9 ms·

Is it really nuts though? This should be a completely unsurprising move, given this is exactly what Play Store did in South Korea [0]. That's three months old,

by jsnell 5y ago

Is it really nuts though? This should be a completely unsurprising move, given this is exactly what Play Store did in South Korea [0]. That's three months old, has anyone heard of a followup suggesting their solution is being treated non-compliant by the regulators? This solution also seems to be in line with what the US courts found in the Epic vs. Apple case. > Imagine if in the past Apple would have had to pay 30% of their gross to Microsoft in order to be allowed to run their software on Windows. Anyone making software for the Xbox has to pay Microsoft. Why is this different? [0] https://developers-kr.googleblog.com/2021/11/enabling-alternative-billing-in-korea-en.html https://developers-kr.googleblog.com/2021/11/enabling-altern... Edit: Good grief, people. I am not pro-App Store. But jacquesm is literally claiming that Apple is nuts and that their solution will never fly. But everything we've seen so far in analogous cases suggests it will.

clusterfish 5y ago
Why? Because how much you have to pay is determined by how much the platform owner can get away with. There is no fundamental logic to it other than market power. Why don't you compare to better, open platforms instead - desktop apps, the web. Why does everything has to be as shitty as something else.
- jsnell 5y ago
  I'm not comparing to those other cases because the question being asked was "what if Microsoft had been charging a fee", so it seems rather relevant that Microsoft has been charging exactly that kind of a fee for a couple of decades. I hope we can agree that laws need to apply to everyone equally. For a long time, it's been fine for platform owners to charge e.g. licensing fees, for store owners to charge a fee, etc. Why is Apple different, such that they cannot charge such a fee while others can? If they're not substantially different, do we expect that going forward nobody can charge a fee?
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    > I'm not comparing to those other cases because the question being asked was The question being asked was specifically about windows, and wasn't about Microsoft being "good", but rather about how Apple benefited from platforms being open. > If they're not substantially different, do we expect that going forward nobody can charge a fee? That seems reasonable.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    > Why is Apple different, such that they cannot charge such a fee while others can? The difference is market power. Yes, literally if a company is big enough, then they should be legally prevented from doing certain things that anti-competitively take advantage of it's market power. For video game consoles, I am less concerned about the platform taking a fee, because there are 3 major consoles, as well as an absolutely huge PC gaming market, and the PC gaming market is very open Where as for smartphones I am concerned, because it is a 2 company duopoly, and there is no major open competitor, with significant market share.
withinboredom 5y ago
Just out of curiousness, does the Xbox have a shell like my iPhone? Can I ssh from my Xbox? I can from my iPhone, for all intents it seems like a personal computer (PC) and can do anything my computer can do. My phone wasn’t marketed as a gaming console either. I’m not sure comparing an Xbox and a phone is anywhere near the same thing. I could be wrong though.
- jsnell 5y ago
  The Xbox certainly has sufficient hardware and software capabilities to run a shell or a ssh client; it is basically PC hardware and a PC operating system, just locked down. If it doesn't have a ssh client, it's only because Microsoft didn't let the app onto the Xbox store. If that's the line you draw, then the obvious thing for Apple to do is to remove ssh clients from the store.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    Heh, that’d actually be entertaining. After that it would be image editing, then text editors, then, actually just delete the utilities section from the App Store…
    - tehbeard 5y ago
      The previous gen had a developer mode which practically let you run Windows apps... All for a one time fee of $20? Of course this was within their hypervisor and security systems, so you were kept well away from the games/dashboard/Xbox live. But, homebrew and emulators could run pretty well on there, an SSH client or vscode probably would just take a small amount of porting.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    It has Edge on it so if you can do a browser version you can do whatever. If you plug in a keyboard and mouse you can gamedev on our platform for example.
  - nomel 5y ago
    Imagine how well the xbox would sell if there was a PC "homework" mode, where you could just boot into windows. I doubt Microsoft would do that to their PC making brethren though.
schmorptron 5y ago
Consoles are a super interesting comparison. In principle, I agree that they should have to be open too. On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties, while Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone.
- dustinmoris 5y ago
  > On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties Legally that has no bearing on the matter though.
- 30204604 5y ago
  >Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone. Do you suppose that means Nintendo, which has sometimes turned a profit on their consoles, should have an open system? Interesting take, and I wonder what, in your mind, the threshold is for "makes a lot of profit." I.e., if Apple cut the price of their devices to make as much profit as Nintendo, would they get a pass?
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    To be honest, I haven't thought about that much, and don't have the mental capacity right now to really think about the answer. It's a good point. On the spot though I'd say that that would make Nintendo the ones that should open up their system in my mind though, provided they are making a sizeable (10% including stuff like R&D over the span of a few years) profit.
- vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
  It would be interesting to see the reaction if consoles had to be open to other store (my opinion is that they shouldn't since their are not general purpose devices per se). When the Epic Game Store appeared, the pc gaming community was up in arms against it because it was a Steam rival (sort of a tribal reaction) but were complaining against the NVIDEA GPU monopoly
  - 5y ago
theli0nheart 5y ago
> Anyone making software for the Xbox has to pay Microsoft. Why is this different? It's different because Apple sells and markets their hardware as general-purpose computing devices. An Xbox is a gaming console and that's what it's sold and marketed as.
- SllX 5y ago
  To my continued disappointment, this is exactly how they have not marketed iPhones since the beginning.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    "A general purpose computer is a computer that is designed to be able to carry out many different tasks." "There's an app for that" Seems pretty straightforward that they did. Them doing their best to lock down the ecosystem for profit does not make the device non-general-purpose.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      There is literally no legal distinction whatsoever between general-purpose devices and non-general-purpose devices. I don't know where this legal myth on HN came from, but there's no law anywhere saying Apple has to be one or the other, or that marketing has anything to do with what a device should be allowed or not allowed to do, nor does the law define these terms anywhere.
      - clusterfish 5y ago
        Nobody's saying that this has anything to do with legality under current laws. Neither does whataboutism that this is usually in response to, for the record.
    - SllX 5y ago
      The part of the “general purpose computer” that Apple does not display in its iPhone marketing is the “computer” part including the original “there’s an app for that” commercial. Arguably also the “general purpose” part in that a general purpose computer will run any calculable task, and App Store + OS policies prevent this or at least make it difficult and the messaging around this also comes out of their crack marketing team. Feet to the fire, Apple would probably call iPhones pachinko machines before they ever called them general purpose computers in any part of their marketing.
Tijdreiziger 5y ago
> That's three months old, has anyone heard of a followup suggesting their solution is being treated non-compliant by the regulators? Yes, reported on yesterday by Reuters [1]: > As for Google's plan, the official said the KCC was aware of concern over Google's planned policy of only reducing its service charge to developers by 4 percentage points when users choose an alternative billing system, and the regulator is waiting for additional information from Google. > "As a result of any policy, if app developers find it realistically difficult to use an alternative payment system and resort to using the dominant app store operator's payment system, it would not fit the law's purpose," the official said, adding that this stance would likely be reflected in the final ordinance. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-seeks-improved-compliance-plans-apple-google-app-store-law-2022-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-seeks-improved-com...
- jsnell 5y ago
  Thanks! That was great timing.
amelius 5y ago
> Is it really nuts though? I don't know. But I do know it is nuts that we programmers still support these extortionists.
blinding-streak 5y ago
I'm not sure that Google Korea blog post supports your assertion. It says: "97% of developers don’t sell digital content and are not subject to any service fee for having their apps displayed in the Play Store or for any of the services listed" And it mostly talks about fees going down.
PretzelPirate 5y ago
I think that the Xbox should be an open platform. Microsoft has built in enough sandboxing and security that I’d hope they could handle arbitrary downloads while offering their store + online services for games that use their store (provide actual value for their cut). It’s not like they make money off of the hardware, and their new push is in Gamepass subscriptions which people will still want. There will of course be people who pirate, just like they do on the switch, but piracy is likely to be so small that it won’t affect Microsoft’s profits.
- kmlx 5y ago
  > It’s not like they make money off of the hardware microsoft hasn’t made any money off of the whole xbox ecosystem since it’s inception 20 years ago. it’s been loss making since day zero.
  - vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
    Quotations needed please. You are not 20 years in an industry without making a buck
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      They make it up on software royalties
- threeseed 5y ago
  > but piracy is likely to be so small Odd take given how rampant piracy is within the PC gaming market. Losing a similar percentage of sales in consoles would absolutely make it unprofitable for smaller developers.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    Right because you have data to show that piracy takes away more than 30% of small devs' desktop games' revenue? Given that most pirates wouldn't actually buy it if they had to pay? Smaller developers publish PC games just fine, you know, choosing whichever store they like most, or choosing to entirely self publish. This is how it should be everywhere.
elliekelly 5y ago
Doesn’t Google allow alternative app stores to be loaded onto Androids though? If that’s the case I’m not sure the comparison makes sense because consumers aren’t forced to use the Play Store to install software. Give Google 30% of sales or have no sales at all the way it is for iPhone developers.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Yes, but side-loading, either directly or through third-party stores, prompts the user with dire warnings, making it almost impossible for developers to realistically use that method. The exceptions are hardware manufacturers that ship custom versions of Android that have their own stores. If it weren't for that detail, or that Google warned all installs about the same thing (even from their own store), I wouldn't have a problem with it.
  - warkdarrior 5y ago
    Alternate app stores, like F-Droid, trigger no "dire warnings" when used.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Anyone making software for the Xbox has to pay Microsoft. Why is this different? Historically, writing software for the Xbox meant getting dev kits not sold to the public as well as access to private documentation. And there was a level of support from Microsoft game studios could expect. The deals between studios and Microsoft could also include co-marketing or exclusivity. Plus to get an Xbox tittle out you needed a distributor (remember brick and mortar stores) so it really was B2B. Today I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft just going with the Store model and taking a very small cut from indies. But distribution is nowhere as hard and expensive as it was back in 2001. I really don’t think it’s the same as Apple that advertise it’s developer program to individuals. Apple’s developer program almost seems like a consumer product (term and conditions are pretty much the same for every individual dev out there, it’s a flat fee).

by jsnell 5y ago

clusterfish 5y ago

Why? Because how much you have to pay is determined by how much the platform owner can get away with. There is no fundamental logic to it other than market power. Why don't you compare to better, open platforms instead - desktop apps, the web. Why does everything has to be as shitty as something else.

jsnell 5y ago
I'm not comparing to those other cases because the question being asked was "what if Microsoft had been charging a fee", so it seems rather relevant that Microsoft has been charging exactly that kind of a fee for a couple of decades. I hope we can agree that laws need to apply to everyone equally. For a long time, it's been fine for platform owners to charge e.g. licensing fees, for store owners to charge a fee, etc. Why is Apple different, such that they cannot charge such a fee while others can? If they're not substantially different, do we expect that going forward nobody can charge a fee?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > I'm not comparing to those other cases because the question being asked was The question being asked was specifically about windows, and wasn't about Microsoft being "good", but rather about how Apple benefited from platforms being open. > If they're not substantially different, do we expect that going forward nobody can charge a fee? That seems reasonable.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > Why is Apple different, such that they cannot charge such a fee while others can? The difference is market power. Yes, literally if a company is big enough, then they should be legally prevented from doing certain things that anti-competitively take advantage of it's market power. For video game consoles, I am less concerned about the platform taking a fee, because there are 3 major consoles, as well as an absolutely huge PC gaming market, and the PC gaming market is very open Where as for smartphones I am concerned, because it is a 2 company duopoly, and there is no major open competitor, with significant market share.

withinboredom 5y ago

Just out of curiousness, does the Xbox have a shell like my iPhone? Can I ssh from my Xbox? I can from my iPhone, for all intents it seems like a personal computer (PC) and can do anything my computer can do. My phone wasn’t marketed as a gaming console either. I’m not sure comparing an Xbox and a phone is anywhere near the same thing. I could be wrong though.

jsnell 5y ago
The Xbox certainly has sufficient hardware and software capabilities to run a shell or a ssh client; it is basically PC hardware and a PC operating system, just locked down. If it doesn't have a ssh client, it's only because Microsoft didn't let the app onto the Xbox store. If that's the line you draw, then the obvious thing for Apple to do is to remove ssh clients from the store.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Heh, that’d actually be entertaining. After that it would be image editing, then text editors, then, actually just delete the utilities section from the App Store…
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    The previous gen had a developer mode which practically let you run Windows apps... All for a one time fee of $20? Of course this was within their hypervisor and security systems, so you were kept well away from the games/dashboard/Xbox live. But, homebrew and emulators could run pretty well on there, an SSH client or vscode probably would just take a small amount of porting.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  It has Edge on it so if you can do a browser version you can do whatever. If you plug in a keyboard and mouse you can gamedev on our platform for example.
- nomel 5y ago
  Imagine how well the xbox would sell if there was a PC "homework" mode, where you could just boot into windows. I doubt Microsoft would do that to their PC making brethren though.

schmorptron 5y ago

Consoles are a super interesting comparison. In principle, I agree that they should have to be open too. On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties, while Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone.

dustinmoris 5y ago
> On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties Legally that has no bearing on the matter though.
30204604 5y ago
>Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone. Do you suppose that means Nintendo, which has sometimes turned a profit on their consoles, should have an open system? Interesting take, and I wonder what, in your mind, the threshold is for "makes a lot of profit." I.e., if Apple cut the price of their devices to make as much profit as Nintendo, would they get a pass?
- schmorptron 5y ago
  To be honest, I haven't thought about that much, and don't have the mental capacity right now to really think about the answer. It's a good point. On the spot though I'd say that that would make Nintendo the ones that should open up their system in my mind though, provided they are making a sizeable (10% including stuff like R&D over the span of a few years) profit.
vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
It would be interesting to see the reaction if consoles had to be open to other store (my opinion is that they shouldn't since their are not general purpose devices per se). When the Epic Game Store appeared, the pc gaming community was up in arms against it because it was a Steam rival (sort of a tribal reaction) but were complaining against the NVIDEA GPU monopoly
- 5y ago

theli0nheart 5y ago

> Anyone making software for the Xbox has to pay Microsoft. Why is this different? It's different because Apple sells and markets their hardware as general-purpose computing devices. An Xbox is a gaming console and that's what it's sold and marketed as.

SllX 5y ago
To my continued disappointment, this is exactly how they have not marketed iPhones since the beginning.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  "A general purpose computer is a computer that is designed to be able to carry out many different tasks." "There's an app for that" Seems pretty straightforward that they did. Them doing their best to lock down the ecosystem for profit does not make the device non-general-purpose.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    There is literally no legal distinction whatsoever between general-purpose devices and non-general-purpose devices. I don't know where this legal myth on HN came from, but there's no law anywhere saying Apple has to be one or the other, or that marketing has anything to do with what a device should be allowed or not allowed to do, nor does the law define these terms anywhere.
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      Nobody's saying that this has anything to do with legality under current laws. Neither does whataboutism that this is usually in response to, for the record.
  - SllX 5y ago
    The part of the “general purpose computer” that Apple does not display in its iPhone marketing is the “computer” part including the original “there’s an app for that” commercial. Arguably also the “general purpose” part in that a general purpose computer will run any calculable task, and App Store + OS policies prevent this or at least make it difficult and the messaging around this also comes out of their crack marketing team. Feet to the fire, Apple would probably call iPhones pachinko machines before they ever called them general purpose computers in any part of their marketing.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago

> That's three months old, has anyone heard of a followup suggesting their solution is being treated non-compliant by the regulators? Yes, reported on yesterday by Reuters [1]: > As for Google's plan, the official said the KCC was aware of concern over Google's planned policy of only reducing its service charge to developers by 4 percentage points when users choose an alternative billing system, and the regulator is waiting for additional information from Google. > "As a result of any policy, if app developers find it realistically difficult to use an alternative payment system and resort to using the dominant app store operator's payment system, it would not fit the law's purpose," the official said, adding that this stance would likely be reflected in the final ordinance. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-seeks-improved-compliance-plans-apple-google-app-store-law-2022-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-seeks-improved-com...

jsnell 5y ago
Thanks! That was great timing.

amelius 5y ago

> Is it really nuts though? I don't know. But I do know it is nuts that we programmers still support these extortionists.

blinding-streak 5y ago

I'm not sure that Google Korea blog post supports your assertion. It says: "97% of developers don’t sell digital content and are not subject to any service fee for having their apps displayed in the Play Store or for any of the services listed" And it mostly talks about fees going down.

PretzelPirate 5y ago

I think that the Xbox should be an open platform. Microsoft has built in enough sandboxing and security that I’d hope they could handle arbitrary downloads while offering their store + online services for games that use their store (provide actual value for their cut). It’s not like they make money off of the hardware, and their new push is in Gamepass subscriptions which people will still want. There will of course be people who pirate, just like they do on the switch, but piracy is likely to be so small that it won’t affect Microsoft’s profits.

kmlx 5y ago
> It’s not like they make money off of the hardware microsoft hasn’t made any money off of the whole xbox ecosystem since it’s inception 20 years ago. it’s been loss making since day zero.
- vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
  Quotations needed please. You are not 20 years in an industry without making a buck
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    They make it up on software royalties
threeseed 5y ago
> but piracy is likely to be so small Odd take given how rampant piracy is within the PC gaming market. Losing a similar percentage of sales in consoles would absolutely make it unprofitable for smaller developers.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Right because you have data to show that piracy takes away more than 30% of small devs' desktop games' revenue? Given that most pirates wouldn't actually buy it if they had to pay? Smaller developers publish PC games just fine, you know, choosing whichever store they like most, or choosing to entirely self publish. This is how it should be everywhere.

elliekelly 5y ago

Doesn’t Google allow alternative app stores to be loaded onto Androids though? If that’s the case I’m not sure the comparison makes sense because consumers aren’t forced to use the Play Store to install software. Give Google 30% of sales or have no sales at all the way it is for iPhone developers.

wccrawford 5y ago
Yes, but side-loading, either directly or through third-party stores, prompts the user with dire warnings, making it almost impossible for developers to realistically use that method. The exceptions are hardware manufacturers that ship custom versions of Android that have their own stores. If it weren't for that detail, or that Google warned all installs about the same thing (even from their own store), I wouldn't have a problem with it.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  Alternate app stores, like F-Droid, trigger no "dire warnings" when used.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Anyone making software for the Xbox has to pay Microsoft. Why is this different? Historically, writing software for the Xbox meant getting dev kits not sold to the public as well as access to private documentation. And there was a level of support from Microsoft game studios could expect. The deals between studios and Microsoft could also include co-marketing or exclusivity. Plus to get an Xbox tittle out you needed a distributor (remember brick and mortar stores) so it really was B2B. Today I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft just going with the Store model and taking a very small cut from indies. But distribution is nowhere as hard and expensive as it was back in 2001. I really don’t think it’s the same as Apple that advertise it’s developer program to individuals. Apple’s developer program almost seems like a consumer product (term and conditions are pretty much the same for every individual dev out there, it’s a flat fee).