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Let's take this to an extreme. Imagine an app that does little except thread together the basic UI components provided by iOS. In other words, something that mo

Let's take this to an extreme. Imagine an app that does little except thread together the basic UI components provided by iOS. In other words, something that most people here could write in an afternoon. Now imagine it ends up on the Apple marketplace. Given how much work goes into building iOS, the UX, and the app store, by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees. The person who created the app just spent a few hours and Apple spent bazillions of hours (amortized over many apps).

danShumway 2y ago
> by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they're putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon. If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by that discussion. The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple. "You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.
wkat4242 2y ago
But the app ecosystem is also a selling point for users to actually buy an iPhone, on which they already make a huge margin compared to the rest of the industry.
bigiain 2y ago
I wonder how much of the software you're proposing Apple get paid 99.9% for is open source? (Including the xkcd-famous "one guy in Nebraska" who's been doing his thing for over 20 years)? How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid? https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ And all the stuff not listed there too, like OpenSSH, curl, all those little things that pretty much _every_ OS uses? And the predecessors? BSD, Mach, FreeBSD...

danShumway 2y ago

> by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they're putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon. If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by that discussion. The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple. "You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.

wkat4242 2y ago

But the app ecosystem is also a selling point for users to actually buy an iPhone, on which they already make a huge margin compared to the rest of the industry.

bigiain 2y ago

I wonder how much of the software you're proposing Apple get paid 99.9% for is open source? (Including the xkcd-famous "one guy in Nebraska" who's been doing his thing for over 20 years)? How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid? https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ And all the stuff not listed there too, like OpenSSH, curl, all those little things that pretty much _every_ OS uses? And the predecessors? BSD, Mach, FreeBSD...