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The economy primarily exists to benefit the consumers, not the producers. With that in mind, I should be able to run any operating system on an iPhone I bought.

The economy primarily exists to benefit the consumers, not the producers. With that in mind, I should be able to run any operating system on an iPhone I bought. Apple should not be required to actively support this, put in extra work to document things or whatnot, but they should not be allowed to actively make things harder. If I got an iOS license, I should be able to install and run any application and be able to get it from where ever I want. If I use the App Store to distribute apps, then Apple should charge a reasonable amount reflecting the cost of distributing that app. If I use their payment services, then they should charge a reasonable amount reflecting the cost of that service.

paulddraper 3y ago
Is 30% reasonable?
- tstrimple 3y ago
  They are the terms the developers on the platform agreed to.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    That is the correct answer to a different question
- cesarvarela 3y ago
  Would the iPhone be as successful if it wasn't reasonable?
  - danbruc 3y ago
    There are always two limits, what producing something costs and how much people value the thing and are therefore willing to pay for it. The actual prize must be somewhere in that range. A thing is a success because the prize is less than what people are willing to pay but they might still be overpaying if a lack of competition does not drive the prize down towards the costs of production.
  - novagameco 3y ago
    Well the iPhone is a worse device than a flagship android already, so I think it would still remain popular because of the fashion aspect of being an apple user
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Worse by some arbitrary metric that supports your point of view.
      - novagameco 3y ago
        You can easily sideload apps on android with only one setting change. This alone makes Android better than iPhone
        incrudible 3y ago
        I'm aware of that and yet I find iPhone to be the better platform. Now what?
    - Bud 3y ago
      [dead]
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    That seems like a false dichotomy. Anyway, it's unprovable either true or false, because no evidence exists. Let's just assert that it's false, then. Let's say 30% is unreasonable, and that iPhones would be as successful even with yet more unreasonable developer fees.
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Would the iPhone be as successful if it took a 99% cut and nobody would bother developing paid apps for it? Probably not. Whether 30% is the sweet spot is unclear, but given that there is plenty of paid apps on the platform, why would it be unreasonable?
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        Minimum wage is unreasonable IMO and plenty of people will work for that amount.
- danbruc 3y ago
  The cost of distributing an app is not tied to its price, it probably mostly depends on things like size and so should be a reasonable prize.
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  I remember that when it was first announced it was big news they were only charging 30%. I was a mobile app developer at the time and before the App Store the usual way for people to buy games on their phones was by sending an SMS to a shortcode. You would then get a reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS) with the download link. The telco’s would usually take around a 50% commission on that SMS. 50% of your revenue, for delivering up to 140 bytes to a phone. Note that delivering a message was the only thing they did. You had to write the code to handle the incoming SMS message and send the reply. You had to host this service and serve the downloads (meaning you had to also pay for hosting and bandwidth). You also had to set this up for every single country you want to offer it in. None of this was discoverable, so you had to advertise your game/app as well. Also, the development tools were absolute shit (and you had to pay for those as well). In comes Apple, who lets you keep 70%, provides excellent dev tools (I know it’s trendy to hate on Xcode, but even early versions of Xcode were heaven compared to the absolute shit show we had to deal with before). They host the app, they make it discoverable in their app store, they handle payments and make it all available worldwide. So yeah, I’d say it was more than reasonable. Is it still reasonable in today’s market? Hard to say.
  - turquoisevar 3y ago
    Reading your comment brings back memories and old knowledge hidden away in deep memory. This might be due to a slightly different era and/or market, but I recall in the WAP and i-mode era, 50/50 would’ve been amazing. More often than not, you’d be lucky if you got 30%, and you’d brag if you’d get 40%. In most cases, you’d be left with a measly 10%, and none of it included payment processing, which ate up a few percent more. The worst part wasn’t the revenue split, though believe it or not, it was negotiating with multiple carriers over every little thing, and it could take months to get things going. Discoverability was a bit better in this era than what you describe because carriers would have a little directory in which they listed apps. Of course, being listed in this directory, especially in a helpful way, would eat up more of your revenue share. Carriers were also acting in a dirty way. If something was wrong and a customer complained, they’d charge you a refund but wouldn’t pass it along to the customer. Essentially, telling the customer they’re SOOL while telling the developer to pay up because their app didn’t work and then pocket that money. The barrier to entry was also high and costly. Developer tools were shit, as you said, and the pipeline from development to sales was nearly non-existent. So yeah, of course, in comparison, Apple was some kind of utopia, not despite the 30% but because of it, not to mention how hassle-free it is and, like you said, the excellent tools provided. I genuinely like Xcode despite the hate it gets, and I’d say that it’s been significantly improved over the last decade or so. Similarly, the improvements and development of frameworks in the last couple of years are tremendous. I’d say all of it is well worth the 30%, but at the 15% I’m at now, it’s close to a steal. Without exaggeration, the latest developments in frameworks really make my life easier, and some of what I do wouldn’t even be possible without it. The framing around the commission is starting to irk me the wrong way. In part because these big developers such as Epic, Spotify, and the like claim to speak for me, to make it look like they fight for “the little guy” and drum up support when they plainly don’t. Their interests and mine are miles apart and only marginally overlap and, in some cases, contradict each other. In part, it is also because the effective rate for most developers is 15%, regardless of Apple’s motivations behind that discounted rate. 15% in exchange for the low barrier of entry and the solid tools that allow you to spin up an app and publish it on the App Store within a day or two is a pretty solid deal, in my opinion.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I think 30% is reasonable in a vacuum. But as a TLDR for a long winded rant: I don't care what a distributor takes as long as I have other options (even if it's economically inefficient. That just proves their rate is the best option) . And IOS gave none until this crumb of an olive branch popped up. But what's happening is that this 30% is more or less a lock-in cost for the only official way to do business on IOS. And before this ruling, you weren't even allowed to mention in the app that consumers can also pay on your website. And now we come to this article saying "okay, you can show your website were still going to charge you 90% of our rate despite handling none of those transactions". And that's where things get really dicey. With this new perspective, the question shifts to "is apple's 27% for distribution (minus payment processing) reasonable?" and I'm less sure. Especially when Apple can throw out my app for any reason whatsoever. To use android for comparison, I can throw an APK up to download with relatively minimal effort, with zero regards for Google's rules and I owe Google 0% of my revenue. They still take 30% for using Google play as distribution. But it's nice knowing I could theoretically host it elsewhere if I don't agree with Google's pricing (minus some bribing issues Google is currently being taken to court for). There's none of that for Apple. Firefox is just a Safari skin because Apple says so. Emulator apps are in flux based on Apple's whims. Your app may be taken down for nudity as Apple profits millions from a few dozen games that barely try to hide it.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    > I don't care what a distributor takes as long as I have other options > this 30% is more or less a lock-in cost for the only official way to do business on IOS As an app developer you're pretty much "screwed" TBH. You don't have a choice as to what platform your users choose (as long as you want to be in the market). Let's say Apple allows sideloading, but it is somewhat tedious and most users choose to stick to the official App Store -- then you're back to where you were, because you still want to sell your app/services to the users who stick to the official app store, and presumably your app is not so essential that users will actively switch if you dropped support for the official App Store. If as an app developer you could influence the platform your users choose, then you would have asked them to move to Android and directly download your APK already, instead of bickering with the App Store (or even Google play store). The fact that you aren't proves that you're still at mercy to your users decisions, and whether they decide installing your app via sideloading is worth the trouble. I'm not trying to denigrate you, but I suspect you might have unrealistically rosy expectations of the world where Apple is forced to allow sideloading.
- LeonB 3y ago
  It’s unlikely that 30% is reasonable. In the absence of a competitive market we don’t know whether 30% is reasonable but it’s unreasonable (or naive) to suspect that a closed system has hit on an efficient fee structure, from the end users point of view. More broadly — a competitive market would allow innovation on many many variables, not just different rent-taking numbers.
- jkestner 3y ago
  A good way to find out would be to let the market choose from other app stores.
Someone 3y ago
As a hacker, I want those, too, but I’m not 100% sure I want that as a developer or user. It also has disadvantages. Part of what Apple sell app developers is that piracy is hard on the App Store. It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible. A cloned or patched iOS that allowed users to install anything could change that by no longer checking app signatures.
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  TBH as an app developer myself I'd far prefer an option to publish and make transactions outside of Apple's purview than any kind of concern about piracy or meddling.
- throw10920 3y ago
  > It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible. This would be just as impossible in a well-designed version of iOS that allowed arbitrary app installation - iOS could do client-side attestation, and app developers could choose to prevent users from playing online matches with app versions that aren't attested by Apple (or a hypothetical Steam for iOS, for instance).
  - tpmoney 3y ago
    And yet, desktop anti-cheat is a continual cat and mouse game more than any iOS anti-cheat conflict I've seen. One can argue that macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose, but at that point you'd have to start distinguishing what features are missing from those OSes that would be present in this hypothetical iOS version that isn't highly dependent on the degree to which Apple tightly controls the ability to install software on your device.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      Anyone remotely familiar with operating system design can tell you that desktop and mobile operating systems have massive differences with respect to security. "macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose" is exactly the case.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aurareturn 3y ago
With that in mind, I should be able to run any operating system on an iPhone I bought. Apple should not be required to actively support this, put in extra work to document things or whatnot, but they should not be allowed to actively make things harder. I should be able to run any OS on my Samsung TV that I bought. Samsung should support it with an SDK. They should provide warranty and support for me if the OS I chose to install destroyed the screen. Do you see how silly the above statement is?
- danbruc 3y ago
  No, I don't. I specifically said that they should not be required to actively support this, write and publish documentation or even provide a SDK. And I said nothing about providing warranty, replacing the operating system could just void the warranty. Again, I did not ask for active support, I asked for no active blocking, i.e. putting in extra work to block something that would naturally be possible.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    Ok, I read it wrong. But I still disagree. Why does Apple have to allow a different OS to run on their hardware? That's absurd. I don't demand that my refrigerator let me run my own software if I want to - nor do I demand that of my headphones, car, microwave, etc.

paulddraper 3y ago

Is 30% reasonable?

tstrimple 3y ago
They are the terms the developers on the platform agreed to.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  That is the correct answer to a different question
cesarvarela 3y ago
Would the iPhone be as successful if it wasn't reasonable?
- danbruc 3y ago
  There are always two limits, what producing something costs and how much people value the thing and are therefore willing to pay for it. The actual prize must be somewhere in that range. A thing is a success because the prize is less than what people are willing to pay but they might still be overpaying if a lack of competition does not drive the prize down towards the costs of production.
- novagameco 3y ago
  Well the iPhone is a worse device than a flagship android already, so I think it would still remain popular because of the fashion aspect of being an apple user
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Worse by some arbitrary metric that supports your point of view.
    - novagameco 3y ago
      You can easily sideload apps on android with only one setting change. This alone makes Android better than iPhone
      - incrudible 3y ago
        I'm aware of that and yet I find iPhone to be the better platform. Now what?
  - Bud 3y ago
    [dead]
- plagiarist 3y ago
  That seems like a false dichotomy. Anyway, it's unprovable either true or false, because no evidence exists. Let's just assert that it's false, then. Let's say 30% is unreasonable, and that iPhones would be as successful even with yet more unreasonable developer fees.
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Would the iPhone be as successful if it took a 99% cut and nobody would bother developing paid apps for it? Probably not. Whether 30% is the sweet spot is unclear, but given that there is plenty of paid apps on the platform, why would it be unreasonable?
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Minimum wage is unreasonable IMO and plenty of people will work for that amount.
danbruc 3y ago
The cost of distributing an app is not tied to its price, it probably mostly depends on things like size and so should be a reasonable prize.
Aaargh20318 3y ago
I remember that when it was first announced it was big news they were only charging 30%. I was a mobile app developer at the time and before the App Store the usual way for people to buy games on their phones was by sending an SMS to a shortcode. You would then get a reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS) with the download link. The telco’s would usually take around a 50% commission on that SMS. 50% of your revenue, for delivering up to 140 bytes to a phone. Note that delivering a message was the only thing they did. You had to write the code to handle the incoming SMS message and send the reply. You had to host this service and serve the downloads (meaning you had to also pay for hosting and bandwidth). You also had to set this up for every single country you want to offer it in. None of this was discoverable, so you had to advertise your game/app as well. Also, the development tools were absolute shit (and you had to pay for those as well). In comes Apple, who lets you keep 70%, provides excellent dev tools (I know it’s trendy to hate on Xcode, but even early versions of Xcode were heaven compared to the absolute shit show we had to deal with before). They host the app, they make it discoverable in their app store, they handle payments and make it all available worldwide. So yeah, I’d say it was more than reasonable. Is it still reasonable in today’s market? Hard to say.
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  Reading your comment brings back memories and old knowledge hidden away in deep memory. This might be due to a slightly different era and/or market, but I recall in the WAP and i-mode era, 50/50 would’ve been amazing. More often than not, you’d be lucky if you got 30%, and you’d brag if you’d get 40%. In most cases, you’d be left with a measly 10%, and none of it included payment processing, which ate up a few percent more. The worst part wasn’t the revenue split, though believe it or not, it was negotiating with multiple carriers over every little thing, and it could take months to get things going. Discoverability was a bit better in this era than what you describe because carriers would have a little directory in which they listed apps. Of course, being listed in this directory, especially in a helpful way, would eat up more of your revenue share. Carriers were also acting in a dirty way. If something was wrong and a customer complained, they’d charge you a refund but wouldn’t pass it along to the customer. Essentially, telling the customer they’re SOOL while telling the developer to pay up because their app didn’t work and then pocket that money. The barrier to entry was also high and costly. Developer tools were shit, as you said, and the pipeline from development to sales was nearly non-existent. So yeah, of course, in comparison, Apple was some kind of utopia, not despite the 30% but because of it, not to mention how hassle-free it is and, like you said, the excellent tools provided. I genuinely like Xcode despite the hate it gets, and I’d say that it’s been significantly improved over the last decade or so. Similarly, the improvements and development of frameworks in the last couple of years are tremendous. I’d say all of it is well worth the 30%, but at the 15% I’m at now, it’s close to a steal. Without exaggeration, the latest developments in frameworks really make my life easier, and some of what I do wouldn’t even be possible without it. The framing around the commission is starting to irk me the wrong way. In part because these big developers such as Epic, Spotify, and the like claim to speak for me, to make it look like they fight for “the little guy” and drum up support when they plainly don’t. Their interests and mine are miles apart and only marginally overlap and, in some cases, contradict each other. In part, it is also because the effective rate for most developers is 15%, regardless of Apple’s motivations behind that discounted rate. 15% in exchange for the low barrier of entry and the solid tools that allow you to spin up an app and publish it on the App Store within a day or two is a pretty solid deal, in my opinion.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I think 30% is reasonable in a vacuum. But as a TLDR for a long winded rant: I don't care what a distributor takes as long as I have other options (even if it's economically inefficient. That just proves their rate is the best option) . And IOS gave none until this crumb of an olive branch popped up. But what's happening is that this 30% is more or less a lock-in cost for the only official way to do business on IOS. And before this ruling, you weren't even allowed to mention in the app that consumers can also pay on your website. And now we come to this article saying "okay, you can show your website were still going to charge you 90% of our rate despite handling none of those transactions". And that's where things get really dicey. With this new perspective, the question shifts to "is apple's 27% for distribution (minus payment processing) reasonable?" and I'm less sure. Especially when Apple can throw out my app for any reason whatsoever. To use android for comparison, I can throw an APK up to download with relatively minimal effort, with zero regards for Google's rules and I owe Google 0% of my revenue. They still take 30% for using Google play as distribution. But it's nice knowing I could theoretically host it elsewhere if I don't agree with Google's pricing (minus some bribing issues Google is currently being taken to court for). There's none of that for Apple. Firefox is just a Safari skin because Apple says so. Emulator apps are in flux based on Apple's whims. Your app may be taken down for nudity as Apple profits millions from a few dozen games that barely try to hide it.
- hnfong 3y ago
  > I don't care what a distributor takes as long as I have other options > this 30% is more or less a lock-in cost for the only official way to do business on IOS As an app developer you're pretty much "screwed" TBH. You don't have a choice as to what platform your users choose (as long as you want to be in the market). Let's say Apple allows sideloading, but it is somewhat tedious and most users choose to stick to the official App Store -- then you're back to where you were, because you still want to sell your app/services to the users who stick to the official app store, and presumably your app is not so essential that users will actively switch if you dropped support for the official App Store. If as an app developer you could influence the platform your users choose, then you would have asked them to move to Android and directly download your APK already, instead of bickering with the App Store (or even Google play store). The fact that you aren't proves that you're still at mercy to your users decisions, and whether they decide installing your app via sideloading is worth the trouble. I'm not trying to denigrate you, but I suspect you might have unrealistically rosy expectations of the world where Apple is forced to allow sideloading.
LeonB 3y ago
It’s unlikely that 30% is reasonable. In the absence of a competitive market we don’t know whether 30% is reasonable but it’s unreasonable (or naive) to suspect that a closed system has hit on an efficient fee structure, from the end users point of view. More broadly — a competitive market would allow innovation on many many variables, not just different rent-taking numbers.
jkestner 3y ago
A good way to find out would be to let the market choose from other app stores.

Someone 3y ago

As a hacker, I want those, too, but I’m not 100% sure I want that as a developer or user. It also has disadvantages. Part of what Apple sell app developers is that piracy is hard on the App Store. It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible. A cloned or patched iOS that allowed users to install anything could change that by no longer checking app signatures.

JeffSnazz 3y ago
TBH as an app developer myself I'd far prefer an option to publish and make transactions outside of Apple's purview than any kind of concern about piracy or meddling.
throw10920 3y ago
> It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible. This would be just as impossible in a well-designed version of iOS that allowed arbitrary app installation - iOS could do client-side attestation, and app developers could choose to prevent users from playing online matches with app versions that aren't attested by Apple (or a hypothetical Steam for iOS, for instance).
- tpmoney 3y ago
  And yet, desktop anti-cheat is a continual cat and mouse game more than any iOS anti-cheat conflict I've seen. One can argue that macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose, but at that point you'd have to start distinguishing what features are missing from those OSes that would be present in this hypothetical iOS version that isn't highly dependent on the degree to which Apple tightly controls the ability to install software on your device.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    Anyone remotely familiar with operating system design can tell you that desktop and mobile operating systems have massive differences with respect to security. "macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose" is exactly the case.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aurareturn 3y ago

With that in mind, I should be able to run any operating system on an iPhone I bought. Apple should not be required to actively support this, put in extra work to document things or whatnot, but they should not be allowed to actively make things harder. I should be able to run any OS on my Samsung TV that I bought. Samsung should support it with an SDK. They should provide warranty and support for me if the OS I chose to install destroyed the screen. Do you see how silly the above statement is?

danbruc 3y ago
No, I don't. I specifically said that they should not be required to actively support this, write and publish documentation or even provide a SDK. And I said nothing about providing warranty, replacing the operating system could just void the warranty. Again, I did not ask for active support, I asked for no active blocking, i.e. putting in extra work to block something that would naturally be possible.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  Ok, I read it wrong. But I still disagree. Why does Apple have to allow a different OS to run on their hardware? That's absurd. I don't demand that my refrigerator let me run my own software if I want to - nor do I demand that of my headphones, car, microwave, etc.