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"The Coalition for App Fairness", I cannot not laugh. On the stage you have: Epic - Trying to be the next Valve/Steam. Happy to rip off their customers via i

"The Coalition for App Fairness", I cannot not laugh. On the stage you have: Epic - Trying to be the next Valve/Steam. Happy to rip off their customers via in-game transactions. Spotify - Who rip off artists by either failing or paying very little in royalties. Tinder - Sells sex. None of these companies have any care for the actual developer; who are the folk trying to make a living from their creations.

jeremiahlee 6y ago
70% of Spotify's revenue goes to rights holders. That's not ripping off artists. Streaming royalties have been the largest segment of music rights holder revenue for several years. The record labels negotiated these deals and had all of the power. Also, all music streaming services have effectively the same deals. Spotify does not have preferential treatment. Artists can distribute their music without Spotify. Spotify cannot distribute its app to iOS users without Apple.
- TylerE 6y ago
  That’s more representative of how the market has imploded. There were 900M CDs sold in the US in 2000. This year that number will be less than 25M
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Imploded or transformed? Music consumption hasn't gone down. Consumption of physical media that I can't slip in my pocket has.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Spending on music is vastly down. The RIAA publishes numbers - https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ Inflation adjusted we are down by over half from the peak. Subscription revenue is less that 30% of peak CD revenue.
- acruns 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be the record companies though? I have heard Kanye is trying to get more money for artists but not really sure. I am puzzled why blockchain+streaming for music hasn't taken off. Artists would maintain rights and profits from what I can tell
  - ticmasta 6y ago
    Traditionally payment & accounting has never been a problem in the music business, so I think blockchain would not really help. The underlying economics is what has changed dramatically. Distribution is close to free, but unlike the ~ $1 an artist might have seen out of a CD sale (before discounting for costs & advances) they now see sub-cents on a single track. You used to pay $15-20 for an entire album to get 2 or 3 good songs; now you only stream everybody's top tracks and pay less than that a month. So the artist gets a couple of pennies for the period when they are hot, then nothing.
  - rblatz 6y ago
    Why would you put blockchain in this?
    - damnyou 6y ago
      For micropayments per stream, presumably.
      - rmah 6y ago
        Blockchain is not suitable for micropayments. The computing resource requirements are many orders of magnitude too high.
        damnyou 6y ago
        A proof of work blockchain isn't suitable, but proof of work is one of many ways to reach distributed consensus.
- ticmasta 6y ago
  70% of an apple purchase goes to the app developer. That's not ripping off developers.
  - christopherwxyz 6y ago
    Apple doesn’t charge itself a 30% fee when it competes with other developers for the same paying users.
    - sithlord 6y ago
      And you dont charge yourself what the lawn companies charge you to cut your yard. I don't really get your point.
      - christopherwxyz 6y ago
        Your example is faulty. No one pays you to cut your own lawn. People pay Apple to listen to Apple Music. People pay Apple to watch TV+. Other competitors have to pay 30% for every customer before they can even compete with their own product.
- criddell 6y ago
  Spotify is complicated because the big record companies are also big shareholders. They have a conflict of interest. Also 70% doesn't mean anything without actual numbers. If they lowered their subscription to $1 / month and gave 80% to rights holders it wouldn't be an improvement. I'd be more interested if they reported how many plays per month it takes to earn as much as you would in a minimum wage job. Edit: I was curious about the minimum wage question so I looked it up. Assuming $15 / hour for minimum wage it would take 750,000 streams on Spotify and 430,000 streams on Apple Music to earn the same in a month as you would working a minimum wage job. https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
  - jeremiahlee 6y ago
    My understanding is that rights holders are paid by the percentage of all plays, not per play. Deezer is trying to fix this, but it requires the major labels to agree to the change. Deezer's user-centric payment system would apportion royalties based on an individual customer's play percentage instead of the total customer base's percentage. So if you only listen to 5 artists, all of your subscription's royalties would go to those 5 artists. More info on UCPS at https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/deezer-launches-initiative-for-user-centric-approach-to-distribute-royalties-883310/ https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/deezer-launches-initia... and https://www.deezer.com/ucps https://www.deezer.com/ucps
gostsamo 6y ago
Many good things in history happened because bad people had interest of them happening. At hominem attacks does not invalidate a claim. P.S. I'm not downvoting but still trying to bring everyone down is a low-quality argument.
- singularity2001 6y ago
  No hominem was attached
  - izacus 6y ago
    Attacking a companny/person behind an argument for unrelated issues is a definition of "ad hominem".
    - singularity2001 6y ago
      [deleted]
      - roblabla 6y ago
        They're the messenger. The idea behind an ad hominem is to attack the messenger instead of the message - whether the messenger is a human or corporation doesn't really matter. Who's behind the argument doesn't matter, if the argument is solid.
mFixman 6y ago
All three allow games, music, and dating to happen outside of their platforms. The Apple equivalent would be Microsoft not allowing any program being installed from outside their store or Tinder closing down all bars in a city to lower competition.
- dleslie 6y ago
  I can't sell my music streaming service on Spotify. I can't provide my own dating service on Tinder. I can't operate my own app store on EGS. Edit: what, I can't expect them to abide by their own demands of Apple?
- zepto 6y ago
  What does apple not allow outside it’s platform? How would they even control that?
  - Floegipoky 6y ago
    There is nothing _but_ their platform- from the hardware, to OS, to app store, they're arguing that their platform encompasses an entire vertically-integrated business model. Microsoft got nailed for shipping their web browser with their OS (which users could easily replace), but it's fine for Apple to control all software a user can install? Take a monopoly and call it a platform, and it's fine? No. I have little love for Epic, but I'm glad somebody has the money to try to buy some law that will ultimately result in users having more control over the technology they depend on.
    - 52-6F-62 6y ago
      > users having more control over the technology they depend on. Bit of a chicken/egg problem there isn't it? I bought the iOS device and depend on it being as locked down as it is—that's why I bought it. I wasn't force to choose an iOS device for any reason. If I depended on more openness I could have gone with an Android or other device. Do I depend on having a phone? Yes. Does it matter which one? No—the choice is there.
  - 6y ago
speedgoose 6y ago
Tinder sells rejections and disappointments too.
- valvar 6y ago
  Or happiness. I met my wife on Tinder several years ago, and we know other couples who met the same way.
- Kalium 6y ago
  Tinder doesn't sell sex. It sells access to a Skinner box with intermittent positive reinforcement and frequent negative reinforcement where the reward is human connection. Way, way more psychologically toxic.
asou 6y ago
Considering Tinder's parent ( The Match Group ) got sued by the FTC for fraud, not very smart to include them. Intentionally making subscriptions hard to cancel is one of the behaviors Apple's payment system seeks to prevent. As much as I like Tim Sweeney's arguments for lower royalties, he doesn't have half a toe to stand on. Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone. This fairness coalition is free to manufacture Android phones with a no royalties store . Hogan's Law on YouTube has done a very good take on this. The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract. If I set up a newspaper stand and decide anyone who wants to sell news papers needs to cut me in for 30%, you can't demand special treatment. I could see Apple making an example out of Epic and banning them for life. You don't sneak in hidden functionality, and then flick it on via a server side command
- damnyou 6y ago
  In the world I inhabit, Apple is the one that intentionally makes it really hard to cancel subscriptions. You literally cannot cancel a subscription to an iOS app from an Android phone or Linux PC.
  - asou 6y ago
    You can't subscribe without an IOS Device , Mac or Windows PC. If your in some strange edge case where your subscribing to services and then discarding your IOS devices before canceling , that's on you. In a worst case scenario you could borrow a friend's Windows PC. As much as I love Linux I can't imagine most Linux users don't have at least one windows PC or Mac. If we really want to get technical, spin up an AWS instance, RDP into it, install iCloud for windows and then cancel your subscription.
    - kemayo 6y ago
      There are a few services you can sign up for without any of those... but Apple has a support page telling you how to unsubscribe from those from the devices you signed up from: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011 Said support page also says you can contact Apple Support about it, which I imagine would also work for the "canceling an arbitrary in-app subscription" issue.
indigochill 6y ago
I agree Epic's arguing in bad faith, but I also don't see why Apple (and other App Store companies, like Google) need to have change legislated upon them (or why this is something that needs to be protested). Apple got to where they are by being a successful platform that attracted users and developers with their walled garden ethos. If in fact that walled garden is bad for users/developers, then there are competitors. If Apple users felt they were getting ripped off (or Apple developers felt it wasn't worth it to develop for Apple platforms) they could go to Windows or Linux/Android. The only way I can interpret this is that Epic & Friends see Apple has a nice cake which they now want to both have and eat. Given that Apple made the cake and there are other cakes, I think they're being entirely unfair to Apple. If Epic & Friends don't like Apple's rules, they're welcome to get off Apple's platform and focus on other platforms. I personally don't think it's worth developing for Apple platforms myself, but the argument that developers somehow -have- to develop for Apple platforms is nonsense (the AAA market for games on PC vs Mac makes this obvious). That's only true if you decide you have to reach those users, which is only true if you as the developer decide it's economically worthwhile, in which case you have implicitly agreed that Apple's terms are economically justifiable.
- lewdev 6y ago
  "walled garden ethos" I like that. Apple is all about exclusivity and premium priced products. It seems like developers develop for them and consumers buy for them for that reason. But expecting Apple to be a free, fair, and open company, is really going against their business model.
stephc_int13 6y ago
As an actual game developer I can say that I am very happy to see this happening, and I know for a fact that this is the case of a very large number of devs.
bluedevil2k 6y ago
> Happy to rip off their customers via in-game transactions. If people are happy and willingly buying skins, dances, and battle passes, that's not a rip-off.
- pb7 6y ago
  How is this different than "if developers are happy and willingly develop for iOS then [the fees] are not a rip-off"?
  - bluedevil2k 6y ago
    The developers aren’t happy. No one forces a Fortnite player to buy skins or emotes, Apple forces developers to pay the fee.
    - DivisionSol 6y ago
      Er, no one is forcing any developer to make an app for iOS.
      - bluedevil2k 6y ago
        I see this type of comment a lot in these discussions on the App Store - "no one is forcing you to make an iOS app". No, no one is holding a gun to your head to make an iOS app. But you know what, people need to make money to pay the mortgage and feed their kids. If you're a programmer who has years of experience, who wants to make money in the field you have years of experience in, the field you likely enjoy doing and are good at, then YES you are forced to make an app on iOS because that's where the majority of the paying customers are. It's a bogus excuse to say "don't make an iOS app then". That's akin to telling a programmer "just learn to eat a little less".
        pb7 6y ago
        Oh no, won't someone think of the... talented and skilled white-collar worker in one of the hottest and highest paying industries of all time that can work literally anywhere? Enough with the appeals to emotion.
Apocryphon 6y ago
Basecamp, Tile, Protonmail are also some big names listed in the site. Even Prepear, the fairly obscure company that ran afoul of Apple’s aggressive trademark protection actions, is a founding member. I wonder if Telegram will join next. It’s as if they rallied together every company that’s had a news controversy with Apple this past year, at least the ones smaller than FANG.
cblconfederate 6y ago
apparently neither does apple

jeremiahlee 6y ago

70% of Spotify's revenue goes to rights holders. That's not ripping off artists. Streaming royalties have been the largest segment of music rights holder revenue for several years. The record labels negotiated these deals and had all of the power. Also, all music streaming services have effectively the same deals. Spotify does not have preferential treatment. Artists can distribute their music without Spotify. Spotify cannot distribute its app to iOS users without Apple.

TylerE 6y ago
That’s more representative of how the market has imploded. There were 900M CDs sold in the US in 2000. This year that number will be less than 25M
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Imploded or transformed? Music consumption hasn't gone down. Consumption of physical media that I can't slip in my pocket has.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Spending on music is vastly down. The RIAA publishes numbers - https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ Inflation adjusted we are down by over half from the peak. Subscription revenue is less that 30% of peak CD revenue.
acruns 6y ago
Wouldn't that be the record companies though? I have heard Kanye is trying to get more money for artists but not really sure. I am puzzled why blockchain+streaming for music hasn't taken off. Artists would maintain rights and profits from what I can tell
- ticmasta 6y ago
  Traditionally payment & accounting has never been a problem in the music business, so I think blockchain would not really help. The underlying economics is what has changed dramatically. Distribution is close to free, but unlike the ~ $1 an artist might have seen out of a CD sale (before discounting for costs & advances) they now see sub-cents on a single track. You used to pay $15-20 for an entire album to get 2 or 3 good songs; now you only stream everybody's top tracks and pay less than that a month. So the artist gets a couple of pennies for the period when they are hot, then nothing.
- rblatz 6y ago
  Why would you put blockchain in this?
  - damnyou 6y ago
    For micropayments per stream, presumably.
    - rmah 6y ago
      Blockchain is not suitable for micropayments. The computing resource requirements are many orders of magnitude too high.
      - damnyou 6y ago
        A proof of work blockchain isn't suitable, but proof of work is one of many ways to reach distributed consensus.
ticmasta 6y ago
70% of an apple purchase goes to the app developer. That's not ripping off developers.
- christopherwxyz 6y ago
  Apple doesn’t charge itself a 30% fee when it competes with other developers for the same paying users.
  - sithlord 6y ago
    And you dont charge yourself what the lawn companies charge you to cut your yard. I don't really get your point.
    - christopherwxyz 6y ago
      Your example is faulty. No one pays you to cut your own lawn. People pay Apple to listen to Apple Music. People pay Apple to watch TV+. Other competitors have to pay 30% for every customer before they can even compete with their own product.
criddell 6y ago
Spotify is complicated because the big record companies are also big shareholders. They have a conflict of interest. Also 70% doesn't mean anything without actual numbers. If they lowered their subscription to $1 / month and gave 80% to rights holders it wouldn't be an improvement. I'd be more interested if they reported how many plays per month it takes to earn as much as you would in a minimum wage job. Edit: I was curious about the minimum wage question so I looked it up. Assuming $15 / hour for minimum wage it would take 750,000 streams on Spotify and 430,000 streams on Apple Music to earn the same in a month as you would working a minimum wage job. https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
- jeremiahlee 6y ago
  My understanding is that rights holders are paid by the percentage of all plays, not per play. Deezer is trying to fix this, but it requires the major labels to agree to the change. Deezer's user-centric payment system would apportion royalties based on an individual customer's play percentage instead of the total customer base's percentage. So if you only listen to 5 artists, all of your subscription's royalties would go to those 5 artists. More info on UCPS at https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/deezer-launches-initiative-for-user-centric-approach-to-distribute-royalties-883310/ https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/deezer-launches-initia... and https://www.deezer.com/ucps https://www.deezer.com/ucps

gostsamo 6y ago

Many good things in history happened because bad people had interest of them happening. At hominem attacks does not invalidate a claim. P.S. I'm not downvoting but still trying to bring everyone down is a low-quality argument.

singularity2001 6y ago
No hominem was attached
- izacus 6y ago
  Attacking a companny/person behind an argument for unrelated issues is a definition of "ad hominem".
  - singularity2001 6y ago
    [deleted]
    - roblabla 6y ago
      They're the messenger. The idea behind an ad hominem is to attack the messenger instead of the message - whether the messenger is a human or corporation doesn't really matter. Who's behind the argument doesn't matter, if the argument is solid.

mFixman 6y ago

All three allow games, music, and dating to happen outside of their platforms. The Apple equivalent would be Microsoft not allowing any program being installed from outside their store or Tinder closing down all bars in a city to lower competition.

dleslie 6y ago
I can't sell my music streaming service on Spotify. I can't provide my own dating service on Tinder. I can't operate my own app store on EGS. Edit: what, I can't expect them to abide by their own demands of Apple?
zepto 6y ago
What does apple not allow outside it’s platform? How would they even control that?
- Floegipoky 6y ago
  There is nothing _but_ their platform- from the hardware, to OS, to app store, they're arguing that their platform encompasses an entire vertically-integrated business model. Microsoft got nailed for shipping their web browser with their OS (which users could easily replace), but it's fine for Apple to control all software a user can install? Take a monopoly and call it a platform, and it's fine? No. I have little love for Epic, but I'm glad somebody has the money to try to buy some law that will ultimately result in users having more control over the technology they depend on.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    > users having more control over the technology they depend on. Bit of a chicken/egg problem there isn't it? I bought the iOS device and depend on it being as locked down as it is—that's why I bought it. I wasn't force to choose an iOS device for any reason. If I depended on more openness I could have gone with an Android or other device. Do I depend on having a phone? Yes. Does it matter which one? No—the choice is there.
- 6y ago

speedgoose 6y ago

Tinder sells rejections and disappointments too.

valvar 6y ago
Or happiness. I met my wife on Tinder several years ago, and we know other couples who met the same way.
Kalium 6y ago
Tinder doesn't sell sex. It sells access to a Skinner box with intermittent positive reinforcement and frequent negative reinforcement where the reward is human connection. Way, way more psychologically toxic.

asou 6y ago

Considering Tinder's parent ( The Match Group ) got sued by the FTC for fraud, not very smart to include them. Intentionally making subscriptions hard to cancel is one of the behaviors Apple's payment system seeks to prevent. As much as I like Tim Sweeney's arguments for lower royalties, he doesn't have half a toe to stand on. Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone. This fairness coalition is free to manufacture Android phones with a no royalties store . Hogan's Law on YouTube has done a very good take on this. The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract. If I set up a newspaper stand and decide anyone who wants to sell news papers needs to cut me in for 30%, you can't demand special treatment. I could see Apple making an example out of Epic and banning them for life. You don't sneak in hidden functionality, and then flick it on via a server side command

damnyou 6y ago
In the world I inhabit, Apple is the one that intentionally makes it really hard to cancel subscriptions. You literally cannot cancel a subscription to an iOS app from an Android phone or Linux PC.
- asou 6y ago
  You can't subscribe without an IOS Device , Mac or Windows PC. If your in some strange edge case where your subscribing to services and then discarding your IOS devices before canceling , that's on you. In a worst case scenario you could borrow a friend's Windows PC. As much as I love Linux I can't imagine most Linux users don't have at least one windows PC or Mac. If we really want to get technical, spin up an AWS instance, RDP into it, install iCloud for windows and then cancel your subscription.
  - kemayo 6y ago
    There are a few services you can sign up for without any of those... but Apple has a support page telling you how to unsubscribe from those from the devices you signed up from: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011 Said support page also says you can contact Apple Support about it, which I imagine would also work for the "canceling an arbitrary in-app subscription" issue.

indigochill 6y ago

I agree Epic's arguing in bad faith, but I also don't see why Apple (and other App Store companies, like Google) need to have change legislated upon them (or why this is something that needs to be protested). Apple got to where they are by being a successful platform that attracted users and developers with their walled garden ethos. If in fact that walled garden is bad for users/developers, then there are competitors. If Apple users felt they were getting ripped off (or Apple developers felt it wasn't worth it to develop for Apple platforms) they could go to Windows or Linux/Android. The only way I can interpret this is that Epic & Friends see Apple has a nice cake which they now want to both have and eat. Given that Apple made the cake and there are other cakes, I think they're being entirely unfair to Apple. If Epic & Friends don't like Apple's rules, they're welcome to get off Apple's platform and focus on other platforms. I personally don't think it's worth developing for Apple platforms myself, but the argument that developers somehow -have- to develop for Apple platforms is nonsense (the AAA market for games on PC vs Mac makes this obvious). That's only true if you decide you have to reach those users, which is only true if you as the developer decide it's economically worthwhile, in which case you have implicitly agreed that Apple's terms are economically justifiable.

lewdev 6y ago
"walled garden ethos" I like that. Apple is all about exclusivity and premium priced products. It seems like developers develop for them and consumers buy for them for that reason. But expecting Apple to be a free, fair, and open company, is really going against their business model.

stephc_int13 6y ago

As an actual game developer I can say that I am very happy to see this happening, and I know for a fact that this is the case of a very large number of devs.

bluedevil2k 6y ago

> Happy to rip off their customers via in-game transactions. If people are happy and willingly buying skins, dances, and battle passes, that's not a rip-off.

pb7 6y ago
How is this different than "if developers are happy and willingly develop for iOS then [the fees] are not a rip-off"?
- bluedevil2k 6y ago
  The developers aren’t happy. No one forces a Fortnite player to buy skins or emotes, Apple forces developers to pay the fee.
  - DivisionSol 6y ago
    Er, no one is forcing any developer to make an app for iOS.
    - bluedevil2k 6y ago
      I see this type of comment a lot in these discussions on the App Store - "no one is forcing you to make an iOS app". No, no one is holding a gun to your head to make an iOS app. But you know what, people need to make money to pay the mortgage and feed their kids. If you're a programmer who has years of experience, who wants to make money in the field you have years of experience in, the field you likely enjoy doing and are good at, then YES you are forced to make an app on iOS because that's where the majority of the paying customers are. It's a bogus excuse to say "don't make an iOS app then". That's akin to telling a programmer "just learn to eat a little less".
      - pb7 6y ago
        Oh no, won't someone think of the... talented and skilled white-collar worker in one of the hottest and highest paying industries of all time that can work literally anywhere? Enough with the appeals to emotion.

Apocryphon 6y ago

Basecamp, Tile, Protonmail are also some big names listed in the site. Even Prepear, the fairly obscure company that ran afoul of Apple’s aggressive trademark protection actions, is a founding member. I wonder if Telegram will join next. It’s as if they rallied together every company that’s had a news controversy with Apple this past year, at least the ones smaller than FANG.

cblconfederate 6y ago

apparently neither does apple