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I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Consider competing app stores. Some of them would

I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Consider competing app stores. Some of them would be stricter than Apple and do a far better job of curation IMO. For example, apps that exist to trick children into in-app purchases could be forbidden. Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. I would gravitate to those stores and it’s where I’d send everyone I know. If others did the same, the “specialty” stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. Maybe the market would even shrink by eliminating the low quality participants. How do you run an app store filled with garbage if there’s suddenly competition? IMO, that’s what Apple and Google are scared of. They want to keep selling large volumes of junk and competition makes that harder.

LordDragonfang 3y ago
> Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. [...] [Those] stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. While I'd love to live in a universe where this could actually happen, in reality this is a pipe dream. The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Any app store that tried to have such principles would find that they get almost no devs willing to add their apps, and those that did would get barely any sales compared to their less scrupulous peers (rendering the store unable to stay solvent at worst, or having almost no effect on the wider market at best)
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose But that's the problem with a generalist store. They're leaving too much money on the table to exclude those things, so they include them, and then the store is full of crap and you can't trust anything. If anyone could start a store then you could have a store operated by a tiny startup with low overhead who only has to pay one or two salaries and can therefore be sustainable with only a tiny fraction of the market, because they have a niche. Which enables the quality store to exist, and serve all of the customers who prefer that.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    I feel like you're missing the point that the existence of such a niche store would have no effect on the "money left on the table" of the main app store. To affect the main store, they would have to a) Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this) b) Alternatively, they could release both the niche paid app and the free-main-store app, in which case consumers have little incentive to pick the pay-up-front one - so no change there. Sure, such a store could exist (and should), but it will be a blip on Apple's radar (and all the more reason they should just allow sideloading)
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this) You're assuming that all customers want the same thing. Right now if you want to make a paid non-freemium game, no one can find it because the freemium games will have more downloads and the main store sorts by popularity. The customers who want such games hate this too, but because the main store has no competitors, they're just as stuck with it. And since customers can't find them, developers don't make them. If you had a store that has only non-freemium games, the developer who makes one can go there and actually reach their customers, because being at the top of the list on a store with 1% of the market generates more sales than being on page 5000 of the main store's search results where even fewer people will see it. And then more of those games actually get made, which grows the market for the alternate store, which allows more of those games to get made. Meanwhile that store doesn't take a huge chunk out of the main store's market, but it takes a percent or three. Many other niche stores each take a little share. And then a big store that competes directly with the main store but only charges 3% instead of 30% takes the rest.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. No, it's because Apple threw the App Store together very quickly (after realizing that the "sweet solution" of web apps wasn't going to fly), and in order to accelerate this process they directly cloned the iTunes Music Store in almost every way. This turned out to be a complete disaster and resulted in a race to the bottom, because the music store was designed to sell 99 cent songs, not software that may have traditionally been $99, or at least $29. One of the best ways to get visibility is to be in the "top charts", which makes a kind of sense for music, because all singles and all albums are more or less the same price, but to get into the top charts for software you've got to optimize for volume rather than price. In so many ways, trying to sell apps like songs completely destroyed the software market. Indeed, it wasn't great for the music market either. Apple convinced the music publishers to unbundle albums and resulted in a race to the bottom there too. Musicians need the money from album sales; very few can "make it up in volume" with just hit singles. > Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Only because of the downward pressure from the mobile market.
- livueta 3y ago
  The existence of F-Droid demonstrates the existence both of devs willing to list apps in restrictive "stores" and of users who seek such software. Even assuming commercialized stores, that proposed race to the bottom dynamic doesn't hold up - Walmart is not the only retailer. People are happy to pay for quality and curation.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    I use F-Droid (mostly just for Termux) on Android. It's an entirely different thing than GP was proposing. It's a host for FOSS apps that don't expect to be paid for the delivery of their software. Its existence essentially zero effect on the existence of freemium/SaaS apps the play store, which is kind of evidence for my point.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
They're afraid of competition in general, because competition benefits customers. You could find stricter or more specialized stores where you can trust everything in them more than you can from a general purpose store. You could find stores that allow apps you may want that Apple prohibits even though they're not malicious, like BitTorrent or third party browser engines or adult content. The competition would reduce their margins; 30% is absurd and only exists because it's a monopoly rent. Everything about it benefits you, which is why there are supposed to be laws constraining them from removing your ability to choose.
lapcat 3y ago
> I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Yes! I've been arguing for a long time that the crApp Store is actually a honeypot for criminals. It's a single point of failure, and Apple's reviewers can only spend a few minutes on each submission. Before the crApp Store, indie devs already set up their own web stores, did their own marketing, etc. Apple has now made it trivial for anyone to publish an app, and that includes criminals! Criminals don't want to make an effort like serious indie devs do. They don't want to bide their time and build up a loyal audience. Criminals just want the quick easy scam money. Not to mention that it's vastly easier and less expensive to game crApp Store search—and also to buy crApp Store Search Ads!—than it is to game Google search. The worst part of the crApp Store is that Apple tells consumers, falsely, that the crApp Store is safe. It lowers their guard when they should be suspicious and careful. And of course crApp Store crowdsourced ratings and reviews can't be trusted at all. They're easily faked and/or purchased. Even when ratings and reviews are real, they're often ignorant and badly written, not done by professional reviewers. (As a developer myself, it drives me nuts that reviewers never contact support before writing, and they also put feature requests and bug reports in there instead of writing an actual review of the app.)

LordDragonfang 3y ago

> Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. [...] [Those] stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. While I'd love to live in a universe where this could actually happen, in reality this is a pipe dream. The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Any app store that tried to have such principles would find that they get almost no devs willing to add their apps, and those that did would get barely any sales compared to their less scrupulous peers (rendering the store unable to stay solvent at worst, or having almost no effect on the wider market at best)

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose But that's the problem with a generalist store. They're leaving too much money on the table to exclude those things, so they include them, and then the store is full of crap and you can't trust anything. If anyone could start a store then you could have a store operated by a tiny startup with low overhead who only has to pay one or two salaries and can therefore be sustainable with only a tiny fraction of the market, because they have a niche. Which enables the quality store to exist, and serve all of the customers who prefer that.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  I feel like you're missing the point that the existence of such a niche store would have no effect on the "money left on the table" of the main app store. To affect the main store, they would have to a) Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this) b) Alternatively, they could release both the niche paid app and the free-main-store app, in which case consumers have little incentive to pick the pay-up-front one - so no change there. Sure, such a store could exist (and should), but it will be a blip on Apple's radar (and all the more reason they should just allow sideloading)
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this) You're assuming that all customers want the same thing. Right now if you want to make a paid non-freemium game, no one can find it because the freemium games will have more downloads and the main store sorts by popularity. The customers who want such games hate this too, but because the main store has no competitors, they're just as stuck with it. And since customers can't find them, developers don't make them. If you had a store that has only non-freemium games, the developer who makes one can go there and actually reach their customers, because being at the top of the list on a store with 1% of the market generates more sales than being on page 5000 of the main store's search results where even fewer people will see it. And then more of those games actually get made, which grows the market for the alternate store, which allows more of those games to get made. Meanwhile that store doesn't take a huge chunk out of the main store's market, but it takes a percent or three. Many other niche stores each take a little share. And then a big store that competes directly with the main store but only charges 3% instead of 30% takes the rest.
lapcat 3y ago
> The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. No, it's because Apple threw the App Store together very quickly (after realizing that the "sweet solution" of web apps wasn't going to fly), and in order to accelerate this process they directly cloned the iTunes Music Store in almost every way. This turned out to be a complete disaster and resulted in a race to the bottom, because the music store was designed to sell 99 cent songs, not software that may have traditionally been $99, or at least $29. One of the best ways to get visibility is to be in the "top charts", which makes a kind of sense for music, because all singles and all albums are more or less the same price, but to get into the top charts for software you've got to optimize for volume rather than price. In so many ways, trying to sell apps like songs completely destroyed the software market. Indeed, it wasn't great for the music market either. Apple convinced the music publishers to unbundle albums and resulted in a race to the bottom there too. Musicians need the money from album sales; very few can "make it up in volume" with just hit singles. > Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Only because of the downward pressure from the mobile market.
livueta 3y ago
The existence of F-Droid demonstrates the existence both of devs willing to list apps in restrictive "stores" and of users who seek such software. Even assuming commercialized stores, that proposed race to the bottom dynamic doesn't hold up - Walmart is not the only retailer. People are happy to pay for quality and curation.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  I use F-Droid (mostly just for Termux) on Android. It's an entirely different thing than GP was proposing. It's a host for FOSS apps that don't expect to be paid for the delivery of their software. Its existence essentially zero effect on the existence of freemium/SaaS apps the play store, which is kind of evidence for my point.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

They're afraid of competition in general, because competition benefits customers. You could find stricter or more specialized stores where you can trust everything in them more than you can from a general purpose store. You could find stores that allow apps you may want that Apple prohibits even though they're not malicious, like BitTorrent or third party browser engines or adult content. The competition would reduce their margins; 30% is absurd and only exists because it's a monopoly rent. Everything about it benefits you, which is why there are supposed to be laws constraining them from removing your ability to choose.

lapcat 3y ago

> I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Yes! I've been arguing for a long time that the crApp Store is actually a honeypot for criminals. It's a single point of failure, and Apple's reviewers can only spend a few minutes on each submission. Before the crApp Store, indie devs already set up their own web stores, did their own marketing, etc. Apple has now made it trivial for anyone to publish an app, and that includes criminals! Criminals don't want to make an effort like serious indie devs do. They don't want to bide their time and build up a loyal audience. Criminals just want the quick easy scam money. Not to mention that it's vastly easier and less expensive to game crApp Store search—and also to buy crApp Store Search Ads!—than it is to game Google search. The worst part of the crApp Store is that Apple tells consumers, falsely, that the crApp Store is safe. It lowers their guard when they should be suspicious and careful. And of course crApp Store crowdsourced ratings and reviews can't be trusted at all. They're easily faked and/or purchased. Even when ratings and reviews are real, they're often ignorant and badly written, not done by professional reviewers. (As a developer myself, it drives me nuts that reviewers never contact support before writing, and they also put feature requests and bug reports in there instead of writing an actual review of the app.)