17 ms·

I also think apple's 30% cut is excessive, but I don't think this line of argument helps. We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's makin

by remus 3y ago

I also think apple's 30% cut is excessive, but I don't think this line of argument helps. We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have.

pompino 3y ago
> We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have. Its not based on how much money they have. Its how they've managed to accumulate the money - by gouging devs.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pompino 3y ago
    >Why do you get to run a business off it for free? There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights. >They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. At least see it and acknowledge it. I don't feel like paying for an Apple executives BMW car payment. But you do you.
    - Ma8ee 3y ago
      > There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights. Not in America. The only venue to change you have is to spend, or not spend money somewhere. Since people think they profit more from developing apps for iOS than not developing apps for iOS, Apple’s profit is “right”. And a century or so of indoctrination has made most Americans believe that this is just the natural order of things.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      This isn't about rights. You already have all the rights you need here. You would like others to work for nothing, or for what you care to give them, instead of the price they offer their services at, and you'd like to vote, fight and protest until they work for your price.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > You would like others to work for nothing, So like developers working on macOS or Windows? It's so horrible that Apple has allowed third party developers to exploit them for for free for over 40 years now...
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        It's not horrible, because they chose it. The price Apple offered there was $0. No one forced them.
        qwytw 3y ago
        Well yeah, obviously. Because Apple benefited a lot more from developers making apps/etc. for their platform than the other way around. Now that the balances has shifted (of course only on mobile) Apple became a lot more exploitative.
  - jzl 3y ago
    It’s a symbiotic relationship Yes, exactly. It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place. Apple is already getting their cut of the symbiotic relationship by selling their massively profitable iPhone hardware, full stop. Any chance you remember the first year of the iPhone when there were no third party apps? Other than being a good phone, it was basically just a technological novelty, and that was about it. Third party apps are literally what give value to the iPhone (and other iOS devices).
    - aspenmayer 3y ago
      Cydia was live on iOS before Apple's App Store. Which is to say, I agree.
    - ankit219 3y ago
      I have never fully agreed with this premise. On the face of it, yes apps help people stay on the store. But at the same time, Apple does come up with many good apps. Comparing it to the first iPhone is probably valid. They saw the writing on the wall and opened the gates, but could have easily chosen the other way of doing it themselves. No one wins in this scenario - nor the devs, nor the users, nor Apple. But it's not as clear as "Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place". Idly wondering, say you don't download any third party app and neither does anyone. You can still surf the internet for the most part. You can still connect with others via FaceTime/iMessage. You can still check mails etc. Things you won't be able to do is play games, go on dates, browse tiktok, book a cab (though all that is possible through safari but not a great experience). A caveat here: The original 30% was on infinitely reproducible digital goods only. Which is 80-90% gaming skins and artifacts and digital subscriptions. Don't know if that is still the case.
    - jrowen 3y ago
      It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place. And developers need a solid platform with users willing to pay money. I feel like you have the wrong answer to the chicken and egg problem. The first iPhone was a marvel to pretty much everyone, and blew everything else at the time out of the water. I don't recall much sentiment of people being disappointed about the lack of apps, because there was no reason to expect that at that point. Just being able to use a lot of the web like you would on a computer was a massive leap from a RAZR or whatever. This is not to defend the 30% tax or anything, but I don't think it does any good to downplay the value they've built. The elephant in the room with your argument is that, if it were true, app developers would simply flock to Android and Apple would be forced to course-correct.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    >They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. You can get about 1.1 terabytes of data transfer out from Amazon S3 to Internet for $100.
    - ryanbrunner 3y ago
      And anyone on Apple's scale is paying orders of magnitude less than that, even through Amazon.
      - Hamuko 3y ago
        I mean, if you were self-distributing your iOS app right now instead of having Apple do it, and you had to look up how much transferring data in the terabytes costs, you'd just use Cloudflare R2 instead. I'd be willing to bet that, all things being equal, most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store.
        qwytw 3y ago
        > most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store There must be a reason why almost all games are still published on Steam despite the 30% though. The increased customer reach almost always outweighs the additional revenue (and this also applies to major companies like EA, Ubisoft etc. who have tried building their own storefronts).
        seec 3y ago
        The thing is that you can't really talk about Steam like other platforms. They are already competing with themselves on price somehow. Games that are launched on Steam do not cost more than they do elsewhere in the first place, and secondly people very often buy on sales at prices low enough that it doesn't make sense to look elsewhere for the convenience of having it all in one place. There are also plenty of big games with publishers big enough that they have their own platform (EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Microsoft) and depending on many things their games may or may not be on Steam also. Steam also accepts keys purchased from elsewhere so in principle even if most of your sales are somewhere else, it is better to have it on Steam. I also think you Steam is offering some valuable community/platforms tools. Not much of this applies to the Apple app store. The truth is the reason people use it is because that's the only thing allowed. If peoples could install apps from anywhere with its own self-update mechanism (like sparkle or something more modern like a hybrid web-app) I doubt it would be used as much appart from free stuff from developers that do not want to figure out distribution. If there was a large price difference, most people wouldn't use it, just like most people do not go to the more expensive supermarket unless they absolutely have to.
  - thayne 3y ago
    And if no one wrote apps for iOS how many people would buy iPhones and iPads? Yes, it is a symbiotic relationship. But Apple has better position to negotiate, because it is as single entity, and have a lot more resources than the the other side. If all the app developers were able to organize and boycott apple, they might be able to force Apple to negotiate better terms. But that would probably result in many of the smaller companies going out of business, unless the boycott was very short lived. > Your $100 does not cover it. There are almost 2 million apps on the app store. Assuming there is roughly 1 developer license per app, (some developers will create multiple apps with a single license, but others will have multiple licenses to develop a single app), that is at least in the ballpark of "hundreds of millions on SWE". And that doesn't include revenue from selling the devices themselves.
    - camillomiller 3y ago
      You just proved your point wrong. Hundreds of million is peanuts, and it’s very improbable that it covers anything near the HR costs of Apple’s App Store infrastructure and department.
      - dvdkon 3y ago
        If Apple can't run the App Store just on developer fees, then I'm sure somebody else could. But that's conveniently not allowed.
    - ikiris 3y ago
      Where do you think those app developers / apps originally came from. Huge amounts of people bought those iphones first man.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        So what? Shut down the App Store tomorrow, and forcibly delete all non-Apple-authored apps off of everyone's iPhones. Watch everyone flock to Android, no matter how much they claim to hate it. Watch Apple's stock drop into the toilet. Apple needs all their third-party developers just as much as those developers need Apple -- more than at least some of those developers need Apple.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. I mean, let's be real here. Most people even if Apple fully allowed other payment processors would still opt into Apple's payment. Easiest to setup, most visible and familiar interface for consumers, and lets them push liability back to Apple. So they'd still get 30% from many consumers. This angle only applies in a situation where you think 1) the pareto principle applies and 2) all of that 20% decided to roll their own payment processing, which isn't trivial nor a risk many want to take onto themselves. It'd take a lot more than a dozen megacorps doing this to make Apple sweat. And if this does happen, it sounds like a service issue a that point. If you can offer all that convenience but people don't view it as worth 30%, then maybe the rate should be re-negotiated. >They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use they spend hundreds of millions to get other businesses to do business with them, and still charge many upfront costs along the way. Back then, we simply called that the cost to do business. Adtech also spends hundreds of millions each on salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. I don't exactly feel I owe those companies for their labor since I'm (the dev) not the primary point of revenue.
  - NineStarPoint 3y ago
    Would Apple even approve something going on the app store that tried to do things in ways that were that non-standard? More generally it’s not like you can choose to host your own servers or, in forgoing all of Apple’s work, not have to pay that 30%. When Apple isn’t going to let you do things another way, they don’t get to argue that all of the benefits they do provide are what people are paying for. People have to pay the price to be allowed on the ecosystem at all.
  - 6510 3y ago
    I look at it like this. If someone is doing it you have to do it too, you cant run a competitive business if your competitor is taking 30%. It is not something you chose to do but you have to. The most important angle is what this grows into. Apple doesn't have to make hardware. They can simply stop doing that and live on rent alone. Hardware is hard work. It might just be that they have to stop doing it. How much they put the squeeze on who and who makes how much money isn't even important. This is not beneficial to the industry or to society. After the age of working your ass off while starving comes the age of contributing and thriving, this period ends with the age of entitlement. You do the work, I enjoy the benefits. we can only afford so much of that before our civilization turns into a hell hole. You will be working day and night to make ends meet while I have all the time and resources in the world to figure out how I'm going to take just a little bit more from you. It's not about wealth, people should be able to EARN whatever they EARN. It isn't even about mortality, we can go back to the age of working your ass off while starving, we know how to do that. The bigger issue is to have people in control who cant tie their own shoes. It sets us up for total failure. It takes one small incident to end humanity.
    - kridsdale1 3y ago
      > Apple doesn't have to make hardware. They can simply stop doing that and live on rent alone. This is what Valve discovered. Nobody in 2004 would have thought the best developer in the world would stop making games.
    - seec 3y ago
      To be honest it seems like what it is for the younger generation in life generally. A nice legacy from the boomers and unsurprisingly Apple is a very big boomer company. I think many here do not see this since they earn enough that those considerations are kind of irrelevant, but I believe current Apple problems reveal a systemic problem across society. Apple acts like an old entitled asshole who just want to capture value for not doing much because one day they did something good and I feel in general this is exactly what the current governing generation is doing...
  - guax 3y ago
    Apple wrote their kernel from zero?
    - kridsdale1 3y ago
      No, that’s why I excluded posix parts of the operating system. That’s from Berkeley.
  - AYBABTME 3y ago
    There's a point where the phone becomes similar to infrastructure, and allowing a single market actor to charge 30% tax on anyone using the roads, for any business conducted where someone took a road to get there, is ridiculous. I'm not saying the App Store is infrastructure-like. But the market share of Apple is so large, and it's quasi-impossible to conduct consumer business without being required to have a native app... that it's starting to be infrastructure-like. Can a viable B2C online business exist without being present via a native app? It seems untenable due to consumer expectations. Consumers also expect to be able to drive to coffeeshops, yet road providers don't charge 30% taxes on coffeeshop revenues.
    - MilaM 3y ago
      > I'm not saying the App Store is infrastructure-like. It is infrastructure-like. Try to live in modern society without a smartphone. It will be very difficult. Not impossible, but much less convenient.
      - AYBABTME 3y ago
        I meant I'm not ready to say that it is, I have not solidified this as a fact in my own mind. I'm contemplating.
    - seer 3y ago
      It’s no surprise countries like india are indeed treating phones as infra, with their whole government stack centered around smartphones. You’re forced to have and use one, but in return you get free transactions, strong identity and various other perks. It _is_ a monopoly, but the monopoly is the government so everyone has a say on how its run and audited. It’s still strange to me how the states allows private companies to do things the at should be public goods/services.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Apple was just fine building all those platform SDKs for macOS without charging people to write apps for it. Why should iOS be any different? The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close. But none of that matters. Very few businesses set their prices based on how much it costs them to provide their goods or services. They charge what the market will bear. The problem is that there is no "iOS app distribution market"; Apple controls it, 100%, so they can set prices wherever they want, without regard to competition.
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      I feel the App Store is one thing differentiating Apple from Android phone manufacturers. Money from the App Store gets reinvested in the entire iPhone supply chain. Whereas in the case of Android, App Store money goes to Google only. It also encourages Apple to support their phones long term as its preferred that you stay on your aging iPhone and keep spending at the App Store then risking you leaving the Apple ecosystem because Apple allows their older phones to become obsolete. Android manufacturers on the other hand have every incentive to obsolete your phone ASAP because you buying a new phone is the only way they make money.
      - albert180 3y ago
        Do you seriously believe this? It's Apple that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates when you don't receive iOS Versions Updates anymore, while Google Play doesn't care about it, as long as the app itself is still developed for that version. Also they make more than enough money from the Hardware itself, they just take the profits off the software purchases.
        ffgjgf1 3y ago
        > that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates Technically that’s the app developers who do that.
        albert180 3y ago
  - greysphere 3y ago
    You just described most games.
    - kridsdale1 3y ago
      I am aware.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > Why do you get to run a business off it for free? So Microsoft did all of this on Windows (or Apple itself for that matter for macOS) due to entirely altruistic reasons? Also platforms need developers a whole lot more than developers need specific platforms. You can always go and works at a bank or something. Apple would be skewed with no 3-rd party developers they always knew it. > They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Maybe the ads on the app store would more than cover it? Not only do you need to pay 30% you also have to pay extra for placement so that Apple wouldn’t put your competitors apps at the top of the results when users search for your app?
    - blasphemers 3y ago
      It's like people don't remember windows phone failed because of a lack of third-party apps.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  To be fair, roughly half of Apple's money is made from hardware. The app store is extremely lucrative and apparently 70%+ of their revenue from the App store is just leeching off of mobile games, but Apple can definitely survive without the app store if push came to shove. BUT, I will also mention that part of its market capture comes from all the charges on devs even before the rev share. You need apple equipment to develop, and they (apparently) don't sell server racks anymore for businesses to scale off of, nor any legitimate form of emulation. You have a small cost per year to have a developer account, and a cost to submit your app for review. Then if you care about visibilty they have their own ad discovery program you can pay into. So I did disagree with a brief judge statement about how "It's possible to skirt around Apple's innnovation for free...". Apple controls and charges for the entire pipeline, even before you launch the app.
  - jb1991 3y ago
    > a cost to submit your app for review They charge you to submit an app? Is this new? When I worked as an iOS developer this was not a thing but that was many years ago.
    - __m 3y ago
      No they don’t
    - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      You pay 99 per year. But this definitely doesn’t cover their cost. The review process is very labor intensive on their side
      - munk-a 3y ago
        As someone who has developed a commercial app and spent time on the app store - their review process is a joke... there are non-compliances all over the store and I suspect a lot of their review process is highly automated.
        3y ago
- camillomiller 3y ago
  This is a biased view that disregards basic available metrics. Apple is a hardware company. Developers are instrumental to its devices success and a point can be made that 30% might be too high of a fee. On the other hand many of those developers wouldn’t have a job in the first place if it wasn’t for Apple creating the App Store.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already". So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"?
    - pompino 3y ago
      Agreed, While there may be people who think they're defending Apple "on principle", I hope those folks also realize that there is no "principle" that is ingrained in nature. We're all just making up rules, laws, taxes, as we go along. Just because a law or article of constitution is old, doesn't make it any more 'natural' than others. There is no "right" of any student for their debt to be forgiven, but we want to do it anyway. Apple has taken advantage (as have others) of a ridiculously broken tax code, availed of the strong US legal system, property rights, etc. How about we shift the balance back?
    - kergonath 3y ago
      > I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already". Do you account for the fact that it might not be the same people making both arguments? Most websites’ readerships are not monoliths and even on HN there are plenty of people with different perspectives, and who are not necessarily vocal in the same threads. > So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"? That’s an interesting argument, but it’s usually not discussed with any nuance. Basically there are several layers: - are we entitled to Apple opening their platforms? (AFAICT the opposite would be a first though the EU seems to be going that way) - is Apple entitled to profit from the App Store in principle? (Some people are arguing that they are not, but they are a fringe; Epic lost their argument about that) - is 30% too much? (But then, where is the line? It’s more or less the standard for closed platforms Where would you put your “public commons”? Did this ever happen?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Oh no, those devs would have certainly passed the difference on to the consumer.
pratnala 3y ago
I agree that Apple should take some cut but 30% is predatory and excessive.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  They can get 99% provided they allow the users the freedom to download and install apps from wherever they want.
  - merlindru 3y ago
    This I don't care about the fee for using their services, I care about the fact that I'm forced to use their services
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Apple charges 15%. The only developers who pay 30% are the ones earning over a million dollars a year through the App Store. Even then, they get charged 15% if it’s a long-term subscription.
nevir 3y ago
Here's a little story / timeline from 2009-2010 (from my perspective as a dev on Kindle for iOS): * we submit the Kindle app ...including an in-app bookstore... to Apple for initial app review (Note: multiple ebook readers with in-app bookstores are already on the app store at this point) * several weeks pass with no response * Apple announces in-app purchasing (to be released several months later) * Apple rejects our app: we have to give them a 30% cut of all sales through the app, or remove the store and all references / external links to it. We chose option 2. * Apple forces the other ereader apps to remove their stores or go with IAP. Several (most?) just gave up and pulled their apps entirely * Apple negotiates agreements with most of the major book publishers that if they want to sell books on iBooks, ebooks must be listed at the same price on ALL stores, and have a 30% margin * Apple launches in-app purchasing and the iBooks store (with the iPad announcement, IIRC) ...aka even if we (or any other ereader app) wanted to sell books via our app, the terms Apple set forth effectively meant that ALL profit from those sales must go to them (and we would have to eat the bandwidth / service costs on top of that)
- issafram 3y ago
  I did my first iOS development about a couple of years ago. Question, how in the world do you tolerate the storyboard XML files? One small change in XCode results in so many line changes. PRs are impossible to review with any confidence.
  - 0x0 3y ago
    Answer: Don't use storyboards.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That's a big argument for SwiftUI, which replaces storyboards. But if you must use them, keep each storyboard small enough it's only going to be used by one dev at a time to avoid conflicts, and then combine trusting the GUI won't make stupid XML plus some automated UI tests to make sure functionality isn't damaged by e.g. a button being deleted.
    - 3y ago
yMEyUyNE1 3y ago
I view such companies as Trolls under the Bridge (i.e. appstores) that connect the app developers and the users.
psychoslave 3y ago
If merit was a highly pondering factor of income, coal miners would be extremely rich and no annuitant would exist out there.
gigatexal 3y ago
People also need to remember how it was before in the CompUSA or telco provided phones. The retailer or marketplace would take > 30% margins closer to 50% and to get on a pseudo-smart phone before the current smart phone era one had to ask the AT&T's and Verizon's very nicely. But now one can build apps now and publish and just pay the 30% comission or 15% on subscriptions after the second year and look at the explosion in the app marketplace.
- muro 3y ago
  We don't need to remember that, good riddance and great that they were disrupted. How do you disrupt this market though?
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    I honestly think Apple will need to be compelled by law verdict or congress to open up the appstore or allow other appstores and have some sort of cap on fees charged -- I dunno. The ideal would probably be what Steve envisioned before the AppStore was a thing and that's basically PWAs. But I think it's been alleged that Apple is arbitrarily nerfing Safari to prevent PWAs on iOS running as well as native applications -- though I've no source. How to effectively "disrupt" the appstore model is a billion dollar question I'm not sure of. What I do know is that the Tim Sweeny's et al of the world are hypocrites in that they just want to create their own rent-seeking AppStores and charge their own commissions and skirt around paying the platform anything for being on the platform. This is akin to wanting to be in a supermarket and put your kiosk inside and sell your product to the supermarket's customers without some sort of financial agreement between you and the supermarket.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      It's just imessage. If imessage falls, so will the iPhone. The courts don't take stuff like "social compliance" into account when evaluating something like the iPhone, so it all looks rosy. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to be a social young person in the US without an iPhone. Which naturally spreads to families becoming "iPhone families". All of it just comes down to messaging though.
nkrisc 3y ago
No, we can factor in who’s making them and how much money they have.
BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
The merits are centered around the outcomes, which in this case are the consolidation of wealth by a few who don’t need it from the many who do. What other merits are more meaningful than the observable outcomes of the practice?
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Here’s a very simple example. Search ChatGPT in the App Store. The top result is an ad that’s not ChatGPT but looks extremely similar. The top 10 results are basically intended to look as much like the ChatGPT in name and logo as possible. Ostensibly this 30% cut is supposed to prevent things like this from happening, as Apple argues it uses that money to keep the App Store clean from fraudulent or misrepresenting apps, among other things. There is a much touted “review” process that is supposed to be partially funded by the 30% cut. So if that isn’t really happening, what, pray tell, is that 30% going towards? It isn’t making the App Store a better experience
taylorius 3y ago
Why shouldn't who's making a claim and their money be relevant? Monopolies (and near monopolies) are a bad thing for free markets.
sharemywin 3y ago
I think it's kind of the same argument. if you can justify an excessive marketplace tax for a company that "wins" in a wins a winner take all market dynamic then you get a $Trillion company. not sure how you get one without the other.
gunapologist99 3y ago
That's often true, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule, because we also have to look at the capabilities of the two combatants. It's why you would probably/hopefully assist the underdog who was being bullied. We're talking about the wealthiest company in the world who can obviously afford to run out the clock on the court system and bury an opponent with legal fees. There's a monster difference of offensive capabilities, even if we realize that Epic is a sizeable company; in this case, Epic is really standing in for every other tiny company or one-man shop in the App Store, and we should thank them for doing that.

by remus 3y ago

I also think apple's 30% cut is excessive, but I don't think this line of argument helps. We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have.

pompino 3y ago

> We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have. Its not based on how much money they have. Its how they've managed to accumulate the money - by gouging devs.

kridsdale1 3y ago
[flagged]
- pompino 3y ago
  >Why do you get to run a business off it for free? There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights. >They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. At least see it and acknowledge it. I don't feel like paying for an Apple executives BMW car payment. But you do you.
  - Ma8ee 3y ago
    > There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights. Not in America. The only venue to change you have is to spend, or not spend money somewhere. Since people think they profit more from developing apps for iOS than not developing apps for iOS, Apple’s profit is “right”. And a century or so of indoctrination has made most Americans believe that this is just the natural order of things.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    This isn't about rights. You already have all the rights you need here. You would like others to work for nothing, or for what you care to give them, instead of the price they offer their services at, and you'd like to vote, fight and protest until they work for your price.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > You would like others to work for nothing, So like developers working on macOS or Windows? It's so horrible that Apple has allowed third party developers to exploit them for for free for over 40 years now...
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It's not horrible, because they chose it. The price Apple offered there was $0. No one forced them.
        qwytw 3y ago
        Well yeah, obviously. Because Apple benefited a lot more from developers making apps/etc. for their platform than the other way around. Now that the balances has shifted (of course only on mobile) Apple became a lot more exploitative.
- jzl 3y ago
  It’s a symbiotic relationship Yes, exactly. It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place. Apple is already getting their cut of the symbiotic relationship by selling their massively profitable iPhone hardware, full stop. Any chance you remember the first year of the iPhone when there were no third party apps? Other than being a good phone, it was basically just a technological novelty, and that was about it. Third party apps are literally what give value to the iPhone (and other iOS devices).
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    Cydia was live on iOS before Apple's App Store. Which is to say, I agree.
  - ankit219 3y ago
    I have never fully agreed with this premise. On the face of it, yes apps help people stay on the store. But at the same time, Apple does come up with many good apps. Comparing it to the first iPhone is probably valid. They saw the writing on the wall and opened the gates, but could have easily chosen the other way of doing it themselves. No one wins in this scenario - nor the devs, nor the users, nor Apple. But it's not as clear as "Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place". Idly wondering, say you don't download any third party app and neither does anyone. You can still surf the internet for the most part. You can still connect with others via FaceTime/iMessage. You can still check mails etc. Things you won't be able to do is play games, go on dates, browse tiktok, book a cab (though all that is possible through safari but not a great experience). A caveat here: The original 30% was on infinitely reproducible digital goods only. Which is 80-90% gaming skins and artifacts and digital subscriptions. Don't know if that is still the case.
  - jrowen 3y ago
    It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place. And developers need a solid platform with users willing to pay money. I feel like you have the wrong answer to the chicken and egg problem. The first iPhone was a marvel to pretty much everyone, and blew everything else at the time out of the water. I don't recall much sentiment of people being disappointed about the lack of apps, because there was no reason to expect that at that point. Just being able to use a lot of the web like you would on a computer was a massive leap from a RAZR or whatever. This is not to defend the 30% tax or anything, but I don't think it does any good to downplay the value they've built. The elephant in the room with your argument is that, if it were true, app developers would simply flock to Android and Apple would be forced to course-correct.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  >They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. You can get about 1.1 terabytes of data transfer out from Amazon S3 to Internet for $100.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    And anyone on Apple's scale is paying orders of magnitude less than that, even through Amazon.
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      I mean, if you were self-distributing your iOS app right now instead of having Apple do it, and you had to look up how much transferring data in the terabytes costs, you'd just use Cloudflare R2 instead. I'd be willing to bet that, all things being equal, most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store There must be a reason why almost all games are still published on Steam despite the 30% though. The increased customer reach almost always outweighs the additional revenue (and this also applies to major companies like EA, Ubisoft etc. who have tried building their own storefronts).
        seec 3y ago
        The thing is that you can't really talk about Steam like other platforms. They are already competing with themselves on price somehow. Games that are launched on Steam do not cost more than they do elsewhere in the first place, and secondly people very often buy on sales at prices low enough that it doesn't make sense to look elsewhere for the convenience of having it all in one place. There are also plenty of big games with publishers big enough that they have their own platform (EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Microsoft) and depending on many things their games may or may not be on Steam also. Steam also accepts keys purchased from elsewhere so in principle even if most of your sales are somewhere else, it is better to have it on Steam. I also think you Steam is offering some valuable community/platforms tools. Not much of this applies to the Apple app store. The truth is the reason people use it is because that's the only thing allowed. If peoples could install apps from anywhere with its own self-update mechanism (like sparkle or something more modern like a hybrid web-app) I doubt it would be used as much appart from free stuff from developers that do not want to figure out distribution. If there was a large price difference, most people wouldn't use it, just like most people do not go to the more expensive supermarket unless they absolutely have to.
- thayne 3y ago
  And if no one wrote apps for iOS how many people would buy iPhones and iPads? Yes, it is a symbiotic relationship. But Apple has better position to negotiate, because it is as single entity, and have a lot more resources than the the other side. If all the app developers were able to organize and boycott apple, they might be able to force Apple to negotiate better terms. But that would probably result in many of the smaller companies going out of business, unless the boycott was very short lived. > Your $100 does not cover it. There are almost 2 million apps on the app store. Assuming there is roughly 1 developer license per app, (some developers will create multiple apps with a single license, but others will have multiple licenses to develop a single app), that is at least in the ballpark of "hundreds of millions on SWE". And that doesn't include revenue from selling the devices themselves.
  - camillomiller 3y ago
    You just proved your point wrong. Hundreds of million is peanuts, and it’s very improbable that it covers anything near the HR costs of Apple’s App Store infrastructure and department.
    - dvdkon 3y ago
      If Apple can't run the App Store just on developer fees, then I'm sure somebody else could. But that's conveniently not allowed.
  - ikiris 3y ago
    Where do you think those app developers / apps originally came from. Huge amounts of people bought those iphones first man.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      So what? Shut down the App Store tomorrow, and forcibly delete all non-Apple-authored apps off of everyone's iPhones. Watch everyone flock to Android, no matter how much they claim to hate it. Watch Apple's stock drop into the toilet. Apple needs all their third-party developers just as much as those developers need Apple -- more than at least some of those developers need Apple.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. I mean, let's be real here. Most people even if Apple fully allowed other payment processors would still opt into Apple's payment. Easiest to setup, most visible and familiar interface for consumers, and lets them push liability back to Apple. So they'd still get 30% from many consumers. This angle only applies in a situation where you think 1) the pareto principle applies and 2) all of that 20% decided to roll their own payment processing, which isn't trivial nor a risk many want to take onto themselves. It'd take a lot more than a dozen megacorps doing this to make Apple sweat. And if this does happen, it sounds like a service issue a that point. If you can offer all that convenience but people don't view it as worth 30%, then maybe the rate should be re-negotiated. >They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use they spend hundreds of millions to get other businesses to do business with them, and still charge many upfront costs along the way. Back then, we simply called that the cost to do business. Adtech also spends hundreds of millions each on salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. I don't exactly feel I owe those companies for their labor since I'm (the dev) not the primary point of revenue.
- NineStarPoint 3y ago
  Would Apple even approve something going on the app store that tried to do things in ways that were that non-standard? More generally it’s not like you can choose to host your own servers or, in forgoing all of Apple’s work, not have to pay that 30%. When Apple isn’t going to let you do things another way, they don’t get to argue that all of the benefits they do provide are what people are paying for. People have to pay the price to be allowed on the ecosystem at all.
- 6510 3y ago
  I look at it like this. If someone is doing it you have to do it too, you cant run a competitive business if your competitor is taking 30%. It is not something you chose to do but you have to. The most important angle is what this grows into. Apple doesn't have to make hardware. They can simply stop doing that and live on rent alone. Hardware is hard work. It might just be that they have to stop doing it. How much they put the squeeze on who and who makes how much money isn't even important. This is not beneficial to the industry or to society. After the age of working your ass off while starving comes the age of contributing and thriving, this period ends with the age of entitlement. You do the work, I enjoy the benefits. we can only afford so much of that before our civilization turns into a hell hole. You will be working day and night to make ends meet while I have all the time and resources in the world to figure out how I'm going to take just a little bit more from you. It's not about wealth, people should be able to EARN whatever they EARN. It isn't even about mortality, we can go back to the age of working your ass off while starving, we know how to do that. The bigger issue is to have people in control who cant tie their own shoes. It sets us up for total failure. It takes one small incident to end humanity.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    > Apple doesn't have to make hardware. They can simply stop doing that and live on rent alone. This is what Valve discovered. Nobody in 2004 would have thought the best developer in the world would stop making games.
  - seec 3y ago
    To be honest it seems like what it is for the younger generation in life generally. A nice legacy from the boomers and unsurprisingly Apple is a very big boomer company. I think many here do not see this since they earn enough that those considerations are kind of irrelevant, but I believe current Apple problems reveal a systemic problem across society. Apple acts like an old entitled asshole who just want to capture value for not doing much because one day they did something good and I feel in general this is exactly what the current governing generation is doing...
- guax 3y ago
  Apple wrote their kernel from zero?
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    No, that’s why I excluded posix parts of the operating system. That’s from Berkeley.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  There's a point where the phone becomes similar to infrastructure, and allowing a single market actor to charge 30% tax on anyone using the roads, for any business conducted where someone took a road to get there, is ridiculous. I'm not saying the App Store is infrastructure-like. But the market share of Apple is so large, and it's quasi-impossible to conduct consumer business without being required to have a native app... that it's starting to be infrastructure-like. Can a viable B2C online business exist without being present via a native app? It seems untenable due to consumer expectations. Consumers also expect to be able to drive to coffeeshops, yet road providers don't charge 30% taxes on coffeeshop revenues.
  - MilaM 3y ago
    > I'm not saying the App Store is infrastructure-like. It is infrastructure-like. Try to live in modern society without a smartphone. It will be very difficult. Not impossible, but much less convenient.
    - AYBABTME 3y ago
      I meant I'm not ready to say that it is, I have not solidified this as a fact in my own mind. I'm contemplating.
  - seer 3y ago
    It’s no surprise countries like india are indeed treating phones as infra, with their whole government stack centered around smartphones. You’re forced to have and use one, but in return you get free transactions, strong identity and various other perks. It _is_ a monopoly, but the monopoly is the government so everyone has a say on how its run and audited. It’s still strange to me how the states allows private companies to do things the at should be public goods/services.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Apple was just fine building all those platform SDKs for macOS without charging people to write apps for it. Why should iOS be any different? The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close. But none of that matters. Very few businesses set their prices based on how much it costs them to provide their goods or services. They charge what the market will bear. The problem is that there is no "iOS app distribution market"; Apple controls it, 100%, so they can set prices wherever they want, without regard to competition.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    I feel the App Store is one thing differentiating Apple from Android phone manufacturers. Money from the App Store gets reinvested in the entire iPhone supply chain. Whereas in the case of Android, App Store money goes to Google only. It also encourages Apple to support their phones long term as its preferred that you stay on your aging iPhone and keep spending at the App Store then risking you leaving the Apple ecosystem because Apple allows their older phones to become obsolete. Android manufacturers on the other hand have every incentive to obsolete your phone ASAP because you buying a new phone is the only way they make money.
    - albert180 3y ago
      Do you seriously believe this? It's Apple that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates when you don't receive iOS Versions Updates anymore, while Google Play doesn't care about it, as long as the app itself is still developed for that version. Also they make more than enough money from the Hardware itself, they just take the profits off the software purchases.
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        > that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates Technically that’s the app developers who do that.
        albert180 3y ago
- greysphere 3y ago
  You just described most games.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    I am aware.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > Why do you get to run a business off it for free? So Microsoft did all of this on Windows (or Apple itself for that matter for macOS) due to entirely altruistic reasons? Also platforms need developers a whole lot more than developers need specific platforms. You can always go and works at a bank or something. Apple would be skewed with no 3-rd party developers they always knew it. > They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Maybe the ads on the app store would more than cover it? Not only do you need to pay 30% you also have to pay extra for placement so that Apple wouldn’t put your competitors apps at the top of the results when users search for your app?
  - blasphemers 3y ago
    It's like people don't remember windows phone failed because of a lack of third-party apps.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
To be fair, roughly half of Apple's money is made from hardware. The app store is extremely lucrative and apparently 70%+ of their revenue from the App store is just leeching off of mobile games, but Apple can definitely survive without the app store if push came to shove. BUT, I will also mention that part of its market capture comes from all the charges on devs even before the rev share. You need apple equipment to develop, and they (apparently) don't sell server racks anymore for businesses to scale off of, nor any legitimate form of emulation. You have a small cost per year to have a developer account, and a cost to submit your app for review. Then if you care about visibilty they have their own ad discovery program you can pay into. So I did disagree with a brief judge statement about how "It's possible to skirt around Apple's innnovation for free...". Apple controls and charges for the entire pipeline, even before you launch the app.
- jb1991 3y ago
  > a cost to submit your app for review They charge you to submit an app? Is this new? When I worked as an iOS developer this was not a thing but that was many years ago.
  - __m 3y ago
    No they don’t
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    You pay 99 per year. But this definitely doesn’t cover their cost. The review process is very labor intensive on their side
    - munk-a 3y ago
      As someone who has developed a commercial app and spent time on the app store - their review process is a joke... there are non-compliances all over the store and I suspect a lot of their review process is highly automated.
      - 3y ago
camillomiller 3y ago
This is a biased view that disregards basic available metrics. Apple is a hardware company. Developers are instrumental to its devices success and a point can be made that 30% might be too high of a fee. On the other hand many of those developers wouldn’t have a job in the first place if it wasn’t for Apple creating the App Store.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already". So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"?
  - pompino 3y ago
    Agreed, While there may be people who think they're defending Apple "on principle", I hope those folks also realize that there is no "principle" that is ingrained in nature. We're all just making up rules, laws, taxes, as we go along. Just because a law or article of constitution is old, doesn't make it any more 'natural' than others. There is no "right" of any student for their debt to be forgiven, but we want to do it anyway. Apple has taken advantage (as have others) of a ridiculously broken tax code, availed of the strong US legal system, property rights, etc. How about we shift the balance back?
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already". Do you account for the fact that it might not be the same people making both arguments? Most websites’ readerships are not monoliths and even on HN there are plenty of people with different perspectives, and who are not necessarily vocal in the same threads. > So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"? That’s an interesting argument, but it’s usually not discussed with any nuance. Basically there are several layers: - are we entitled to Apple opening their platforms? (AFAICT the opposite would be a first though the EU seems to be going that way) - is Apple entitled to profit from the App Store in principle? (Some people are arguing that they are not, but they are a fringe; Epic lost their argument about that) - is 30% too much? (But then, where is the line? It’s more or less the standard for closed platforms Where would you put your “public commons”? Did this ever happen?
jacquesm 3y ago
Oh no, those devs would have certainly passed the difference on to the consumer.

pratnala 3y ago

I agree that Apple should take some cut but 30% is predatory and excessive.

DeathArrow 3y ago
They can get 99% provided they allow the users the freedom to download and install apps from wherever they want.
- merlindru 3y ago
  This I don't care about the fee for using their services, I care about the fact that I'm forced to use their services
JimDabell 3y ago
Apple charges 15%. The only developers who pay 30% are the ones earning over a million dollars a year through the App Store. Even then, they get charged 15% if it’s a long-term subscription.

nevir 3y ago

Here's a little story / timeline from 2009-2010 (from my perspective as a dev on Kindle for iOS): * we submit the Kindle app ...including an in-app bookstore... to Apple for initial app review (Note: multiple ebook readers with in-app bookstores are already on the app store at this point) * several weeks pass with no response * Apple announces in-app purchasing (to be released several months later) * Apple rejects our app: we have to give them a 30% cut of all sales through the app, or remove the store and all references / external links to it. We chose option 2. * Apple forces the other ereader apps to remove their stores or go with IAP. Several (most?) just gave up and pulled their apps entirely * Apple negotiates agreements with most of the major book publishers that if they want to sell books on iBooks, ebooks must be listed at the same price on ALL stores, and have a 30% margin * Apple launches in-app purchasing and the iBooks store (with the iPad announcement, IIRC) ...aka even if we (or any other ereader app) wanted to sell books via our app, the terms Apple set forth effectively meant that ALL profit from those sales must go to them (and we would have to eat the bandwidth / service costs on top of that)

issafram 3y ago
I did my first iOS development about a couple of years ago. Question, how in the world do you tolerate the storyboard XML files? One small change in XCode results in so many line changes. PRs are impossible to review with any confidence.
- 0x0 3y ago
  Answer: Don't use storyboards.
- ben_w 3y ago
  That's a big argument for SwiftUI, which replaces storyboards. But if you must use them, keep each storyboard small enough it's only going to be used by one dev at a time to avoid conflicts, and then combine trusting the GUI won't make stupid XML plus some automated UI tests to make sure functionality isn't damaged by e.g. a button being deleted.
  - 3y ago

yMEyUyNE1 3y ago

I view such companies as Trolls under the Bridge (i.e. appstores) that connect the app developers and the users.

psychoslave 3y ago

If merit was a highly pondering factor of income, coal miners would be extremely rich and no annuitant would exist out there.

gigatexal 3y ago

People also need to remember how it was before in the CompUSA or telco provided phones. The retailer or marketplace would take > 30% margins closer to 50% and to get on a pseudo-smart phone before the current smart phone era one had to ask the AT&T's and Verizon's very nicely. But now one can build apps now and publish and just pay the 30% comission or 15% on subscriptions after the second year and look at the explosion in the app marketplace.

muro 3y ago
We don't need to remember that, good riddance and great that they were disrupted. How do you disrupt this market though?
- gigatexal 3y ago
  I honestly think Apple will need to be compelled by law verdict or congress to open up the appstore or allow other appstores and have some sort of cap on fees charged -- I dunno. The ideal would probably be what Steve envisioned before the AppStore was a thing and that's basically PWAs. But I think it's been alleged that Apple is arbitrarily nerfing Safari to prevent PWAs on iOS running as well as native applications -- though I've no source. How to effectively "disrupt" the appstore model is a billion dollar question I'm not sure of. What I do know is that the Tim Sweeny's et al of the world are hypocrites in that they just want to create their own rent-seeking AppStores and charge their own commissions and skirt around paying the platform anything for being on the platform. This is akin to wanting to be in a supermarket and put your kiosk inside and sell your product to the supermarket's customers without some sort of financial agreement between you and the supermarket.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    It's just imessage. If imessage falls, so will the iPhone. The courts don't take stuff like "social compliance" into account when evaluating something like the iPhone, so it all looks rosy. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to be a social young person in the US without an iPhone. Which naturally spreads to families becoming "iPhone families". All of it just comes down to messaging though.

nkrisc 3y ago

No, we can factor in who’s making them and how much money they have.

BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago

The merits are centered around the outcomes, which in this case are the consolidation of wealth by a few who don’t need it from the many who do. What other merits are more meaningful than the observable outcomes of the practice?

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago

Here’s a very simple example. Search ChatGPT in the App Store. The top result is an ad that’s not ChatGPT but looks extremely similar. The top 10 results are basically intended to look as much like the ChatGPT in name and logo as possible. Ostensibly this 30% cut is supposed to prevent things like this from happening, as Apple argues it uses that money to keep the App Store clean from fraudulent or misrepresenting apps, among other things. There is a much touted “review” process that is supposed to be partially funded by the 30% cut. So if that isn’t really happening, what, pray tell, is that 30% going towards? It isn’t making the App Store a better experience

taylorius 3y ago

Why shouldn't who's making a claim and their money be relevant? Monopolies (and near monopolies) are a bad thing for free markets.

sharemywin 3y ago

I think it's kind of the same argument. if you can justify an excessive marketplace tax for a company that "wins" in a wins a winner take all market dynamic then you get a $Trillion company. not sure how you get one without the other.

gunapologist99 3y ago

That's often true, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule, because we also have to look at the capabilities of the two combatants. It's why you would probably/hopefully assist the underdog who was being bullied. We're talking about the wealthiest company in the world who can obviously afford to run out the clock on the court system and bury an opponent with legal fees. There's a monster difference of offensive capabilities, even if we realize that Epic is a sizeable company; in this case, Epic is really standing in for every other tiny company or one-man shop in the App Store, and we should thank them for doing that.