11 ms·

Apple's Indies

182 points by davidbarker 11y ago

cpr 11y ago
Seems like this is a lost cause. With nearly no action after 7+ years, Apple's not going to change the app store fundamentals. But, boy was it exciting at the start! Shed a few tears and move on...
- coldtea 11y ago
  "No action" you mean like them adding in-app-purchases, better monitoring, easier provisioning, faster submission and check process, unified iOS+Mac subscriptions, bundles, and tons of other things?
  - cpr 11y ago
    Yeah, by no action I mean no substantial action that would seriously increase developer revenues like: trial versions without hacky in-app purchases; paid upgrades; actual working app discovery; etc.
    - zw 11y ago
      Trials and upgrades are niceties for the developer, not the user. The App Store isn't made for developers, it's made for users. If developers want access to those users, they should build businesses not oriented around extorting money to fix their technical debt.
      - cpr 11y ago
        Sure, but if users want developers to stay in business, the latter need recurring revenue from ongoing investment. "Extorting money to fix their technical debt". Really?
      - titaniumdecoy 11y ago
        I guess you're still using Photoshop version 1. You wouldn't want to pay for all that technical debt in subsequent versions, after all.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >Yeah, by no action I mean no substantial action that would seriously increase developer revenues like trial versions without hacky in-app purchases Actually in-app-purchases quickly became the preffered monetization methods for tons of games and other apps (photo, office, etc), and made lots of developers lots of money. As for "working app discovery" that's a pipe dream. There are > 1 million apps in the store. The developer has the responsibility for making it known and doing his marketing. Apple's Top Lists and Picks will always be cherry picking from a very small percentage.
jbob2000 11y ago
People are missing that the whole Taylor Swift/Apple thing was intentional and completely orchestrated to generate buzz about Apple Music. Nothing an A-list celebrity does in public is unplanned, her letter was way too PR friendly to be penned by a 20-something musician.
k-mcgrady 11y ago
This is pretty ridiculous. There's very little comparison. 1. Apple didn't respond to a letter from Taylor swift in < 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let's not forget it's rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn't been considering this for weeks already. 2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It's simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores. 3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.
- magicmu 11y ago
  This is completely true. Apple's absolute control over their ecosystem is not just a drawback -- it's also a significant benefit of them. There are far fewer apps in the Apple store than the Play store that are DOA, and the general quality of apps is far higher. Although it's somewhat contrary to the modern spirit of development, Apple's policies have proven to be a very good method of quality control.
  - notsony 11y ago
    This is highly subjective...
    - magicmu 11y ago
      I can see how my claim comes off that way, but I really just meant "better quality" as "adhering to the basic best practice principles for mobile," not as a claim on design quality or usefulness. A ton of apps on the Play store really don't even function correctly.
  - lips 11y ago
    I hear this constantly, and if you base your judgements on top-tier apps that are recommended via various techie sources, it's absolutely true. But if you start searching blind, you're quite likely to end up trying out or purchasing some truly craptacular iOS apps. I've been a split iOS/Android for 5 years or so, and am always flummoxed at this claim.
bedhead 11y ago
Taylor Swift's got juice. Indie devs don't. In other news, the sun is hot.
- seqastian 11y ago
  Taylor Swift is young and wants to be richer now and not wait 50 years until streaming nets here the same. Indies will have to make they money from live events and t-shirts anyways.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- smanuel 11y ago
  "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Shocking news.
- bnegreve 11y ago
  I don't quite get the logic here. Being "not news" doesn't make it any more acceptable to me. In fact, it's the other way around.
snowwrestler 11y ago
At least some of the complaints of indie devs like Cabel Sasser relate to the technical restrictions that Apple places on Mac App Store apps. Based on statements by Apple, these restrictions are, to Apple, important from a security standpoint. Thus it's probably going to take more than complaints to resolve them. It's going to take Apple engineers figuring out how to permit more power for good devs without creating holes for malware. Apple is well aware of the shortcomings of the Mac App Store model, which is why they continue to provide an official, supported path for apps to be installed on Macs from outside of the App Store. From a money standpoint, Taylor Swift is getting 1.5% more from Apple than App Store developers are...doesn't seem like that much to me. As far as I know, there is no "download and try it for 90 days" feature in the App Store.
pbnjay 11y ago
Apple wants access to Swift's market. Devs want access to Apple's market. Simple supply and demand here - the demand side has to pay or otherwise they don't get in. Sure it sucks that the policies aren't very transparent and things are expensive, but them's the breaks.
exelius 11y ago
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the only reason Apple caved is that the dollar amount was too little to be worth any amount of negative PR. Apple is a $300 billion/yr company. They will not risk that revenue stream (which is largely based on their positive brand image) for a few points of margin on a product that will probably never be more than 0.01% of their revenue. Kudos to Apple for recognizing that this is something they absolutely don't care about. The value of their brand is worth more than this. I just worry about the volume of new products coming out of Apple these days and wonder how much care and thought goes into them.
- TillE 11y ago
  That's pretty much it. It's a modest marketing investment which probably makes them look better than if they'd just done the right thing in the first place. I doubt it was calculated like that from the start, but that must be how it looks to them now.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Yeah, my guess is that their legal department negotiated the hell out of these contracts with the labels (which is what they're supposed to do) and obtained a concession. Someone at the labels probably went to Taylor Swift about this and told her what was happening, knowing that she would cause a public stink about it and Apple would cave. Anyway, it's not as if Apple and the labels have a cozy relationship -- so all's fair in love, war and contract negotiations. I'm sure Apple has plenty of other pricing / payment levers they can use to claw back most of what they're losing anyway (which probably isn't much at all).
    - micampe 11y ago
      > Someone at the labels probably went to Taylor Swift about this and told her what was happening I think you are painting her as more naive than she is. She’s been critical of streaming services in the past, I’m sure she (and her entourage/business partners) were following Apple’s announcement closely without the labels telling them anything.
jusben1369 11y ago
"Reminder: Apple uses music to make billions off hardware. Artists see nothing from this." - I have never seen the exact numbers but I assume a lot more people have a portable music player with them at all times (iPod then iPhone) than they did a decade ago. I can only speak anecdotally but I buy more music because I know I'll have it with me at all times than I did in the portable CD/tape days.
- josefresco 11y ago
  The iPod was a success, but the iPhone and iPad were mega-super-success. Those devices were not about music, but apps, email and Internet. Apple certainly leveraged their success with the iPod but I don't buy that "Apple makes all it's money off hardware because of music" line.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I buy no music today, because I know I can stream it at any time. Even my parents use Pandora and Spotify instead of buying new stuff.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  I buy more music today than I ever have done in the past and having a decent portable media player (iPhone) has a lot to do with this. I actually buy 99% of my music from bandcamp which is a really great service that pays musicians quite well and has lossless downloads.
- r00fus 11y ago
  Music takes about 0.1% of my iPhone nominal usage... even when I'm doing other stuff. I use my iPhone for business and personal connectivity - taking calls, sharing webex, emails, SMS/imessages, etc. Once in a while I listen to music. It's great. However, I see no reason why artists of that music should get a piece of Apple's pie here.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Well, record player companies made money off of Artists without paying them. This is a basic secondary market (hell, parking garages make money off Artists) and has nothing to do with the direct making of money on music such as a subscription service or actual record sales. This argument has actually been used to tax blank CDs which is bull. Should we tax all parking lots when a game or Artists is playing near them? Taxing the ecosystem because some group determined their part of it is more important is foolish.
nr152522 11y ago
Developer reactions have been mixed: Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit exclaimed, "Damn, I wish Taylor Swift were also a Mac App Store developer." And perhaps build a new music app named 'Taylor' in Swift?
- mrmondo 11y ago
  It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone like blizzard said something similar about the App Store.
  - dpcan 11y ago
    I think Supercell is more the Taylor Swift of the App Store. Maybe if they threatened to turn off IAP on Clash of Clans until Apple made the developer split more fair, then we'd get a response? But then again, this could be apples and oranges.
- metatation 11y ago
  How about a web server? https://github.com/izqui/Taylor https://github.com/izqui/Taylor
PaulHoule 11y ago
Not much new here. Apple has been shafting developers since at least 1987.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Yeah, creating all this multi-billion dollar app market and all, what a shafting...
  - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
    Without apps, Apple has nothing. Developers should get 30% of the profits from Apple's hardware business.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      A sense of entitlement always fascinates me. Yours isn't as much fun as the variety you can find reading gaming forums, but it's still making me smile. Thank you!
      - PaulHoule 11y ago
        I think of the dolts who vote for EA as "Worst Company" when EA is nothing like Comcast or Time Warner Cable or even Seaworld or Monsanto.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >Without apps, Apple has nothing. Actually Apple managed to make the iPod a huge success, and the iPhone for the first year too, without any apps. They built a market of billions without any apps. Only then did apps appeared with the first SDK.
      - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
        Nobody is making money selling phones that don't have apps. Apps are 100% necessary for a smartphone to survive. Apple simply could not have a successful mobile platform without apps.
hiou 11y ago
The whole thing between Taylor Swift and Apple is so obviously staged. The fact that this was done over Twitter, the most shareable possible format, the "Love, Apple" bit the wording of all of it. The need for Apple to position itself as the Artists streaming service. How are we seriously talking about this as if this actually happened unscripted? Edit: It's a common negotiation technique to add something that you know the other party will object to. Since there will always be push back it's good to have something you can sacrifice that you never really needed in the first place to appease the other side.
- kylnew 11y ago
  Reminds me of a story of a photographer that would leave their hand in some of the shots deliberately so the client would point them out and spend less time nitpicking on the rest of the composition.
saturdaysaint 11y ago
A request to tweak Apple's music contracts that amounts to a rounding error on their quarterly profits is not exactly analogous to requests to change Apple's software platform strategy (which the OP leaves annoyingly vague).
skeltoac 11y ago
Pull request failed ingratiation testing.
vinceguidry 11y ago
The author seems excessively concerned with the language people use to interact with Apple. It would seem to me that a simple application of "you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" is all that's at play here, and that the author is tilting at windmills. Apple's a big, powerful company, it's hard for one hand to know what the other hand is doing sometimes. All such companies have to rely on their customer base to guide them. If you think about it, Apple is far more responsive than most other companies their size or in their segment. Jobs used to answer emails ferchrissakes.
higherpurpose 11y ago
Unless it was all a PR stunt, then it all makes some sense. Let's see if Apple responds to the next music indie the same way.
Tloewald 11y ago
I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in how it treats people. The funny thing, it's everyone except Apple that gets a free ride from these discussions. First -- Apple is in fact offering a better deal to artists than pretty much anyone else. It's possible Amazon matches Apple in some cases -- as a book author, I know Amazon's "matching" of Apple's 70% is a sham (you only get it if you price your books low, lower than makes sense in many cases, otherwise your royalty is halved -- and even then they subtract "download fees" based on the size of your book from your 70% (or 35%)). When Apple entered the market, 70% was far and away the best deal in town. Since then it's only been exceeded by players trying to make a beach-head. (Incidentally, Apple is going to pay the same percentage of its revenues to artists as everyone else -- but Apple Music has no free tier. In practice, Spotify and Pandora have minuscule revenues. 70% of almost nothing is nothing.) A guy from Pandora chastising Apple for not being altruistic is simply disingenuous. Quoting that guy as an example of the industry being loath to criticize Apple for fear of ... something ... is even more dishonest. (Let's face it, at least part of the reason both Swift and the guy from Pandora couched their criticism in praise is that they aren't disinterested parties -- they're trying to make money too. Being nasty might just draw attention to the fact Taylor Swift is arguing for Apple to give her more money when they aren't collecting any. If a musician's agent or the record company has tickets to give away, do they pay for them? I doubt it.) The bottom line argument is that Apple is offering a free trial loss leader and took the view that it would pay artists X% of what it collected, and X% of nothing is nothing. (A record label or hollywood studio would subtract accrued costs from future royalties, but hey who's counting?) Taylor Swift argues that Apple is taking more value away from the free trial than musicians -- she may be right, or it may be Ping all over again -- but she has a bazillion followers and she's Taylor Swift, so Apple immediately caves. (Hey, they named a programming language after her, what more could she want? j/k) If you sell a CD through a record label, or a movie through a studio, or a game through a games company, you don't see royalties until production and marketing costs have been paid, and Hollywood and the Labels have become masters of padding their costs. For this reason, most artists use their albums as promotional tools for their live performances, and have done so since long before Apple.
- tfigueroa 11y ago
mosdave 11y ago
> most musicians do live shows out of necessity, not by choice. This is absolutely a correct statement, but not in the way the author intended. A writer writes, a painter paints, a musician performs. Not by choice but out of necessity.
- mavdi 11y ago
  Erm... no. They mostly love what they do and would do it as a hobby even if they didn't get paid for it. However musicians absolutely despise most kinds of live shows.
  - malnourish 11y ago
    Where is your source for the latter half of your claim? I go to a plethora of local and small-medium sized concerts and I often get a chance to talk with the performers, they love sharing their art to a hungry crowd.
mesozoic 11y ago
I guess Apple is getting into making music now. They sure are playing Taylor Swift and the media like a fiddle.
pluckytree 11y ago
The likely reason for all this is Apple not wanting to be accused of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. It’s illegal to use your market power and financial position to sell products below cost and thwart real competition in the market. This is why they offered higher royalties later and no royalties for 3 months. It was designed so artists would get the same amount in the end but unfortunately have to wait 3 months to start getting in. Apple’s reverse in direction is interesting. Perhaps they feel the risk is not as high as they were expecting. Apple gets sued every day of the week, but something like this could be very costly. Perhaps they know the financial benefit outweighs the risk. Claiming Apple doesn’t care about artists is absolutely ridiculous. Except for a few high-profile critics, artists view iTunes as saving the music business and allowing even small-time artists to make a living without needing to sign with a label (other than with one of the labels that specialize in this sort of thing and for which artists don’t need to qualify).
allsystemsgo 11y ago
Would it not be mutually beneficial for Apple to relinquish their 30% cut from app sales? More developers would focus on iOS (because of the money), they'd make better quality apps, and Apple would sell more hardware.
- drham 11y ago
  Though if Apple removed its cut it would likely be even less incentivized to fix thing like app store review times/app store discovery, as those teams would suddenly become pure cost centers.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
So...iOS app developers band together to protest the fact that Apple uses our apps for marketing purposes and to make the platform more attractive to buyers. Yet, they don't pay us a dime. It's the same mechanism, isn't it? The iOS platform became attractive to buyers due to the HUGE investment on the part of developers who created free, freemium and paid apps for the platform. Apple has been using all of these apps in their marketing campaign since day one. The platform without apps is worthless. Ergo, the apps give them value and make them desirable. And so, Apple created a slippery slope of an App Store model where just about the only way to have a shot is to give your work product away and hope to monetize it through paid upgrades or advertising. Failure on the App Store is the norm, not the exception. Yet, again, Apple still benefits from your free/mium app being there and they never pay you a dime for it. Are there parallels between this and music? I think one could very well argue the case to be so.
joshstrange 11y ago
Look I agree with most of the points raised here but: > 2. Apple can pivot in less than a day. I seriously doubt this happened. I think it's crazy to believe that Apple changed it minds due to this one blog post. More likely they had been planning this announcement for some time and possibly moved it up a little bit due to Taylor.
serve_yay 11y ago
His criticism of Gruber (and others) is apt, and important. Even when these guys are being honest about the flaws in the things Apple makes, they offer very little structural critique of what has become the most profitable company in the world and a major driving force in the tech industry.
- Yhippa 11y ago
  I imagine if they are truly critical they are putting their jobs on the line. Apple will probably cut you off from them in a heartbeat.
drham 11y ago
It's not just about Taylor Swift having way more pull than any developer, she was also presenting Apple with a problem simple enough that it could literally be solved by throwing money at it. As Rob Napier pointed out in a great blog post [1]: The app store sustainability problem is definitely not the sort of problem you can just throw money at, and thus can't be responded to by Apple with the same way. Even in this article it is immediately apparent there is no consensus among the affected as to what the real problem is: Is it lack of free trials? Paid upgrades? Review times? [1] http://robnapier.net/throw-money http://robnapier.net/throw-money
ChrisLTD 11y ago
Isn't it possible the Apple flattery is genuine?

182 points by davidbarker 11y ago

cpr 11y ago

Seems like this is a lost cause. With nearly no action after 7+ years, Apple's not going to change the app store fundamentals. But, boy was it exciting at the start! Shed a few tears and move on...

coldtea 11y ago
"No action" you mean like them adding in-app-purchases, better monitoring, easier provisioning, faster submission and check process, unified iOS+Mac subscriptions, bundles, and tons of other things?
- cpr 11y ago
  Yeah, by no action I mean no substantial action that would seriously increase developer revenues like: trial versions without hacky in-app purchases; paid upgrades; actual working app discovery; etc.
  - zw 11y ago
    Trials and upgrades are niceties for the developer, not the user. The App Store isn't made for developers, it's made for users. If developers want access to those users, they should build businesses not oriented around extorting money to fix their technical debt.
    - cpr 11y ago
      Sure, but if users want developers to stay in business, the latter need recurring revenue from ongoing investment. "Extorting money to fix their technical debt". Really?
    - titaniumdecoy 11y ago
      I guess you're still using Photoshop version 1. You wouldn't want to pay for all that technical debt in subsequent versions, after all.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Yeah, by no action I mean no substantial action that would seriously increase developer revenues like trial versions without hacky in-app purchases Actually in-app-purchases quickly became the preffered monetization methods for tons of games and other apps (photo, office, etc), and made lots of developers lots of money. As for "working app discovery" that's a pipe dream. There are > 1 million apps in the store. The developer has the responsibility for making it known and doing his marketing. Apple's Top Lists and Picks will always be cherry picking from a very small percentage.

jbob2000 11y ago

People are missing that the whole Taylor Swift/Apple thing was intentional and completely orchestrated to generate buzz about Apple Music. Nothing an A-list celebrity does in public is unplanned, her letter was way too PR friendly to be penned by a 20-something musician.

k-mcgrady 11y ago

This is pretty ridiculous. There's very little comparison. 1. Apple didn't respond to a letter from Taylor swift in < 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let's not forget it's rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn't been considering this for weeks already. 2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It's simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores. 3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.

magicmu 11y ago
This is completely true. Apple's absolute control over their ecosystem is not just a drawback -- it's also a significant benefit of them. There are far fewer apps in the Apple store than the Play store that are DOA, and the general quality of apps is far higher. Although it's somewhat contrary to the modern spirit of development, Apple's policies have proven to be a very good method of quality control.
- notsony 11y ago
  This is highly subjective...
  - magicmu 11y ago
    I can see how my claim comes off that way, but I really just meant "better quality" as "adhering to the basic best practice principles for mobile," not as a claim on design quality or usefulness. A ton of apps on the Play store really don't even function correctly.
- lips 11y ago
  I hear this constantly, and if you base your judgements on top-tier apps that are recommended via various techie sources, it's absolutely true. But if you start searching blind, you're quite likely to end up trying out or purchasing some truly craptacular iOS apps. I've been a split iOS/Android for 5 years or so, and am always flummoxed at this claim.

bedhead 11y ago

Taylor Swift's got juice. Indie devs don't. In other news, the sun is hot.

seqastian 11y ago
Taylor Swift is young and wants to be richer now and not wait 50 years until streaming nets here the same. Indies will have to make they money from live events and t-shirts anyways.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
smanuel 11y ago
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Shocking news.
bnegreve 11y ago
I don't quite get the logic here. Being "not news" doesn't make it any more acceptable to me. In fact, it's the other way around.

snowwrestler 11y ago

At least some of the complaints of indie devs like Cabel Sasser relate to the technical restrictions that Apple places on Mac App Store apps. Based on statements by Apple, these restrictions are, to Apple, important from a security standpoint. Thus it's probably going to take more than complaints to resolve them. It's going to take Apple engineers figuring out how to permit more power for good devs without creating holes for malware. Apple is well aware of the shortcomings of the Mac App Store model, which is why they continue to provide an official, supported path for apps to be installed on Macs from outside of the App Store. From a money standpoint, Taylor Swift is getting 1.5% more from Apple than App Store developers are...doesn't seem like that much to me. As far as I know, there is no "download and try it for 90 days" feature in the App Store.

pbnjay 11y ago

Apple wants access to Swift's market. Devs want access to Apple's market. Simple supply and demand here - the demand side has to pay or otherwise they don't get in. Sure it sucks that the policies aren't very transparent and things are expensive, but them's the breaks.

exelius 11y ago

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the only reason Apple caved is that the dollar amount was too little to be worth any amount of negative PR. Apple is a $300 billion/yr company. They will not risk that revenue stream (which is largely based on their positive brand image) for a few points of margin on a product that will probably never be more than 0.01% of their revenue. Kudos to Apple for recognizing that this is something they absolutely don't care about. The value of their brand is worth more than this. I just worry about the volume of new products coming out of Apple these days and wonder how much care and thought goes into them.

TillE 11y ago
That's pretty much it. It's a modest marketing investment which probably makes them look better than if they'd just done the right thing in the first place. I doubt it was calculated like that from the start, but that must be how it looks to them now.
- exelius 11y ago
  Yeah, my guess is that their legal department negotiated the hell out of these contracts with the labels (which is what they're supposed to do) and obtained a concession. Someone at the labels probably went to Taylor Swift about this and told her what was happening, knowing that she would cause a public stink about it and Apple would cave. Anyway, it's not as if Apple and the labels have a cozy relationship -- so all's fair in love, war and contract negotiations. I'm sure Apple has plenty of other pricing / payment levers they can use to claw back most of what they're losing anyway (which probably isn't much at all).
  - micampe 11y ago
    > Someone at the labels probably went to Taylor Swift about this and told her what was happening I think you are painting her as more naive than she is. She’s been critical of streaming services in the past, I’m sure she (and her entourage/business partners) were following Apple’s announcement closely without the labels telling them anything.

jusben1369 11y ago

"Reminder: Apple uses music to make billions off hardware. Artists see nothing from this." - I have never seen the exact numbers but I assume a lot more people have a portable music player with them at all times (iPod then iPhone) than they did a decade ago. I can only speak anecdotally but I buy more music because I know I'll have it with me at all times than I did in the portable CD/tape days.

josefresco 11y ago
The iPod was a success, but the iPhone and iPad were mega-super-success. Those devices were not about music, but apps, email and Internet. Apple certainly leveraged their success with the iPod but I don't buy that "Apple makes all it's money off hardware because of music" line.
mikeash 11y ago
I buy no music today, because I know I can stream it at any time. Even my parents use Pandora and Spotify instead of buying new stuff.
mrmondo 11y ago
I buy more music today than I ever have done in the past and having a decent portable media player (iPhone) has a lot to do with this. I actually buy 99% of my music from bandcamp which is a really great service that pays musicians quite well and has lossless downloads.
r00fus 11y ago
Music takes about 0.1% of my iPhone nominal usage... even when I'm doing other stuff. I use my iPhone for business and personal connectivity - taking calls, sharing webex, emails, SMS/imessages, etc. Once in a while I listen to music. It's great. However, I see no reason why artists of that music should get a piece of Apple's pie here.
protomyth 11y ago
Well, record player companies made money off of Artists without paying them. This is a basic secondary market (hell, parking garages make money off Artists) and has nothing to do with the direct making of money on music such as a subscription service or actual record sales. This argument has actually been used to tax blank CDs which is bull. Should we tax all parking lots when a game or Artists is playing near them? Taxing the ecosystem because some group determined their part of it is more important is foolish.

nr152522 11y ago

Developer reactions have been mixed: Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit exclaimed, "Damn, I wish Taylor Swift were also a Mac App Store developer." And perhaps build a new music app named 'Taylor' in Swift?

mrmondo 11y ago
It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone like blizzard said something similar about the App Store.
- dpcan 11y ago
  I think Supercell is more the Taylor Swift of the App Store. Maybe if they threatened to turn off IAP on Clash of Clans until Apple made the developer split more fair, then we'd get a response? But then again, this could be apples and oranges.
metatation 11y ago
How about a web server? https://github.com/izqui/Taylor https://github.com/izqui/Taylor

PaulHoule 11y ago

Not much new here. Apple has been shafting developers since at least 1987.

coldtea 11y ago
Yeah, creating all this multi-billion dollar app market and all, what a shafting...
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  Without apps, Apple has nothing. Developers should get 30% of the profits from Apple's hardware business.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    A sense of entitlement always fascinates me. Yours isn't as much fun as the variety you can find reading gaming forums, but it's still making me smile. Thank you!
    - PaulHoule 11y ago
      I think of the dolts who vote for EA as "Worst Company" when EA is nothing like Comcast or Time Warner Cable or even Seaworld or Monsanto.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Without apps, Apple has nothing. Actually Apple managed to make the iPod a huge success, and the iPhone for the first year too, without any apps. They built a market of billions without any apps. Only then did apps appeared with the first SDK.
    - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
      Nobody is making money selling phones that don't have apps. Apps are 100% necessary for a smartphone to survive. Apple simply could not have a successful mobile platform without apps.

hiou 11y ago

The whole thing between Taylor Swift and Apple is so obviously staged. The fact that this was done over Twitter, the most shareable possible format, the "Love, Apple" bit the wording of all of it. The need for Apple to position itself as the Artists streaming service. How are we seriously talking about this as if this actually happened unscripted? Edit: It's a common negotiation technique to add something that you know the other party will object to. Since there will always be push back it's good to have something you can sacrifice that you never really needed in the first place to appease the other side.

kylnew 11y ago
Reminds me of a story of a photographer that would leave their hand in some of the shots deliberately so the client would point them out and spend less time nitpicking on the rest of the composition.

saturdaysaint 11y ago

A request to tweak Apple's music contracts that amounts to a rounding error on their quarterly profits is not exactly analogous to requests to change Apple's software platform strategy (which the OP leaves annoyingly vague).

skeltoac 11y ago

Pull request failed ingratiation testing.

vinceguidry 11y ago

The author seems excessively concerned with the language people use to interact with Apple. It would seem to me that a simple application of "you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" is all that's at play here, and that the author is tilting at windmills. Apple's a big, powerful company, it's hard for one hand to know what the other hand is doing sometimes. All such companies have to rely on their customer base to guide them. If you think about it, Apple is far more responsive than most other companies their size or in their segment. Jobs used to answer emails ferchrissakes.

higherpurpose 11y ago

Unless it was all a PR stunt, then it all makes some sense. Let's see if Apple responds to the next music indie the same way.

Tloewald 11y ago

I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in how it treats people. The funny thing, it's everyone except Apple that gets a free ride from these discussions. First -- Apple is in fact offering a better deal to artists than pretty much anyone else. It's possible Amazon matches Apple in some cases -- as a book author, I know Amazon's "matching" of Apple's 70% is a sham (you only get it if you price your books low, lower than makes sense in many cases, otherwise your royalty is halved -- and even then they subtract "download fees" based on the size of your book from your 70% (or 35%)). When Apple entered the market, 70% was far and away the best deal in town. Since then it's only been exceeded by players trying to make a beach-head. (Incidentally, Apple is going to pay the same percentage of its revenues to artists as everyone else -- but Apple Music has no free tier. In practice, Spotify and Pandora have minuscule revenues. 70% of almost nothing is nothing.) A guy from Pandora chastising Apple for not being altruistic is simply disingenuous. Quoting that guy as an example of the industry being loath to criticize Apple for fear of ... something ... is even more dishonest. (Let's face it, at least part of the reason both Swift and the guy from Pandora couched their criticism in praise is that they aren't disinterested parties -- they're trying to make money too. Being nasty might just draw attention to the fact Taylor Swift is arguing for Apple to give her more money when they aren't collecting any. If a musician's agent or the record company has tickets to give away, do they pay for them? I doubt it.) The bottom line argument is that Apple is offering a free trial loss leader and took the view that it would pay artists X% of what it collected, and X% of nothing is nothing. (A record label or hollywood studio would subtract accrued costs from future royalties, but hey who's counting?) Taylor Swift argues that Apple is taking more value away from the free trial than musicians -- she may be right, or it may be Ping all over again -- but she has a bazillion followers and she's Taylor Swift, so Apple immediately caves. (Hey, they named a programming language after her, what more could she want? j/k) If you sell a CD through a record label, or a movie through a studio, or a game through a games company, you don't see royalties until production and marketing costs have been paid, and Hollywood and the Labels have become masters of padding their costs. For this reason, most artists use their albums as promotional tools for their live performances, and have done so since long before Apple.

tfigueroa 11y ago

mosdave 11y ago

> most musicians do live shows out of necessity, not by choice. This is absolutely a correct statement, but not in the way the author intended. A writer writes, a painter paints, a musician performs. Not by choice but out of necessity.

mavdi 11y ago
Erm... no. They mostly love what they do and would do it as a hobby even if they didn't get paid for it. However musicians absolutely despise most kinds of live shows.
- malnourish 11y ago
  Where is your source for the latter half of your claim? I go to a plethora of local and small-medium sized concerts and I often get a chance to talk with the performers, they love sharing their art to a hungry crowd.

mesozoic 11y ago

I guess Apple is getting into making music now. They sure are playing Taylor Swift and the media like a fiddle.

pluckytree 11y ago

The likely reason for all this is Apple not wanting to be accused of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. It’s illegal to use your market power and financial position to sell products below cost and thwart real competition in the market. This is why they offered higher royalties later and no royalties for 3 months. It was designed so artists would get the same amount in the end but unfortunately have to wait 3 months to start getting in. Apple’s reverse in direction is interesting. Perhaps they feel the risk is not as high as they were expecting. Apple gets sued every day of the week, but something like this could be very costly. Perhaps they know the financial benefit outweighs the risk. Claiming Apple doesn’t care about artists is absolutely ridiculous. Except for a few high-profile critics, artists view iTunes as saving the music business and allowing even small-time artists to make a living without needing to sign with a label (other than with one of the labels that specialize in this sort of thing and for which artists don’t need to qualify).

allsystemsgo 11y ago

Would it not be mutually beneficial for Apple to relinquish their 30% cut from app sales? More developers would focus on iOS (because of the money), they'd make better quality apps, and Apple would sell more hardware.

drham 11y ago
Though if Apple removed its cut it would likely be even less incentivized to fix thing like app store review times/app store discovery, as those teams would suddenly become pure cost centers.

rebootthesystem 11y ago

So...iOS app developers band together to protest the fact that Apple uses our apps for marketing purposes and to make the platform more attractive to buyers. Yet, they don't pay us a dime. It's the same mechanism, isn't it? The iOS platform became attractive to buyers due to the HUGE investment on the part of developers who created free, freemium and paid apps for the platform. Apple has been using all of these apps in their marketing campaign since day one. The platform without apps is worthless. Ergo, the apps give them value and make them desirable. And so, Apple created a slippery slope of an App Store model where just about the only way to have a shot is to give your work product away and hope to monetize it through paid upgrades or advertising. Failure on the App Store is the norm, not the exception. Yet, again, Apple still benefits from your free/mium app being there and they never pay you a dime for it. Are there parallels between this and music? I think one could very well argue the case to be so.

joshstrange 11y ago

Look I agree with most of the points raised here but: > 2. Apple can pivot in less than a day. I seriously doubt this happened. I think it's crazy to believe that Apple changed it minds due to this one blog post. More likely they had been planning this announcement for some time and possibly moved it up a little bit due to Taylor.

serve_yay 11y ago

His criticism of Gruber (and others) is apt, and important. Even when these guys are being honest about the flaws in the things Apple makes, they offer very little structural critique of what has become the most profitable company in the world and a major driving force in the tech industry.

Yhippa 11y ago
I imagine if they are truly critical they are putting their jobs on the line. Apple will probably cut you off from them in a heartbeat.

drham 11y ago

It's not just about Taylor Swift having way more pull than any developer, she was also presenting Apple with a problem simple enough that it could literally be solved by throwing money at it. As Rob Napier pointed out in a great blog post [1]: The app store sustainability problem is definitely not the sort of problem you can just throw money at, and thus can't be responded to by Apple with the same way. Even in this article it is immediately apparent there is no consensus among the affected as to what the real problem is: Is it lack of free trials? Paid upgrades? Review times? [1] http://robnapier.net/throw-money http://robnapier.net/throw-money

ChrisLTD 11y ago

Isn't it possible the Apple flattery is genuine?