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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoYes, if your using it as a caching layer, that's correct.
- Lazare 5y agoI 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 agoA 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...