is dead on arrival). - I don't think the web is in a significantly different than it has been for the entirety of iOS/Android existences : it has its place but is not going to replace native anytime soon, especially for the "high quality" apps the author talks about.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). I stay the hell away from apps that don’t let me manage my own data, which excludes most apps that have recurring costs. Even so more and more standalone apps that I use are going subscription because of the lack of another way to deal with upgrades.
  - on_and_off 6y ago
    Even something as simple as a weather app needs to pay recurring costs for its API, regardless of user data And thinking about it .. hard to make a good weather app that does not collect your location. Good is relative here, for me a good weather app will automatically update to my current location wherever I go.
- wilshipley 6y ago
  The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed. I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money. I’m pretty sure we can do micro-subscription already — I could ask Apple to just charge $1 a month, that’s pretty micro. (I don’t think we can do pennies, yet.) But that model doesn’t really work for all types of apps. For instance, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users had the option to just pay me 5 cents for the month they used the app, I’d have to get 16 million of these users to make back the money I’ve put into this app. That’s not really feasible. -— My point with the web is that pass-through web “apps” on iOS are the same as pass-through web “apps” on Android, so Apple is losing a competitive advantage if they kill of their native developers. If you’ve got Slack or Chrome or a banking app or a finance app or a health app on your iPhone, you could be running the exact same app on Android. So why did you spend extra on an iPhone? Apple needs to treat its independent, native developers better because we are the only ones who are making products that are Apple-only, and show off all the cool things iOS and macOS can do. -Wil
mdoms 6y ago
Why would it change if you keep shoveling money (and dev resources) directly to Apple? They already know you'll stay regardless of their response.
- wilshipley 6y ago
  They don’t know that, actually, because I haven’t decided I’ll stay in the App Store. -Wil
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Other prominent indie devs have left the App Store: Panic, Bare Bones, Rogue Amoeba. It didn't change the system, and some of them even came back (with special favors from Apple). Perhaps leaving is a (temporary) solution for Wil Shipley, but I would agree with the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370 "The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING. Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us." We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. - Ben Franklin
    - wilshipley 6y ago
      See, my thinking is if enough of us get “special favors” then the special favors will become the norm.
pjbster 6y ago
I have been thinking about an alternative pricing model but it only works for content creation software. It would be enabled by an OpenPGP library which handles signing of files and micropayments. What if the app itself was free but it charged a small fee the first time a new file was saved? The file format doesn't have to be proprietary - a simple chunk of metadata should be able to identify the creator and the files won't need to be tracked by a central authority because the mere existence of the signature in the file would imply that the one-off payment had already been made. The canonical example is a rich Markdown editor. You could get the WYSIWYG conveniences à la Word and the resulting .md file would have a signature indicating that the app had saved it. Subsequent edits by the author wouldn't incur a fee as the signature would match the app instance. But someone else with a copy of the app would incur a fee if they also used it to make changes of their own and their signature would be added to the file. Someone else could edit the file with their favourite text editor. This wouldn't incur a fee. But the signatures would have to be preserved otherwise the original author(s) wouldn't be able to re-edit the file without incurring another payment. Perhaps I'm being dumb but I think these files could be safely pushed to Github with the signatures intact. They'd be as secure as any public key. I can see this working with many file types -- MS Office documents, Adobe Illustrator et al, 3D model files, PDFs, images, movies. The same file could be edited with different apps each saving their own signatures. All that's needed is something which disables the "File/Save" command unless a payment is made. Is anyone aware of any software which works like this?
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  How do you define "new file"? Why don't I put all my data into various copies of the same original file?
  - pjbster 6y ago
    A "new" file is simply one which doesn't contain the licensee's signature. Yes, there would be ways to game this approach by minimising the number of files saved but the price per new save could be set sufficiently low to make the inconvenience too uneconomical. And there might be users who need to create thousands of new files over the course of a year and who might be better served by a subscription model or a pricing cap.
buboard 6y ago
are there people here making substantial money selling apps (instead of making them)?
- jamil7 6y ago
  There are quite a few independant developers in the iOS and macOS community who make a living selling apps. This is one of the points in the tweets. These people developing specifically for the platform are often the ones building the highest quality experiences as they're focused in one area and able to make use of all the OS level integrations and user experiences (think accessibility, gestures, spotlight search, siri integration). In short these developers are what make Apple products "Apple". The app store right now is hurting these people the most, if all we end up with is cross platform ports on each platform that behave the same then theres no reason to buy an iPhone in the first place since the experience would be the same anywhere else for far less money.
ksec 6y ago
The problem isn't with the 30% Cut. It is the value that it offers. Right now it is nothing more than rent seeking. Apple doesn't even have to lower the Cut. They need to provide more values from the Cut. It could be CDN for your app, where Apple could lower the bandwidth usage for certain uses, using the Apple EdgeCache. Or additional tools that helps developer's productivity. There are lots could be done. And yet Post Steve Jobs Apple hasn't acted on it.
- _qulr 6y ago
  CDN for your app sounds like a minority use case, a service that could be sold separately. Not even relevant for native-only apps. I don't want Apple to try to justify the 30% with luxury services, I just want them to reduce the cut.

429 points by twapi 6y ago

Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious. Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam). It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. The other suggestions are also really good, I'd love to be able to pay for big updates (though I personally don't really mind subscriptions for apps I regularly use). I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.

kortilla 6y ago
> I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible. Coming from the android world there is a very high bar for a native app for me. I tend to assume the app is garbage if it could have been done just as easily as a web app.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I find this surprising and it makes me wonder if native android apps are just bad? The difference between a native iOS app and a fake app that's really just a wrapped web page is obvious. Native apps are a lot faster. It's possible there is some selection bias here and you only notice the web apps when they're bad, but I really don't think this is the case. Native apps just seem categorically better. If Facebook pouring immense resources into it couldn't get web based mobile applications to be good, it's probably because the technology just can't compete with native.
  - thrwaway69 6y ago
    More money doesn't mean good web app though. Most big websites ironically google's doesn't follow their own accessibility, speed, UX, UI, inclusiveness etc guidelines they recommend for getting into search results. They are also the biggest abuser of UA agent while chromium team is trying to get rid of it. There are so many things they get wrong that they preach or push themselves. Also, there are technical limitations especially around tracking lol. Web apps can't run processes in the background or access your files without your consent everytime.
  - jollins 6y ago
    Facebook was pouring resources into their HTML5 mobile apps ten years ago. I’m not saying web apps on mobile feel native now by any means, but I don’t think that’s a good example of a big company trying and failing anymore.
    - sutterbomb 6y ago
      But what makes you think html+js+css performance have improved enough over native in the subsequent years where this isn’t relevant?
      - jollins 6y ago
        The Facebook html5 example predates react-native and all the other under-the-hood features and apps powered-by-JS that people don’t notice now.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Native > web in general, but most Android apps are freemium garbage designed either to get you spend money on IAP, or as a vector for getting you to run a bunch of advertising SDKs, which promptly proceed to exfiltrate everything they can about you. This shifts the balance, because finding a non-crappy app on the appstore is so difficult that it's much safer to go with the web app.
qppo 6y ago
This bothers me on all search. Search for <model> <year> of any product on google, 50/50 shot its a different company's item in the first (few) places. Search bribes are user hostile but developer necessary it seems.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Yes, but Google is an advertising company, Apple didn’t use to be.
intopieces 6y ago
Apple should wind down their ads system (iAd) entirely. Advertisements are antithetical to what Apple stands for - privacy, premium experience, doing the right thing for users. They should lower their cut to 10% (not to 20, as the article states) and start offering curated experience bundles like they do with AppleTV.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  iAd is dead. These are search ads.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah I agree (at least on the ads piece, not sure about the rest of your comment) - I think the ads are an unnecessary dilution of their brand. They can help developers with ad discovery in a bunch of different and better ways that are less hostile for devs and users.
  - thunderrabbit 6y ago
    *app discovery Thank you for the funny typo "ad discovery" "We curate the finest ads for your consumer experience.."
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Ah yes - my bad, too late to edit :) Ad discovery is more Facebook and Google’s business.
- pvg 6y ago
  iAd was shut down years ago. Tracking ads might not align with some of the values Apple espouses but it seems a bit of a stretch to say a company famous for its ads (and often lowbrow-dismissed as 'just marketing' entirely) and advertising are 'antithetical'.
  - intopieces 6y ago
    I'd say ads inside apps is antithetical to Apple's brand. Does anyone like those?
sixothree 6y ago
I'm sick of this. I'm so, so sick of this. I swear every time this happens, I think "oh, there is no app by that name" and then I have to double check make sure I really used the right search term and that the result is actually a first party app. If I were searching for a genre such as "podcast" or "camera" app, I understand seeing paid ads. But when I search for a specific name, I see absolutely no reason whatsoever there should be an ad above my results. There has to be a better way.
- californical 6y ago
  Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term
  - leonidasv 6y ago
    You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not. It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?
Apocryphon 6y ago
Exact search results are getting bumped by paid ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483101
rexf 6y ago
App Store search results aren't very good. Instead of trying to improve the interface or results, they added app search Ads to monetize their poor search functionality. Also, the App Store has prominent ads for their in-house services (Apple Arcade apps).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  The entire OS has ads for their services :/
akira2501 6y ago
> It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. It's an old-school protection racket, particularly because they own both sides of the deal. "It'd be a shame if anything happened to your app store listing. But, you know, if you just pay us $5/mo we can make sure that doesn't happen to _you_."
seltzered_ 6y ago
> It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people. This. I've experienced this exact problem in helping elders install commonplace apps like Gmail.
- briandear 6y ago
  Why wouldn’t they just use the native mail app?
tempestn 6y ago
This is also very frustrating with branded searches on Google. It's basically extortion, where you have to buy the ads on your brand or someone else will. They excuse it by pointing to how cheap it is on a PPC basis, since the clickthrough rate and resulting quality score is so high. Great, you're only extorting a nominal amount. Thank you.

lancewiggs 6y ago

A great list. Also: Capping in-app payments (I’m targeting games here) at a certain multiple of cost price, or a fixed amount for free apps, would fix the absurd gaming mechanisms aimed only at extracting more money rather than great gameplay.

mod50ack 6y ago
It's a bit sad. I feel like mobile gaming is in large part dead because of these stupid pay-to-play games. Back in the early days of the iPhone, even the iPhone games were one-time $2 games (and good for that!), while you had the DS where games were $20+ (often more). Now mobile games of quality are mostly dead.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Apple Arcade was supposed to fix that - it’d be interesting to read a blog post from a developer in that ecosystem to see if it’s actually working.
  - the_lucifer 6y ago
    The problem with Apple Arcade seems to be stemming from the lack of a deep gameplay experience. The games although devoid of micro-transactions and other predatory practices are often very simplistic and feel like made for gaming sessions in transit. Another drawback seems to be lack of controllers that make some games hard to play. This is yet another issue to be addressed by Apple-- They did add in DualShock and XBox controller support but that doesn't mean a lot unless users have access to those consoles in the first place, further solidifying Apple Arcade's place as a on-the-go gaming solution.
- unix_fan 6y ago
  unfortunately, the market isn’t willing to pay for high-quality games.
  - wmf 6y ago

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

All these great things that would reduce Apple’s profits. I’m not even sure it’s too unfair since developers know the state of things going in. It can also get a bit worse since so many developers continue to put out high quality apps despite it all.

saagarjha 6y ago

The survey was great, because it hits basically everything that developers hate about Apple: * Search Ads * Documentation * App Store Review Guidelines * Codesigning * Apple Developer Forums * App Store Review The only thing missing is bug reporting, and I stuck my response for that in it anyways when they asked what was wrong with their developer tools ("Respond to our feedback!"). Sadly, I think the results of this survey are anonymized so thoroughly that they disappear entirely before anyone at Apple can get to look at them. (Supposedly the forums are getting revamped in a week for WWDC. I don't have very high hopes, sadly, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.)

cglong 6y ago

The original source is here: https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312 https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312

dang 6y ago
Ok, we'll change to that from https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-shipley-every-year-i-fill-out-this.html https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-shipley-every-.... Some people may find the latter easier to read though.

howon92 6y ago

Interesting points. I disagree with one of the points that argues Apple should favor the “real apps,” which I assume refer to native iOS apps. Users don’t care what stack developers use as long as the product does its job and developers for sure want to reach as many users as possible regardless of what platform they are on. Also, companies with more resources will be better positioned than indie developers to make native apps for multiple platforms, so it wouldn’t benefit the author too. So who really benefits from this?

fastball 6y ago
Also worth noting that Steve Jobs' original plan for the iPhone involved making web-apps first class citizens, with access to system notifications, etc.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Push notifications were introduced after the iPhone SDK, weren't they?
  - fastball 6y ago
    Yes?
- toasterlovin 6y ago
  Also worth noting that Steve didn't want to make the iPod available on Windows. Sometimes the guy was just dead wrong...
  - stuartd 6y ago
    [flippant] Even Christ stumbled
dceddia 6y ago
Pretty much the only time I care about whether an app is “native” or not is when I have to update it. The CapitalOne app is awful about this. Every month or two (which is roughly how often I open the thing), it requires an update. Not a suggestion. Not coming soon. Refuses to login without updating first. The download is 375mb. Three Hundred and Seventy-Five Megabytes, for an app to display credit card balances and pay them. It’s a nice app. Really it is. But forcing a 375mb download every month or two is extremely frustrating when I just wanted to check a balance real quick.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

One nit to pick, Slack on iOS is apparently fully native: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459 I think this shows, in my opinion, how little native vs. web/electron actually matters to overall quality. You can generally make a smooth, fast, bug-free app on any platform. Or not... I used to use the Android version and I was never quite sure whether it was native or not. I couldn't think of a way to tell.

saagarjha 6y ago
Slack on macOS is Electron. Slack on iOS is native, and their app wasn't actually all that bad until they redesigned it a couple months ago and made it really, really bad :(
- m-ee 6y ago
  I’m still not over the fact that notifications on my phone don’t clear when I view the message on my computer, and this is by design because of some other big fix. It’s been almost a year https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dfmuhj/issue_with_ios_notifications/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dfmuhj/issue_with_io...
twhb 6y ago
You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app. Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a good app in many dimensions; I didn’t mean to say that an Electron app can’t be good in some ways, even in the most important ways, but rather that Electron introduces flaws that prevent the app from being good in all ways. In particular, while faster than most Electron apps it’s still sluggish on old devices. It still loses track of files when renamed unless you do the rename through Visual Studio Code. The UI elements aren’t as polished as native let alone consistent with it, settings aren’t synced and backed up to iCloud, system-wide keyboard settings aren’t obeyed, Quick Look previews aren’t provided, etc. All of these problems were either introduced by Electron or made more difficult by it.

davidajackson 6y ago

>Lower the cut you take from 30% to 20% I agree with this. I think there are probably a lot of app ideas where the margin is small enough that 30% probably prevents them from even being started. Also fix app review. It's so arbitrary, it's like playing a game of darts.

MintelIE 6y ago

I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian or OpenBSD. Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going, they will support and then drop some technology on an apparent whim. I've had serious issues when they dropped WebObjects, Java as a first class Cocoa development language, and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple. The promise of ZFS on OS X made me buy a Mac Pro, and then several months later they just dropped all mention of ZFS on OS X. I'm not going to stick with a company which is so secretive about what they are going to do, failing to even publish roadmaps for their customers and developers. Mindshare among the tech geeks is how OS X took off. Now they're losing it - many developers I know are moving away from the platform too.

josephg 6y ago
They bailed on zfs when oracle bought sun. The semi opensource license sun distributed zfs under wasn’t good enough for Apple, so (I assume) they wanted an explicit license. I assume Oracle tried to milk as much as they could from Apple and apple walked. From what I understand, a lot of apple engineers were really disappointed about dropping zfs. It’s sucks they can’t talk about it.
andrekandre 6y ago
yes... all this churn, and what do we get for it, we can loose our old apps, customers can get upset, devs large and small look for shortcuts because thier investment (obj-c, appkit, uikit, swift 1 - 4, 32-bit, etc etc) is obsoleted... it just reduces the number of viable apps... isnt the whole point of apis that they abstract the machine/os underneath so we dont have churn so much? i know windows isnt the best thing ever, but lots of older apps just work, and i feel apple (and all of us) would be better served if they at least wrote better abstractions to support older apps (32bit runs in compatibility mode, etc)
- chiefsucker 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

linuxlizard 6y ago

"Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago." Aw. I love their software. Omnigraffle is my platonic ideal of great software.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wilshipley 6y ago
Thanks! -Wil

alexashka 6y ago

One day it'll dawn on people that we should provide infrastructure that guarantees safety and freedom, not walled gardens that provide safety and freedom only if it also happens to be profitable for somebody. There seem to be enough people who don't see this as self evident and are motivated to try and create their own walled gardens in the hopes of becoming the next rent seeker overlord. These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. It reminds me of children who beg their parents into buying them a toy they want. It makes me sad for both the child to be stooping to such a level but even more so for the parent, for letting the child end up in such a situation in the first place. I don't know, is begging trillion dollar companies to provide basic functionality not in conflict with having an iota of dignity?

arvinsim 6y ago
> These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
zadokshi 6y ago
We already have laws for this. Look up what “anti trust” is. The real question you should be asking is “why are anti trust rules not functioning properly” or why aren’t they being applied for this generation?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alexashka 6y ago
  I'm well aware of the reasons why. I'm simply using baby-steps to get others to inch their way towards realizing it, instead of naively hoping Apple or some other entity is their mommy/daddy figure that needs to be pleaded with.

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Right now new versions either have to be made into all-new apps, or we have to give away all new versions for free. There’s no way to charge an upgrade free. If I buy a Mac or iPhone from Apple I can trade it in towards a new one when I upgrade, but users can’t do the same thing for software. All the developers I know are suffering right now because Apple has prevented us from offering special upgrade pricing. It’s completely unsustainable to ask developers to continue supporting their apps but also to forbid them from charging for upgrades. I don't understand. Aren't freemium apps allowed on AppStore? There are lots of apps with in-app purchase upgrades.

frenchie14 6y ago
There's a model for going free -> paid. There's no model for going App V1 -> V2 with payment.
- jonas21 6y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from shipping V2, but keeping the new features locked behind an in-app purchase.
  - greysphere 6y ago
    (1) This is difficult. You have to support multiple versions within the same executable. So there is an economic barrier. (2) And sometimes, it is impossible. An example is supporting new iphonex+ aspect ratios. There's no way post-launch to 'go back' to the old scheme or go forward to the new.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Could you have subsequent versions as individual IAPs, like DLCs for software?
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danielrhodes 6y ago

I was curious about the arguments for not including upgrade pricing on the App Store. Apple maintains that upgrade pricing is a relic of shrink wrapped software and subscriptions are better. I lean softly towards Apple on this one. A few reasons I can think of for why subscriptions are preferred over upgrade pricing: - The app developer can keep making money over a longer period of time. - Generally means somebody can try out software first before committing, whereas upgrade pricing implies you either have to commit before trying it or nothing -- there are no demos on the App Store. - Subscriptions also mean a developer does not hold out new features or bug fixes for customers unless they upgrade -- it incentivizes developers to keep working on an app and maintain a relationship with customers. This is especially true as the app needs to be updated to be compatible with new devices and OS versions. - Potentially lets customers choose feature sets in the app. This is a good thing as it means developers can broaden their market to customers who want to pay less for fewer features or more for more features. It doesn't lump everybody into the same bucket.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
There's a lot of arguments one way or another - but the killer deal-breaker for many of us is the feeling of being held hostage: once you stop paying subscription, you typically don't get to "keep last paid version" - you loose application, and any files, data or artifacts that you created with it or would open/manipulate with it :-/ The other aspect is just how well we each feel we can keep track of and be disciplined with dozens of subscriptions. I'm the other way around from you - I'd pay $5 for an app without blinking, even to "try it out"; but I hesitate to "commit" to $3 a year, let alone $3 a month, for something new.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I think the way Jetbrains does it is ideal - every chunk of 12 months you pay for with your subscription gives you permanent use of that version.
  - electricviolet 6y ago
    But this only works if you're releasing a new version every subscription period -- and in that case, it's equivalent to upgrade pricing.

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AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Why do app developers accept the app store... It is a amazing programmers organize so well for open source but can't organize for basic policy like resisting these ridiculous terms.

saagarjha 6y ago
Because they want to shop software for the billion iOS devices out there.
qayxc 6y ago
Serious question: how else would they be able to get their product into the walled garden that is iOS? It's basically play by their rules or be left out of the game entirely...
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  So leave them as well. And when enough will do this Apple will wake up, but will be too late for that.

elagost 6y ago

Every year, it becomes more and more obvious that Apple cares far greater for money and numbers than developers or customers. Any criticism thrown at the company goes into a void, they don't communicate about any issues or feedback, and they continue to take away useful features and replace them with either nothing, or something nobody asked for. I used to really like this company.

KarlKemp 6y ago
Every year for 40 years running...

tln 6y ago

> almost 1% of our profits The article says 1%, his tweet says 1/3... but that seems low! Apple's cut is 30%. To only take 1/3 of profits, costs must only be 10% of revenue... cost of support, advertising, AND development.

znpy 6y ago

So the author has felt mistreated for a number of years, filler a form for a number of years and nothing changed? All I can think of is the following quote: «Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results».

_ph_ 6y ago
If a goal is worthy, one should keep persue it. It often takes preserverance to achieve an abitiuos goal. Don't let people win, just because they are stalling the discussion.

e40 6y ago

As a new user to iOS (on Android since the OG Droid), I totally agree. I had to post on /r/iOS to find a Solitaire game that didn't have ads. I looked and looked and I couldn't find Solitaire City. It's not even ranked in the top 200 in its category. I tried like 20 Solitaire games and they all sucked or had ads. Terrible ads. Honestly, I was shocked. I thought the App store would be better than Google Play Store, which I didn't think was that great, but I could usually find paid apps without ads. Btw, I totally agree with his asks for the App store.

reeddavid 6y ago

I'm not an app developer, but I am equally frustrated as a user on several of Wil Shipley's key points: 1. Ads for competitors. Sure, show me ads. But don't replace my exact match with an ad that takes up the whole screen. As a user who searches for apps, I find this outrageous. If the App Store was solely an advertising network I would understand. But Apple takes a 30% commission! Get out of my way and let me find what I'm looking for, then take your commission. 2. Upgrade pricing. I'm tired of abandoned apps, especially those I paid for initially. I don't expect developers to work for free (nor do I want to have 100+ subscriptions). Let me upgrade to major new versions. 3. Subscriptions for everything. Ugh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to buy something outright and use it for its useful life. There are many apps I never use because I don't want yet another subscription, but I would have happily purchased. 4. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't. EDIT: I see trials have been possible for 2 years! I had no idea. I guess I haven't encountered any, which seems odd. As a user, I feel that Apple has created a race to the bottom and they've made the app ecosystem way less valuable to me. I would be happier if upgrades and trials allowed me to spend more money to get more valuable iOS apps. Instead I regret some purchases, avoid some purchases, can't tell how much apps actually cost, have to find new apps when old ones are abandoned, and don't trust that I'm able to discover and buy the best apps.

vageli 6y ago
> 4. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't. I would be surprised if Apple didn't have in place a policy similar to the Google Play store (and others, like Steam), where you have a limited amount of time (a couple of hours) during which time you can "return" the software and not incur the cost.

schappim 6y ago

For those who don't know Wil is behind Delicious Library, and prior to that co-founded and headed The Omni Group in 1991. He's also won 8 design awards!

api 6y ago

The App Store sharecropping model is bad enough, but it adds insult to injury that app stores (ALL of them!) are so absolutely horrible. The search functionality is terrible. Discovery is terrible. The developer experience is terrible. They're just total amateur hour. For something Apple and others want to push it really seems like they're not putting any resources into making them not suck.

jennyyang 6y ago

The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING. Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us. Google does exactly the same thing. If we organize as a large enough group, they have to listen. I firmly believe what Apple does is anti-competitive and they need to be regulated firmly by the government. I also think Google and Facebook need to be firmly regulated by the government as well. Apple needs to allow other people to create their own App Store or they should be regulated by the government. We need to organize as a group of software developers and sue Apple and lobby our politicians, because that seems to be the only way Apple will listen. I also agree that subscriptions are NOT the way to go, and having paid upgrades are the best way to go. Driving down the costs such that things are freemium has ruined our industry as far as I'm concerned. I want to pay good money for a good piece of software, but even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days. This needs to stop otherwise iOS app development will become the sweatshop of the 2020s.

slimsag 6y ago
> even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days In my experience, this is not really true - most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. The last 7 apps I downloaded on iOS wanted a $5-10/mo monthly subscription, and I literally _cannot_ purchase the app. And I'm talking about really basic zero-infrastructure apps: - 2 transcriber apps that use iOS's native speech recognition functionality only (no server). - A Snapchat equivalent that puts beards and other funny things on a picture of your face. - A photo collage maker. - A photo effects editor. - An app that turns live pictures into gifs (really?)
- musicale 6y ago
  > most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. Yes!! The App Store search function is useless. I want affordable paid apps without ads, subscriptions, or IAPs.
  - 6y ago

musicale 6y ago

Wil Shipley is an excellent developer and his points are excellent as well. Agreed completely about ads in the app store - they are basically worthless and often very annoying and spammy. I particularly concur with subscription vs. upgrade pricing. I utterly despise subscriptions, and I want to have the option to pay an incremental fee for an upgrade if I want to rather than having to purchase a new version of the app!

musicale 6y ago

> Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago Which was during the coronavirus lockdown and associated unemployment and economic upheaval. In addition to Omni group seemed to be on something of a downturn (personally I recently gave up on Omnigraffle because 1) I was tired of the upgrade pricing and 2) simultaneous cross-platform multiuser editing is currently more important to me than a rich feature set and beautiful UI.)

chrisseaton 6y ago

> I’ve literally never met one person who has enjoyed subscribing to software and losing access to it once they stop paying. You can meet me - I much prefer subscriptions. Pay while I use it, like a service, rather than pretending to 'buy' it which was never really how it was anyway. I don't mind losing access if I'm not paying any more. If want to use it again, I'm happy to pay again. What's the problem?

wilshipley 6y ago
Nice to meet you. -W

ericflo 6y ago

People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation. The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Basically what I'm saying is, we need to nip this in the bud, or indie development is over.

whatshisface 6y ago
The "don't call us, we'll call you" model already exists in the form of game consoles. Nintendo is probably the most restrictive in this way. If you don't have a pile of money for the development equipment, don't bother calling.
- toast0 6y ago
  I don't think this is as true for Nintendo anymore. The switch store is full of tons of stuff. Maybe they're not letting everything through, and they certainly aren't letting everyone make physical games, but the digital store seems like it must not have a big filter.
  - the_af 6y ago
    I don't own a Nintendo console: what's a physical game and how does it differ from a digital game?
    - Larrikin 6y ago
      There are some games where you can't buy a physical cartridge and Nintendo actively encourages players to buy digital versions of games that are stored on the switch by offering a discount. Personally I refuse to buy digital versions whenever I can after what happened with the Wii, but some titles I can't actually get.
    - toast0 6y ago

CharlesMerriam2 6y ago

I buy an app on my iPhone once every couple months. I simply cannot find anything. I cannot buy. The 'freemium' games hide. I want: - games that offer a single purchase, or a one time upgrade for full features without ads. Yes, some people will buy the 'bucket of coffee beans' upgrade. I won't. I don't want to search through twenty games that offer it. - productivity tools that do something useful. My phone is stuck in 2001. Universal menu ordering? Teach me in two minutes? Manage my contacts to call people I haven't talked to in a while? Anything? - privacy. Why does the Peet's Application in the background still get updated location services, draining my battery? When is the microphone on? Who is really calling me? Seriously. A business model based on "the other players aren't doing well either" seems excessively fragile.

paulvorobyev 6y ago

>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam, etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But, again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App Store’s policies. Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago. NO! Stop giving Apple more reasons to ruin the web. The browser lock-in on iOS, poor support for modern browser features, and lack of any native interfacing is beyond unforgivable. For Apple, the web is a second-class citizen and it's bordering on lunacy to suggest otherwise.

cancerSpreads 6y ago
I consider it bad capitalism to give Apple money. It's like buying BP after the oil spill, but Apple has been destroying the tech environment for 20+ years.
flatiron 6y ago
Genuinely interested how you think their WebKit (which they started from KHTML back in the day) implementation has “poor support for modern browser features” I agree with browser lock in though. But I feel that iOS is so successful that they don’t treat the web as a second class citizen. It’s just WebKit...
- realusername 6y ago
  I'm a web developer, Safari mobile feels honestly on the borderline of being abandoned, every time I look at their new Safari release, there's a least a minimum of 6 to 8 years of lagging behind Chrome and Firefox (and that's just the features we're talking about here, not basic layout, forms & css bugs they still have...). I generally spend as much time to fix Safari mobile as IE11
  - Nextgrid 6y ago

jayd16 6y ago

>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Can't this be done with a non-consumable in app purchase? Is that against the TOS?

StillBored 6y ago

This ad/keywork thing on iOS drove me nuts for the few months I actually was using a iphone (before switching back to android). If I search for "RDP", I don't want to see a bunch of proprietary desktop sharing applications, VNC applications, etc as the top 10-20 hits. I want to see applications that support the RDP protocol.

chadlavi 6y ago

I agree with all of this, but isn't it possible to charge for updates via an in app purchase?

saagarjha 6y ago
Then you’re shipping every version of the app at once, I guess?
- chadlavi 6y ago
  No. Let's say I'm on version 9 of my app and I release a new major version 10. I think I could use in-app purchases in a new pushed version 9.1 that allows all the people who already have the app to purchase the upgrade to 10. Everyone who buys the app brand new now gets version 10, without that in-app purchase to upgrade to 10.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Right, but if someone starts at version 3 they need to always be on version 3 until they pay…
    - chadlavi 6y ago
      That's the whole point the linked post makes--they wish it were easier to make that happen. Updates represent labor. It's fair to ask users to pay for that labor.
manigandham 6y ago
Possible but poor experience for devs and users. The app will have to contain the full working functionality for every major release, and seamlessly handle upgrading it internally. This is counter to how almost all applications are actually build and released where you only run the artifacts for the current version.

on_and_off 6y ago

Strongly agree with most of the points, but not all. Disagreements : - App updates. I think that the subscription model would be pretty good for apps actually if you could have a micro transaction system. Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). Selling apps for a one time fee does not fit that well in this model. A nominal fee for app updates kinda solves part of the problem .. you just hope that your users love the new feature enough to buy it. It feels a lot like for a lot of apps that would just lead to feature creep instead of good design. I have been hoping to see a micro-subscription model emerge for a very long time. Unfortunately I don't think customers want that and Apple/Google don't seem super interested in pushing it either (Google kinda has that with Google Play Pass, but in typical Google fashion this is dead on arrival). - I don't think the web is in a significantly different than it has been for the entirety of iOS/Android existences : it has its place but is not going to replace native anytime soon, especially for the "high quality" apps the author talks about.

AlexandrB 6y ago
> Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). I stay the hell away from apps that don’t let me manage my own data, which excludes most apps that have recurring costs. Even so more and more standalone apps that I use are going subscription because of the lack of another way to deal with upgrades.
- on_and_off 6y ago
  Even something as simple as a weather app needs to pay recurring costs for its API, regardless of user data And thinking about it .. hard to make a good weather app that does not collect your location. Good is relative here, for me a good weather app will automatically update to my current location wherever I go.
wilshipley 6y ago
The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed. I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money. I’m pretty sure we can do micro-subscription already — I could ask Apple to just charge $1 a month, that’s pretty micro. (I don’t think we can do pennies, yet.) But that model doesn’t really work for all types of apps. For instance, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users had the option to just pay me 5 cents for the month they used the app, I’d have to get 16 million of these users to make back the money I’ve put into this app. That’s not really feasible. -— My point with the web is that pass-through web “apps” on iOS are the same as pass-through web “apps” on Android, so Apple is losing a competitive advantage if they kill of their native developers. If you’ve got Slack or Chrome or a banking app or a finance app or a health app on your iPhone, you could be running the exact same app on Android. So why did you spend extra on an iPhone? Apple needs to treat its independent, native developers better because we are the only ones who are making products that are Apple-only, and show off all the cool things iOS and macOS can do. -Wil

mdoms 6y ago

Why would it change if you keep shoveling money (and dev resources) directly to Apple? They already know you'll stay regardless of their response.

wilshipley 6y ago
They don’t know that, actually, because I haven’t decided I’ll stay in the App Store. -Wil
- _qulr 6y ago
  Other prominent indie devs have left the App Store: Panic, Bare Bones, Rogue Amoeba. It didn't change the system, and some of them even came back (with special favors from Apple). Perhaps leaving is a (temporary) solution for Wil Shipley, but I would agree with the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370 "The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING. Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us." We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. - Ben Franklin
  - wilshipley 6y ago
    See, my thinking is if enough of us get “special favors” then the special favors will become the norm.

pjbster 6y ago

I have been thinking about an alternative pricing model but it only works for content creation software. It would be enabled by an OpenPGP library which handles signing of files and micropayments. What if the app itself was free but it charged a small fee the first time a new file was saved? The file format doesn't have to be proprietary - a simple chunk of metadata should be able to identify the creator and the files won't need to be tracked by a central authority because the mere existence of the signature in the file would imply that the one-off payment had already been made. The canonical example is a rich Markdown editor. You could get the WYSIWYG conveniences à la Word and the resulting .md file would have a signature indicating that the app had saved it. Subsequent edits by the author wouldn't incur a fee as the signature would match the app instance. But someone else with a copy of the app would incur a fee if they also used it to make changes of their own and their signature would be added to the file. Someone else could edit the file with their favourite text editor. This wouldn't incur a fee. But the signatures would have to be preserved otherwise the original author(s) wouldn't be able to re-edit the file without incurring another payment. Perhaps I'm being dumb but I think these files could be safely pushed to Github with the signatures intact. They'd be as secure as any public key. I can see this working with many file types -- MS Office documents, Adobe Illustrator et al, 3D model files, PDFs, images, movies. The same file could be edited with different apps each saving their own signatures. All that's needed is something which disables the "File/Save" command unless a payment is made. Is anyone aware of any software which works like this?

Dylan16807 6y ago
How do you define "new file"? Why don't I put all my data into various copies of the same original file?
- pjbster 6y ago
  A "new" file is simply one which doesn't contain the licensee's signature. Yes, there would be ways to game this approach by minimising the number of files saved but the price per new save could be set sufficiently low to make the inconvenience too uneconomical. And there might be users who need to create thousands of new files over the course of a year and who might be better served by a subscription model or a pricing cap.

buboard 6y ago

are there people here making substantial money selling apps (instead of making them)?

jamil7 6y ago
There are quite a few independant developers in the iOS and macOS community who make a living selling apps. This is one of the points in the tweets. These people developing specifically for the platform are often the ones building the highest quality experiences as they're focused in one area and able to make use of all the OS level integrations and user experiences (think accessibility, gestures, spotlight search, siri integration). In short these developers are what make Apple products "Apple". The app store right now is hurting these people the most, if all we end up with is cross platform ports on each platform that behave the same then theres no reason to buy an iPhone in the first place since the experience would be the same anywhere else for far less money.

ksec 6y ago

The problem isn't with the 30% Cut. It is the value that it offers. Right now it is nothing more than rent seeking. Apple doesn't even have to lower the Cut. They need to provide more values from the Cut. It could be CDN for your app, where Apple could lower the bandwidth usage for certain uses, using the Apple EdgeCache. Or additional tools that helps developer's productivity. There are lots could be done. And yet Post Steve Jobs Apple hasn't acted on it.

_qulr 6y ago
CDN for your app sounds like a minority use case, a service that could be sold separately. Not even relevant for native-only apps. I don't want Apple to try to justify the 30% with luxury services, I just want them to reduce the cut.