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I have also been really surprised with the whole debate on this saga here. For developers, this looks like such a no brainer because they should personally rela

I have also been really surprised with the whole debate on this saga here. For developers, this looks like such a no brainer because they should personally relate to what these companies are asking for.

zepto 6y ago
None of this would be great for developers. Having to deal with a multitude of stores run by companies that are even shadier than Apple is not good.
- Aldo_MX 6y ago
  Then don't install the other stores. (That's how people who say "then don't use Apple devices" sounds like).
  - zepto 6y ago
    That sounds like you conceding that it would be a bad situation. One can think that the current situation has problems and also see that the remedy will make things much worse. These are not in contradiction.
    - Aldo_MX 6y ago
      Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. Imagine not being able to ditch the App Store the way publishers have done so in the Mac App Store: https://bohemiancoding.tumblr.com/post/134322691555/leaving-the-mac-app-store https://bohemiancoding.tumblr.com/post/134322691555/leaving-... https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2014/10/bbedit-at-max-q/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2014/10/bbedit-at-max-q/ Imagine an App Store update breaking all of your apps: https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/apple-acknowledges-mac-app-store-issue-that-caused-apps-to-stop-working-details-fixes/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/apple-acknowledges-mac-app... The App Store approach basically gives you 1 choice if you're uneasy with the status quo: To get out.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Developers won’t have more choices. They’ll be forced to support all the stores that have a significant set of customers.
      - riversflow 6y ago
        >Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. really? I completely disagree, let me illustrate. I don't have much choice of toilet paper when I go to the bathroom, especially in a public restroom. Theres usually only one dispenser, but somehow nobody cares, no one is asking the government to regulate for every Walmart in the country to offer dispensers for every manufacturer, or to regulate residential construction so that every bathroom has one of those industrial size dispensers (or space to install one!) so homeowners can use the jumbo rolls seen in public restrooms. But let's play pretend and imagine if every time you went to use a public restroom there were 8 different toilet papers in the stall. What benefit would that serve, and how would it be a better situation vs the "bad situation" of no choice in toilet paper? Sure, its a bad situation for Charmin as the only toilet paper offered at thousands of Walmarts in the US is probably some cheap Marathon or Georgia-Pacific product, but is it really a social responsibility to make sure that every public restroom has a selection of toilet papers? I would be surprised if you thought that choice would be good here. Given my assumption, why is it not a social responsibility to demand toilet paper choice, and how is toilet paper choice different than app store choice? Serious question, because they seem about equivalent to me. Moreover, I detest this type of pointless choice in most areas of my life because it is an absolute waste of my time and mental resources. Choice is good for macro economic reasons, not social reasons, and sometimes its not even good for micro economic reasons[1]. It allows for competition in a marketplace, driving down prices as a typical consequence. However competition is also typically a waste of resources, whether it's the consumer's time or engineering costs for duplicate/redundant products/factories/supply chains, and it can certainly lead to lower consumer satisfaction. Your links are from a developer's point of view, but like it or not developers are businesses, and Apple and the government don't exist to serve them, they exist to serve everyone(or in Apple's case their shareholders and by extension everyone who can afford an iPhone), developers are a small minority of that everyone. It sucks for those developers, sure, but business is rough as a rule, and I find this whole "but the app developers" like a bad joke. I'd be interested in an example of another cottage industry like app development that got some sort of regulation on stores similar to this. Honestly it seems if we look at precedent in the economy, usually this sort of intervention is anti-consumer; the dealership model for car sales drives car prices up 10% [2], for example. I think small developers should be fearful of this lobby. App development could be a lot more regulated, considering the amount of personal information on a phone and the importance of them in modern life, it seems crazy that the production of eggs is so much more tightly regulated than the production of phone applications. I could probably bounce back from getting salmonella in a month or less, but if all the information on my iphone got stolen and used maliciously it would take me years to recover my identity, if I ever did. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next type of thing that this lobby went after. Let's create a government body to do randomized security audits on smart phone applications, with arcane and pointless rules. Seriously, check out the laws in the US on the sale and farming of eggs and then tell me you want to let big business get the government involved in regulating apps. [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.08.002 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.... [2]https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franchise-laws-restrict-consumer-choice-and-increase-prices https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franch...
  - threeseed 6y ago
    So you've turned the situation into an anti-consumer one. As a consumer I would then lose access to a significant proportion of apps.
    - Aldo_MX 6y ago
      Why? If an app is not present in the App Store then it's Apple's fault for not being an attractive option. That's how competition works.
- bogwog 6y ago
  Are you kidding? Being able to sell on more than one store is a massive advantage. Besides the obvious lower risks and lower fees, you can also benefit from better exposure and discovery (two things that are terrible on the app store and google play) especially in niche stores.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Being forced to sell on multiple stores and comply with multiple sets of store rules just to access the same set of consumers is a massive disadvantage. There will be greater risks. It’s conceivable that fees will be a little lower, but this will only benefit larger developers who can absorb the increased costs of dealing with all the stores. It will be nothing but destructive for smaller developers.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      This is scaremongering. Android has alternative app stores and most apps don't bother releasing to them. iOS would not fragment overnight into dozens of app stores if it was to become open. Likely the majority of apps would still target the App Store, with a handful of major competing stores. These competitors would be incentivized to attract developers, otherwise they would end up with the same lack of apps that killed alternative smartphone operating systems. Not to mention, there would be some degree of standardization of store rules across these platforms, because that's how industries with multiple players tend to function. You're describing an entirely extreme position without any basis.
      - nxc18 6y ago
        The basis for this belief is that Epic also sued Google Play for creating the existing conditions that you describe. Epic doesn't want to turn iOS into Android (which is bad enough on its own), they want to open the floodgates on Android, too.
        Apocryphon 6y ago
        But I don't care about Epic, nor am I talking about them. I'm talking about the hypothetical scenario where Apple allows alternative app stores to exist. I'm not framing this under Epic's terms.
judge2020 6y ago
It's also a no-brainer from the business and marketing side. Unless Apple somehow forces certain rules on third-party app stores to require their apps to comply with advertising, tracking, and security measures, there's no reason for these third party app stores to care if the apps they have on their store track the user for advertising via something other than the tracking identifier - they'd all bypass the tracking consent popup via fingerprinting and other techniques.

zepto 6y ago

None of this would be great for developers. Having to deal with a multitude of stores run by companies that are even shadier than Apple is not good.

Aldo_MX 6y ago
Then don't install the other stores. (That's how people who say "then don't use Apple devices" sounds like).
- zepto 6y ago
  That sounds like you conceding that it would be a bad situation. One can think that the current situation has problems and also see that the remedy will make things much worse. These are not in contradiction.
  - Aldo_MX 6y ago
    Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. Imagine not being able to ditch the App Store the way publishers have done so in the Mac App Store: https://bohemiancoding.tumblr.com/post/134322691555/leaving-the-mac-app-store https://bohemiancoding.tumblr.com/post/134322691555/leaving-... https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2014/10/bbedit-at-max-q/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2014/10/bbedit-at-max-q/ Imagine an App Store update breaking all of your apps: https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/apple-acknowledges-mac-app-store-issue-that-caused-apps-to-stop-working-details-fixes/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/apple-acknowledges-mac-app... The App Store approach basically gives you 1 choice if you're uneasy with the status quo: To get out.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Developers won’t have more choices. They’ll be forced to support all the stores that have a significant set of customers.
    - riversflow 6y ago
      >Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. really? I completely disagree, let me illustrate. I don't have much choice of toilet paper when I go to the bathroom, especially in a public restroom. Theres usually only one dispenser, but somehow nobody cares, no one is asking the government to regulate for every Walmart in the country to offer dispensers for every manufacturer, or to regulate residential construction so that every bathroom has one of those industrial size dispensers (or space to install one!) so homeowners can use the jumbo rolls seen in public restrooms. But let's play pretend and imagine if every time you went to use a public restroom there were 8 different toilet papers in the stall. What benefit would that serve, and how would it be a better situation vs the "bad situation" of no choice in toilet paper? Sure, its a bad situation for Charmin as the only toilet paper offered at thousands of Walmarts in the US is probably some cheap Marathon or Georgia-Pacific product, but is it really a social responsibility to make sure that every public restroom has a selection of toilet papers? I would be surprised if you thought that choice would be good here. Given my assumption, why is it not a social responsibility to demand toilet paper choice, and how is toilet paper choice different than app store choice? Serious question, because they seem about equivalent to me. Moreover, I detest this type of pointless choice in most areas of my life because it is an absolute waste of my time and mental resources. Choice is good for macro economic reasons, not social reasons, and sometimes its not even good for micro economic reasons[1]. It allows for competition in a marketplace, driving down prices as a typical consequence. However competition is also typically a waste of resources, whether it's the consumer's time or engineering costs for duplicate/redundant products/factories/supply chains, and it can certainly lead to lower consumer satisfaction. Your links are from a developer's point of view, but like it or not developers are businesses, and Apple and the government don't exist to serve them, they exist to serve everyone(or in Apple's case their shareholders and by extension everyone who can afford an iPhone), developers are a small minority of that everyone. It sucks for those developers, sure, but business is rough as a rule, and I find this whole "but the app developers" like a bad joke. I'd be interested in an example of another cottage industry like app development that got some sort of regulation on stores similar to this. Honestly it seems if we look at precedent in the economy, usually this sort of intervention is anti-consumer; the dealership model for car sales drives car prices up 10% [2], for example. I think small developers should be fearful of this lobby. App development could be a lot more regulated, considering the amount of personal information on a phone and the importance of them in modern life, it seems crazy that the production of eggs is so much more tightly regulated than the production of phone applications. I could probably bounce back from getting salmonella in a month or less, but if all the information on my iphone got stolen and used maliciously it would take me years to recover my identity, if I ever did. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next type of thing that this lobby went after. Let's create a government body to do randomized security audits on smart phone applications, with arcane and pointless rules. Seriously, check out the laws in the US on the sale and farming of eggs and then tell me you want to let big business get the government involved in regulating apps. [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.08.002 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.... [2]https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franchise-laws-restrict-consumer-choice-and-increase-prices https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franch...
- threeseed 6y ago
  So you've turned the situation into an anti-consumer one. As a consumer I would then lose access to a significant proportion of apps.
  - Aldo_MX 6y ago
    Why? If an app is not present in the App Store then it's Apple's fault for not being an attractive option. That's how competition works.
bogwog 6y ago
Are you kidding? Being able to sell on more than one store is a massive advantage. Besides the obvious lower risks and lower fees, you can also benefit from better exposure and discovery (two things that are terrible on the app store and google play) especially in niche stores.
- zepto 6y ago
  Being forced to sell on multiple stores and comply with multiple sets of store rules just to access the same set of consumers is a massive disadvantage. There will be greater risks. It’s conceivable that fees will be a little lower, but this will only benefit larger developers who can absorb the increased costs of dealing with all the stores. It will be nothing but destructive for smaller developers.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    This is scaremongering. Android has alternative app stores and most apps don't bother releasing to them. iOS would not fragment overnight into dozens of app stores if it was to become open. Likely the majority of apps would still target the App Store, with a handful of major competing stores. These competitors would be incentivized to attract developers, otherwise they would end up with the same lack of apps that killed alternative smartphone operating systems. Not to mention, there would be some degree of standardization of store rules across these platforms, because that's how industries with multiple players tend to function. You're describing an entirely extreme position without any basis.
    - nxc18 6y ago
      The basis for this belief is that Epic also sued Google Play for creating the existing conditions that you describe. Epic doesn't want to turn iOS into Android (which is bad enough on its own), they want to open the floodgates on Android, too.
      - Apocryphon 6y ago
        But I don't care about Epic, nor am I talking about them. I'm talking about the hypothetical scenario where Apple allows alternative app stores to exist. I'm not framing this under Epic's terms.

judge2020 6y ago

It's also a no-brainer from the business and marketing side. Unless Apple somehow forces certain rules on third-party app stores to require their apps to comply with advertising, tracking, and security measures, there's no reason for these third party app stores to care if the apps they have on their store track the user for advertising via something other than the tracking identifier - they'd all bypass the tracking consent popup via fingerprinting and other techniques.