8 ms·

Resetting the App Store

49 points by cglong 5y ago

dzhiurgis 5y ago
One of the easiest solution is making tech companies accountable for support. This creates jobs and solves those nasty edge cases where lives are ruined. Thats where all tech companies cut their corners so sounds fair to me.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Another one is curated open source apps. Works really well for something like Spotify where content is in their servers. Developer agrees to pay $1 per line of code per update and review + submits app in github repo. In return the cost of subscription is dropped to 3% or so. This way chances of malicious apps is minimised. I struggle to imagine anything proprietary about Spotify fronted app. Same for Facebook, Uber, Slack etc. Obviously doesn’t work well for games.
  - satyrnein 5y ago
    Imagine you needed to be open source to request any sensitive APIs (outside of maybe platform provided analytics), so anyone could see what you were doing with them. Client side games might stay closed source and not request anything, but apps that are clients to a service would be open source, just like their web apps theoretically are.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Salesforce is partly good example because they also do security review on your API and infra. It’s also bad example because they only do it on first release.
1cvmask 5y ago
A very simple solution to all these issues would be to allow iOS users the ability to download apps from outside the App Store and ecosystem like on Android devices and computers. The user could do it at their own risk. This would solve all the antitrust and regulatory issues.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  I wonder if App Stores (Apple, Google, whatever) serve a purpose no one seems to mention. Do these app stores (try to) verify that apps behave appropriately once given access to carrier cellular networks?
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    I don't think that's a purpose but I know that Google does run automated tests on the apps themselves... We submitted an app with access to Firebase and immediately started seeing data being added and deleted from a non-test IP.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Do these app stores (try to) verify that apps behave appropriately once given access to carrier cellular networks? It's automated, but sometimes underpaid contractors are given a few minutes to inspect an app. However, due to the lack of competition, there's no pressure for better screening of apps. A free market for mobile app distribution would gives users more security, better efficiency and experiences, and lower prices as companies competed to provide better mobile app distribution methods.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > A free market for mobile app distribution would gives users more security, better efficiency and experiences, and lower prices as companies competed to provide better mobile app distribution methods. Or it could just end up as a race to the bottom as the market for paid apps is completely eliminated by a few ad based platforms.
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        And yet that hasn't happened on macOS despite existing for two decades. The same can be said for Android and Windows, as well, with their respective lifetimes. It could also just end up that the community, or even non-profits, step up and provide great distributions methods. In fact, I'd say this is the one of the most likely outcomes based on the past, given Maemo's user-supplied apt repositories[1], webOS's Preware[2], or Android's F-Droid[3]. We can also look at the prevailing commercial app stores on platforms with multiple app distribution methods to see what's most likely. They aren't ad based platforms, like Ubuntu's Snap Store[4], Amazon's AppStore[5] for Android, and Samsung's Galaxy Store[6] for Android. Game distribution stores aren't like that, like Steam, GOG, Humble Store, Microsoft store, etc. Even on iOS, Cydia[7] wasn't an ad based platform, and you could purchase paid apps on it. [1] https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-repositories-and-community-packages.html https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-repositories-and-c... [2] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware [3] https://www.f-droid.org/ https://www.f-droid.org/ [4] https://snapcraft.io/store https://snapcraft.io/store [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore [6] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/ https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/ [7] https://cydia-app.com/ https://cydia-app.com/
cblconfederate 5y ago
> sandboxed software model has been a huge step forward for both users and developers. Proof? Do users get more value and developers make more money with mobile apps? Does software become significantly better? Vast majority of mobile games are copycats with a different skin. Showing the total app revenue which correlates with the total number of iphone users isn't telling much.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Vast majority of mobile games are copycats with a different skin. Vast majority of games are crap anyway. Same as vast majority of apps. There are 1.5 million apps in the App Store. Who really expected 1.5 million GOOD apps? Or even close? If there are, say, 10.000 good apps, that still leaves ~1.5 million crap apps. And, still, 10.000 good apps are plenty enough. In graphics work, for example, this includes anything from Photoshop and Procreate, to Vectornator, Lightroom, Pixelmator, Affinity Designer and Photo and 10-20 more very good apps. These are more than enough to cover the whole field from bitmap to vector to photo editing. Same for music work - I can find anything from Garageband and Logic remote, to Cubasis, FL, Audio Units by top brands, controllers, sequencers, and so on. Even more so for regular office apps, productivity, etc. And there are tons of good games as well. The fact that everybody with $100 to spare can put up a BS game, means little, given the plethora of good stuff there.
  - cageface 5y ago
    Same for music work - I can find anything from Garageband and Logic remote, to Cubasis, FL, Audio Units by top brands, controllers, sequencers, and so on. It's telling if you compare what music software is available in the app store vs on the open market. On the open market where devs can charge higher prices and charge for upgrades there is an enormous range of options from cheap, simple tools to professional tools with incredible depth and range. Most of what's available on the app store is a joke in comparison and several of the top virtual instrument devs have said they won't touch the app store because of the restrictions and the race to the bottom on pricing.
cageface 5y ago
Equally, a built-in, one-tap-to-install app store with frictionless payment led to an explosion of software creation and developer revenue. Trust was a huge problem, distribution was a huge problem, and Apple solved both. It's important to keep in mind that this "explosion" of developer revenue is mostly in scammy pay to play games. Apple's app store rules have made it very difficult to build the kind of software business that flourished in the older model where users paid for significant feature upgrades. Apple's answer to this is pushing everything into a subscription model or awkward bundles of in-app purchases which I argue has not been to the benefit of users or most developers.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  Is it true empirically that independent developer software sales are lower on mobile than desktop? I definitely spend more on mobile apps, and I’m a software engineer who spends a lot of time on desktop. My impression is that the mobile app ecosystem has massively grown the market. Subscriptions are lucrative, so platform support for that only helps developers.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    I've spent no more than $50 on mobile software in the last decade, but more than $1000 for desktop software. The difference is that mobile apps are cheap and single-function, but desktop software is feature-rich and expensive. So even if I buy a lot of apps, I still spend more on desktop software. That is an anecdote, but I expect it's broadly true for the wider population. Even for games, I wouldn't blink at spending $50 on a PC or Nintendo Switch game, but for some reason I would never spend more than $5 for a mobile game.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  I don't believe the subscription model was "Apple's answer", it was probably coming along anyway. It made it somewhat easier with th app store, and perhaps gave it a push, but running a business with a subscription model, particularly in consumer software, has huge benefits to the business. It lets you charge a smaller amount up front, to get more people trying, and paying for your software, but keeps an ongoing revenue stream to keep the business going as well.
egypturnash 5y ago
What if Stripe could be the default in-app payment provider for every app on your phone, replacing iTunes, or could compete with Apple Pay on websites in Safari? My immediate response to this is that if this is possible, then how do we stop MaliciousPaymentSkimmerApp from social engineering people into becoming the default in-app payment provider for every app on their phone? I mean, sure, I would like the option to replace the default camera app too, but now I'm asking myself how we make sure MaliciousCloneOfCoolCameraApp isn't sending every photo it takes to a remote server that scans for anything its owners think might be able to make it money? (There is some prior art for this in iOS' custom keyboard world, I suppose. I was excited for those but that quickly faded when every damn custom keyboard demanded Internet access, which is not a thing I want my keyboard to have, whatever their excuse may have been.)
- Dah00n 5y ago
  It's a question of when as the EU is already going after Apple for forcing the use of its own payment system. I can't see how Apple can possibly win.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Payment system for a small slice of purchases: digital goods. Saying they force a payment system without qualifying it makes it sound much more restrictive.
- Vespasian 5y ago
  For payment apps you could tie this into the existing regulatory framework for money transfer services and banks.
  - iscrewyou 5y ago
    Zelle, a monopolized bank service, where banks can monitor it? Or ACH so my app will be delivered in 3 business days? A lot of the options for payment and what’s good for the consumer just seem so much worse than what apple is offering now. There’s a lot more people than developers. And to a user, it doesn’t matter who takes what money. As long the transaction is frictionless and Apple’s advertisements about privacy sell, there won’t be much push from the consumer side.
makecheck 5y ago
App restrictions go well, well beyond some nice safe and secure system that is somehow protecting customers. I mean, they won’t even let app makers TELL their users certain things, or really communicate too much in general (even when users are actively trashing developers and ruining their ratings over things that are entirely the fault of the store, the OS or the device!). Meanwhile: scams, unnecessary restrictions on what the device can do, no automatic support for age-old income models like free trials or paid upgrades, etc.
spacebear 5y ago
This article ignores the human rights aspect. We need to be able to install software independent of the App Store to work around government censorship. As is, if my government asks Apple to take down VPN apps, they will do it, and I’m left with no way to access information on the open web.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Apple can’t serve the entire market of smartphone users. If you care about this, maybe there is another phone for you.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    If you sincerely believe that privacy is a human right, you wouldn't raise this argument. But then again, I am just talking generally, not you specifically.
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      The word privacy wasn’t mentioned once in the post I was responding to. Human rights was. But privacy wasn’t. I do believe in privacy has a human right.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ihuman 5y ago
  Not all VPNs need an app (Settings --> General --> VPN), and you can also use proxies without an app.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
>Apple collected perhaps $15bn in App Store commissions last year (and, incidentally, close to $10bn from Google for making the default search provider in Safari). 90% of that was games, I think the figure depends on estimate, some point it at closer to 80%. But either way it is the vast majority of their profit. And I think Apple should break the App Store into App And Game Store. The Games continue to charge a 30%, all integrated model. Along with much more curation. No more one min of game play and one minutes of ads. Then Apple can spend time to think about the rest. The App Store and how to move forward. Simply by doing so Apple would have protected 80-90% of their current App Store revenue. App Store could also have a App Credit Model, where every new "App" would have 90 days payment terms. So any time a scam do go through App Store Apple could refund at least 90 days of credit. Any high refund rate of an App should also trigger alarm for additional review. Basically returning to the original point of the App Store which is to help its Customers, and your business partners. Right now it is not doing that. It is only helping Apple's services revenue.

49 points by cglong 5y ago

One of the easiest solution is making tech companies accountable for support. This creates jobs and solves those nasty edge cases where lives are ruined. Thats where all tech companies cut their corners so sounds fair to me.

dzhiurgis 5y ago
Another one is curated open source apps. Works really well for something like Spotify where content is in their servers. Developer agrees to pay $1 per line of code per update and review + submits app in github repo. In return the cost of subscription is dropped to 3% or so. This way chances of malicious apps is minimised. I struggle to imagine anything proprietary about Spotify fronted app. Same for Facebook, Uber, Slack etc. Obviously doesn’t work well for games.
- satyrnein 5y ago
  Imagine you needed to be open source to request any sensitive APIs (outside of maybe platform provided analytics), so anyone could see what you were doing with them. Client side games might stay closed source and not request anything, but apps that are clients to a service would be open source, just like their web apps theoretically are.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Salesforce is partly good example because they also do security review on your API and infra. It’s also bad example because they only do it on first release.

1cvmask 5y ago

A very simple solution to all these issues would be to allow iOS users the ability to download apps from outside the App Store and ecosystem like on Android devices and computers. The user could do it at their own risk. This would solve all the antitrust and regulatory issues.

jjtheblunt 5y ago
I wonder if App Stores (Apple, Google, whatever) serve a purpose no one seems to mention. Do these app stores (try to) verify that apps behave appropriately once given access to carrier cellular networks?
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  I don't think that's a purpose but I know that Google does run automated tests on the apps themselves... We submitted an app with access to Firebase and immediately started seeing data being added and deleted from a non-test IP.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > Do these app stores (try to) verify that apps behave appropriately once given access to carrier cellular networks? It's automated, but sometimes underpaid contractors are given a few minutes to inspect an app. However, due to the lack of competition, there's no pressure for better screening of apps. A free market for mobile app distribution would gives users more security, better efficiency and experiences, and lower prices as companies competed to provide better mobile app distribution methods.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > A free market for mobile app distribution would gives users more security, better efficiency and experiences, and lower prices as companies competed to provide better mobile app distribution methods. Or it could just end up as a race to the bottom as the market for paid apps is completely eliminated by a few ad based platforms.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      And yet that hasn't happened on macOS despite existing for two decades. The same can be said for Android and Windows, as well, with their respective lifetimes. It could also just end up that the community, or even non-profits, step up and provide great distributions methods. In fact, I'd say this is the one of the most likely outcomes based on the past, given Maemo's user-supplied apt repositories[1], webOS's Preware[2], or Android's F-Droid[3]. We can also look at the prevailing commercial app stores on platforms with multiple app distribution methods to see what's most likely. They aren't ad based platforms, like Ubuntu's Snap Store[4], Amazon's AppStore[5] for Android, and Samsung's Galaxy Store[6] for Android. Game distribution stores aren't like that, like Steam, GOG, Humble Store, Microsoft store, etc. Even on iOS, Cydia[7] wasn't an ad based platform, and you could purchase paid apps on it. [1] https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-repositories-and-community-packages.html https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-repositories-and-c... [2] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware [3] https://www.f-droid.org/ https://www.f-droid.org/ [4] https://snapcraft.io/store https://snapcraft.io/store [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore [6] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/ https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/ [7] https://cydia-app.com/ https://cydia-app.com/

cblconfederate 5y ago

> sandboxed software model has been a huge step forward for both users and developers. Proof? Do users get more value and developers make more money with mobile apps? Does software become significantly better? Vast majority of mobile games are copycats with a different skin. Showing the total app revenue which correlates with the total number of iphone users isn't telling much.

coldtea 5y ago
>Vast majority of mobile games are copycats with a different skin. Vast majority of games are crap anyway. Same as vast majority of apps. There are 1.5 million apps in the App Store. Who really expected 1.5 million GOOD apps? Or even close? If there are, say, 10.000 good apps, that still leaves ~1.5 million crap apps. And, still, 10.000 good apps are plenty enough. In graphics work, for example, this includes anything from Photoshop and Procreate, to Vectornator, Lightroom, Pixelmator, Affinity Designer and Photo and 10-20 more very good apps. These are more than enough to cover the whole field from bitmap to vector to photo editing. Same for music work - I can find anything from Garageband and Logic remote, to Cubasis, FL, Audio Units by top brands, controllers, sequencers, and so on. Even more so for regular office apps, productivity, etc. And there are tons of good games as well. The fact that everybody with $100 to spare can put up a BS game, means little, given the plethora of good stuff there.
- cageface 5y ago
  Same for music work - I can find anything from Garageband and Logic remote, to Cubasis, FL, Audio Units by top brands, controllers, sequencers, and so on. It's telling if you compare what music software is available in the app store vs on the open market. On the open market where devs can charge higher prices and charge for upgrades there is an enormous range of options from cheap, simple tools to professional tools with incredible depth and range. Most of what's available on the app store is a joke in comparison and several of the top virtual instrument devs have said they won't touch the app store because of the restrictions and the race to the bottom on pricing.

cageface 5y ago

Equally, a built-in, one-tap-to-install app store with frictionless payment led to an explosion of software creation and developer revenue. Trust was a huge problem, distribution was a huge problem, and Apple solved both. It's important to keep in mind that this "explosion" of developer revenue is mostly in scammy pay to play games. Apple's app store rules have made it very difficult to build the kind of software business that flourished in the older model where users paid for significant feature upgrades. Apple's answer to this is pushing everything into a subscription model or awkward bundles of in-app purchases which I argue has not been to the benefit of users or most developers.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
Is it true empirically that independent developer software sales are lower on mobile than desktop? I definitely spend more on mobile apps, and I’m a software engineer who spends a lot of time on desktop. My impression is that the mobile app ecosystem has massively grown the market. Subscriptions are lucrative, so platform support for that only helps developers.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  I've spent no more than $50 on mobile software in the last decade, but more than $1000 for desktop software. The difference is that mobile apps are cheap and single-function, but desktop software is feature-rich and expensive. So even if I buy a lot of apps, I still spend more on desktop software. That is an anecdote, but I expect it's broadly true for the wider population. Even for games, I wouldn't blink at spending $50 on a PC or Nintendo Switch game, but for some reason I would never spend more than $5 for a mobile game.
pedalpete 5y ago
I don't believe the subscription model was "Apple's answer", it was probably coming along anyway. It made it somewhat easier with th app store, and perhaps gave it a push, but running a business with a subscription model, particularly in consumer software, has huge benefits to the business. It lets you charge a smaller amount up front, to get more people trying, and paying for your software, but keeps an ongoing revenue stream to keep the business going as well.

egypturnash 5y ago

What if Stripe could be the default in-app payment provider for every app on your phone, replacing iTunes, or could compete with Apple Pay on websites in Safari? My immediate response to this is that if this is possible, then how do we stop MaliciousPaymentSkimmerApp from social engineering people into becoming the default in-app payment provider for every app on their phone? I mean, sure, I would like the option to replace the default camera app too, but now I'm asking myself how we make sure MaliciousCloneOfCoolCameraApp isn't sending every photo it takes to a remote server that scans for anything its owners think might be able to make it money? (There is some prior art for this in iOS' custom keyboard world, I suppose. I was excited for those but that quickly faded when every damn custom keyboard demanded Internet access, which is not a thing I want my keyboard to have, whatever their excuse may have been.)

Dah00n 5y ago
It's a question of when as the EU is already going after Apple for forcing the use of its own payment system. I can't see how Apple can possibly win.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Payment system for a small slice of purchases: digital goods. Saying they force a payment system without qualifying it makes it sound much more restrictive.
Vespasian 5y ago
For payment apps you could tie this into the existing regulatory framework for money transfer services and banks.
- iscrewyou 5y ago
  Zelle, a monopolized bank service, where banks can monitor it? Or ACH so my app will be delivered in 3 business days? A lot of the options for payment and what’s good for the consumer just seem so much worse than what apple is offering now. There’s a lot more people than developers. And to a user, it doesn’t matter who takes what money. As long the transaction is frictionless and Apple’s advertisements about privacy sell, there won’t be much push from the consumer side.

makecheck 5y ago

App restrictions go well, well beyond some nice safe and secure system that is somehow protecting customers. I mean, they won’t even let app makers TELL their users certain things, or really communicate too much in general (even when users are actively trashing developers and ruining their ratings over things that are entirely the fault of the store, the OS or the device!). Meanwhile: scams, unnecessary restrictions on what the device can do, no automatic support for age-old income models like free trials or paid upgrades, etc.

spacebear 5y ago

This article ignores the human rights aspect. We need to be able to install software independent of the App Store to work around government censorship. As is, if my government asks Apple to take down VPN apps, they will do it, and I’m left with no way to access information on the open web.

enos_feedler 5y ago
Apple can’t serve the entire market of smartphone users. If you care about this, maybe there is another phone for you.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  If you sincerely believe that privacy is a human right, you wouldn't raise this argument. But then again, I am just talking generally, not you specifically.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    The word privacy wasn’t mentioned once in the post I was responding to. Human rights was. But privacy wasn’t. I do believe in privacy has a human right.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ihuman 5y ago
Not all VPNs need an app (Settings --> General --> VPN), and you can also use proxies without an app.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksec 5y ago

>Apple collected perhaps $15bn in App Store commissions last year (and, incidentally, close to $10bn from Google for making the default search provider in Safari). 90% of that was games, I think the figure depends on estimate, some point it at closer to 80%. But either way it is the vast majority of their profit. And I think Apple should break the App Store into App And Game Store. The Games continue to charge a 30%, all integrated model. Along with much more curation. No more one min of game play and one minutes of ads. Then Apple can spend time to think about the rest. The App Store and how to move forward. Simply by doing so Apple would have protected 80-90% of their current App Store revenue. App Store could also have a App Credit Model, where every new "App" would have 90 days payment terms. So any time a scam do go through App Store Apple could refund at least 90 days of credit. Any high refund rate of an App should also trigger alarm for additional review. Basically returning to the original point of the App Store which is to help its Customers, and your business partners. Right now it is not doing that. It is only helping Apple's services revenue.