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Apple's mentality it seems is to not care about you or your small development company. They don't care if you're a large app developer, and they never have. Fro

Apple's mentality it seems is to not care about you or your small development company. They don't care if you're a large app developer, and they never have. From antenna gate to the butterfly keyboard, Apple does what it wants and if you don't like it, well, tough.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Do you expect a customer to purchase peanuts by the kg and another customer to purchase peanuts by the tons at the same price/kg? Larger companies bring larger revenue. They get juicy discounts. I acknowledge the situation with smaller devs, but the comparison is extreme - billion dollar company vs. a single developer. How do you reconcile these? Every enterprise software has volume licensing even though the cost of distribution is negligible. Is an App store different? I argue its not, but open for discussion. With Stripe, I can get 1.9% or even lower transaction fees if my volume is $2M+ annually. Usually for poor small companies, they have to pay 2.9%. So sorry for small companies :-( but that's how the world works. There is a lot of emotion behind arguments on HN when it comes to Apple. It is mob thinking and bandwagoning, I am not impressed. Edit: Sorry, I was referring to another comment. My mistake.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago
  Hasn't the pro-Apple argument centered around everyone pays the same amount and people knew what the rules are so stop complaining and pay? The anti-Apple argument has been that the policy hurts smaller developers and is being applied unfairly. This at least validates the latter argument while suggesting truth to the former. Regardless, it's an interesting development.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    > Hasn't the pro-Apple argument centered around everyone pays the same amount and people knew what the rules are so stop complaining and pay? To me it's looked more like the argument is: it's Apple's store, so Apple gets to make the rules. And that they don't have anything close to a monopoly in mobile hardware or mobile OSes, which is one argument for not allowing them to make their own rules.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    At some point when the amount is in multi millions, it becomes a call to the a real person at Apple - negotiations are on the table. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. Unless we see this wrong across the board including the peanut business. Any other argument is hypocrisy unless the App Store is something different than normal business dealings?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The pro-Apple argument centers on “you got what you signed up for, what’s the problem?” Arguments about uniform treatment don’t play much part. The anti-Apple argument (at least the one that matters) is that Apple has hurt consumers in some way. Whether Apple has made life difficult for developers is pretty much irrelevant.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Given that developers have to pay Apple for access to the app store, they are also consumers, just in a different way.
      - akiselev 6y ago
        I don't think that's how most business relationships work. When I buy a high end sintering 3d printer, for instance, it doesn't come with a mountain of consumer protections because it's assumed that if I'm buying one, I know what I'm doing and will make sure the purchase contract contains warranty clauses, support, and so on. The cheap FDM 3d printer I bought off of Amazon, however, is targeted at Joe Public and thus treated differently by the law with a mandated one year warranty. I'm not sure what the legal test is for differentiating the two, but the difference is definitely recognized by the courts. IANAL but it's unlikely that the courts would decide that app developers are consumers in the classical sense. That said, it doesn't matter (again, IANAL). Consumers are still being harmed, as Apple so graciously showed by removing Epic from the store - removing consumer choice in a free market is anti-competitive.
        gamblor956 6y ago
        Being a business doesn't render one a non-consumer, otherwise, no business would ever have recourse against another business for non-negotiated transactions. A consumer is simply a purchaser that "consumes" a product or service rather than using it for production (of their own goods or services) or reselling it.
        akiselev 6y ago
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Mob thinking and hopping on the bandwagon are just fallacies to dismiss how Apple operates as a business. If you poison the well, and it's just by one actor, do you not think that's enough action to warrant a response?
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Sorry to point out but you picked the weakest point of my argument which was my gut feeling about the what I see on HN, not sure how you can say that's disputable.
WWLink 6y ago
Yeah, Apple is the opposite of a company that would bother with focus groups and surveys. The butterfly keyboard was a good example of that. The "You don't know what you want" model. It worked out really well for them for a while, but I think these days when it doesn't work out, they sit in denial a bit too long. With the macbook pro's flimsy hinge ribbon cable and delicate butterfly keyboard that both broke way too quickly, they seemed to be trying to pull the "well, people won't use it for more than x years before they ewaste it!" method, and failed pretty spectacularly.
- akiselev 6y ago
  > Yeah, Apple is the opposite of a company that would bother with focus groups and surveys. The butterfly keyboard was a good example of that. The "You don't know what you want" model. It worked out really well for them for a while, but I think these days when it doesn't work out, they sit in denial a bit too long. It worked until organizational entropy caught up with Apple. It's all fine and dandy when they make changes that are consistent, if not totally intuitive at first, but now the low hanging fruit has been picked and the only way to get promotions is to push for stupid projects like "fixing the keyboard."
- mooman219 6y ago
  I also recall 3D touch being almost entirely removed at this point.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Do you expect a customer to purchase peanuts by the kg and another customer to purchase peanuts by the tons at the same price/kg? Larger companies bring larger revenue. They get juicy discounts. I acknowledge the situation with smaller devs, but the comparison is extreme - billion dollar company vs. a single developer. How do you reconcile these? Every enterprise software has volume licensing even though the cost of distribution is negligible. Is an App store different? I argue its not, but open for discussion. With Stripe, I can get 1.9% or even lower transaction fees if my volume is $2M+ annually. Usually for poor small companies, they have to pay 2.9%. So sorry for small companies :-( but that's how the world works. There is a lot of emotion behind arguments on HN when it comes to Apple. It is mob thinking and bandwagoning, I am not impressed. Edit: Sorry, I was referring to another comment. My mistake.

jlbnjmn 6y ago
Hasn't the pro-Apple argument centered around everyone pays the same amount and people knew what the rules are so stop complaining and pay? The anti-Apple argument has been that the policy hurts smaller developers and is being applied unfairly. This at least validates the latter argument while suggesting truth to the former. Regardless, it's an interesting development.
- dmurray 6y ago
  > Hasn't the pro-Apple argument centered around everyone pays the same amount and people knew what the rules are so stop complaining and pay? To me it's looked more like the argument is: it's Apple's store, so Apple gets to make the rules. And that they don't have anything close to a monopoly in mobile hardware or mobile OSes, which is one argument for not allowing them to make their own rules.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  At some point when the amount is in multi millions, it becomes a call to the a real person at Apple - negotiations are on the table. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. Unless we see this wrong across the board including the peanut business. Any other argument is hypocrisy unless the App Store is something different than normal business dealings?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  The pro-Apple argument centers on “you got what you signed up for, what’s the problem?” Arguments about uniform treatment don’t play much part. The anti-Apple argument (at least the one that matters) is that Apple has hurt consumers in some way. Whether Apple has made life difficult for developers is pretty much irrelevant.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Given that developers have to pay Apple for access to the app store, they are also consumers, just in a different way.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      I don't think that's how most business relationships work. When I buy a high end sintering 3d printer, for instance, it doesn't come with a mountain of consumer protections because it's assumed that if I'm buying one, I know what I'm doing and will make sure the purchase contract contains warranty clauses, support, and so on. The cheap FDM 3d printer I bought off of Amazon, however, is targeted at Joe Public and thus treated differently by the law with a mandated one year warranty. I'm not sure what the legal test is for differentiating the two, but the difference is definitely recognized by the courts. IANAL but it's unlikely that the courts would decide that app developers are consumers in the classical sense. That said, it doesn't matter (again, IANAL). Consumers are still being harmed, as Apple so graciously showed by removing Epic from the store - removing consumer choice in a free market is anti-competitive.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        Being a business doesn't render one a non-consumer, otherwise, no business would ever have recourse against another business for non-negotiated transactions. A consumer is simply a purchaser that "consumes" a product or service rather than using it for production (of their own goods or services) or reselling it.
        akiselev 6y ago
rootsudo 6y ago
Mob thinking and hopping on the bandwagon are just fallacies to dismiss how Apple operates as a business. If you poison the well, and it's just by one actor, do you not think that's enough action to warrant a response?
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Sorry to point out but you picked the weakest point of my argument which was my gut feeling about the what I see on HN, not sure how you can say that's disputable.

WWLink 6y ago

Yeah, Apple is the opposite of a company that would bother with focus groups and surveys. The butterfly keyboard was a good example of that. The "You don't know what you want" model. It worked out really well for them for a while, but I think these days when it doesn't work out, they sit in denial a bit too long. With the macbook pro's flimsy hinge ribbon cable and delicate butterfly keyboard that both broke way too quickly, they seemed to be trying to pull the "well, people won't use it for more than x years before they ewaste it!" method, and failed pretty spectacularly.

akiselev 6y ago
> Yeah, Apple is the opposite of a company that would bother with focus groups and surveys. The butterfly keyboard was a good example of that. The "You don't know what you want" model. It worked out really well for them for a while, but I think these days when it doesn't work out, they sit in denial a bit too long. It worked until organizational entropy caught up with Apple. It's all fine and dandy when they make changes that are consistent, if not totally intuitive at first, but now the low hanging fruit has been picked and the only way to get promotions is to push for stupid projects like "fixing the keyboard."
mooman219 6y ago
I also recall 3D touch being almost entirely removed at this point.