3 ms·

It's an "arbitrary" number in the sense that it is the revers of the previous industry standard in the mobile space which was 70/30 in favor of the Carrier. Of

by MCRed 11y ago

It's an "arbitrary" number in the sense that it is the revers of the previous industry standard in the mobile space which was 70/30 in favor of the Carrier. Often times developers would get less than %30 of the revenue for their products. And they had many more hoops to jump thru to get to the market, could only even get a meeting to try and get on mobile devices if they were already a large company, and had to work with terrible SDKs, etc. Apple democratized and revolutionized that entire industry, providing a level playing field where I can compete with Omni, and we both have the same hoops to jump thru and get the same deal. We both get a much better deal than before. The $99 fee covers the cost of administering the developer program. This program is hugely popular, and is already overrun with people who just want to get access to early versions of iOS before they are released publicly. Even with the $99 fee. It's a very low fee so that anyone serious can afford it, but high enough to keep out the problematic people who would abuse the service and overwhelm Apple's developer support resources. Seriously, I find it kinda curious that you're complaining about $99 as if it's some big barrier. The idea that an "Apple centric skill-set is not transferrable to other platforms" is pretty darn silly. I mean, sure, if you learn to program using Cocoa you will be frustrated and annoyed at how terrible certain other platforms are to develop for. But these days only HR people seem to think that programmers can only learn one langage and that experienced in one language is not useful in other languages or using other frameworks. Are you an HR person? Because that perspective is not one I would expect from any software developer.

notsony 11y ago
The Internet democratized the entire software industry by allowing developers to sell direct to customers. You would no longer have to beg CompUSA to carry your boxed software in store. Before the rise of the App Stores, you could use Kagi or eSellerate to sell your software for 8-12%, or you could use PayPal, WorldPay, 2Checkout for 2-4%. Things are even cheaper and easier now with Braintree, Stripe, etc. Apple charges 30% because they can, just like how CompUSA could charge whatever they wanted and make you pay for boxing and associated costs, because the software you spent a year writing cannot be sold anywhere else except on their platform. And if you want to sell by yourself on the Mac, without using the Mac App Store, you are a second class citizen because certain APIs like the iCloud SDK are not available to you. If the $99 is a nominal amount, why even charge it? Why $99 and not $49? Or $199? Again, it's a number they came up with which they felt a certain demographic, let's say teenage programmers could afford, or younger kids could get their parents to pay for. I'm open to better reasons if you have one. Being experienced in many languages does not make one a good programmer. You can be the jack of all trades and master of none. You think someone can just pick up C++ in a few weeks and become an "expert"? It takes years to become proficient in not only a single language but it's associated tooling and ecosystem. I have no doubt that there are many developers out there who have spent years of effort learning Apple's proprietary stack and are now regretting it and kicking themselves because a decade has passed and Apple, as a friend to developers, has regressed and gone backwards. Finally, Cocoa is a nice enough API, but have you ever had a problem and then tried to resolve it? Good luck going to the sign-in Apple developer forums where everyone shouts "ssh, we can't talk about it, it's under NDA" or having to file a bug report on Radar where nobody even responds and when they do it's to say it's a duplicate bug filing or, or opening a DTS incident and having the person say "Yep, it's a bug on our end, not sure when it will be fixed, in the mean time try a workaround". How is this better than having an open roadmap with discussion in public forums regarding language/SDK features, bugs, fixes etc?
- ghshephard 11y ago
  Apple could not care less about that $99 fee. It is 100% immaterial to them beyond the function that it is attempting to server - act as a minimum bar of entry to the developer program.
  - StillBored 11y ago
    The $99 isn't the barrier, owning a recent mac decent enough to develop on is the real barrier.
    - greedo 11y ago
      It doesn't need to be a recent mac, I'm running Yosemite on a 9 year old Mac Pro. I think you can pick one up on eBay for under $400 if you look carefully.
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      Exactly my point - the $99 isn't a financial barrier, but, your average user isn't going to pay it each year, so it creates a minimum barrier between "Users" and "Developers" to provide Apple with some insight into how many developers they have. Advance access to IOS kind of messed that up, (at lot of people paid the developer fee to access the next operating system) which is why application to the WWDC lottery is probably a better estimate of developer count.

by MCRed 11y ago

notsony 11y ago

The Internet democratized the entire software industry by allowing developers to sell direct to customers. You would no longer have to beg CompUSA to carry your boxed software in store. Before the rise of the App Stores, you could use Kagi or eSellerate to sell your software for 8-12%, or you could use PayPal, WorldPay, 2Checkout for 2-4%. Things are even cheaper and easier now with Braintree, Stripe, etc. Apple charges 30% because they can, just like how CompUSA could charge whatever they wanted and make you pay for boxing and associated costs, because the software you spent a year writing cannot be sold anywhere else except on their platform. And if you want to sell by yourself on the Mac, without using the Mac App Store, you are a second class citizen because certain APIs like the iCloud SDK are not available to you. If the $99 is a nominal amount, why even charge it? Why $99 and not $49? Or $199? Again, it's a number they came up with which they felt a certain demographic, let's say teenage programmers could afford, or younger kids could get their parents to pay for. I'm open to better reasons if you have one. Being experienced in many languages does not make one a good programmer. You can be the jack of all trades and master of none. You think someone can just pick up C++ in a few weeks and become an "expert"? It takes years to become proficient in not only a single language but it's associated tooling and ecosystem. I have no doubt that there are many developers out there who have spent years of effort learning Apple's proprietary stack and are now regretting it and kicking themselves because a decade has passed and Apple, as a friend to developers, has regressed and gone backwards. Finally, Cocoa is a nice enough API, but have you ever had a problem and then tried to resolve it? Good luck going to the sign-in Apple developer forums where everyone shouts "ssh, we can't talk about it, it's under NDA" or having to file a bug report on Radar where nobody even responds and when they do it's to say it's a duplicate bug filing or, or opening a DTS incident and having the person say "Yep, it's a bug on our end, not sure when it will be fixed, in the mean time try a workaround". How is this better than having an open roadmap with discussion in public forums regarding language/SDK features, bugs, fixes etc?

ghshephard 11y ago
Apple could not care less about that $99 fee. It is 100% immaterial to them beyond the function that it is attempting to server - act as a minimum bar of entry to the developer program.
- StillBored 11y ago
  The $99 isn't the barrier, owning a recent mac decent enough to develop on is the real barrier.
  - greedo 11y ago
    It doesn't need to be a recent mac, I'm running Yosemite on a 9 year old Mac Pro. I think you can pick one up on eBay for under $400 if you look carefully.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Exactly my point - the $99 isn't a financial barrier, but, your average user isn't going to pay it each year, so it creates a minimum barrier between "Users" and "Developers" to provide Apple with some insight into how many developers they have. Advance access to IOS kind of messed that up, (at lot of people paid the developer fee to access the next operating system) which is why application to the WWDC lottery is probably a better estimate of developer count.