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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

by 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.

by ajkjk 5y ago

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.