is that Apple deserves a cut of third party App Store developer revenues
Reasonable people can disagree on how much, and Apple HAS harmed itself through greed
But distribution infrastructure has value. Creating and maintaining runtimes has value. Building developer tools has value. Calling it “payment processing” totally misses the mark on what they built
There has never been a universe where you got distribution for your product for free.
@danilo it's not a hot take. It took the open source world more than a decade to make flatpak at least usable, let alone as successful as the Appstore.
@danilo this entire thread is a wonderful bonanza of Apple cultism and weird inconsistencies. Like, did the customer not pay for the device? Should a new distributor pay for distribution? Is marketing the same as innovation?
But the funniest thing is that the people who are most harmed by Apple's policies are Apple customers, and those are also the ones most against changing up things. Hilarious!
@danilo
(i may have misunderstood this to be about third party stores for iphone apps)
should microsoft get a cut of all paid windows software? what about linux? should only the foundation get a cut for software sold for various linux distros, or the distro devs themselves? what about the company who made the chair you sit on while working your job, they obviously need a ongoing cut of every value you provide to your employer.
@danilo I think it's important that they're not the only one who'd be able to provide said infrastructure service.
I think most people would be okay if Apple charged, if they'd also be able to distribute their apps a different way/users be able to load the apps from other platforms.
@danilo@triketora …then why don’t they deserve it on the Mac? Should valve be paying Apple 30% for the Steam store?
Also… they don’t handle distribution with third party app stores; that’s the whole point of it being 3rd party. Apple already gets paid — very well! — for the device. Why should they get paid a cut of every dollar spent on that device?
Before the iPhone, telecoms charged obscene revenue shares to reach the customer
Apple showed up with superior technology and strategy and not only destroyed that arrangement, but also vastly expanded the market for phone software and content
If no one can come in and do to Apple what Apple did to the cell phone carriers
(To be clear at $3T in market cap I’m entirely open to regulators doing any number of things to Apple, they’re not some sweet nanny goat or anything.
But the idea that developers, absent the rapacious intentions of Evil Apple, would otherwise keep all of their revenues on the way to the customer is not a position grounded in any sort of reality or history. Financial success requires interdependency)
@danilo Yeah. And OF COURSE the App Store review process is a vector for monopolist abuse as much or more as it is a vector for security review....
BUT the fact that I as a consumer know that any iOS app I install has been through security review means a LOT! Extension of the brand umbrella is a value-add.
@ericjmorey@betsythemuffin the moment code is discovered that either does harm or violates the larger security contract, it can be remotely disabled across the world
that's serious, serious value and protection. The security review NEVER ENDS
@ericjmorey@betsythemuffin my whole premise is that if it's so easy to build a highway into hundreds of millions of pockets, any other vendor is welcome to set it up and compete
@danilo I agree, and it is antidemocratic that a company residing in an American jurisdiction with American cultural norms would get to decide what apps a women from Greece should be able to run.
You could say the same, about Facebook deciding what content people from other countries are allowed to see. @glyph
5% thoughtful engagement with the actual substancece
90% whiffing the point by either doubling down on the payment processing miscue or otherwise imagining "distribution" is a solely digital process (it isn't. getting into the pocket, physically, is quite a feat and any other company is welcome to try it and prove me wrong)
5% rude mfs signing their real names to terrible first impressions lmao
The notion that “I own the hardware I should be able to do whatever I want with it, including download and execute arbitrary code from arbitrary sources” is not the own folks think it is
You own your money, you can use it to buy what you want. You buy an iPhone, you CHOOSE to buy into something a little more complex than just atoms in your hand
In part, you're buying into a security regime. You are purchasing what amounts to years of device management, patches, etc
The hardest problem in computing is The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Memory, storage and processing can be coopted to generate serious harms. This isn't an abstract notion. This isn't speculative.
Microsoft networked EVERYTHING without defenses, AND WITHOUT the means of issuing remote updates, in the late 90's and the result was a mess. That seriously compromised the internet itself.
This isn't an easy problem and it’s not something where you can just let the user figure it all out.
@danilo I agree. But I should have some protection from manufacturer abuse. HP shouldn't be able to disable my printer if I don't use their ink. Tesla/GM/Ford shouldn't be able to disable my vehicle remotely. Do you have thoughts on where to draw the line?
@danilo This is the crux of it though: monopolistic gatekeeping and rent-seeking by the telecoms was bad, and it’s also bad when Apple does it. They didn’t smash the Big Brother screen with a hammer — they just changed whose picture is on the screen.
Distribution is absolutely worth paying for. How much developers pay should be based on competition with other distributors. 30% isn’t what distribution costs in a competitive market.
In practice I would imagine much of it just too much of a pain in the ass to reconcile for too little reward compared to a clean explicit revenue share. What do you think?
@danilo I think fundamentally Apple does not care one bit about their costs because they also have no problem with you shipping a free app to every damn iOS device on the planet for $99 a year.
@mattiem I mean at that point the developer is providing APPLE a subsidy in the form of content that enhances the platform, hell, why not distribute it
@danilo The tired "Apple just took control from the eevil telecoms" argument is ahistorical bullshit (or, generously, region-dependent?). Before Apple you'd... buy a phone from a local telecom retailer, sign up to your cell network, get a SIM card from them, and plug it into the phone.
The initial iPhone was a massive downgrade, only being available through a cell network, and only when committing to a special iPhone subscription.
@danilo we won't know if they've been charging a fair price for that until they are forced to allow 3rd parties to build alternate, more efficient distribution infrastructure though. maybe it really is 30% — steam charges roughly that much, and they do have competition! maybe it's 20%. maybe it's 5%. impossible to say.
@glyph yeah my thing is they should not be forced to do that
Let Epic build a Roman road all the way into the pockets of hundreds of millions of consumers and charge what they want for the privilege. They are free to compete on this point, and if they can’t, Apple has earned their right to a cut
@danilo Rome didn't pay for the road though, I did. I am very happy for Apple to continue charging the 30% tax on downloads to any phones that I got for free!
@glyph nahhhhh you can’t be all “I am a student of technology history” and then ignore the whole part where Apple reinvented the category, built all the infrastructure, maintain the R&D and constantly push every industrial process to keep it unfathomably performant
That the platform is valuable enough to attract both customers and developers only strengthens my point
You are welcome to pay for an open source junk phone, but you don’t
@danilo the valuable-ness of the platform and the network effects work equally well as arguments in both directions though. Perhaps they have merely accrued to themselves the resources required to push those industrial processes (which, I might add, are being pushed by TSMC and Intel as much as they are by Apple?) by dirty tricks such as the 30% tax, and in a flatter competitive environment others would be doing the same?
@glyph if anyone could do it, TSMC would be fabbing high performance chips for everyone and Intel would still be in the Mac
But if you’re calling a fully documented revenue share that, again, the history student will note is dramatically lower than what was previously charged a “dirty trick” I’m not sure there’s any common ground to be found here
@danilo wait is TSMC no longer fabbing for Nvidia, AMD, qualcomm, and broadcom? Is your contention that Nvidia is not doing anything particularly innovative or “high performance” with their own designs? And is the fair comparison a mall software retailer (40%) microsoft (30/15/0%, depending) epic (12%) or gumroad (10%)? I am not saying those are perfectly equivalent, but in the absence of a preference price signal, we do not have a way to know if this is a fair price, it’s just Apple’s choice.
@danilo oh, hahaha, having very recently re-watched the scene preceding this exact line, while I clearly have my own feelings about antitrust policy, I very much vibe with the sentiment here. And I was watching this scene because I'm thinking about doing my first app store submission ;)
Hey, hit me up if there’s anything I can do to be helpful. I hung up my spurs awhile back but in my heyday I was on the front page of the App Store across multiple projects
@danilo thanks, that is super generous, and I hopefully will take you up on it, but first I need to deal with my panoply of self-inflicted wounds created by using Python for everything (and, like, finish the app…)
@danilo Like it’s not that Standard Oil didn’t build any new infrastructure, it’s that at a certain scale of vertical integration, they can name their own price for that infrastructure and there’s no check on their rent-seeking.
@danilo It's a bit of "be careful what you wish for," too. Remember a decade ago, when we were all sick of the cable monopoly and wanted to pay for our entertainment services a la carte?
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