12 ms·

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..

by 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.
  - roopepal 3y ago
    SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit). You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine. And writing your UI in code indeed easily solves the whole versioning conflicts issue that storyboards have. So no, not a big argument for SwiftUI, but instead for writing UIs in code. SwiftUI vs. UIKit and IB vs. code are two entirely separate discussions. But yes, I totally agree, if you must use storyboards, keep them as small as possible.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit). Unless I've missed something, by doing the latter it automatically also does the former? > You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine. Eh, perhaps the examples I've worked with of that were especially egregious (it's certainly possible given some of the other things very very wrong with that code), but my experience of such a codebase was very much not fine.
      - watchblob 3y ago
        I have worked with lots of codebases using UIKit constraints in code. These were non-trivial apps (200k lines of code). You can create wrappers of your own to simplify things or use libraries like Snapkit. It works and there's no need to use Storyboards.
        ben_w 3y ago
        The bad codebase I'm thinking of was 120 kloc. But I'll take your word for it being possible to do better than that example, one example is merely an anecdote.
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        I think they want to make the distinction that SwiftUI is not necessarily to replace Storyboards, although it will replace them. UIKit works okay in code. But unless you have experienced people actively laying groundwork, it's IMO more likely to be a mess than SwiftUI. Even the explicitly declarative part, Autolayout, will only be understood by like 10% of the team and the rest are kinda winging it. Using Autolayout outside of Storyboards makes it less declarative, so it is then more conducive to programmer error (like non-idempotent updates).
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Do everything programmatically. Especially because the XML is not (last I checked) compile-time validated against the symbols it is using.
jacquesm 3y ago
Sorry but I can't find much sympathy for anything Amazon related when comparing with Apple. In my book they're both predatory.
- elcomet 3y ago
  This doesn't affect only Amazon, it affects also all smaller online book stores
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Well all the same things would apply to any independent ebook store, it would just hurt them massively more than it does Amazon..
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Perhaps the stance to take is that it was bad for consumers in the long-term, because monopolies aren't a good thing.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  They are not sports teams. We should be rooting for better outcomes for consumers. Not picking between which megacorp is less bad.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    >We should be rooting for better outcomes for consumers. Not picking between which megacorp is less bad. I will argue that pointing out the hypocrisy of a megacorp complaining about the anti-competitive behaviour of another magacorp, when it engages in the same type of behaviour but at a much bigger scale, is a pro-consumer move.
bsjaux628 3y ago
That sounds a lot like price fixing and the same thing that Amazon is being grilled on with FBA
torginus 3y ago
Weird, this sounds super illegal, and anti-competitive, considering Apple has its own competing bookstore that's not subject to these fees.
- nevir 3y ago
  The US courts thought so, too. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450-million-settlement-e-book-price-fixing-supreme-court https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    So Amazon won (and consumers lost), where we could have had Apple win (and consumers lose). There was little to cheer about whatever happened.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    That fine of 0.016% of their market cap will really show them!
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  In retrospect, yes, the consequences of what happened are now very obvious, but at the time, whilst there were a fair number of people sounding the alarm across the blogosphere, most people didn't care because the iPad was a hit, and the Apple reality distortion field was at its peak of effectiveness.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    The situation is farcical and feeling sad for Apple or Amazon shouldn’t happen. Consumers lost whatever the outcome.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Completely agreed.
ruddct 3y ago
Don’t forget the kicker, that IAP at the time was unable to support more than a few thousand SKUs! And (iirc) that pricing, naming, etc for everything would’ve needed to be done through their atrocious web app. Not exactly doable for the ‘everything store’.
- nevir 3y ago
  Oh, lol, I totally forgot about those technical limitations! We couldn't even have done it if we wanted to. Also hi :) long time!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
slimsag 3y ago
This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year. So $MEGACORP abuses their absolute monopolistic position in the market to underhandedly negotiate with book publishers and force their hand into working the way $MEGACORP wants: in order to gain access to $MEGACORPs completely dominated (but technically not a monopoly*) audience who wishes to buy books in a convenient way online, book publishers must bow down to $MEGACORP and pay the tax. Meanwhile, everyone else who sells books through alternative avenues is decimated because the audience only wants to buy books through $MEGACORP. And you can replace $MEGACORP with both 'Apple' and 'Amazon', and it is 100% factually accurate. Beautiful. It's fucking turtles eating turtles all the way down.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year. ‘Funniest thing in a fortnight’ sounds less impressive. You’re comment is actually funny, the OPs just makes one sad and frustrated.
- dsign 3y ago
  This must be f*cking really hard with our culture. I for once can say that I have been reading less because Amazon's recommendation algorithm keeps throwing at me books with trendy covers that make me cringe. And same with the blurbs. Sometimes, if I manage to go over my cringe reaction to those two things, the book under it is actually good. Therefore, I get a feeling authors and publishers feel they need to imitate the crowd and make the book look childish from the outside, in order to mollify The Algorithm.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    Have you tried storygraph?
- fallingknife 3y ago
  It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel. The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.
rickdeckard 3y ago
The missing part is that Apple's maneuver was to effectively destroy the wholesale model in favor of an agency-model, and orchestrate all major publishers to charge more for ebooks just so they can earn their 30% commission from it. Apple actively engaged as facilitator to help publishers raise prices on the whole market, for a 30% cut. The result was that books previously available for $9.99 were suddenly sold for $12.99 [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fixed-ebook-prices-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fix...
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  To highlight the untold level of harm Apple caused, I now realise this event stopped me reading for years. I loved ebooks and my reading went way up. They were cheaper than paperbacks and cheap enough that I was making curiosity and impulse purchases. The problem with digital sales is that unlike a bookshop, I could not browse and take a book from the shelf and start reading and get hooked. Once ebooks suddenly jumped in price and absurdly became more expensive than paperbacks, I was done, and didn't buy a book for years. You might try and argue this was irrational, but when I feel I am being scammed, my wallet stays in my pocket. I will indeed cut off my nose to spite an asshole.
  - clankyclanker 3y ago
    Agreed, I only picked up reading again after finding Libby. (A short story about how cheating the user with exorbitant prices results in the exit of your audience.)
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    Jobs was deeply cynical about ebooks, claiming early on that Kindle would fail because “people don’t read anymore”[0]. There’s some level of irony in the fact that the most successful product from the guy who wanted to build a “bicycle of the mind”[1] ended up being something more like the floating chairs in Wall E. 0 - https://www.wired.com/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/ https://www.wired.com/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/ 1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8
amelius 3y ago
Again, if you're against government regulation, then you haven't seen a company regulate a market.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fenomas 3y ago
Another random app store anecdote: way back when (2010?) Adobe made a feature where you could publish flash content as an iOS app. Like you build a flash game, hit publish, and an .ipa file comes out. So the feature goes into open beta, and a bunch of flash devs make iPhone apps, they work fine, they get accepted into the app store, users are using them, everybody's happy. Then a few days before the feature was scheduled to leave beta and be formally supported, Apple changed the app store terms to disallow it, by requiring that apps be "originally written" in certain languages like objective-C or C++. Nothing to do with what the app did or how it worked, and no definition for what "originally written" specifically meant. And there were lots of other technologies for building apps by then, so of course they all freaked (though AFAIK Apple never actually enforced the new terms for anything besides flash). Anyway shortly afterward Adobe reverted the app-publishing feature, and then a few months later Apple quietly reverted the terms to what they were before.
- toyg 3y ago
  Apple is very much a subscriber to the Darth Vader School of Business: "I'm altering the deal; pray that I don't alter it any further."
  - mdhb 3y ago
    You would think that as the web platform is starting to pick up things like WASM and many new capabilities that there are an extremely large set of apps all of a sudden where you would be insane to think about - writing it in a different language that only really runs on one operating system - pay $99/yr for the privilege - at any point and for any reason you can be cut off from reaching your audience - you have to pay them 30% of your revenue (not profit) for any money your application makes - you can’t make updates in a timely manner - you have close to zero avenues of recourse if you disagree with any of this - the deal can change at any time and you don’t get a say in it. Why the fuck would anyone choose that option in 2024 if they didn’t have to? It’s no wonder Apple went out of their way to try and cripple the web for over a decade now, it was only legal action from the EU that forced them to staff Safari properly about two years ago. And even now, they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus. That’s a hostage taking business. Get out of that ecosystem if you can
d4rti 3y ago
KDP from Amazon will always take a 30% or greater cut. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210
honeybadger1 3y ago
Honestly this is the only thread of comments that really get to the meat and potatoes of why Apple can be evil although while making good product. Their evil must be curbed as they go out of their way with certain actions to completely punish their customers and partners.
macspoofing 3y ago
>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 That's also what Amazon does, except with everything. It's terrible what Apple is doing, but is peanuts compared to what Amazon does.
nvarsj 3y ago
Apples behaviour vis a vis the App Store is the textbook definition of monopolistic practices. It’s beyond the pale these stories. The only reason I can think it continues is because there are a lot of AAPL holders in Congress.

by nevir 3y ago

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.
- roopepal 3y ago
  SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit). You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine. And writing your UI in code indeed easily solves the whole versioning conflicts issue that storyboards have. So no, not a big argument for SwiftUI, but instead for writing UIs in code. SwiftUI vs. UIKit and IB vs. code are two entirely separate discussions. But yes, I totally agree, if you must use storyboards, keep them as small as possible.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit). Unless I've missed something, by doing the latter it automatically also does the former? > You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine. Eh, perhaps the examples I've worked with of that were especially egregious (it's certainly possible given some of the other things very very wrong with that code), but my experience of such a codebase was very much not fine.
    - watchblob 3y ago
      I have worked with lots of codebases using UIKit constraints in code. These were non-trivial apps (200k lines of code). You can create wrappers of your own to simplify things or use libraries like Snapkit. It works and there's no need to use Storyboards.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        The bad codebase I'm thinking of was 120 kloc. But I'll take your word for it being possible to do better than that example, one example is merely an anecdote.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      I think they want to make the distinction that SwiftUI is not necessarily to replace Storyboards, although it will replace them. UIKit works okay in code. But unless you have experienced people actively laying groundwork, it's IMO more likely to be a mess than SwiftUI. Even the explicitly declarative part, Autolayout, will only be understood by like 10% of the team and the rest are kinda winging it. Using Autolayout outside of Storyboards makes it less declarative, so it is then more conducive to programmer error (like non-idempotent updates).
plagiarist 3y ago
Do everything programmatically. Especially because the XML is not (last I checked) compile-time validated against the symbols it is using.

jacquesm 3y ago

Sorry but I can't find much sympathy for anything Amazon related when comparing with Apple. In my book they're both predatory.

elcomet 3y ago
This doesn't affect only Amazon, it affects also all smaller online book stores
ffgjgf1 3y ago
Well all the same things would apply to any independent ebook store, it would just hurt them massively more than it does Amazon..
hammyhavoc 3y ago
Perhaps the stance to take is that it was bad for consumers in the long-term, because monopolies aren't a good thing.
jimbokun 3y ago
They are not sports teams. We should be rooting for better outcomes for consumers. Not picking between which megacorp is less bad.
- macspoofing 3y ago
  >We should be rooting for better outcomes for consumers. Not picking between which megacorp is less bad. I will argue that pointing out the hypocrisy of a megacorp complaining about the anti-competitive behaviour of another magacorp, when it engages in the same type of behaviour but at a much bigger scale, is a pro-consumer move.

bsjaux628 3y ago

That sounds a lot like price fixing and the same thing that Amazon is being grilled on with FBA

torginus 3y ago

Weird, this sounds super illegal, and anti-competitive, considering Apple has its own competing bookstore that's not subject to these fees.

nevir 3y ago
The US courts thought so, too. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450-million-settlement-e-book-price-fixing-supreme-court https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...
- lostlogin 3y ago
  So Amazon won (and consumers lost), where we could have had Apple win (and consumers lose). There was little to cheer about whatever happened.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  That fine of 0.016% of their market cap will really show them!
hammyhavoc 3y ago
In retrospect, yes, the consequences of what happened are now very obvious, but at the time, whilst there were a fair number of people sounding the alarm across the blogosphere, most people didn't care because the iPad was a hit, and the Apple reality distortion field was at its peak of effectiveness.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  The situation is farcical and feeling sad for Apple or Amazon shouldn’t happen. Consumers lost whatever the outcome.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Completely agreed.

ruddct 3y ago

Don’t forget the kicker, that IAP at the time was unable to support more than a few thousand SKUs! And (iirc) that pricing, naming, etc for everything would’ve needed to be done through their atrocious web app. Not exactly doable for the ‘everything store’.

nevir 3y ago
Oh, lol, I totally forgot about those technical limitations! We couldn't even have done it if we wanted to. Also hi :) long time!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

slimsag 3y ago

This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year. So $MEGACORP abuses their absolute monopolistic position in the market to underhandedly negotiate with book publishers and force their hand into working the way $MEGACORP wants: in order to gain access to $MEGACORPs completely dominated (but technically not a monopoly*) audience who wishes to buy books in a convenient way online, book publishers must bow down to $MEGACORP and pay the tax. Meanwhile, everyone else who sells books through alternative avenues is decimated because the audience only wants to buy books through $MEGACORP. And you can replace $MEGACORP with both 'Apple' and 'Amazon', and it is 100% factually accurate. Beautiful. It's fucking turtles eating turtles all the way down.

lostlogin 3y ago
> This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year. ‘Funniest thing in a fortnight’ sounds less impressive. You’re comment is actually funny, the OPs just makes one sad and frustrated.
dsign 3y ago
This must be f*cking really hard with our culture. I for once can say that I have been reading less because Amazon's recommendation algorithm keeps throwing at me books with trendy covers that make me cringe. And same with the blurbs. Sometimes, if I manage to go over my cringe reaction to those two things, the book under it is actually good. Therefore, I get a feeling authors and publishers feel they need to imitate the crowd and make the book look childish from the outside, in order to mollify The Algorithm.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  Have you tried storygraph?
fallingknife 3y ago
It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel. The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

rickdeckard 3y ago

The missing part is that Apple's maneuver was to effectively destroy the wholesale model in favor of an agency-model, and orchestrate all major publishers to charge more for ebooks just so they can earn their 30% commission from it. Apple actively engaged as facilitator to help publishers raise prices on the whole market, for a 30% cut. The result was that books previously available for $9.99 were suddenly sold for $12.99 [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fixed-ebook-prices-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fix...

Fluorescence 3y ago
To highlight the untold level of harm Apple caused, I now realise this event stopped me reading for years. I loved ebooks and my reading went way up. They were cheaper than paperbacks and cheap enough that I was making curiosity and impulse purchases. The problem with digital sales is that unlike a bookshop, I could not browse and take a book from the shelf and start reading and get hooked. Once ebooks suddenly jumped in price and absurdly became more expensive than paperbacks, I was done, and didn't buy a book for years. You might try and argue this was irrational, but when I feel I am being scammed, my wallet stays in my pocket. I will indeed cut off my nose to spite an asshole.
- clankyclanker 3y ago
  Agreed, I only picked up reading again after finding Libby. (A short story about how cheating the user with exorbitant prices results in the exit of your audience.)
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  Jobs was deeply cynical about ebooks, claiming early on that Kindle would fail because “people don’t read anymore”[0]. There’s some level of irony in the fact that the most successful product from the guy who wanted to build a “bicycle of the mind”[1] ended up being something more like the floating chairs in Wall E. 0 - https://www.wired.com/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/ https://www.wired.com/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/ 1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8

amelius 3y ago

Again, if you're against government regulation, then you haven't seen a company regulate a market.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fenomas 3y ago

Another random app store anecdote: way back when (2010?) Adobe made a feature where you could publish flash content as an iOS app. Like you build a flash game, hit publish, and an .ipa file comes out. So the feature goes into open beta, and a bunch of flash devs make iPhone apps, they work fine, they get accepted into the app store, users are using them, everybody's happy. Then a few days before the feature was scheduled to leave beta and be formally supported, Apple changed the app store terms to disallow it, by requiring that apps be "originally written" in certain languages like objective-C or C++. Nothing to do with what the app did or how it worked, and no definition for what "originally written" specifically meant. And there were lots of other technologies for building apps by then, so of course they all freaked (though AFAIK Apple never actually enforced the new terms for anything besides flash). Anyway shortly afterward Adobe reverted the app-publishing feature, and then a few months later Apple quietly reverted the terms to what they were before.

toyg 3y ago
Apple is very much a subscriber to the Darth Vader School of Business: "I'm altering the deal; pray that I don't alter it any further."
- mdhb 3y ago
  You would think that as the web platform is starting to pick up things like WASM and many new capabilities that there are an extremely large set of apps all of a sudden where you would be insane to think about - writing it in a different language that only really runs on one operating system - pay $99/yr for the privilege - at any point and for any reason you can be cut off from reaching your audience - you have to pay them 30% of your revenue (not profit) for any money your application makes - you can’t make updates in a timely manner - you have close to zero avenues of recourse if you disagree with any of this - the deal can change at any time and you don’t get a say in it. Why the fuck would anyone choose that option in 2024 if they didn’t have to? It’s no wonder Apple went out of their way to try and cripple the web for over a decade now, it was only legal action from the EU that forced them to staff Safari properly about two years ago. And even now, they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus. That’s a hostage taking business. Get out of that ecosystem if you can

d4rti 3y ago

KDP from Amazon will always take a 30% or greater cut. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210

honeybadger1 3y ago

Honestly this is the only thread of comments that really get to the meat and potatoes of why Apple can be evil although while making good product. Their evil must be curbed as they go out of their way with certain actions to completely punish their customers and partners.

macspoofing 3y ago

>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 That's also what Amazon does, except with everything. It's terrible what Apple is doing, but is peanuts compared to what Amazon does.

nvarsj 3y ago

Apples behaviour vis a vis the App Store is the textbook definition of monopolistic practices. It’s beyond the pale these stories. The only reason I can think it continues is because there are a lot of AAPL holders in Congress.