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This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to hos
by behnamoh 1y ago
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoI think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoYou have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device. You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days. They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mitemte 1y agoWhat’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.
- demosthanos 1y ago90 days is still absurd. I have custom apps I install on my Android phones once per phone. I go years without bothering to rebuild them.
- akutlay 1y agoI would guess they do it because they want to minimize the chance that someone will install an unapproved app to someone’s phone and cause harm. I know it’s already pretty hard but Apple seems to be very particular when it comes to this.
- prmoustache 1y agoThat is not their job.
- Someone 1y agoThat’s an opinion. Apple’s take is that they sell ”everything that runs on your phone has gone through our reviews, so you can trust it isn’t malware” That, in their opinion, makes it their job to prevent people from permanently installing software on other people’s phones. I’m sure they would remove the “permanently” if they could, but developers have to test builds so frequently that they can’t review them all.
- phanimahesh 1y agoPopup on app open that warns app is sideloaded? There are simpler and more usable options that are more defensible than what they do today.
- fmbb 1y ago> You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days. Does this mean you lose data, or is data retained when reinstalling?
- neilv 1y ago> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
- lm411 1y agoNot even close compared to Google Play and their review and appeal process. Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google. The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help. Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately. I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.
- bigyabai 1y ago"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.
- 8note 1y agoapple could easily pay that with its money printer commision on app sales or on its money printer iphone sales, both of which are inpart because of the app developers. whats the value add of rigourously validating an app that youre only running on your own phone?
- wpm 1y agoOK, then don't charge me until I submit something to the App Store. I should be able to self-sign an app for longer than a week on a free developer account.
- notnmeyer 1y agoi’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.
- Gigachad 1y agoWhich is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.
- phire 1y agoI'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.
- eddythompson80 1y agoIt could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step tutorial to enable side loading.
- notnmeyer 1y agoyeah, this also makes sense
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rkagerer 1y agoThis is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days. I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
- sampullman 1y agoThe Android fee is only $25, but in my experience everything around the submission process is at least 4x worse, so it evens out. At least Apple has humans doing review and support.
- prmoustache 1y agoBut you don'have to pay to sideload your app and have it stay forever on your device.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoIn this very narrow case, the grass on the Android side is much greener: You can install your own APKs on an Android device without paying anyone at all, without having to upload anything anywhere, and without requiring any particular device to build the APK in the first place. You don't even need to touch the bootloader or root it; you just toggle a setting to allow the installation and it works.
- freedomben 1y agoFor now at least. There have been articles recently about how Google is looking to change that
- asimovfan 1y agowhat is it that you "love" about Apple?
- theshackleford 1y agoNot op but... It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold. What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware. I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.) Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.
- lmm 1y ago> how is it even justified Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.
- cortesoft 1y ago> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most. There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc. Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
- sigmoid10 1y ago>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.
- keerthiko 1y agoI'm pretty sure in a free market, how much someone is willing to pay for something is what determines how much a company charges for something, not how much it cost to provide. We wouldn't have inflation of most goods/services if it was based on how much it cost to produce/provide.
- freedomben 1y agoYou're right, but generally in a free market competition will force prices down until they are close enough to production costs that going lower risks loss. In practice this rarely happens because we don't really have "free" markets, but rather a weird hybrid plus legal landmines all over the place.
- 7speter 1y agoWhats seemingly more absurd is you already paid for the phone AND the Mac you have to develop for iOS devices for
- latexr 1y ago> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent. Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.
- lillecarl 1y agoI recall seeing a lot of "in your hand", "on you device", "tailored for you" and such in their keynotes and press material.
- rfoo 1y agoApple pushes a narrative that their devices are secure (not private, but secure). And my less tech-savvy friends sincerely believe that it's due to it being a walled garden, with curated software only. Apple made no attempt clarifying this.
- notnullorvoid 1y agoI believe they are talking about Apple's anti-trust legal defense narrative. Not the marketing narrative, which is in direct conflict, and maybe false advertising.
- KolibriFly 1y agoFeels even sillier in an era where people are trying to find creative, sustainable uses for older hardware
- carlosjobim 1y agoWhat other serious business to business agreements can you enter into without spending at least $100? The fee is not to cover technical costs, but administration costs. Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.