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The only aspect of the Apple App Store that strikes me as truly anticompetitive is their prohibition on adjusting prices to include Apple’s fees, or even to tel

The only aspect of the Apple App Store that strikes me as truly anticompetitive is their prohibition on adjusting prices to include Apple’s fees, or even to tell the user what they are. I can accept that Apple can demand a 30% fee for billing customers on their devices. And I can accept that they would prohibit installation/sales of software any other way. But I should be allowed to mark up the price by 30% and then call it out as a line item. The fact that Apple can control what prices I set on other platforms and prohibit me from disclosing what’s happening to my users... That is the part of this that strikes me as dystopian, and that’s the area where I think antitrust and free speech laws perhaps ought to step in.

ajkjk 5y ago
Dystopian is the word for it. It's fucking insane that you can't talk about why it's priced that way. Of course, if you include the fee explicitly then people will think to look elsewhere and realize they can avoid it. But that's fine, taking a cut is stupid anyway. Really just seems like the app should be paying more to Apple (like a physical store paying rent on real estate) up front and getting the full price of their purchases anyway.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Really can't agree more. It's clear that the App Store offers significant value for many vendors, and charging for it is fine. Epic apparently generates $500m of revenue per year from the iPhone, and they're doing so using platforms, tools, and APIs that Apple built to help developers do that. It's reasonable that Apple would get a slice of that. The company I work for makes, well, a lot less revenue that Epic, but a decent chunk of the revenue we do make goes to AWS and Stripe, as compensation for their help in letting us earn that revenue. What's not great is the specific way Apple has chosen to get this cut. AWS and Stripe both run, more-or-less, on a cost-plus model; they package up a service, and resell it to us at a markup (in the case of AWS bandwidth, a very, very, fat markup), and they let us decide how much of that service to consume, and how we want to balance our purchases between them and competing vendors. Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs.
  - eloff 5y ago
    > Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs. Is that a good example? I think that's how it works. Egress out to cloudflare is billed at the full rate last I checked. GCP gives you a discount, but not AWS.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I assume the situation here was using Cloudflare in front of your AWS so it doesn’t get hit as much, so your costs stay low. Of course AWS↔Cloudflare is going to cost money, but ideally they will be doing caching for you do the traffic on this is less.
      - eloff 5y ago
        Yes, if your using it as a caching layer, that's correct.
    - Lazare 5y ago
      I meant using it as a cacheing layer, yes. Perhaps not the best example, but still! AWS doesn't care if you try and offload some processing to cheap Hetzner servers; Stripe doesn't care if you offer Paypal as a second option. Apple very much cares about anything you do which might reduce the amount of money routed through the app store.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    A lot of the design elements that are part of modern iOS, macOS design were first created by third party developers for free. Simple example is the sidebar [1] Before it became the commonly used it is not in early OSX i twas third party libraries that would allow you do use these views. A lot of what is now macOS HIG was first made popular by third party developers (for free) then integrated into the OS X and then third party developers would migrate to the officially supported version. To pretend Apple created all of this in a vaccum is a convenient lie people tell themselves. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/sidebars/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- sircastor 5y ago
  No. This is not dystopian. That is over-dramatic. We’re not talking about the loss of meaningful society. And iOS and Apple are not the whole of society. This is capitalism, plain and simple. Market position creates behavior, the market attempts to route around.
  - ksec 5y ago
    > And iOS and Apple are not the whole of society. I dont think it is over-dramatic. It is little exaggerated to make the point, but not over-dramatic for sure. The Smartphone impact to our society will be if not already unprecedented. We will ( unfortunately ) "live" on our Smartphone. For those who have been looking forward to Smartphone since ( Apple ) Newton era, which is now coming close to 30 years, this has been long time coming. But now we are actually here, it is kind of scary the direction we are heading.
  - notSupplied 5y ago
    More economic activity is shifting from meat space and onto our phones over time. Apple’s idea that they deserve a 30% cut of “economic activity that happens on an iDevice” will appear ever more expansive. During the pandemic, when fitness classes shifted to virtual video sessions, Apple demanded a 30% cut because what was once an offline “delivery of the goods” became online and iPhone -facilitated. What’s so dystopian about this example is that a virtual gym session is not too different from any kind of remote work. Under the “value is delivered over an iDevice” philosophy, Apple’s tax can take a bite from nearly any plate in the economy.
- charwalker 5y ago
  Yeah, the current model is basically sharecropping with all the possible methods of abusing the farmers leveraged in favor of Apple as if they were Monsanto. I love being able to side load classic Android apps and I've only had one recently stop working entirely, Google Tracks.
mjthompson 5y ago
Apple's use of its own market power on its store to regulate conduct on other markets is deeply concerning. Another example is Apple ID. If I use Google or Facebook SSO in my app, I have to offer Apple SSO alongside it. That is okay. However Apple will refuse the app into the App Store if I don't also offer Apple ID login on desktop and Android platforms. Apple should keep its nose in its own business.
- cma 5y ago
  Apple also tried to delete all of Epic's Apple ID users, with no way for Epic to contact them, affecting users on non-Apple platforms who just happened to sign up with Apple ID. They ended up backing down to avoid judicial scrutiny, but now everyone knows the threat. If Apple comes out of the antitrust stuff on top, they can push ahead with this later to see how far they can take it.
- conk 5y ago
  If a user chooses to sign up using Apple’s SSO, how are they supposed to also use your desktop or other apps if those don’t also support Apple SSO?
  - mjthompson 5y ago
    That is not a matter of concern of Apple. This is just one of several examples of Apple forcing behaviour changes outside its own walled garden. Whether or not it makes business sense to restrict the use of Apple ID elsewhere is a matter properly left to the app developer and not Apple. I should have added - this is based on my own interpretation of the App Store guidelines. If I'm wrong, I'd like someone to point it out, since I don't want to be spreading misinformation.
mcphage 5y ago
> their prohibition on adjusting prices to include Apple’s fees I believe that credit card processors include this policy as well. Otherwise, I’m sure a lot more places would offer a discount if you pay by cash.
- _delirium 5y ago
  That was historically the case, but allowing merchants to offer cash discounts is protected under U.S. federal law since 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment. Around me, only gas stations and liquor stores seem to commonly offer such discounts though. What's less settled is whether businesses can charge credit-card customers a CC surcharge to pass on the fees. Economic theory would consider this functionally the same as offering a cash discount, but it differs in calling out the CC fee as a line item charge. Some state laws prohibit that, and they've been tied up in litigation, e.g. this mostly inconclusive 2017 Supreme Court ruling that kicked the question back down to lower courts: https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/03/opinion-analysis-justices-offer-minimalist-decision-new-york-credit-card-surcharge-statute/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/03/opinion-analysis-justices...
  - fpoling 5y ago
    The credit card companies still demand that it should be called cache discount and not credit card surcharge. Various marketing studies show that the term surcharge leaves bad impression supposedly due to priming effect.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I think Apple really considers this a store. If we compare to Walmart, I’d say 2 out of 3 are obviously the way it works. When selling in Walmart, they won’t let you advertise that you can buy the same product cheaper elsewhere. They also want their distribution deal with you a secret. You don’t go post your terms of engagement with Walmart on your corporate blog if you expect to keep selling stuff in Walmart. The pricing is where things start to change and I think I agree with you that it’s a step too far.
- ksec 5y ago
  This Walmart store analogy often over simplifies the problem that is not accurate in the grand scheme of things. Everything about the Walmart as a "store" in the above are correct. Except iOS is also a "State", and this State only accept one "store". While in the Walmart example, which is a real world example, one could always expect you to open a Store next to Walmart selling exactly the same thing with a lower price. The Store, The State ( Platform ) , Judiciary ( App Store Rules ) are all interlinked together. You cant compare one thing without mentioning the other. And that is not even including the payment processing.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    Perhaps it’s more like Costco’s decade(s) of “you can only pay with Amex”. Visa card holders could not shop there. You want to use a Visa, you find a Sam’s Club. Don’t like state of iOS, travel to territory of Android.
    - ksec 5y ago
      Well that would be payment processing with Amex. You are still allowed to go to Sam's Club next door, or Sam's Club ( Store ) opening one close to Costco. >Don’t like state of iOS, travel to territory of Android. Except the "State" of iOS currently holds close to 70% of Smartphone user in US with close to 80% of the spending. You are basically telling business to either comply with the "State" or go else where. Which is why something "above" the state has to come in. I am not arguing for or against opening or side loading App Store. But there are no competition on each of those different levels. Which Apple likes to lump it all together as one thing. And this idea shouldn't be hard to grasp.
prepend 5y ago
I actually like this as consumers don’t care about price breakdowns. One of the biggest annoyances with consumer prices in the US is the separate price for taxes. Many countries require net prices advertised and it’s so much simpler, both for ease of mind and for lower prices. Having $10 advertised and then 10% taxes layers on, and convenience fees, and service fees, etc sucks. I’d rather have $12 advertised and not care about all the stuff that goes into it.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  It's not about having to pay it separately, but having it as a separate item on receipt. Here, all prices are advertised after tax, but the receipt lists tax percent for each item, and amount. A B C next to items denote tax percent, then below you have value of items with tax group "Sprzed. opod. PTU A", tax amount "Kwota A 23%", and sum of all taxes "Podatek PTU". https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EFFuzBF17reBWZvxpeGeDh0yPL9wtdaS.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EFFuzBF17reBWZvxpe...
  - prepend 5y ago
    I don’t mind this method. In the US, typically the advertised price is base and then extras are added on afterwards. In my order of preference I like: - your way -Apple’s way (although seems to be the way other app stores do it too) -current US way

ajkjk 5y ago

Dystopian is the word for it. It's fucking insane that you can't talk about why it's priced that way. Of course, if you include the fee explicitly then people will think to look elsewhere and realize they can avoid it. But that's fine, taking a cut is stupid anyway. Really just seems like the app should be paying more to Apple (like a physical store paying rent on real estate) up front and getting the full price of their purchases anyway.

Lazare 5y ago
Really can't agree more. It's clear that the App Store offers significant value for many vendors, and charging for it is fine. Epic apparently generates $500m of revenue per year from the iPhone, and they're doing so using platforms, tools, and APIs that Apple built to help developers do that. It's reasonable that Apple would get a slice of that. The company I work for makes, well, a lot less revenue that Epic, but a decent chunk of the revenue we do make goes to AWS and Stripe, as compensation for their help in letting us earn that revenue. What's not great is the specific way Apple has chosen to get this cut. AWS and Stripe both run, more-or-less, on a cost-plus model; they package up a service, and resell it to us at a markup (in the case of AWS bandwidth, a very, very, fat markup), and they let us decide how much of that service to consume, and how we want to balance our purchases between them and competing vendors. Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs.
- eloff 5y ago
  > Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs. Is that a good example? I think that's how it works. Egress out to cloudflare is billed at the full rate last I checked. GCP gives you a discount, but not AWS.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    I assume the situation here was using Cloudflare in front of your AWS so it doesn’t get hit as much, so your costs stay low. Of course AWS↔Cloudflare is going to cost money, but ideally they will be doing caching for you do the traffic on this is less.
    - eloff 5y ago
      Yes, if your using it as a caching layer, that's correct.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    I meant using it as a cacheing layer, yes. Perhaps not the best example, but still! AWS doesn't care if you try and offload some processing to cheap Hetzner servers; Stripe doesn't care if you offer Paypal as a second option. Apple very much cares about anything you do which might reduce the amount of money routed through the app store.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  A lot of the design elements that are part of modern iOS, macOS design were first created by third party developers for free. Simple example is the sidebar [1] Before it became the commonly used it is not in early OSX i twas third party libraries that would allow you do use these views. A lot of what is now macOS HIG was first made popular by third party developers (for free) then integrated into the OS X and then third party developers would migrate to the officially supported version. To pretend Apple created all of this in a vaccum is a convenient lie people tell themselves. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/sidebars/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
sircastor 5y ago
No. This is not dystopian. That is over-dramatic. We’re not talking about the loss of meaningful society. And iOS and Apple are not the whole of society. This is capitalism, plain and simple. Market position creates behavior, the market attempts to route around.
- ksec 5y ago
  > And iOS and Apple are not the whole of society. I dont think it is over-dramatic. It is little exaggerated to make the point, but not over-dramatic for sure. The Smartphone impact to our society will be if not already unprecedented. We will ( unfortunately ) "live" on our Smartphone. For those who have been looking forward to Smartphone since ( Apple ) Newton era, which is now coming close to 30 years, this has been long time coming. But now we are actually here, it is kind of scary the direction we are heading.
- notSupplied 5y ago
  More economic activity is shifting from meat space and onto our phones over time. Apple’s idea that they deserve a 30% cut of “economic activity that happens on an iDevice” will appear ever more expansive. During the pandemic, when fitness classes shifted to virtual video sessions, Apple demanded a 30% cut because what was once an offline “delivery of the goods” became online and iPhone -facilitated. What’s so dystopian about this example is that a virtual gym session is not too different from any kind of remote work. Under the “value is delivered over an iDevice” philosophy, Apple’s tax can take a bite from nearly any plate in the economy.
charwalker 5y ago
Yeah, the current model is basically sharecropping with all the possible methods of abusing the farmers leveraged in favor of Apple as if they were Monsanto. I love being able to side load classic Android apps and I've only had one recently stop working entirely, Google Tracks.

mjthompson 5y ago

Apple's use of its own market power on its store to regulate conduct on other markets is deeply concerning. Another example is Apple ID. If I use Google or Facebook SSO in my app, I have to offer Apple SSO alongside it. That is okay. However Apple will refuse the app into the App Store if I don't also offer Apple ID login on desktop and Android platforms. Apple should keep its nose in its own business.

cma 5y ago
Apple also tried to delete all of Epic's Apple ID users, with no way for Epic to contact them, affecting users on non-Apple platforms who just happened to sign up with Apple ID. They ended up backing down to avoid judicial scrutiny, but now everyone knows the threat. If Apple comes out of the antitrust stuff on top, they can push ahead with this later to see how far they can take it.
conk 5y ago
If a user chooses to sign up using Apple’s SSO, how are they supposed to also use your desktop or other apps if those don’t also support Apple SSO?
- mjthompson 5y ago
  That is not a matter of concern of Apple. This is just one of several examples of Apple forcing behaviour changes outside its own walled garden. Whether or not it makes business sense to restrict the use of Apple ID elsewhere is a matter properly left to the app developer and not Apple. I should have added - this is based on my own interpretation of the App Store guidelines. If I'm wrong, I'd like someone to point it out, since I don't want to be spreading misinformation.

mcphage 5y ago

> their prohibition on adjusting prices to include Apple’s fees I believe that credit card processors include this policy as well. Otherwise, I’m sure a lot more places would offer a discount if you pay by cash.

_delirium 5y ago
That was historically the case, but allowing merchants to offer cash discounts is protected under U.S. federal law since 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment. Around me, only gas stations and liquor stores seem to commonly offer such discounts though. What's less settled is whether businesses can charge credit-card customers a CC surcharge to pass on the fees. Economic theory would consider this functionally the same as offering a cash discount, but it differs in calling out the CC fee as a line item charge. Some state laws prohibit that, and they've been tied up in litigation, e.g. this mostly inconclusive 2017 Supreme Court ruling that kicked the question back down to lower courts: https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/03/opinion-analysis-justices-offer-minimalist-decision-new-york-credit-card-surcharge-statute/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/03/opinion-analysis-justices...
- fpoling 5y ago
  The credit card companies still demand that it should be called cache discount and not credit card surcharge. Various marketing studies show that the term surcharge leaves bad impression supposedly due to priming effect.

wodenokoto 5y ago

I think Apple really considers this a store. If we compare to Walmart, I’d say 2 out of 3 are obviously the way it works. When selling in Walmart, they won’t let you advertise that you can buy the same product cheaper elsewhere. They also want their distribution deal with you a secret. You don’t go post your terms of engagement with Walmart on your corporate blog if you expect to keep selling stuff in Walmart. The pricing is where things start to change and I think I agree with you that it’s a step too far.

ksec 5y ago
This Walmart store analogy often over simplifies the problem that is not accurate in the grand scheme of things. Everything about the Walmart as a "store" in the above are correct. Except iOS is also a "State", and this State only accept one "store". While in the Walmart example, which is a real world example, one could always expect you to open a Store next to Walmart selling exactly the same thing with a lower price. The Store, The State ( Platform ) , Judiciary ( App Store Rules ) are all interlinked together. You cant compare one thing without mentioning the other. And that is not even including the payment processing.
- Terretta 5y ago
  Perhaps it’s more like Costco’s decade(s) of “you can only pay with Amex”. Visa card holders could not shop there. You want to use a Visa, you find a Sam’s Club. Don’t like state of iOS, travel to territory of Android.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Well that would be payment processing with Amex. You are still allowed to go to Sam's Club next door, or Sam's Club ( Store ) opening one close to Costco. >Don’t like state of iOS, travel to territory of Android. Except the "State" of iOS currently holds close to 70% of Smartphone user in US with close to 80% of the spending. You are basically telling business to either comply with the "State" or go else where. Which is why something "above" the state has to come in. I am not arguing for or against opening or side loading App Store. But there are no competition on each of those different levels. Which Apple likes to lump it all together as one thing. And this idea shouldn't be hard to grasp.

prepend 5y ago

I actually like this as consumers don’t care about price breakdowns. One of the biggest annoyances with consumer prices in the US is the separate price for taxes. Many countries require net prices advertised and it’s so much simpler, both for ease of mind and for lower prices. Having $10 advertised and then 10% taxes layers on, and convenience fees, and service fees, etc sucks. I’d rather have $12 advertised and not care about all the stuff that goes into it.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
It's not about having to pay it separately, but having it as a separate item on receipt. Here, all prices are advertised after tax, but the receipt lists tax percent for each item, and amount. A B C next to items denote tax percent, then below you have value of items with tax group "Sprzed. opod. PTU A", tax amount "Kwota A 23%", and sum of all taxes "Podatek PTU". https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EFFuzBF17reBWZvxpeGeDh0yPL9wtdaS.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EFFuzBF17reBWZvxpe...
- prepend 5y ago
  I don’t mind this method. In the US, typically the advertised price is base and then extras are added on afterwards. In my order of preference I like: - your way -Apple’s way (although seems to be the way other app stores do it too) -current US way