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> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to. This is just such a radically differe

> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to. This is just such a radically different way thinking about platforms than the way that I think about them. It's like saying that I owe Facebook for the privilege of talking to my college friends because "they're not my friends, they're Facebook's users and I've been given access to them." It's hard for me to debate something like this because it's just so fundamentally incompatible with my basic axioms about how interactions work online. The idea that platforms own their users is just not how I see the world. > It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_. If every single developer jumped ship off of iOS, iOS would stop existing. We only have to look at Windows Phone to understand what the difference is between a platform with developer support and a platform without developer support. The reality is that Apple and developers have a mutually beneficial relationship and they are more like partners than customers. If Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, etc all stopped working on iOS, iOS users would jump to Android. Heck, look at the most recent Vision Pro launch, in which I saw users complaining that Apple even gave iPad developers the choice at all of whether or not their apps would be supported on the new device. The users want the apps. So this is something that users care about, and users pay Apple handsomely for the privilege of accessing developers on iOS. That doesn't mean developers should pay literally nothing, but this is a relationship. The argument that developers are just customers always strikes me as vaguely Comcast-y -- saying that Net Neutrality is unfair and that websites are leeches if they don't pay for network access. No, your customers are there because of us. Customers are paying for access to a service that allows them to access the stuff that they actually care about -- apps, movies, books, the ability to talk to their friends, the ability to transact online, the ability to browse websites. And this gets back to the disagreement on axioms above, but to treat those customers primarily as if they're just resources to be locked down and resold for even more profit -- I just don't think it's a healthy place for a platform to be in. > It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air Funnily enough, iOS launched without an app store entirely on the promise of using web apps for all of its functionality. We weren't using the term PWA back then, but it's notable how different iOS's approach to application development is today than what it was when iOS launched. And notable for Apple's continued direction as the company appears to be actively reducing PWA functionality in Europe in response to increased browser access. What we have on the web is effectively what Apple hates -- a completely Open, device-agnostic ecosystem of apps that is much more difficult for any one company to lock down or extract rent from. But Apple didn't always hate that principle, when iOS originally launched they were all for it; and in fact Apple looked at the web as a key strategy in differentiating their devices -- by offering developers a way to target their devices without development kits, exhaustive agreements, or commissions. Over time that became less valuable to Apple, and it became increasingly important for Apple to distinguish between web capabilities and native capabilities. Is that change fair, are they entitled to do it? I don't know, but it's not the direction I want the computing industry to go. How we deal with Apple's increasingly hostile approach to Open Standards, user freedoms, and market competition is an open question, but it seems clear to me that we should be trying to deal with it at the point where Apple is threatening to go backwards on web standards in response to regulation that opens them up to browser and ecosystem competition.

menacingly 3y ago
(I honestly wish I could so clearly order my thoughts in writing like you have done here) That it is mutually beneficial is sort of my point. If every developer jumped ship, iOS would be in trouble. But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. So I'm not the only one viewing the platform users as an asset. So is everyone clamoring to reach them. It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Android exists today. It doesn't have anywhere near the access to the people who spend money. Apple spent decades cultivating that access, and they're in an extremely strong position because of it. I hate the app store, it's a lazy mess. I hate Apple's deliberate crippling of the open web to stifle competition. That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do.
- lozenge 3y ago
  >It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Yes it is. Look at Visa and MasterCard. Even if there was no anti competitive practices (which I don't know), we wouldn't want them to take 6% of every retail transaction. So the EU set a limit, I think 0.5%. Otherwise, the rentier corporations would extract a lot of wealth from the economy, instead of the productive class (like manufacturing, services, farming, etc).
- danShumway 3y ago
  Thanks, I'm never sure how to respond to things like that, but it is a very kind thing for you to say. ---- > That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do. I am open to other strategies (not that I control what the EU does, but you know what I mean), and I understand the perspective of how legislating prices kind of misses the point because it does nothing about user autonomy. If the EU was stepping in and saying "we'll keep everything the same but we'll lock how much money you can charge" I would agree with you that the legislation is arguably unproductive. Apple could charge 90%, 1%, and my opinions would be the same -- the 30% just ranks very low on my list of concerns about iOS. So sure, somewhat agreed on that point. What I want is the original iPhone back where I can write web apps. I don't want to trade a corporate dictator for a government dictator, I want to not have a dictator. That being said, it does kind of seem like that's what the EU is targeting? Correct me if I'm wrong (I might be), but the extent to which the EU does any price control here it seems likely only to only be a restriction that Apple can't make the prices of sideloading so egregious that it's unrealistic for anyone to do it. Apple's position seems to be that their entire app store is only worth a 3% commission, and the hosting and payment processing and curation and customer acquisition and user metrics are all bundled in that 3%, but the platform API is 27% of app store costs. I don't think people are necessarily wrong to call out Apple over that? But whatever, we'll ignore that, that's still talking about price. Arguably the more important EU legislation that Apple is flaunting is 3rd-party browser access -- Apple is now being stuck in a position where Safari will actually have competition, and (conversations about Google dominance aside), that has the potential to completely change mobile development. Or it would, if Apple's position didn't seem to be that they'll just add large compatibility requirements in front of every browser that basically disqualify any indie-web browser from launching, and that in response to other browsers having the ability to improve PWA support that they'll just disable PWAs entirely from the OS for everyone. With good 3rd-party browser support for PWAs and required user options on both iOS and (importantly) Android for browser selection, the entire sideloading conversation might eventually become almost moot -- and I really mean that, I am convinced that one of the reasons why Android PWAs are kind of awful (aside from Google in general being terrible) is because without actual cross-platform support there's not much incentive for anyone to make them better or demand that they improve. But this seems again like exactly what the EU is targeting, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that the EU is just deciding what prices Apple can charge. ---- > But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. Not to go out of order, but this is an important question when talking about sideloading: why won't developers do that? I agree, it's an absurd idea. But is it absurd because iOS is so attractive, or is it more stuff like "if 50% of people with a mobile phone can't watch my movies or talk to their friends or transfer money on my service, I am going to have 0% of the market?" I buy your explanation for apps like Fortnite, I totally agree that Epic sees iOS users as an asset. Fortnite doesn't need to be on iOS. But I buy that argument a lot less for any social media site or commerce platform or ridesharing app or anything that involves communication between users. I've also seen some of those sites try to go the PWA option, and typically "why don't you have a mobile app" ends up being one of their more common support questions, even in cases where I personally feel like current web support seems like it should be good enough for users. I don't think that the reason that (for example) Uber has an app for iOS is because Apple created an attractive market, I think it's because Uber needs their customers to be able to order taxis from a phone and very few people would use their service on iOS or on Android if they only supported one platform. If Microsoft forced Windows Phone to 20% market-share, even if nobody on the entire platform was ever willing to pay money for an app, I bet Uber would be on the Windows Phone app store. In one sense, yes Apple created a platform and for some apps that's entirely where the story ends (games, buy-once utilities, etc). But in another sense for a lot of other apps Apple constructed a platform around people who already existed and who are already connected to the market and need to be serviced in order to stay market-viable regardless of what platform they're on. The actual harm here is not really that Apple takes 30% of the profits, it's that Apple (and Google) can both single-handedly decide that certain services won't exist on mobile platforms at all, because those businesses need to work for everyone regardless of what phone they've purchased. ---- > It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing Totally agreed, BUT Apple doesn't have to be evil to be a monopoly. Apple can legitimately and earnestly work itself into a position that is bad for the market. There's a very common idea that bad outcomes are the result of bad people or bad decisions or bad intentions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes companies like Apple or Cloudflare or Google offer great products that people love and then suddenly most of the Internet is behind a Captcha and Apple is deciding to ban entire genres of applications off of the iPhone and self-hosting email is impossible. Even benevolent dictators are still dictators. So I'm not saying that Apple is evil, I'm saying they are a corporation that controls a substantial portion of the smartphone market, their only competitor is not particularly interested in competing with them, and they are increasingly coming up with new ways to lock users into that ecosystem and to restrict Open standards that they can't control. And again, I don't necessarily know the right way to deal with that; sometimes EU legislation goes way too far. Personally, I've been of the opinion that we wouldn't need to have as many conversations about government overreach or about the implications of some giant piece of legislation that set a standard for entire digital markets if we instead broke up Google, Microsoft, and Apple. We might not need to set rules about what Google can do to Chrome if Google doesn't own Chrome. If you're making the argument that the EU should handle this differently, I think that's a completely reasonable argument to make. But I don't think that Apple deserves its position regardless of whether or not Apple is evil, because I don't think anybody deserves that position even if they're benevolent: not Apple, not the companies that launch apps on iOS, not Tim Sweeney, not the government. I'm not looking at regulation like it's some kind of punishment, it's just about making the best market possible for innovation, and sometimes that means taking steps that aren't beneficial to the current dominant players. If I have multiple houseplants in a single pot, they grow better if I keep any one of them from taking over the others. That doesn't mean the housplants have done anything wrong, but I'm still going to cut them back if any one of them gets out of control.

menacingly 3y ago

(I honestly wish I could so clearly order my thoughts in writing like you have done here) That it is mutually beneficial is sort of my point. If every developer jumped ship, iOS would be in trouble. But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. So I'm not the only one viewing the platform users as an asset. So is everyone clamoring to reach them. It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Android exists today. It doesn't have anywhere near the access to the people who spend money. Apple spent decades cultivating that access, and they're in an extremely strong position because of it. I hate the app store, it's a lazy mess. I hate Apple's deliberate crippling of the open web to stifle competition. That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do.

lozenge 3y ago
>It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Yes it is. Look at Visa and MasterCard. Even if there was no anti competitive practices (which I don't know), we wouldn't want them to take 6% of every retail transaction. So the EU set a limit, I think 0.5%. Otherwise, the rentier corporations would extract a lot of wealth from the economy, instead of the productive class (like manufacturing, services, farming, etc).
danShumway 3y ago
Thanks, I'm never sure how to respond to things like that, but it is a very kind thing for you to say. ---- > That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do. I am open to other strategies (not that I control what the EU does, but you know what I mean), and I understand the perspective of how legislating prices kind of misses the point because it does nothing about user autonomy. If the EU was stepping in and saying "we'll keep everything the same but we'll lock how much money you can charge" I would agree with you that the legislation is arguably unproductive. Apple could charge 90%, 1%, and my opinions would be the same -- the 30% just ranks very low on my list of concerns about iOS. So sure, somewhat agreed on that point. What I want is the original iPhone back where I can write web apps. I don't want to trade a corporate dictator for a government dictator, I want to not have a dictator. That being said, it does kind of seem like that's what the EU is targeting? Correct me if I'm wrong (I might be), but the extent to which the EU does any price control here it seems likely only to only be a restriction that Apple can't make the prices of sideloading so egregious that it's unrealistic for anyone to do it. Apple's position seems to be that their entire app store is only worth a 3% commission, and the hosting and payment processing and curation and customer acquisition and user metrics are all bundled in that 3%, but the platform API is 27% of app store costs. I don't think people are necessarily wrong to call out Apple over that? But whatever, we'll ignore that, that's still talking about price. Arguably the more important EU legislation that Apple is flaunting is 3rd-party browser access -- Apple is now being stuck in a position where Safari will actually have competition, and (conversations about Google dominance aside), that has the potential to completely change mobile development. Or it would, if Apple's position didn't seem to be that they'll just add large compatibility requirements in front of every browser that basically disqualify any indie-web browser from launching, and that in response to other browsers having the ability to improve PWA support that they'll just disable PWAs entirely from the OS for everyone. With good 3rd-party browser support for PWAs and required user options on both iOS and (importantly) Android for browser selection, the entire sideloading conversation might eventually become almost moot -- and I really mean that, I am convinced that one of the reasons why Android PWAs are kind of awful (aside from Google in general being terrible) is because without actual cross-platform support there's not much incentive for anyone to make them better or demand that they improve. But this seems again like exactly what the EU is targeting, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that the EU is just deciding what prices Apple can charge. ---- > But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. Not to go out of order, but this is an important question when talking about sideloading: why won't developers do that? I agree, it's an absurd idea. But is it absurd because iOS is so attractive, or is it more stuff like "if 50% of people with a mobile phone can't watch my movies or talk to their friends or transfer money on my service, I am going to have 0% of the market?" I buy your explanation for apps like Fortnite, I totally agree that Epic sees iOS users as an asset. Fortnite doesn't need to be on iOS. But I buy that argument a lot less for any social media site or commerce platform or ridesharing app or anything that involves communication between users. I've also seen some of those sites try to go the PWA option, and typically "why don't you have a mobile app" ends up being one of their more common support questions, even in cases where I personally feel like current web support seems like it should be good enough for users. I don't think that the reason that (for example) Uber has an app for iOS is because Apple created an attractive market, I think it's because Uber needs their customers to be able to order taxis from a phone and very few people would use their service on iOS or on Android if they only supported one platform. If Microsoft forced Windows Phone to 20% market-share, even if nobody on the entire platform was ever willing to pay money for an app, I bet Uber would be on the Windows Phone app store. In one sense, yes Apple created a platform and for some apps that's entirely where the story ends (games, buy-once utilities, etc). But in another sense for a lot of other apps Apple constructed a platform around people who already existed and who are already connected to the market and need to be serviced in order to stay market-viable regardless of what platform they're on. The actual harm here is not really that Apple takes 30% of the profits, it's that Apple (and Google) can both single-handedly decide that certain services won't exist on mobile platforms at all, because those businesses need to work for everyone regardless of what phone they've purchased. ---- > It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing Totally agreed, BUT Apple doesn't have to be evil to be a monopoly. Apple can legitimately and earnestly work itself into a position that is bad for the market. There's a very common idea that bad outcomes are the result of bad people or bad decisions or bad intentions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes companies like Apple or Cloudflare or Google offer great products that people love and then suddenly most of the Internet is behind a Captcha and Apple is deciding to ban entire genres of applications off of the iPhone and self-hosting email is impossible. Even benevolent dictators are still dictators. So I'm not saying that Apple is evil, I'm saying they are a corporation that controls a substantial portion of the smartphone market, their only competitor is not particularly interested in competing with them, and they are increasingly coming up with new ways to lock users into that ecosystem and to restrict Open standards that they can't control. And again, I don't necessarily know the right way to deal with that; sometimes EU legislation goes way too far. Personally, I've been of the opinion that we wouldn't need to have as many conversations about government overreach or about the implications of some giant piece of legislation that set a standard for entire digital markets if we instead broke up Google, Microsoft, and Apple. We might not need to set rules about what Google can do to Chrome if Google doesn't own Chrome. If you're making the argument that the EU should handle this differently, I think that's a completely reasonable argument to make. But I don't think that Apple deserves its position regardless of whether or not Apple is evil, because I don't think anybody deserves that position even if they're benevolent: not Apple, not the companies that launch apps on iOS, not Tim Sweeney, not the government. I'm not looking at regulation like it's some kind of punishment, it's just about making the best market possible for innovation, and sometimes that means taking steps that aren't beneficial to the current dominant players. If I have multiple houseplants in a single pot, they grow better if I keep any one of them from taking over the others. That doesn't mean the housplants have done anything wrong, but I'm still going to cut them back if any one of them gets out of control.