Netflix is the latest company to try bypassing Apple’s app store | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is the latest company to try bypassing Apple’s app store

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378 pointsgbaygon462 comments

I worked on an app that is in the same category as Netflix. A week before launch, Apple chose to reject us in spite of months of meetings and reviews with their app teams and assurances we were in-bounds since we were working with them for launch featuring.

It came down to the fact we required an email address and password for IAP so you could bring your subscription to the web or other platforms. While everyone else in the category did this, they decided that policy was going to change and we were just going to be the first people to deal with it. Since having an email-based account was core to the architecture and the UX, I went through a week of refactor hell to make emails/passwords optional to meet our launch date.

Since other apps still get to do this, it's clear the policy change message was BS. I've suspected a lot has had to do with Apple's ambitions in the streaming space and their desire to be in a position to offer bundling and other over the top services. They're already trying to control the UX with the TV app and are offering companies better rev share rates to do the integration work.

It seems like Netflix is daring Apple to pull them from the store. If that's what's happening then I applaud them. I understand that Apple may think they're protecting the consumer by creating a walled garden, but as a developer whose livelihood is tied to their decisions, I'm tired of being jerked around.

They won't pull the Netflix app, they just won't let it update until they've made changes. Spotify tried directing users to the web and that's what happened with them.

What if Spotify would make their app using JavaScript (something like React Native or Cordova) with ability to update bypassing AppStore?

They would reject the update that attempted to roll out that system.

Except that bunches of apps with that model are being accepted now.

That doesn't matter. The app store review process isn't an impartial court of law, where everyone gets a fair hearing. If apple want to do things for competitive or capricious reasons, they can.

Live-updating apps are fine.

One that attempts to use that functionality to get around the App Store's guidelines, especially one as prominent as Spotify's, will be noticed and yanked from the store.

If I was Spotify, the absolute last thing I would want to do is piss off Apple seeing as Apple Music is their main competitor right now.

I actually just let my membership to their developer program lapse after 4 years.

In addition to having to pay money to develop on their platform, the return I get is questionable.

The straw was that they're forcing me to republish old programs, just to force them through their new compliance tunnels.

Frankly, I'm sick of their hoops and their walled-garden. I'm ok with forcing users to the browser now. Amazon does it for digital sales.

I think you're being a bit disingenuous here.

The point of republishing old programs is to make sure they are running against the latest SDK. This is an important aspect for the ecosystem. It forces apps to work properly on the latest OS as well as support technologies like App Thinning.

It's not just to mess you around for compliance reasons.

A website from 1996 will look much the same in a modern version of Chrome. Good luck with your SDKs.

What a hilarious statement to make.

Sure a website from 1996 will look the same. It will also have no accessibility, work terribly on mobile, be largely like reading a Word document and have none of the interesting features of modern web sites. Your world is not the world most people want.

The modern browser is quite good at rendering text, just as it was in 1996. The web is largely still about words. What improvement is so important as to strike the words of those from 1996 off the record?

Nobody here has argued to start striking outdated websites off the record. However the advent of reader mode has certainly helped things in that neighborhood come through a bit cleaner.

But as yet websites don’t control rapidly evolving and privacy sensitive hardware on mobile devices. Also, user time spent in apps versus web browsers is hovering around ~90% versus 10. Might it be possible that having an up-to-date experience as it’s enforced by mobile platform owners could contribute somewhat to this abundant user preference for apps?

I can think of some sites on the order of 15 - 20 years old that work better on mobile than sites made in the last 5.

And while the various accommodations for accessibility that have come up over the last two decades are nice, the fact is that most of the web was fairly accessibly using specialized user agents (or even just Lynx) by the very late 90s.

Hacker News is one such site that is very basic and has none of the stuff you outline as modern features. You know what? It is by far one of the most performant and enjoyable websites I use daily.

Seriously ? Sure pick out a few examples.

Now let's talk about taking the entire web back to 1996. No Javascript, Websockets/SSE, AJAX, CSS etc. You really think all of the innovations made in the last two decades is just throw-away ?

The goalposts have wheels!

> let's talk about taking the entire web back to 1996.

Let's not, that's a tangent. The original statement to which you replied was this:

> A website from 1996 will look much the same in a modern version of Chrome. Good luck with your SDKs.

That remains true, despite the advances you listed. http://www.thekrib.com/ is an example from 1994 which still looks like it renders about the same. It doesn't have the bells and whistles, but the point is, _what was written remains available._ Interactive applications tracking a moving SDK cannot be left for future generations, they have to be maintained. Putting non-interactive content into those types of applications is forcing a maintenance burden forevermore.

There is a lot to be said about adaptive web fails, text or graphics overflowing outside of the screen while locking the zoom level, botched overrides of browser behaviors. A simple old html page is often more readable on a smartphone than a page where the developper tried hard to fuck with the way it is rendered on a small screen. If the text is too small you can easily zoom in. And most smartphones these days have large, high dpi screens.

I guess what we're seeing here is a developer/development-first ideology versus a platform-first ideology.

Should the developer/development have to resubmit to the benevolent platform? Or should the platform have to support the development that has occurred?

I don't really care, but I know that I'd rather develop somewhere where my contributions aren't under constant threat of being wiped off the landscape.

Again, good luck with the other thing.

Not so much platform first as user first. Platforms are nothing without users and developers are nothing without platforms. And luck isn’t needed when your platform is already the best. :)

That's fair, but currently being "the best," doesn't ensure that status.

You have painted this false dichotomy.

In Apple's world: The users come first. Everyone else second.

The policies described in the root comment we're replying to have nothing to do with putting the user first. Apple puts Apple first, even when it's bad for users.

Maybe. But how bad would the user experience be if every time a user went to do an IAP, they were presented with a link to an external web page asking for their credit card information? Would that affect the security and privacy of the platform? Would it affect users' trust in the platform?

Maybe if Apple didn't charge many times more than credit card processors to handle payments, developers wouldn't be trying to avoid getting robbed.

Maybe if credit card processors started inventing platforms for software distribution and made them available and easy to use for anyone, they wouldn’t.

Yes. Unless you want to use Google Maps. My SO just asked me to fix her phone to give her biking directions again. She uses the "Google" app to look up stuff, as far as I can tell the OS is now intercepting calls to https://maps.google.com and opening them in Apple Maps instead?!

That doesn’t happen. If you click on an address from Google’s website, it opens in Google Maps if it is installed. If you click on a link from any Google app it opens Google maps by default.

Mmm, well yes, happening now. From the "Google" app made a search, a long touch on the Directions link shows a maps.google.com URL, Google Maps is installed, even reinstalled GM thinking the registration was corrupted somehow. It opens in Apple Maps. Uninstalled Apple Maps and it prompt me to reinstall.

Perhaps since this is the Google app the URL they show for long touch is not actually what is getting executed when you tap, maybe they are sending a routing command directly, but either way there's a number of UI "nudges" to push you to Apple Maps over Google Maps that you cannot adjust or turn off without jailbreaking the phone.

I just clicked on a direction from Google on Safari and it took me to Google Maps.

I did the same from Chrome. It took me to Google Maps

I went to a third party web site within Chrome, click on "get directions", it took me to Google Maps.

Want to install a pepe the frog app? You can't. Apple decided it's too sensitive. Want to play a porn game? You can't.

Moral panics come first. User second. Developers third.

I strongly disagree. Apple has made a lot of user-hostile moves recently. Suppressing ports to sell more dongles, constant nagging for apple paid services, uping prices to make up for lack of growth in volumes. Profits first, users and developers not on the map.

Apple has been "suppressing ports" since they introduced the iMac over 20 years ago. The USB-C transistion didn't happen as quickly as the original USB transistion.

You don't have to buy dongles from Apple.

I am a developer but if more developers put users before themselves, we wouldn't have Electron apps.

I find it amusing that people think a company making $10B in profit a quarter is trying to use $30 dollar dongles to make money.

And then you end up with Windows. Hack upon hack upon hack to keep old software running. It increases the surfaces of bugs and security vulnerabilities.

And you need that if that platform is to be used for anything serious. I don’t see Macs in the enterprise. And linux has the same obsession with backward compatibility / not breaking user space when making changes in the kernel.

Yet and still iPhones and iPads are. There are many reasons that Macs aren't in the Enterprise. But backwards compatibility isn't the main one.

To be fair, browsers aren't always perfect about preserving backwards compatibility for every API.

Miles ahead of native, and hundreds of miles ahead of mobile. For the most part, the web is one of the most future-proof platforms you can develop for, if not the most future-proof platform you can develop for.

But there's still room to improve.

Pity that it still doesn't provide a fully Delphi like development experience.

IBM mainframes are the most future-proof platform you can develop for. Current mainframes have backwards compatibility going back to the 70's. Perhaps even the 60's.

The web is probably second, though. Either the web or Windows.

If we're including devices that almost nobody has access to, the most future proof device is not the one that keeps backwards compatibility, but the one that only has one version that is still produced, since initial compatibility is the only compatibility.

Any tricks and additional uses you develop for the abacus will likely long outlive any IBM if it's worthwhile. That doesn't mean it's particularly easy to develop something people will find worthwhile enough to propagate forward though. Backwards compatibility only matters as long as you have something that ca take advantage of it and a need to do so.

IIRC, even YouTube subscriptions initiated on an iPhone don't transfer cleanly over to the web.

> but as a developer whose livelihood is tied to their decisions, I'm tired of being jerked around.

I am a developer of a dozen very popular apps and I couldn't disagree more with your position.

Developers having a wonderful experience or sustained livelihood isn't the goal here. It's to make sure consumers are protected and cared for. As Tim Cook would put it that's their North Star.

I agree that this is mostly how Apple views things, but what you said doesn't contradict the post you replied to at all. He is a developer whose livelihood is dependent on Apple, and he is tired of being jerked around. Just because Apple doesn't prioritize his problems doesn't make that untrue.

I don’t think the parent argued that his feelings of frustration are somehow untrue, but was just pointing out that they have to be weighed against the billions of users that Apple decides to prioritize for. Preventing a constant “go to our sketchy website and put in your credit card” experience for IAPs is likely a smart trade off vs a couple weeks of developer frustration surrounding honoring external purchases.

Also, I’m still not clear on how OC’s app was treated differently than others in the space. From his description it doesn’t sound out of the ordinary to me, but I suppose it’s possible I’m misunderstanding something.

Building business that solely relies on constant mercy of someone else's platform is an extremely risky endeavor to begin with.

And virtually unavoidable in the smartphone app space because of the gatekeeping function of the stores. I don't know exactly how we got here given that nobody would have accepted this sort of curation on a desktop, but we somehow just walked into it on our phones.

You have to get there from the start; the app store has to be there from day one. Since that didn't happen on the desktop, it's pretty hard to retroactively introduce one (although Microsoft is trying hard).

Which major operating system doesn't have an app store equivalent?

Thats being pretty pedantic. Introduce one successfully is a pretty obvious implication. Even after almost a decade of desktop app stores they’re still really struggling to get user acceptance outside a few niches. In fact the only one I’d count as an actual commercial success is Steam.

indeed, my mistake I misunderstood the post

Classy, +1

And arguably far more necessary. We have our phones turned on and with us almost 100% of the time we are alive. They can track our locations and hear everything we say. It's more important to control what apps can have access to with smartphones than it was on any prior platform.

Yeah, a difference between my phone and my laptop is that my phone needs to basically be an appliance: it needs to work consistently in all sorts of situations so I don’t get stranded somewhere in an emergency. For this purpose, having a really strict gatekeeper that limits what apps can do is a feature, not a bug.

And yet open source solutions seem way less popular on mobile than their desktop equivalents.

Seems more like a justification for passive acceptance to me.

My phone is on and with me for less than 50% of the time.

Just saying; phones are not as important to everyone as you think.

(yes, I am over 40)

Good for you. Unfortunately, your personal habits aren't really relevant to the global impact of these policies.

I'm sure you probably "haven't owned a TV in 10 years" and wonder "do people still watch TV".

Yes that was a popular post on Slashdot years ago.

Why would you be sure of that? As it happens, I have a TV and watch it every day.

In fact, research (in the UK) suggests that people who use phones less are more likely to watch TV than people who use them a lot.

It wasn't my intention to "boast" that I don't use a phone much. The post I responded to was making a point based on the assumption that "we" have our phones on 100% of the time. I was just trying to point out that there are people in that "we" for which that is not true.

  control what apps can have access to with smartphones

But the Play store doesn't do that. It just documents what permissions are sought by the app, not whether this privileges are appropriate... hence flashlight apps seeking Contacts and Location.

Play Store is at the other end of the spectrum where you can literally upload massive amounts of malware and no one bats an eye.

The issue is not that a manual review process should catch bugs. The issue is that Android’s permission system allows it.

It's great that it allows it.

The problem is that a lot of users don't want to admit that they are not competent to decide whether the app truly needs those permissions or not.

If there would be a power user subscription for Android, it'd be great. It'd pay for itself, etc. (Of course purists still could just root the device and so on.)

Who said anything about bugs? The point is to do something proactive to stop apps that don't conform to your policies (whichever they may be - maybe you don't allow collection of data, or using a specific interface, definitely not malware, etc.) instead of just reacting, and even that too late.

Apple is at one extreme blocking even legitimate things for obscure and esoteric reasons. Google is at the other, letting all kinds of crap in the store only to review it later, maybe. [1]

I'm sure my remark ruffled feathers on some Android fans but it doesn't make it less true.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/30/google-play-removed-70000...

The point is to do something proactive to stop apps that don't conform to your policies (whichever they may be - maybe you don't allow collection of data, or using a specific interface, definitely not malware, etc.) instead of just reacting, and even that too late.

I’m saying that with millions of apps in the store and seeing that all app testing is black box testing, the reviewers are not going to catch most things. The operating system itself should not allow certain things. There is no reason that most of the permissions that SpyPhone needs should be allowed by Android.

Then to what would you attribute the fact that the AppStore is much better curated than the Play Store? Fewer application submissions? More honest coders?

It's a two part answer probably: Apple's store policies are discouraging some of the unwanted behavior, and the actual enforcement of those policies is stricter. Not just a second though.

Most of the “honesty” comes from iOS and it’s just a better thought out model than Android when they introduce new features.

Ad Blockers - the framework is built in a way that third party ad blockers can be installed but they don’t have access to your browsing history. They basically just submit a JSON file that is integrated into Safari and some types of web views

Third party keyboards - because of the opportunity of keyloggers, you have to explicitly go into settings to install one, then you have to give it permission to access the network as a separate step after a huge warning, and even then when you enter a password, iOS switches back to the default keyboard.

SafariViewController - with traditional embedded webviews, the hosting app has complete access to everything you are doing. The SafariViewController runs as a separate process.

The only way that an app on Android can (could?) know if it should stop playing sound was to ask for full permissions to access your phone state.

Why does any app need full access to my storage like Android allows? With iOS, an app has full access to its own file store in iCloud, you can grant it access to your photo library or music library (read only) but it’s very explicit. Any other document outside of those, the user explicitly tells it what file to open.

Why would I ever give a third party app access to my SMS messages? Why is that even an option on Android?

I download stuff without regard on my iPhone because I know that it can’t do anything crazy.

Even if SpyPhone didn’t go through any review process, it’s a track surface is limited on non jailbroken iOS devices.

> Most of the “honesty” comes from iOS and it’s just a better thought out model than Android

That's essentially what I had to say. Apple enforces these policies - and sometimes will go overboard. I still very much prefer it to what Google does where as a user I feel they are completely neglecting to "take my side". I am not their valued customer, I am just a source of personal data.

Since PRISM, we know the players you really don't want to be able to track your location have a backdoor in those systems anyway, and the manufacturers are forbidden by law to talk about it.

It's annoying that candy crush get a piece of your private life.

But it's nowhere close to the problem of big entities that already have a huge control on your life to be able to know everything about you while you can't know anything about them.

The app store is just a symptom of it though, and a small one.

We got here rather simply... Apple introduced the iPhone with no apps at all, then gave a half-assed open solution (bookmarks on your home screen, essentially), then they introduced the App Store, with their rules. Since there was no other way to get apps on the phone (short of jailbreaking), App Store won and Play Store was built in this model.

Other smartphones in this space at the time (Windows Mobile and Blackberry) didn't quite capture the imaginations like Apple did. WM was fairly easy to sideload apps to; not sure about Blackberry.

Unless they've changed it recently, you can install anything you want on an Android phone. You just have to change a setting to allow apps from unknown sources. It takes a few seconds.

I believe this is still the only way to get the Humble Bundle app/game installer on your phone. https://www.humblebundle.com/app

Not to mention you can download other app stores to your device if you wish, including Amazon's and FDroid.

Play Store itself behaves similarly to App Store. Android lets you sideload through a separate mechanism, and all Google has to do is remove that switch from Android

They could do lots of things, but absent any evidence that they're likely to, it's just wild speculation.

And it's not "sideloading." There's no other local device involved. Once you've flipped the "unknown sources" switch, you just go to a website, download, and install, same as you would on a desktop.

This is why I was always bemused at the glee with which people reacted to the deaths of all the other smartphone endeavors.

And the tech press played a huge role in this with their blatant bias as well in my opinion.

A healthy platforms war would have ensured that Apple/Google would have had to think twice about some of these practices.

Mass market is how we got here.

The phone made the flow of non tech savvy users the main source of income.

Before, you had to please geeks, and they thought about products, compared, communicated, criticized and decided where to spend their money.

Now, you have to please people that chose products based on ads, design and trends, but don't have any basic understanding of their device yet makes a lot of noise when they get them self in trouble.

That's the same story anywhere you start with a group of passionate people on something that proves successful: amateurs arrive, then money, then policy.

Any job, hobby, venue, city, sport, product, etc. is susceptible to this problem.

It's why the mt Everest is now an expensive highway full of frozen shit, why battle net turned into an insult party, why Adventure park now have those unusable security systems that take the fun out of it, why websites abuse "target=_blank", why you have weird safety messages on microwaves and why you need to provide medical certificates for so many stupid things now a day.

But.

It's also why you can have a device in your pocket that act as your camera, tv, music player, news provider, landline, game console, pager, gps, phonebook for a 10th of the price of a gigantic calculator from 40 years ago.

In the hilarious canadian comedy, "The Decline of the American Empire", the main character makes a point, stating there are 3 things that makes a winner in history: 1, number. 2, number. 3, number.

You should do a post about your comment's first 4 paragraphs, something we can point our "almost there" non-geek friends to.

Desktop OS where designed for physical media first (side loading). The freedom came first, became part of the expected feature of a desktop, and it would be difficult to take it away.

iPhone defined the image of the smartphone and they started internet first with a curated appstore.

Also remember that in day to day life, from a user perspective, there are more benefits than downsides to the AppStore. Even today, finding software, software update, compatibility, license management, consistent original media availability, ... are actual problems in the desktop (especially windows) world and almost non existent in the iphone/smartphone world.

To go back on the topic. I do hope that the TVApp does succeed, otherwise eventually a market actor will solve the problem and someone will wonder in 10 years how we ended up with cable companies again.

Any business solely relies on the constant mercy of their power and water utilities.

For some reason, though, we don't tolerate Seattle City Light choosing to arbitrarily not supply electricity to another company, or Cupertino's water utility charging extortive rates to Apple, just because the latter has deep pockets.

Funny you mention Seattle City Light, have you seen their new (vulnerable) smart meters? They're fun to tango with, broadcasting with FSK modulation on 900Mhz and 2.4Ghz :3

So, they are technically incompetent, and your business depends on them? Sounds like your business is unsustainable!

To be clear, most smart meters employ any kind of encryption. Worse yet, the more rural areas switched to smart meters years before we did here in Seattle, meaning those utility customers have older meter models with even less protection.

Short of opting out of smart metering (which you can do), your pretty well stuck with a vulnerable meter in much of the US.

Those utilities are heavily regulated. If they want to change their "terms of service" they have to go through a public commission.

Isn't that illegal? Didn't Microsoft lose a huge case about IE just like this?

Only because Microsoft was in a monopoly position in it's market. Apple isn't, and thus is not subject to the same oversight.

Not that the current administration is going to be performing any anti-trust litigation anyway.

We currently have duopoly which is not much better than actual monopoly.

The reason we don't have anti trust litigation is because neither GOP and DEMs are interested to do it and that's because these companies since them got smarter and heavily lobby.

Corruption all the way.

When you write DEM in all caps just because GOP is written in all caps, you sound like one of the people who write MAC in all caps just because PC is all caps.

The duopoly of iOs/Android is still far better than the duopoly of democrat/republican.

Whether Apple is in a monopoly position (with respect to the market for iOS apps) is an open question, really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper

Interesting, the supreme court is hearing that case currently which makes these articles very convenient timing wise: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-18/apple-get...

> They're already trying to control the UX with the TV app and are offering companies better rev share rates to do the integration work.

To be fair, that’s not the only reason the TV app was created. Most notably:

– Users want a single place to keep track of all the shows they’re following across all services. Streaming services weren’t coming up with a cooperative solution for this, so Apple did it instead.

– Plainly put, a large chunk (if not most) streaming service apps suck. The TV app adds value by letting users skip the choppy, inconsistent, badly organized, lowest-bidder browsing UIs so many streaming service apps have and get straight to watching this week’s episode.

I like the TV app and wish it did more. I wouldn’t be bothered if I never had to open a service-specific app again. All I need is a clean, frustration free way to browse the libraries of the services I subscribe to.

On the other hand, Apple controlling the UI means, as usual, they kill other services ability to innovate.

But most apple users don't care to have very limited capabilities as long as the core value is here and it's streamlined in the apple experience. Hell, they used a phone without copy/paste for a long time and it didn't bother them.

If you think other media streaming companies can "innovate" with their interfaces, you're not a cable cutter (I refuse to say cord cutter, my home internet still comes over a cord) who subscribes to Netflix, Hulu, and Directv.

Netflix's interface is horrible on both the Apple TV 4 and modern Rokus. It has a much better interface on the 3rd generation AppleTV where "apps" were limited to just for, all intents and purposed, glorified web apps. They were all running on top of WebKit using a combination of JavaScript and Apple's markup language.

Glorified webapps can't pre-download 50 go of tv shows for my next holidays in the deep country sides. You need file system access for that.

What exactly are you responding to?

I'm responding to the post about "innovation" of apps that not possible if everything goes through the TV app as a central launching pad for videos.

Companies aren't innovating anymore, though. We've reached the point where we have dominant players controlling the field, and any "innovation" we see has to do only with profit margins.

I think whether the new apps are innovating is irrelevant. Apple's making the decision for them. As a company, they've always kept things locked down, so I'm not surprised.

Plenty of ad and dark pattern innovation to do yet :)

Maybe the "smartphone" format is played out for now. New innovation may need to come from a new or emerging industry.

Following price and size trends, the next industry would be making a device ~1/50th the size of a "smartphone". Something like the size of a large SD card, probably.

People are trying all kinds of innovations around streaming video apps, you are just aware of them. I am no expert, but off the top of my head I can think of people trying to create streaming subscription services for horror movies, for esports, for anime.. I'm sure most will fail, but who could have predicted Twitch ten years ago?

On the other hand I don’t understand how Apple approved the Amazon Prim and YouTube Apple TV apps. The UX are horrible and I would rather not use them.

edit: added Apple TV

> Users want a single place to

Imho, we've got to solve that "single place" problem, because it creates a winner-takes-all situation. Not just with apps, but also taxi-cabs, food-delivery, etc. Perhaps a government should step in and say that you can have a "single place" but only if you don't abuse your power.

It's not something you can solve. People want single apps because having to switch across multiple services and multiple accounts (and pay multiple $$$) and remembering what shows are on what services is a piss poor user experience.

Yes, that's why the "platform economy" might need government intervention. A "single place" or "platform", is too detrimental to the economy to ignore as a construct. One reason is that the company behind the platform will now start regulating the market, which is arguably worse than the government regulating it.

For some more insights and viewpoints, see:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/image/docum...

Isn't government the quintessential "single place" or "platform" problem?

I guess you can answer that by considering this question: what do you prefer, a government regulating your market, or a company?

> Users want a single place to keep track of all the shows they’re following across all services.

Isn't that the problem Trakt [0] solves?

[0] https://trakt.tv/

Are you sure that’s the only reason? I can do in app purchases with Udemy that required an account to be used everywhere.

I also know that Hulu, Pluralsight, Netflix, and Evernote all work this way.

The rest of the comment noted that it wasn't exactly a fair reason, but it was apparently the one given.

> Since other apps still get to do this, it's clear the policy change message was BS.

> but as a developer whose livelihood is tied to their decisions, I'm tired of being jerked around.

Let me get this straight. A for-profit company providing a marketplace that has allowed you to sustain a livelihood as a developer is now be considered as "jerking you around". This is truly fascinating.

Is it surprising? No. Is it being "jerked around"? Absolutely.

A company wielding their quasi-monopoly power to change the rules of the game at the last minute on a whim is precisely what I'd call being "jerked around".

> They are being redirected to the mobile web version of the app and asked to enter payment details with Netflix directly.

Sorry, but if Apple's policies are applied consistently (I know they often aren't), this won't fly.

I have an app with a basic email/password sign-in screen (the app represents a small part of a larger web-based SaaS product). Apple has rejected my app for including anything in the app that even remotely hints to the service existing outside of the App Store. This includes a "Sign Up" button linked to the web signup, a "Learn More" button that links to the website, or even a "Support" button that has navigation that can lead to a signup or pricing page. After a long chat with someone from the App Store review team, I learned that you can't link to any page of a site that contains other links that can indirectly lead to a signup or pricing information. It's a pretty harsh policy.

So my app was finally approved, but without any links to support documentation on my site. Congratulations, Apple - you win :)

IF applied consistently. This is Netflix though. I'll be interested to see how this plays out.

The big players can dictate a lot of the rules of the game.

They also often get their own rules. I've designed apps that onboard exactly like the big boys, and been rejected.

Sometimes. Apple certainly pushed back against Uber when they were skirting the rules a few years ago.

It's a lot easier and cheaper to switch from a $10 a month Netflix subscription to a $10 a month Hulu/HBO Go/Amazon Prime subscription than it is to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone.

Those all have different programming. It's even easier for loads of people to scream at Apple for removing one of their favorite apps.

It will be some vague "you can't do this here" message that doesn't directly link. A la current state of affairs with Spotify / Audible / Amazon

As a suggestion regarding your situation... obviously its more work but you could always open the support pages in a webView that blocks the purchase urls via [1].

1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiwebviewdel...

But why would people be signing up from your App if not by discovering about your app through the App store? Is that not marketing through the App store?

Searching for Netflix on Google, the App Store link is the second link with reviews and a button to install. Right after the main website. Which one do you think a user is likely to click? Is that App store marketing? In an App centric world there are countless other ways where users discovers apps first or even developers/businesses/website want the users to download the app first.

Yes, if you already know Netflix. For pretty much every non-Netflix level app, people are unlikely to be googling for your specific app. The little game TinyWings has made millions and they wouldn’t have made anything of it weren’t for App Store discovery. People overestimate their own importance in the marketplace — discovery matters. If you sell an app for $2 and you have an acquisition cost of $0.60 through, for example, PPC, then you have spent the same you would have paid in App Store commission and then you have to still handle billing, chargebacks, credit card fees, have a download server to handle the traffic as well as tax collection for every single country in which you sell.

Look at profitability of Android vs iOS — almost universally iOS makes a far greater profit that more than offsets the commission. I wouldn’t want to buy an app outside of the App Store because frankly, I don’t trust most developers with my personal information nor do I trust them to not engage in practices that are contrary to my privacy or enagage in sloppy coding that might subject my device to security risks. As a consumer, the App Store is great.

At the same time, there is a large contingent of apps in the app store that have 0 interest in discovery through the app store.

There are lots of b2b apps that are fully sold on the Enterprise level and the app is simply an add on. It is very frustrating to have to work within the walked garden when this is the case.

We have a couple apps and there really is no "discovery" through the App Store. You have to pay for ads, whether in the stores directly or in the many ad networks that put you in other apps or other advertising. Unless you're already at the top of the lists (because of your off-store brand), or you win the lottery in the game of getting featured, the App Store doesn't drive new users.

For the majority of apps, the App Store doesn't provide discovery. It provides a nearly frictionless delivery and purchase interface. That's worth something, but not 30% off the top. That's worth a premium on top of processing fees, like X cents per transaction and Y% of the transaction, where Y < 6, I think.

Edit: I should say, I don't think there's any way this is going to happen. It would take an anti-trust action to make any difference, but that's not likely to happen.

Amazon app already does this.

I wonder if it would be possible for developers / other stake holders to launch an investment fund who's sole purpose is buy shares in Apple / Microsoft / etc with the view to influence internal policy.

Activist investor style.

Activist investors are a bit of a misnomer, unlike traditional activists these investors are squarely interested in their own investment.

And those shares would lose money specifically because of what they want to accomplish. Your “fund” would lose more from the stock loss than the gain from attempting to influence policy.

And you’d need a $100 billion fund to even get noticed. Even Warren Buffet isn’t calling the shots at Apple.

Given Apple’s current market-cap - over 1TN USD - you’ll need a lot of investors.

You’d have much better success by spending a fraction of the money to hire goons to kidnap Apple’s executives driving home from work and “convince” them to change corporate policy that way.

I personally wouldn't bother with ios in that case.

I miss the idea that a platform, applications, and marketplace were not a vertical stack owned by one entity.

As a consumer, I’d love to buy a phone, not a content distribution straight jacket.

As a consumer, I love it.

I love that I buy an iPhone and Apple doesn't allow any non-trusted binaries to run on my phone, enforces strict style guidelines (the average app just looks better on my iPhone than Android IMO), has one place where all possible apps are, maintains a distribution channels that allows all my apps to be updated easily, and builds hardware and software that is designed to work together.

I love my iPhone because Apple is such sticklers about apps, design, and creating a consistently nice user experience. The average user doesn't care about how "open" Android is. They just want something that works.

Even if you didn't want to go the walled garden approach, who could look at how Europe treats Android and come to the conclusion that Google made the right decision by being open?

Is it that you love that they don't give you the choice of restricting or not restricting installs? Or simply appreciate that app vetting and security are services you're willing to pay for. It seems more like the latter, but you're expressing more like the former.

I can see the value in the vetting service to a lot of people, but I just don't understand the idea of embracing a forced restriction on other people that you happen to like yourself.

I'm fine with the restriction, given that the App store needs to vet all the apps coming through. I have never felt there wasn't an app for what I was looking for.

I would have loved it if Apple had opened up some APIs (for example, the NFC updates coming in iOS 12) sooner.

> I can see the value in the vetting service to a lot of people, but I just don't understand the idea of embracing a forced restriction on other people that you happen to like yourself.

Here are some benefits to the one-size-fits-all policy Apple uses:

* Developers are forced to comply with Apple's rules. Otherwise companies could develop shitty apps that use private APIs to work around Apple's restrictions and then force customers to open up their devices to use it.

* Apple and every 3rd-party support person/company/family member in the world isn't forced to deal with a steady stream of "Somebody told me to change this setting and now my phone has a virus" support requests.

* People aren't misled (more than they already are) about the safety of the iOS ecosystem by a steady stream of news stories about people who changed the setting and got their phone infected.

> * Developers are forced to comply with Apple's rules. Otherwise companies could develop shitty apps that use private APIs to work around Apple's restrictions and then force customers to open up their devices to use it.

This. Apple consistently chooses to make workaround options complex for the purposes of discouraging this sort of activity.

See:

* Deprecated APIs are actually obsoleted and removed; your app won't run in the new OS version and that means people buying hardware can't run your app.

* Right click has long been a hardware feature but off by default, so that apps wouldn't build in non-standard mouse 'gestures'.

* New ITP anti-tracking features in Safari have no off switch The solution to cookie issues is to change how your app works (such that you don't use hidden cross-domain redirects/frames)

* Side loading apps onto iOS devices is not possible without a business profile or the end user having a development environment - and misused business profiles are revoked.

* The option to turn off app signatures has been removed from the UI (not always the case - Minecraft for instance used to tell users to turn app signature verification off globally to work around their lack of app signing).

* Android has a list of permissions you must grant apps in order to install them. iOS on the other hand requires the application to prompt for individual permissions (location information, microphone access, etc), requires a description of why they want that permission, and per App Store guidelines must run with (reduced) functionality should the user say no.

Everything you posted is a benefit to the developer but not the end user.

You have a strange interpretation of that list. Additional privacy in web views, selective privacy controls for app permissions, how exactly are those developer enhancements and not user benefits?

Apple and people who buy into the apple ecosystem believe that it's actually better, and not that it's simply what they personally prefer.

Forcing a perceived "best path" means that the path is going to be the easiest / only way for everyone to follow, and therefore can receive the most attention / most bug fixes / most thought from executives & developers / etc.

Now of course, some people will still disagree about whether that was indeed the best path, and whether it should've been forced. These people strangely never seem to become Apple executives. :)

I don't quite get the last sentence.

> who could look at how Europe treats Android and come to the conclusion that Google made the right decision by being open?

Google was fined on antitrust grounds. I don't see which direction to leap to make that sentence relevant to them being fined.

From the EU’s competition commissioner

> Fine of €4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. It’s illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop it

Android is free, which unequivocally is a net positive for consumers and smartphone manufacturers. Google places some terms of use to their software and suddenly they're being "anti-competitive." Had they made Android a walled garden like Apple, they wouldn't have been fined.

Only if they're the only ones using Android. Regardless of how you want to complain about this, the fact of the matter is, they're abusing their monopoly to put additional restrictions on OEMs, which is a big no-no.

> Had they made Android a walled garden like Apple, they wouldn't have been fined....Android is free, which unequivocally is a net positive for consumers

It's unequivocally a positive if they play by the rules. They fell foul of Europe(who was protecting it's consumers).

Google's not a charity and made the choices they made to get to where they are. Making Android free ensured they quickly became relevant in the emerging mobile market without having to invest massive amounts in designing/making/manufacturing devices (alongside the risks), if doing Apple way. Or if they went the MS way and tried to sell a closed source OS to device manufacturers, those device manufacturers may instead have chosen a different, more polished OS from a company who had more experience/better reputation in that field.

> Google places some terms of use to their software and suddenly they're being "anti-competitive."

You can drop the scare quotes, it's not "anti-competitive", it's just anti-competitive.

> Google's not a charity and made the choices they made to get to where they are.

That's my point. They chose the option where everyone wins the most, especially themselves. The alternatives would have set the smartphone industry back several years as Google would struggle to make phones and phone manufactures would struggle to make a halfway-decent operating system. Google's policies are "anti-competitive" in the same sense that charging money for their operating system or enforcing copyright is "anti-competitive." In one case, you're forcing companies to pay for your product. In the other case, you're forcing the companies to follow a set of rules to use your product.

> phone manufactures would struggle to make a halfway-decent operating system

They'd have bought from one of the other mobile OS vendors(Symbian, MS) or made their own (Nokia w/Maemo). It could be argued that Google distributing Android for free(so as to ensure the continued dominance/inclusion of Google Search) did set the smartphone industry back. Who the hell wants to compete against free? Even more so when that "free" is coming from a XXX billion dollar company. Which is maybe why MS gave up on mobile OS, or Symbian no longer exists or Maemo.

> you're forcing the companies to follow a set of rules to use your product

...and Europe found those rules broke the existing law.

On Android, I can install whatever I want, replace whatever I want. Hell, I can even install another App store if I wanted.

On iOS, you can't do any of that.

How is that not infinitely more anti-competitive? Somehow licensing software to other manufacturers makes you more anti-competitive then owning the entire pipeline?

> Somehow licensing software to other manufacturers makes you more anti-competitive then owning the entire pipeline?

Yes, giving out a product for free to kill off existing competitors and prevent potential competitors from gaining a foothold is anti-competitive.

I agree that IOS is way more anti-competitive. The problem is that anti-trust laws only take effect when some lawmaker defines something as a monopoly. In the android 5 billion dollar fine case, the EU used "percent of of smartphones running an OS" or more specifically, any OS that has >50% market share because the fine goes back to 2011 when android crossed the 50% threshold in the EU.

Apple put restrictions on phones that it manufactured, google put restrictions on phones other people manufactured.

I don't support either, but there is a clear reason why what google did got caught by anti trust laws.

Google got caught because their OS crossed the >50% market share in 2011 (That is literally the definition for monopoly that the EU used in their fine because the fine specifically charges back to 2011).

One of those terms of use was that manufacturers couldn’t make competing phones that used non Google approved forks. How is that any better than what MS did back in the day?

> Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits

Apple consistently gives its apps more permissions than normal developers they get. They also reject apps that interfere with business fields they are in/eyeing.

Name one....

Their apps are free to use private APIs and other devs are banned from using them

I keep hearing this use of “private APIs” that Microsoft and Apple use and think it’s some evil plot.

This how software engineering works.

If I have a publicly released module, I define a public methods that are my interface and private methods that my interface uses.

Of course as the implementator I’m going to have “private APIs” that only I use. In the next release, I might change the entire underlying implementation get rid of private methods, etc. but still not change the public api. You as a developer shouldn’t depend on “private apis” and Apple should have no obligation not to break apps that depend on them.

To be even more blunt. There is no such thing as a “private API”. The Application Programmers Interface is the published spec that developers should use. By definition, if it’s private, it’s not an “API”.

All this plus-it is so much easier to have all my subscriptions for apps in one place to know who I'm paying monthly, and to able to cancel them all in one place through Apple.

I'm tired of signing up for subscriptions and going through a series of dark patterns on a zillion websites to figure out how to manage and cancel my subscriptions. The worst is when there's one click to subscribe and they make you phone in to an annoying retention specialist to cancel.

Just give us the ability to manually whitelist external developers signing keys. That way you can choose to only install apple signed apps (the current situation which would become the default of the new system) or to accept apple signed apps + selected devs applications (which is currently impossible). It already works on OSX.

As a consumer, you're paying 30% on every app purchase for that privilege. That's a pretty high tax on all your apps, if you ask me.

Considering how cheap apps are an extra 30% for some level of quality guarantee is a steal

Do you really think that makes any difference? It's not like the App Store isn't full of shovel ware. I think it'd be much nicer to have an actual 3rd party curated alternative app store. Maybe one with a working search. Too bad we can't do that.

30% on a subscription-based model is not cheap. Calculate that over a year or more, and that's not exactly pocket change.

That's roughly $40 per year that goes into Apple's pocket on an $11/month subscription in the name of marginal security.

As a consumer I feel much safer recommending iPhones to friends and family. Play Store is a minefield and that scares me. But on iPhone my mom can wander around the App Store and I don't have to worry too much about her wrecking her phone because some app couldn't be trusted.

As a developer I hate it :/

You could still have app store and side channels. If you want security and Apple stamp of approval just use default app store. If you want cheaper apps, maybe from trustworthy trusted companies, install them as well.

Supporting obligatory 30% tax on any developer work makes my blood boil. If Apple model wins it will be a disaster for innovation and salaries. I will never buy or recommended Apple products for this reason. It's worth it to me a stand even if user experience is temporarily better.

If you compare it thinking of it as a sales tax model, Apple’s tax rate is almost 43%.

Dev sells app for $0.69, Apple adds a 43% tax on top ($0.30), for a cost to consumer of $0.99 before paying the state/local tax.

The moment a consumer-ready side channel is created, a few major brands will decide that delivering their app that way is better than conforming to Apple's rules and the whole security model comes crashing down.

If it can be used by a major brand, some unscrupulous actor will gently guide my parents through whatever convoluted steps are required to enable it for their seemingly useful app loaded with badware.

I'm glad there's no side channel.

We've gotten by on MacOS for a long time with relatively decent Security - everyone always assumes that allowing side-loading on iOS will be a wave of viruses and malware. Apples pretty good at securing an OS, but allowing side loading would impact their profits.

Android isn't truly open though. Sure, the AOSP is. However, before Gingerbread there were still a lot of advantages reserved for those who entered a commercial relationship - for instance, access to the Google Apps (mail, calendar, chrome).

Post-Gingerbread, Google has put the vast majority of their development into the Google Play APIs, which are not open and are only available to partners. This means that use of things like chromecast (for instance) are restricted to apps distributed through the Play store, and handsets running partner builds of Android.

+1 = I love iPhone for that + their privacy stance.

+1 = I will never build (or invest into) business that is built on a single platform controlled by someone else.

The monolithic stacks are targeting the "average" person, who just wants to get a thing done, rather than worry about the how to get to the point where you can do a thing. Those stacks are great for that sort of thing: pay small fee without thinking about it, really, and then just do the thing.

That all falls apart if you're an over-thinker, penny-wise, or a skeptic, though. By virtue of having some tech-savvy, you are automatically sort-of excluded from the target marketing for most platform/app/marketplace stacks. You want to pick and chose to try and gain efficiency or cost-savings or whatever.

For the non-technical majority they are a huge advantage. We're never going to have average users fully technically aware.

I well remember the state of Windows during Win 98 and XP where most had no idea what they were downloading, and it seemed every machine had malware, hidden pop ups and 37 IE toolbars. I was constantly asked to clean up friend's machines from the damage done by Kazaa and its associated garbage or some other drive-by crap.

If a restrictive app store is the cost of avoiding that and gaining some minimum enforced standards, safety and confidence to avoid crapware, I've actually come to think it a price well worth paying.

The fact that Google are so laissez faire about the Android app store, and let so much crap in, just further highlights the potential benefits that Google aren't fully providing.

Imagine of Microsoft had a similar store to Apple in 1995 with the same restrictions on downloading and executing external code. The web itself could have been killed in the cradle on day one.

The fact that you are here typing this reply right now is entirely because of the state of Windows during 98 and XP. It's a balance between security and freedom. You are arguing for the benefit of security while ignoring the effect that freedom has had on the last 30 years of computing.

It's always hard to predict how things would have turned out given various alternate possibilities. The web could have been killed, or thrived anyway.

Perhaps a locked-down Microsoft store would have had all kinds of ancillary benefits such as freeing up all the money spent padding their bottom line and dealing with externalities (malware cleanup, etc) and redirecting it towards having competitive open-source/GPL products for regular users. Perhaps all the forgotten OSes that died out due to Microsoft's dominant position would have found their fanbases and survived (OS/2 Warp, AmigaOS, BeOS, etc.) and the web would have avoided the IE6 problem that was due to Microsoft's prevalence.

Microsoft may have brought computing to the masses in the 90's due to Windows prevalence in that era, but assuming the web wouldn't have happened without them is a bit much.

> We're never going to have average users fully technically aware.

OP is establishing that there are different types of users with different usage requirements.

You and Grandma are very different users. Grandma is probably much better served by an iPad and App Store than a true general computing device. Grandma is also not going to invent the next internet.

Maybe we should embrace this dichotomy instead of pretending one size fits all.

Interesting aside: How much innovation does the world miss out on if we raise the next generation of users on locked down "Grandma" interfaces?

At this point in time "Grandma" could have been involved in the creation of the internet and working on the next big thing. Maybe use the word expert or techie or something.

Edit: :)

True. I just wanted a nice folksy metaphor.

Should have added a smiley or something to my comment. I meant it more as a history remimder then social commentary.

That claim could be made at literally any point in history. Even in 1983, any employee at ARPA could have been a grandparent. Old people have been involved in technology since the very beginning. I'm not seeing your point.

I was thinking the internet was started around 1970. Your point is correct, but any Grandma working on it then is very likely dead, so unlikely to be working on the next internet.

You have completely twisted that point to mean something else.

The point is that certain parts of our society are not technical and will never be technical. Despite the expectations and wishes of a tiny minority of technical people.

There are two problems with this: Both these types of users can't co-exist on the same device type or ecosystem. Grandma might not invent the next internet on an iPad but your kid is also never going to get that opportunity.

And secondly, since you can't install the next internet on the iPad, Grandma is never going to get to use it.

>Both these types of users can't co-exist on the same device type or ecosystem.

This is false.

An eco system can easily contain a locked down channel for installing programs as well as an open channel to side-load.

The context here is that we're discussing fully locked down platforms.

But that's with the content ofthe argument that a functioning eco system needs to be locked down.

It doesn't really.

> Both these types of users can't co-exist on the same device type or ecosystem.

That's my point though. One size fits all doesn't work all that well in practice. As a technologist you seem to prefer the freedom of general compute. As a fellow technologist, I agree. We are a minority though. The vast majority of people don't seem to want much more from their devices than a working browser. (and maybe Instagram). To them things like root access are more a liability than asset.

> Grandma might not invent the next internet on an iPad but your kid is also never going to get that opportunity.

This is a real concern to me. What happens when whole generations view computers as black boxes of consumption rather than tools of creation / something to tinker with? Probably nothing good.

I think we agree... I highly recommend iPhones and iPads to non-technical friends and family members for that exact reason. They are essentially foolproof.

But I really don't like the fact that they are fully gated devices. Apple has already keep useful, but competitive-to-them, applications off their platform. They've force developers to eliminate user-beneficial changes to their applications. This is not good even for non-technical users but it's much more difficult to quantify.

One real example is that all users would benefit from alternative competitive web browsers on iOS but they can't have it.

“User-beneficial” — according to whom? How do all users benefit from alternative web browsers on iOS? I would argue that users benefit more from security. Is there really much a user can’t do on iOS? What exactly are they missing out on? And whatever that is, does it offset the value from being reasonably safe from malware or badly written apps?

What competitive software is not available on iOS? Every service that Apple sells has a comietitjr on iOS.

Chrome

It's on the App Store.

A Firefox and Chrome themed wrapper around safari are available on the app store. The meaningful components of those browsers are not.

Well for Google, the "meaningful parts" is to collect data. For users, it's to be able to sync bookmarks, passwords, etc.

Compilers and IDEs for major programming languages

Emulators for classic arcade games (or emulators of almost any sort).

Emulators from third parties not related to the original publisher are using copyrighted firmware and the only way you are going to play games realistically is using pirated images. I'm no making a moral judgement. Plenty of movies have fallen off of the back of truck onto my Plex Server.

The company that owns both the original console and the copyrighted game is free to publish a game that runs on top of an emulator. Sega has plenty of games on the App Store that are basically the emulator bundled with the game image.

> What happens when whole generations view computers as black boxes of consumption rather than tools of creation

You're already seeing it. Most people under 35 have likely spent most of their "computing time" by playing games on game consoles, which are precisely black boxes of consumption. And this is the result: walled gardens.

> What happens when whole generations view computers as black boxes of consumption rather than tools of creation / something to tinker with?

But that's how every generation since computers existed has mostly viewed them; tinkerers have been a small minority, even if young tinkerers-of-computers were an iconic image associated with the first generation in which that was a possible thing. That wasn't because they were common, but because it amazed (mostly older) people that they existed at all.

> Grandma might not invent the next internet on an iPad but your kid is also never going to get that opportunity.

Actually Playgrounds is pretty amazing. And you can definitely spin up a development platform in AWS and then Remote Desktop from your iPad or access via Coda or similar Terminal tools.

I'm pretty ok with OSX and that's an OS that is both noob-friendly and comes with powerful modification features.

I do think both types of users can co-exist on the same platform. People of all knowledge levels use Windows & Android.

Quite a lot, if there's no easy way to step outside of the walled garden. You could argue that Apple does provide one with their developer efforts, but I'm not sure if that quite cuts it.

And how many unnecessary toolbar installs in IE, viruses, and ransomware do we avoid?

Imagine if AOL had created 'apps' you could run, only while connected to AOL? I mean they had games and things like being able to buy airline tickets, and chat rooms, but imagine if there were 3rd party access.

They did, they had 'sites' that were just AOL pages existing inside their own framework. They only added the broader internet access later. Same with CompuServe, all similar services like those had proprietary pages like a massive worldwide BBS system.

You could not see AOL pages from CompuServe and vice versa.

"Just search for AOL Keyword %n"

> The web itself could have been killed in the cradle on day one.

The web is such a killer app, that if MS blocked it, it would be a problem for MS, not the web, imho.

Also IANAL, but given that MS launched a competing service - The Microsoft Network - this seems like a huge anti-trust issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up

The combination of consumer demand for web access + anti-trust would probably crush MS, and it would have to provide access.

Another factor is that Windows was always a target for hackers, so it's virtually certain there'd be some jailbreaking solution that everyone would use if MS started blocking access to killer apps like web access.

MS was a near monopoly, but there were enough exceptions that people were aware how amazing the web is.

Finally, if MS took the Walled Garden approach, it's easy to argue it wouldn't be the monopoly it was. MS benefited immensely from its platform being "free" (as in pirated) and "open" (as in hackable and insecure).

There was a company who took the other approach. Its name is Apple and it wasn't doing too well against MS in 1995.

We are talking hypothetical here -- all things being equal. Apple doesn't have anti-trust problems, they've closed off hackers, etc. Apple might not have a monopoly but closed-platform mobile OS is basicaly the whole market.

But that's all beside the point, the web was a killer app because it was available. Microsoft could have killed it with the same policies as iOS long before it was ever popular. And not by targeting it specifically for competitive reasons but just because it would have been against the very same rules we take for granted now. It wouldn't have even had to be conscious effort.

You can't even get another web browser on iOS! We literally can't even invent the "next web" on mobile. There's no point even trying.

> We literally can't even invent the "next web" on mobile. There's no point even trying.

This right here.

I wonder if anyone at Apple even cares. Maybe they’re so pompous they don’t think anyone other than them even could invent the next web.

Whoever does, will have to invent their own hardware too I guess.

Internet is bigger than Web browsers and Hypermedia systems are even older.

There is plently of room for inovation.

Emabrace network protocols and native apps.

That would have pushed Microsoft even further into the anit-trust shit they were in.

Also you had more technical users back then as the majority of the base who really wouldn't have stood for that. Hell, most probably wouldn't have stood for mandatory OS activation via modem if Microsoft had required it.

Just want to point out that your scenario could not obtain because he App Store model depends on the Internet for distribution. Microsoft could not have strangled the web with an App Store for Windows because an App Store for Windows couldn’t exist without widespread internet adoption. And widespread internet adoption depended on the web.

No, I would be typing this on comp.hackernews on a tiny 300 KB native app instead.

Freedom is slavery.

But Apple has had a bunch of problems with crapware in their store. If they were actually vetting stuff, then I'd kind of agree, but as it stands, you are being limited on what you can do with your own device, but without the benefits. Their security feels a lot like the TSA: It's only there to give you warm fuzzies.

I agree that Android is worse, but that doesn't make Apple's store "Good".

Apple has crapware in the store, but the crapware can’t do the things that SpyPhone can on Android.

> I agree that Android is worse, but that doesn't make Apple's store "Good".

The apps on the store can be good or bad, I don’t care if Apple makes that judgement. I want iOS to limit what any app can do - which it does based on a much better security model.

Ah, I see what you mean, and yes, Apple has better permissions control.

As it turns out, giving the user ultimate control is really the best way to handle these types of things.

Maybe I have my nostalgia lenses on, but I think I'd rather have the internet of kazaa era in terms of how things were working.

There were viruses? Yes. 37 IE toolbars? Of course! But consider for a moment what we have today instead: Instead of the simple and (comparatively) mostly harmless viruses we now have ransomware. Instead of kazaa installing spyware we have the OS itself trying to phone home. Instead of having a virus to delete random files, you now have one of the Big 4 delete stuff from your device without asking you.

You say we had crapware we had to avoid back then, I see that today we install the crapware ourselves and consider it a treat. Back then when you bought a piece of software you owned it. You didn't have micro transactions and DLCs and all these "innovations" that drive "engagement". You didn't have to have data connection to sync something with bluetooth.

Sure there were also some crappy things, but things are not all that better today. We just got used to it.

Huge nostalgia lenses. It was never that great, and besides there's no going back: the computing model of 15+ years ago simply wouldn't survive contact with the latest sophisticated strategies of malice and manipulation.

The reality is >95% of the population don't want to be, don't know how to be, or simply don't have the spare time to be the systems administrator for all of their technology. The computing model that Apple offers with iOS and the App Store is—in effect—the outsourcing of systems administration to a competent third party.

For most people this is not really any different to outsourcing the maintenance of your house to a cleaning service, or the maintenance of your car to a mechanic, or the minding of your children to a daycare provider. For most people the notion of "computing freedom" is not useful or helpful.

I'm the "computer help guy" for my extended family, and believe me, I am very thankful for Apple's approach because the amount of sysadmin-style assistance I've been asked to provide has absolutely plummeted. For many people who just want to browse the internet, an iPad is way better than a Windows PC. There are people in my family for whom I would fear for their bank accounts if they still used a Windows PC. I don't spend a moment's time worrying about the possibility of malware on their iPads.

I prefer sandmboxes, stores and containers than having to go through a pile of floppies with anti-virus and still be unsure of how safe they were.

Windows is very different from iOS in that it had no sandbox and its API allowed developers to do everything they wanted. Users unknowingly granted admin privileges to every application they ran.

iOS, on the other hand, restricts its apps heavily - they are sandboxed, can't access other apps' files (no ransomware) and need explicit user permission to meddle with their private data.

Now, yes, exploits exist, but look at macOS - Apple still controls developer certificates and can pull the plug on misbehaving developers. An alternative to the app store wouldn't be nearly as devastating as win32.

You raise an interesting point about Android malware. Does it stem from the fact that Android apps can access the filesystem?

The biggest issue on Android is side loading and lack of updates.

Since Android 7, apps cannot any longer access filesystem outside their APK installation directory. All accesses must be done via SAF APIs.

As long as real computers don't go extinct, I can agree with this. I don't mind trusted computing; the problem is who owns the keys.

Better that a company like Apple holds the keys to my parents' iPads than my parents. Way better. Waaaaay better.

Yes, I agree with this. People who don't know or care should get devices that they don't have to manage themselves.

Personally I enjoy having the ability to write and run programs for the hardware I paid for without having to beg some company for their permission and blessing. As long as I always have that option, I don't mind.

> I well remember the state of Windows during Win 98 and XP where most had no idea what they were downloading, and it seemed every machine had malware, hidden pop ups and 37 IE toolbars. I was constantly asked to clean up friend's machines from the damage done by Kazaa and its associated garbage or some other drive-by crap.

I still prefer that personally than the crippled smartphones.

That's fantastic.

Some people agree with your views and there are products and software distributions in the market to satisfy them. Some people prefer the way Apple does things. Everyone's preferences are being catered for, and that is wonderful.

the crippled smartphones won the war, there's no real "usable" product for my preferences unfortunately :/.

Can you not install whatever app you want on an Android phone, as long as you enable sideloading in the settings?

I don't really want an app system, I would like a linux-like alternative where I can do a script to cat /dev/gps0 for example to record my location, or just ssh into my phone. I don't like at all the way Android is done.

Has there not always been unequal distribution of apps / content across platforms?

I do think the Apple/Google cut has been natural. The phone and successful app stores aren't accidents, they're endpoints in a long chain of work to focus consumer attention in a way that sells software.

That said, these benefits have an expiration date. I don't think the app store cut has been a ripoff for its entire history, but if the temperature of the room has shifted toward hostility, it might be that they've spent the goodwill they earned with their innovation and now it's time for a more sustainable long term arrangement.

We can find middle ground between "Apple did nothing for me" and "Apple deserves 30% of software sales for eternity"

But to negotiate that, you have to be able to threaten them with leaving. And there's no other way to get iPhone users, who are by far the biggest spenders. And if you're going to go this route of web-only transactions, you're going to have some user drop-off and missed sales, it's just a question of how much. Like, where does it make sense to switch. If its 30% drop off it doesn't matter either way. If its 15% or 5%, you'd better do it. If it's 70%, no way in hell should you do it. And I can guarantee you that every app business will have a different number for this, and it's nearly impossible to know what the drop off is before making the jump. So many are not willing to leave, and here we are. Netflix has a strong multi-platform use case already, so it's a natural move for them. Other apps may not fair so well. I think losing these larger companies is somewhat inevitable as long as the rates stay this high. We'll see Apple fight to retain them, but it would be a real surprise to see them booted from the platform over the switch, since they are still adding value. And can you imagine the backlash over the even less fair solution: Apple decides to negotiate special rates for these behemoths (just to keep them honest) while charging upstart developers the full rate! That would cause even more outrage than the 30%!

It would be interesting if Netflix decided to straight up call Apple's bluff on their revenue restriction. Would Apple risk losing Netflix on the iPhone to enforce their rule about web signup links? Netflix is a ubiquitous expectation, and if it got delisted, Google and Samsung would have a field day talking about how you had to get an Android to get Netflix.

The answer is yes. They already fought with Spotify over this. Spotify had to clean up their game quite a bit to pass App Store review. Apple still has plenty of leverage. Being the highest grossing app on the platform is a double edged sword - and Netflix needs to be on iOS even more than Apple needs them to. But it's very unlikely that Apple would go so far as to delist Netflix. Apple will just reject the new updates until Netflix submits a version that plays by the rules. If Apple delisted an approved (live) version of any app based on something extra that turned up during review of a newer update, and the change wasn't in the live version, that would be unprecedented as far as I know, and likely an error that would be corrected promptly. And the Netflix user base is so big, there's almost no way that error would be allowed to happen.

Why can Netflix just use the mobile browser? Are they allowing downloads for offline viewing? If they are only online streaming I see no reason at all to even have an app. Just a mobile web page. Can somebody enlighten me?

User experience is better in apps

In my experience it depends on the site and the app. Streaming vids seems like a perfect job for the browser.

Agree but overall users seem to prefer apps versus browsers at a ratio of 9 to 1 (in terms of time spent in each medium) .

> Are they allowing downloads for offline viewing?

They do for quite a few items in their catalog - probably not even a majority, but quite a few nonetheless.

I think Spotify needs Apple far more than Netflix does. You don't listen to Spotify (for the most part) on TVs, but Netflix is there.

Many fewer folks use Spotify on desktop OSs, it's common for Netflix.

Netflix is well positioned to fight Apple over this, and if they call Apple's bluff, Apple will likely be forced to consider.

There’s no bluff . Sure Netflix could live on without iOS. But what would be the point of giving up 70% of iOS because they couldn’t get the 30%. It’s not even a problem for them . They’ll be able to move it to the browser just fine and keep 100% they just won’t be able to link it from the app . There’s no fight to be had . Apple has a stronger reason for not linking to external websites where users would be asked to put in their credit cards then just to make sure they get their 30% from the netflixes of the world.

> And there's no other way to get iPhone users, who are by far the biggest spenders.

Well, it's not like iPhone users can't simply buy Androids. I have mostly iOS household with a few Androids sitting around - mostly unpowered and gathering dust (kids use them mainly to watch Netflix on road trips).

I think Netflix has a strong position to negotiate with Apple over this.

So you’re saying your think Netflix has a strong position due to you having a few android devices laying around for occasional Netflix use in addition to your iOS devices? To me, the argument that people will just buy cheap androids just for Netflix is like, ok maybe 5% will, so then Netflix only loses 95% of their iOS revenue by leaving the App Store. But it’s a completely moot point because it’s very unlikely that Netflix would do something to cause their app to be removed from the store. Like, its always going to be better to have 70% of iOS rev than 0%. It’s kind of like talking about what would happen if Russia nuked the US.

Its true that both companies have a strong position. Netflix just doesn’t have quite as much leverage in theirs.

They’ll be allowed to move the purchase off the App Store just like Amazon / Spotify have done, so long as they don’t link to it directly from the app. The question that remains is when will smaller apps start to follow suit, and will they be able to get away with what Netflix / Amazon / Spotify do, and what will be the effect of this pressure? It’s hard for an unknown developer to say “hey, actually, go to my website to do this and heh, sorry but, I can’t link you there!” But for behemoths, it’s almost trivial to do so. There will still be user drop off there even for behemoths, just likely not as bad.

I'm sure it would cause outrage, but I can definitely imagine a negotiation happening. It's in both Apple and Netflix's best interest to stay together. The rest is just negotiating a percentage that works.

Of course, there is no way they would use that negotiated the percentage for the rest of us.

I think it would take an anti-trust action of some sort to cause a dent here, but I'm not holding my breath.

> Epic Games will be launching its hit game Fortnite for Android on its own website, and fans will only be able to download the game there, not on Google Play ... while the setting that blocks third-party installations can be disabled on Android phones.

If they are talking about disabling it system wide vs disabling it for a single application, is this not pretty irresponsible? Lots of kids play Fortnite, saying "hey to play your favourite game just disable this security setting" to millions of them seems risky.

It's possible they're using the uncomfortable security risks as a play to get better terms out of Google.

Not an Android nor Fortnite user, but I believe from other reports there is a prompt to re-enable the setting after installing the app.

Is it not irresponsible for the platform to force the choice to be that coarse-grained?

You're right that it's a bad situation for millions of kids to be told to turn off security settings, it seems like that's a bad situation for Android/Google/Samsung than it is for Epic Games. It's kind of Google's own fault for tying their 'security' into a huge tax. If Google offered certification for a fixed cost then this wouldn't be an issue - you could distribute certified apps yourself and not have the problem. The problem is they tied certification into a tax and appearing in the appstore.

> The problem is they tied certification into a tax and appearing in the appstore.

If you were more profit motivated, you might argue the problem is allowing externally installed software. Granted they foolishly obtained too large of a market share to have any say in that anymore.

If you care about users though, yes, the cost barriers for devs are a problem no matter who puts them up. Ideally the cost is in the phone purchase, not the continued use.

Hopefully these kids will be exposed to the idea that they can choose what software they use rather than being limited to a curated store.

They will most likely be scammed into downloading spyware.

Which is a valuable lesson - a lesson in learning to be a rational, critical, grown-up human being. Or we could educate them and it might never happen. Also, let's not forget that many closed system are spyware already.

Many of us became deeply involved in tech because some person (thanks Pat Volkerding!) or organization gave us a system were we could do whatever the hell we wanted.

> Which is a valuable lesson - a lesson in learning to be a rational, critical, grown-up human being.

Well... you can phrase it like some life lesson, sure. In reality 1% of 3 million kids clicking on 'Free vbux!!' and converting is 30,000 kids having malware ridden phones, doing god knows what to god knows who.

Is increasing the profits of malware distributors by so much really worth some hand-wavy "teach kids to become a grown up" lesson?

Also, it's not just the kids. By any margin.

In reality 1% of 3 million kids clicking on 'Free vbux!!' and converting is 30,000 kids having malware ridden phones, doing god knows what to god knows who.

Well, most of those kids will run outdated Android versions with many known vulnerabilities. And they cannot update their phones, because they have locked firmware and walled-garden OS, largely put in place to make them buy new phones.

Again, the proper solution beyond a good security baseline is to educate people.

> Again, the proper solution beyond a good security baseline is to educate people.

"The beatings will continue until your security improves!"

> ...they cannot update their phones, because they have locked firmware and walled-garden OS, largely put in place to make them buy new phones.

This is one of the biggest problems with the mobile landscape, with Apple, Google, and OEMs culpable to various degrees. It's deeply unethical, selfish, and wasteful.

I'd rather my kids get a few bruises than be slaves to The Man.

>Many of us became deeply involved in tech because some person (thanks Pat Volkerding!) or organization gave us a system were we could do whatever the hell we wanted.

Surely you can understand why letting people do whatever the hell they want might not be the best thing when people's personal and financial data is on the line.

Surely you can understand why letting people do whatever the hell they want might

As a default no. But there should always be an option (with appropriate warnings) to do with your device what you want to do with it.

might not be the best thing when people's personal and financial data is on the line.

Even on a walled garden device people will open phishing mails and log in to phishing websites. There will always be attack vectors. Beyond a reasonable baseline in security (sandboxing between applications, etc.), the most important thing to do is to educate people on proper security practices.

The burned hand teaches best.

Yeah, agreed.

A lot of computer knowledge comes from trying something, failing, and then learning how to recover.

I learned a lot from bricking my laptop in my early teens downloading roms and warez, and then understanding whats safe and what's not, and with little long term consequences.

Having grown up in the time of Windows being very malware-heavy, it was not the children getting scammed.

And much of the bad behavior, such as simple apps bombarding people with ads, is standard in programs found in mobile app stores now anyway.

Darn, this is really "think of the kids" all over.

You don't need to download spyware with virtually any mobile phone, pretty much everyone out there is doing already(recent ref: google maps)

I think Google Maps is in a different league when we're talking about actual spyware that means to do you harm. Google just wants to track your location, while this other crap will spam you phone calls and try to brick your phone for money.

I'm all for more freedoms when installing apps, but Google Maps isn't the same as this other shit.

Think of the kids has always been an excuse to restrict people.

> If they are talking about disabling it system wide vs disabling it for a single application, is this not pretty irresponsible?

It's not a system wide setting, it's an app-specific setting (that is, it's for the app you wish to be able to install other apps.)

Setting it to “allow” for the default browser and leaving it that way is something of an issue, though.

In my experience its only an app-specific setting on Samsung devices. Their phones give you a prompt for disabling the setting "just this one time".

It's app-specific for any phone running Oreo or newer.

So in this case Chrome or Firefox? Does not seem any better. In fact, way worse.

I don't think this is how it works, at least not from my past experience with Lineage. A browser isn't an app installer, as when you download an APK from it, the APK is staged through the phone's integrated file manager (aka "Downloads" app), and is treated as having no real source.

As far as I know, real "app installers" are purpose-built programs such as Amazon Appstore and F-Droid.

Hmm, you might be right, but I installed an APK recently (also on Lineage) and it asked me to authorize Firefox, it had the Firefox logo and seemed to suggest that future installs would be authorized. I cancelled it and opened it through the file manager.

Hmm, that might be one of the changes made in Oreo. Weird, I don't think it's a very good change either.

This is not much of an issue with newer versions of Android. see Tim Sweeney's tweet about the situation: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/102553539172465049...

Installing a downloaded APK means you miss out on Google's identity verification process, and maybe on Google's malicious code scanning -- but Google Play Protect says it will scan all apps on your device, and may upload your apps to Google[1], so it might not be that big of a difference in practice, if you get linked into the appstore by a shady website, you can get a shady app.

There's a bigger difference on iOS, if a similar setting was even available, because Apple curates much more strongly than Google.

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/2812853?hl=en

Unless there's a different app store doing the same thing. (Such as Amazon app store for Android or F-Droid)

Android doesn't have system wide sideloading anymore, if I allow sideloading for one app its still disabled for other apps.

IIRC, the setting only needs to be disabled temporarily to allow the installation of a third party app. If you re-enable the blocking setting after you install the game, I don't see any reason things can't work and be secure.

How will they handle updates?

I have a startup which builds a web-based enterprise product. A year ago we launched a companion app that provides a fraction of the functionality of the desktop application, just enough to help our customers extract the key information they need when they're on the road.

All of a sudden a few days Apple decides we have to implement in-app payments. I explained them that this is an enterprise product for an arcane industry and that our customers require quotations/invoices raised to their procurement department and would not pay several hundred to several thousand dollars through the app. They insist we have to implement in-app payments despite not helping our customers nor our business. We don't have automated billing at all, not even on our desktop product. The requested change means months of development for no value (at this point).

No way to appeal. We can currently not update our app and if we don't implement in-app payments in an unspecified time our current version will be pulled too.

Thanks, Apple.

Do you have any mentions of registering/purchasing in-app? I'd remove those, including any links leading to your website, and only show a login screen. I bet they'd let that pass. I think their main goal is making sure the possibility of registrations/purchases outside of IAP is near-zero.

Can you elaborate on this, because this is what I understand (from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about Apple's review process):

You can't provide your app at no cost on the App Store. You can't provide your app for a cost on the App Store, if you don't include in-app payments.

Or is it the case that you want to allow your customers to make nominal purchases through the app, and Apple say these must be processed through in-app payments?

>>>>>is it the case that you want to allow your customers to make nominal purchases through the app, and Apple say these must be processed through in-app payments?

Yes!!

Customers will not be bypassing the app store, they're bypassing the in-app payment infrastructure. But Apple want to allow only in-app payments.

Accidentally subscribed to Youtube Red / Premium through the App Store. Got an e-mail a few months ago when Youtube shifted to Premium congratulating me that I was grandfathered into the old rate and features forever. I noticed their new rate of $11.99 seemed similar to what I was already paying. This is when I discovered Google had included a $3 surcharge to cover App store fees in the App store price (don't blame them). I looked into transferring and there is no way to transfer an App store subscription to Google without cancelling and starting fresh (thus losing grandfathering). Decided to stick with the App store to maintain grandfathering, but it's a bit ridiculous that Google wasn't allowed to nudge me to a browser to save $36 a year.

Most grandfathered plan will be deliberately hard to be transferred or modified ever so slightly.

The goal is, obviously, making you giving up your grandfathering. It doesn't surprise me.

You aren’t allowed to charge extra for a subscription in an app in the App Store.

I don't think that's true

$11.99 if you sign up on web - https://www.youtube.com/premium

$15.99 if you sign up through in-app - https://itunes.apple.com/app/youtube/id544007664 (Click on In-App Purchases under Information to see the price)

You’re right. That is what Spotify is doing too. I really thought they prohibited that, but can’t find evidence of that. Perhaps that was around their bookstore.

You just can't tell the user in the app that they can get it cheaper by going to your website.

Dear Netflix, I want to use your services but you are the only app that I can't find in the play store of my not-rooted, fully Play store capable Lineage OS device. It's a pain. And why do I need the app? Because Chromecast is the only convenient way to start watching Netflix on a TV (for an Android user). Why won't you make a Kodi plugin?

If you want to be independent, be serious about it, make it easy to find the latest apk on netflix.com/apk, instead of apkmirror. Make it easy for users who pay to enjoy your service the way they want to. Seems to me like Netflix themselves are the ones pushing Play and App store official routes on official, completely locked-in devices.

I was on a app diet when I still had my first gen Moto G (with 8 GB of memory) and I found that almost everything I used apps for before had websites that were as functional as the app (or even more functional in the case of Facebook), minus all the obligatory tracking (if you choose so).

Apps stores are work great if you are a small company and can get access to big audience for 30% cut. Apps stores essentially acts like middleman who does payment processing, can advertise and also provides fraud protection. But when you are already a big company like Netflix or Microsoft those benefits essentially just don't add up.

Could this be analogous to the 'Net neutrality' arguments?

Only in this case Google and Apple are the 'bad guys' (the infrastructure providers, eg the ISP).

While the so called 'Over-the-top' application/service providers (eg Netflix, Spotify, Epic games, etc) and their users are the victims ?

I can see a small difference, where the ISPs did not have anything analogous to 'advertisement' benefit to their 'Over-the-top' application/service providers.

But surely, the advertising help the stores provide -- is not worth continuous 30% (or even 15%) take ?

Totally. Device neutrality. Software freedom even. People should be able to run whatever legal software they want on their own devices for whatever legal purposes.

Can someone help explain how this works today? I'm a bit unclear. The Netflix app is, as far as I know, free. I use it, and I have a subscription paid for via their website. (well, okay, I've never really watched content on a phone or tablet, but I know it works).

Is the problem that new users who sign up via the iOS app have to make an in-app payment for their subscription, thus triggering the 30% cut?

I assume this also means Apple will reject any app that submits payment through the Netflix iOS app directly to Netflix, bypassing the normal iOS payments process.

Why doesn't Netflix just not allow you to sign up via the app, forcing everyone to use a web browser (either on mobile or on desktop)?

It seems like other app developers could do the same thing, allowing the app to sign in to your web account to view content. For example, the Remember The Milk todo list service. I believe I pay on the website, but they have a companion iOS app that allows me to sign in.

Correct. They also must have had a way to sign up through the app itself, which would require going through StoreKit and the App Store (as any app that allows purchasing of products delivered to the device without giving apple a cut will be rejected during the review process). So they are now doing exactly as you suggest and just disallowing the in app purchase.

I think there are restrictions to forbid apps from arbitrarily forcing users to have an account.

Apple can request in some cases that there is a way to use your application without any account, or that you provide a signup form inside the app. There are exceptions, but I assume you have to justify them to Apple aside from "I don't want to pay your fees".

Basically, the rules are a bit more complex I think and they cover a number of potential loopholes.

Apple and Google should update their policies where they take a much smaller cut if the user got to the App Store page directly (via external link) or a direct search. They deserve the 30% cut if users find the app by browsing the store (which doesn't happen nearly as often).

Yeah I doubt anyone has ever learned about Netflix through Google/Apple app store. Netflix is a huge brand.

Maybe intel deserves 30% of the cut since you used their CPU to find an app when you use a web browser. How about Firefox, do they deserve a cut? Maybe Comcast since you used their network. Apple & Google don't deserve 30%, their app store is a monopoly. The same way it's unfair for Microsoft to force you to only use Internet explorer is the same way it's unfair for us to be forced to use the app store. There should be other alternatives, and none of them should have a restriction such as, "You can't publish your apps with us if you do with another store".

There are alternatives, like F-droid or Amazon's app store.

I agree that Google being allowed to bundle their app store (and no other alternatives) amounts to them being as anti-competitive as MS bundling IE.

What alternatives are there on iOS?

Excellent, hopefully this trend continues on all platforms.

Didn't Apple change the rules about external accounts and subscriptions a couple years back? I thought you could create an app that required an external account (and external purchases) as long as there was no links to the external site from the app and no mention of subscription or external purchases within the app.

Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and a few others have been doing it this way for a while, so I'm surprised this is news.

Audible.com is a clear example of this. All purchases have to be made on their website. The app is just a player with the ability to browse and put content on your wish list but nothing more. It's a horrible user experience but a 30% price hike on content might make me think twice about impulse purchases

Oh! So these Apple fees are why Audible doesn't allow you to purchase audio books in the app.

Yep, and the same reason you cannot buy kindle books in the kindle app.

Ultimately it’s of course their choice, but I truly believe that a “fee-less” App Store would be better for the party that so seldom gets mentioned: me, the consumer. I’m the one that’s ultimately paying the 30%, not the apps. I already paid 1000$ for this phone, if I spend money on Netflix I want that money going to making great tv shows, all of it, not 70% of it.

Who cares what the developer has to pay Apple? Do you care how much the developer pays in rent for his office, or his high speed internet? Maybe the app would be cheaper if the developer pays himself $50/hour rather than $100. All of those costs are part of the app price as well.

I would absolutely care if a new price materialized out of thin air that then got passed off to me. 30% is a lot. I posit that if a new 30% penalty was instilled tomorrow in just about every piece of software you interacted with, you would both notice and care.

I also care when the 30% applies solely by proxy through me. That is to say, since Apple doesn't allow you to differentiate pricing on the Store (IOW, charge 30% more on the App Store), the developer is forced to have me be a lower-value customer than if I used the product through another means. That means that in the developer's eyes, I am necessarily a less important customer, the same way someone that pays for the basic account is lower priority than someone that pays for the Pro account. This is not true of all the other costs you mentioned, rent and salary aren't dynamically changing customer to customer. By placing a 30% fee on the App Store, Apple is obscuring my importance to the developer.

What new price? Apple's 30% has been in place since the App Store opened. Outside of the HN bubble, users have no idea what Apple charges developers, nor do they care. If a customer wants an app, they check the price and determine if they want to pay it or not, just as business is conducted every day all around the world.

If a developer is losing money building apps (most cut their own throat with $.99 apps), they need to increase the price to cover their costs, that's Business 101.

Well, the point of the comment was the demonstrate that a 30% revenue cut is rather onerous through the thought experiment of what would happen if an additional one was placed.

That being said, existing services absolutely went through this sort of increase when customers wanting to use a service with a known pricing model, interacted with the service on this new platform: services that wanted to put their business on the App Store DID have to either add an additional 30% increase across the board, or (as mentioned in the end of the comment), treat App Store-acquired customers as 30%-less revenue generating. Again, from the customer's perspective, which I have repeatedly tried to convey, this is confusing and opaque. Notice that in none of my above comments do I ever lament app developers, and thus do not need a business 101 explanation. I am lamenting that Apple, through a combination of not just placing a large 30% cut, but additionally not giving developers the flexibility to either increase the price of the product by 30% on said platform, created an opaque situation where the customers appears as a lower-revenue generating customer to a business.

This was not imagined, it was discussed quite a bit in the space (especially when the MAC App Store appeared), where EXISTING apps, pre App Store, found themselves in the very unfortunate situation where they hoped people found the app not through the App Store.

Even if it's not a new price 30% is a lot.

Imagine if you had a physical store that you rented space for, but all purchases made you had to give 30% to your landlord.

It's INSANE

I'd like to see some sort of a breakdown of how Apple uses the 30% to improve the app store. Even if they were spending 15% of that cut on improving iTunes Connect etc. it would've shown.

This is a list of some of the benefits of the App Store. The idea is not that every developer may want/need every feature, but think how much it would cost a developer to implement each one by themselves.

  - 24/7 worldwide availability, instant payment/download
  - Easy re-install after deletion, you still own the app even if deleted
  - Region restriction
  - Separate app pricing by region
  - Revenues paid to developer from multiple region currencies without conversion fees
  - Tax calculation and collection
  - Customer refunds
  - User rankings and reviews
  - App store advertising in category listings
  - Video previews of the app in operation
  - Packaging of media content allowing developers the ability to load game levels as the user needs them rather than all at once
  - App sales stats

> Easy re-install after deletion, you still own the app even if deleted

It’s not universal. I’ve lost access to several apps that I had paid for—and that’s not even getting into iOS 11 incompatibility.

IMO The European Commission Versus Android[1] from Stratechery is required reading if you want to understand the app store battles of 2018.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-commission-versus-...

There's two arguments: Apple/Google developed the device, support the platform, built the api, maintain the infrastructure, and market the experience.

The other is that app developers have a symbiotic, probably synergistic relationship with the phone makers. Apps are a huge part of the draw of a good platform.

My take is that until we decide that a given platform is a monopoly, we let the platforms fight for a larger market share by attracting high quality apps using this "tax" as leverage (better dev experience, larger market share, superior hardware are other tactics). Microsoft tried (and failed) to improve their platform by offering developers a larger share of the take away and hoping they'd improve the ecosystem.

My hope is the market gets more competitive so that app makers get a larger share of the profit.

> and market the experience.

While locking their devices and users to that experience, or forcing those users to make large-scale security compromises just to avoid it.

> My take is that until we decide that a given platform is a monopoly

They seem like they are. Is there another app store that iPhone users can use? Android users? Does the operating system on these phones let you easily change your "app store" preference?

> we let the platforms fight for a larger market share by attracting high quality apps using this "tax" as leverage

How does that benefit consumers? Is it impossible to achieve these same benefits in any other way than the somewhat draconian system we have now?

> Microsoft tried (and failed) to improve their platform by offering developers a larger share of the take away and hoping they'd improve the ecosystem.

Microsoft had more problems with their platform than just the price. There's already a workable distribution channel for third-party software on their systems. Their "app store" really didn't add any benefit to people already familiar with their software. Plus, they never really sold a volume of phones that puts them close to Apple or Google so their Monopoly position in this regard was severely hampered.

> My hope is the market gets more competitive so that app makers get a larger share of the profit.

How is that going to happen when you only have one app distribution mechanism to choose from per platform?

> They seem like they are. Is there another app store that iPhone users can use? Android users? Does the operating system on these phones let you easily change your "app store" preference?

Companies are not forced to change their hardware to run a competitors binaries really. There's choice in platforms which means iOS or Android phones in this case. If this were true every game console was a monopoly.

> My hope is the market gets more competitive so that app makers get a larger share of the profit.

Isn't the nominal size of a slice of cake more important than it's percentage relative to the overall cake?

Sure, it would be great if developers got a larger chunk of a large market. But what if they got a smaller chunk of a much bigger market? 70 % of a hundred million is a lot more than a hundred percent of 500 bucks. Worrying about percentages can sometimes just be about jealousy/ego.

In the frontier days of app stores, a lot of the policies made way more sense. 30% cut but you don't need to engage a payment processor and it makes it way easier for the consumer to pay? Sure! App approval required so people don't download malware? That's good for consumers, which is also good for the ecosystem. Apple is much better at this than Google is too as we've seen more misbehaving Android apps than iOS (eg crypto mining in the background).

But Apple (and Google, IMHO to a lesser extent) are starting to use their gatekeeper positions for their own advantage. And these markets are getting so huge and the potential damage to other companies so large that they're just inviting government action, probably by the EU first but I can also see the US getting to the point of taking antitrust action.

It's clear Apple has streaming and original content ambitions. They also have iTunes of course. If they're not careful they're going to trigger intervention when they arbitrarily start applying rules to Hulu and Amazon Prime Video that don't apply to others.

There are already some pretty silly contortions for these policies. Take Amazon. You can purchase items through the iOS app... except for anything digital like, say, Kindle books. But you can buy Kindle books elsewhere and then load them on the iOS Kindle app using your email and password. As others have noted, other companies haven't gotten these exceptions.

This is also why I think it's a huge mistake for Apple to get into the original content game. Their other businesses are so huge that original content will never be able to compete on a revenue basis. Yet they risk their own platform by favouring their own content. Government action could be ruinous for them. When Apple competes on their own platform against third parties it undermines faith in that platform and (IMHO) its long term health (even viability).

I don't know what the alternative is though. It's not letting anyone install anything as much as tech-savvy purists may think so. That's actually not what consumers want or need. Is it allowing competition in App stores? Maybe. There isn't just one domain registrar and just one root-level CA.

To me, the 30% is fine.

What disgusts me is that if I decline to use their platform, I can’t even tell users that there is a subscription available through another channel.

If Apple didn’t restrict our speech it would be an easier pill to swallow.

To everyone saying that Apple/Google maintain the hardware/infra for Apps and so deserve a cut, I think the question here is about being forced into it. Imagine if Microsoft did the same with Windows; people would be outraged.

The reason why Apple charges 30%—and is justifiable in doing so—is because the App store itself is a marketing platform.

If a user discovers the Netflix app, signs up, they are essentially discovering Netflix through the App store.

If a user discovers Netflix elsewhere, they can be pointed to download the app for extended utility.

In the latter case, it doesn't violate Apple's 30% revenue cut policy. But if they want to target people who discover Netflix from the App store platform, then they would have to pay.

Salesmen have one-time commissions or finders fees. You won't pay your sales agent a cut of your mortgage every month, would you ?

As another commenter pointed out, the "discovery surcharge" makes sense for a one-time purchase. It makes less sense for an ongoing subscription.

Also, does anyone actually discover Netflix through the App Store? Or do they know about Netflix, go to sign up, and the first device they sign up on happens to be running iOS?

30% is the expected amount for an entire marketing budget. Back when the app store wasn't so overrun, it may have made some sense. (Remember, Jobs justified it when facing initial criticism by saying that most people were going to use mobile web sites anyway so the app stuff isn't really a big deal.)

Now, you have to give the cut and do marketing. It's usurious, and we need to stick to other channels.

Netflix has been doing this for a while. For the longest time you simply couldn't sign up unless you went to the website.

Does this means that any app distributed outside the store doesn't get access to closed features like Google Cloud Messaging? If so that's another reason to support sideloading since right now using MicroG seems like a pain in the ass (if you, like me, need a lot of problematic apps)

Uh, I used to install apps directly from APKs and they don't seem to disable GCM or any other features?

Different outcome when you haven't flashed gapps though. Haha.

It entirely depends on whether the phone itself has Google Play on it or not. When you distribute through the Play Store, you know that's true. When you distribute through other means, you can't be sure of that.

I say everyone involving in this are wrong.

What Netflix trying to achieve can be perfectly done by ordinary web browser. I don't know about their "app" but I bet it's just a wrapper of web browser.

The whole app ecosystem is crap. It must be abolished ASAP.

What's wrong with telling people to go to their website?

They apps seems like a thin wrapper around a web app, couldn't they just have people use the web app? If you add a link to the home screen, it's almost identical.

Not idea, but better than losing 30% of your revenue...

It made me so mad to see Tim Cook on stage with a gazillion dollar check, as if any significant amount of that money actually benefited developers or content owners compared to what a sensible market would have allowed.

Heck, for a year or so it almost would have been lying to claim to be paying developers (plural) when a single developer like Supercell was raking in so much.

Let’s be honest: there’s a giant check from people blowing money on games that they shouldn’t (gems, etc. to fuel addictions), and a large check for a very short list of apps constantly in the top 10 due to app store positive feedback loops. The remaining $4.52 of all payments to anyone is split 145,622 ways to the 98.9% of developers trying to survive.

And let’s not forget, Apple’s store platform feels like it was once one person’s side project and is now 5% of a different person’s time. It doesn’t feel like they’ve cut any checks to make this a good marketplace.

> as if any significant amount of that money actually benefited developers

I don’t see a shortage of well-paid app developers nor multibillion dollar single-app startups.

Just 30% when purchased through the app store. Sounds like a simple solution.

Doesn't this violate the App Store guidelines?

> Section 3.1.3(b) Multiplatform Services:

> Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired elsewhere, including consumable items in multi-platform games, provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app. You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.

To me, it sounds like Netflix is, "directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase." I'm not saying they should or shouldn't break the rules, I'm just saying that they are.

Given that Spotify, a direct competitor to an Apple service, is allowed to remain while also breaking this rule makes it seem like this won't be enforced in Netflix's case. But who knows, maybe when Apple launches their video service they'll come down on both companies, and we'll see what happens.

They will enforce on anyone that won't make international headlines by punting from app store, which is to say 99.99% of developers.

I'll tell you what will happen: an anti-trust case of massive proportions.

I think Apple would face backlash from too many of their customers if they boot netflix for this.

Netflix is potentially more popular than iPhone as a brand.

I could be wrong but it would be amazing to see it play out.

They booted Amazon before for similar. Amazon caved.

Edit: actually, it was Google, not Apple. Google Play's brand isn't as strong as the App Store, but Amazon still caved to Google, which only underscores my point. https://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/amazon-...

But there was a case back in 2011 where Amazon removed the Kindle Store from their iOS app at Apple's request: https://www.cultofmac.com/105966/amazon-caves-to-apple-remov...

Amazon doesn’t have the entertainment brand that Netflix has nor the consumer dedication to the brand. People use amazon because it’s ubiquitous, inexpensive, and has good customer service. People love Netflix.

Yes, they are running a gambit that their app is critical enough that Apple won't ban them. Given how many people use Netflix on their phones (a ton), that's a safe bet. Same gamble Spotify is doing and winning.

This is a pretty shady restriction by Apple. I can see why they wouldn't want IAPs in games to be moved out-of-channel, but making it a violation for subscription services to send you to their website is pretty bad.

How is this different from Walmart taking a commission for putting your products on their shelf? Why does Apple get so much slack? 30% seems reasonable for giving access to its shelf.

Because I bought the shelf from Apple. It’s my shelf now. It’s my phone. Why is Apple involved at all if I want to stream videos from Netflix?

It’s like Wal-mart taking a cut of my cable bill because they sold me the TV. The overreach of Apple is preposterous.

Can someone say is the 30% just for the initial payment? For example has my credit card details does Apple still get 30% of the monthly payment on a recurring basis?

The future is, where mobile is new TV, and you sbuscribe to your favorite content provider via Apple TV app. i.e. creator -> apple -> consumer.

Can we just establish a list of app stores by registration and a fee to pay for vetting by independent experts and force apple to include at first run a choice of stores to enable kind of like forcing MS to include other browsers in the EU. With the understanding of course that they don't exclude users who pick alternative stores from the official apps/store.

Then if we don't want to deal with their bullshit we can just have an iphone shipped from the EU and enjoy a device we actually own.

The app store is such a horrible experience, I'm glad for every single app that circumvents it.

Makes me think of what band-camp has done with their app.

“Do as we say, not as we let others do.” — Apple

Apple and Google not only created the device and funded the R & D for the features, but also created the APIs, the tools, the infrastructure, and attracted the (hundreds of millions of) users. The 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable.

Want to bypass that cut? Build a web app and make it play well on mobile. If you want to run it on Android and iOS devices, then I don't really see how anyone can say "Apple and Google are taking too much of my cut".

Disagree with it sure, but don't act as if they're some thugs stealing from companies.

Nobody denies that they created an amazing ecosystem. But their ecosystem also has no competition: they’ve captured the market, just like Standard Oil did with the petroleum market in the beginning of the 20th century. And neither is good for consumers.

30% of a single app purchase might be reasonable, we can argue about that.

30% of a recurring monthly subscription (like netflix) is bonkers.

It's half that after 1 year.

15% of a recurring monthly subscription (like netflix) is bonkers.

Want to bypass that cut? Build a web app and make it play well on mobile.

I can understand the argument that they should accept the 30% cut to be listed in and downloadable from the App Store. However, an iOS device is also the property of its owner and the owner should be allowed (morally) to install software outside the app store. Even if that comes with potential security problems. Android already permits this.

A world where you can only install software accepted by a gatekeeper is a world that is similar to one where you can only read books that are accepted by a gatekeeper.

> However, an iOS device is also the property of its owner and the owner should be allowed (morally) to install software outside the app store. Even if that comes with potential security problems. Android already permits this.

The owner has the choice between iOS and Android. Why should Apple change their policies (and lose revenue) if the majority of users appear to be sufficiently happy with those restrictions (otherwise they wouldn't buy iOS devices)?

I won't deny that there are many many users that do not care. However, I disagree that there is a real choice in the current duopoly. Android allows you to install applications outside the app store. However, you trade this possibility for continuous data harvesting by Google and only a limited window of updates.

So, the choice is largely:

some freedom ^ (privacy | long-term updates)

Freedom, privacy, and long-term updates are all important to me, so there is no real choice.

Just because you aren't having all your desires perfectly catered to does not mean that there is not real choice. It means that, like everything else in life, you have to make tradeoffs.

Exactly. That's what grownups do.

Since we the users are 99.999999% of the populace why do we have to make trade offs in user freedom?

You say grownups I hear that some are too weak willed to stand up for their rights.

I really think we should ask more of technology rather than to just accept Locked-Thing vs Spy-Thing. It's practically an imposed dichotomy, and people deserve better.

Other models of monetization are simply not sufficient. If you disagree, please feel free to write your own mobile OS (you can even start by just forking Android).

I think (end-user computing) corporations have just become selfish. Even pre-iPhone, phones such as Windows Mobile, Palm Pilot, Symbian, and J2ME all allowed sideloading and didn't mine the users' data (as far as I know). On the desktop, Windows and OS X were both profitable and successful without locking out third-party software or mining all the user's data.

Money can still be made through app stores (exclusivity is not needed - I'm sure the Play Store is still hugely profitable despite sideloading), from hardware sales, from subscription services, from licensing software to OEMs, and more.

What we're seeing is that companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are not content to make a lot of money while still keeping some respect for the user. They realize that even more money can be made screwing over the user. This really causes harm to society, as a lot of people realize they're being screwed but feel like they have no choice or agency in the matter. In my opinion, this is a good example of why capitalism and the free market are not ultimate goods in themselves but are rather a means to an end, and can certainly be used for evil purposes.

Since apple management is 0.000001% of the population why can't we just abrogate the trade off by making them do what we prefer in the name of consumer choice.

By an Android phone. There, you've now exercised consumer choice.

I do have an android phone. I don't think there is any value in having only some workplaces be safe, only some restaurants clean, or only some computers actually owned by their owners.

That's not your call to make, however.

It's the peoples call to make.

Because morality does not revolve around the question "Will a megacorp lose some revenue?" There are many things companies and individuals could do that would make them money which they are nonetheless constrained from doing because those things are wrong.

Also, the idea that users understand these issues and are passing judgment on them when they buy an iPhone doesn't seem realistic for the majority of iPhone owners. If you walked around polling iPhone users about this issue anywhere besides Silicon Valley, the most common answer would probably be "What?" And that's ignoring the fact that someone might object to this but still buy an iPhone for unrelated reasons. So even if their dollars could act as moral validation, I don't think it's reasonable to say they do in practice.

Because of antitrust concerns. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/antitrust.asp

iOS still has less than 50% of the market, however.

Competitive markets ultimately benefit all users even if users aren't smart enough to promote their existence by voting with their wallets.

Kind of like having fire exits benefits users even if people don't pick retailers based on their existence.

If the whole model depends on getting the cost of the device plus a cut of everything I spend going forward, it's more like I'm renting the device than owning.

It would be users demanding this, not devs, if the cost were more like a sales tax instead of VAT (added after instead of before total).

Except you're not renting. They use the word sell, so you are buying. If you want to lease something to people, you need to call it leasing and have an explicit lease agreement. You can't sell something to someone and still keep control of it.

Apple very explicitly sells the same experience as Nintendo aka ‘Just Works.’ Many people even some software developers like me love ‘Just Works’ and the only way to get that is via gatekeepers.

Either software like Chrome or Safari which restricts what developers can do, or people. And frankly people plus transaction fees cost enough that the App Store is not very profitable for them.

PS: I have owned an iPhone for 10+ years and never bought anything from the App Store. Downloaded plenty of things, but someone else was paying for it.

However, an iOS device is also the property of its owner and the owner should be allowed (morally) to install software outside the app store. Even if that comes with potential security problems.

This is supportable by well known technologies. The user could opt-in to various app-signature blacklists and whitelists. App stores and hardware vendors could publish their official app blacklists and whitelists, and even require their use for warranty purposes. On the other hand, the user could also opt-out.

So how does one install an app not from the iOS app store?

Only on the internet does the notion of a "gatekeeper" leading to some authoritarian universe make sense.

In the real word, it isn't immoral to sell devices that don't run non-trusted binaries. If Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai could speak to every user and tell them "the reason our platform's default behavior is to not run non-trusted apps is because we don't want your device to get viruses or perform non-trusted functionality", and you told those users that it's "immoral for these companies to make those decisions for you", nine times out of ten those users would choose to have all developers go through Apple and Google instead.

It's reasonable as a default choice. It's not reasonable as the only choice.

On the flip side, Apple standing its ground and forcing poor companies to get their apps approved by Apple played a big role in South Korea's mobile banking experience not being a total shitfest filled with five Windows-only security plugins (per bank) that will fight with the user and each other.

Sure, in an alternative universe, you can always say no to the whole nation's banking industry and refuse to do mobile banking. Just like you can say no and not buy an iPhone in our world.

Disclaimer: Never had an iPhone. This comment is based on what I have heard.

Very interesting, do you have any cites for that? S. Korea has always been dominated by Android phones (and specifically Samsung, the home brand), so it's amazing that Apple gets the credit for the mobile banking experience. What's even more amazing is that iPhones weren't even sold in Korea until 2010, long after most Korean banks had released mobile apps, so Apple must have somehow manipulated time and space to change Korean mobile banking...

iPhones were more popular back then, and even if there's already an Android app, if the experience is a lot shittier than corresponding iPhone experience, users (and maybe Samsung and LG, who have to sell the phones after all) would demand a better app.

Sorry, that's what I remember from reading Korean boards years ago. I don't have a citation.

Yes, because the average user buys into the lie that "by adhering to this one simple trick you get 100% security", just like people tolerate the TSA with the same reasoning as a means "to fight terrorism".

It is not reasonable for Apple to sue people for attempting to make changed to devices that they own.

(This indeed happened, when Apple attempted to stop people from jailbreaking their phones).

I believe in property rights and everyone's legal right to make whatever changes that they want to devices that they own.

> the owner should be allowed (morally) to install software outside the app store

The inability to do this is a feature. I don’t want my phone to run random garbage like Android does. The curated app store is the main reason I keep buying iPhones.

You realize you don't have to allow this on your Android phone right? Are you worried that you aren't responsible enough to leave unknown sources disabled (as it is from the factory)? Trying to understand how you view being forced to comply, a feature over the option to leave it on or turn it off.

So many things.

Software from unknown sources can have malicious code. But, even if it doesn’t, it can update itself with malware later. The lack of curation leaves the Android ecosystem with millions of garbage apps riddled with bugs and malware. The easiest way to sift through all the crap is to only install apps that have iOS versions.

I trust myself to not enable unknown sources. I trust myself to only install reliable appe as I did for years before switching to the iPhone (owned the G1). But I do not trust children. I do not trust family members and friends. And I don’t have the patience to fix their crappy android phones after they install garbage from the Google Play store.

Also, I would rather use a device that is supported with security updates for years instead of months.

The Fahrenheit 451 analogy sort of falls apart though when they give open access to the internet via Safari. What Apple does with the App Store is maintain a safe & friendly environment for users, where they can trust they won't run into things like viruses or pornography. This creates a healthy market for developers who don't necessarily have the notoriety of a Netflix / Spotify / Amazon to push their product, and instead rely at least somewhat on organic App Store searches to be discovered.

So if these larger companies want to bypass that sales funnel, and they can afford to do so, it's not a huge deal. They're still providing value to the platform in making iOS a better experience. The 30% cut is something along the lines of "Hey, we spend a lot of time maintaining this market place so that users will trust the download button, and we're giving you this opportunity to benefit from that by paying us a cut so you too can benefit from being found organically via our curated market place."

From the standpoint of a fledgling app company, I'd rather pay them to maintain that sales funnel for me. Whereas a Netflix / Amazon already has the brand strength to where they don't need it, so the 30% is very expensive for them (because they can generate plenty of sales on their own, and aren't reliant on organic searches for users to discover their product).

On Google Play, the market is very different and since it's not curated, there is so much more fluff to sift through for users, and it makes it much harder for a brand to gain notoriety through Google Play alone -- hence why so many new app products start on iOS and then grow into Android. The sales funnel created by any non-curated market place will never be as strong as a curated one (assuming the curation is carried out in the interest of promoting welfare of the customers/users on the platform, their privacy, safety, satisfaction, etc.).

Your parent is arguing not that it's wrong to charge a 30% cut to list in the app store, but that it's wrong of Apple to prevent loading apps from any source besides the app store.

Essentially its probably difficult to charge 30% in a market where people have reasonably easy access to multiple markets in the same way its hard to charge $20 per gallon of milk in markets where people can drive to other grocery stores its a monopoly rent.

Well fine, and that would be a great point, except that Apple actually doesn't do this. First of all, absolutely anyone can download Xcode today and load any app they want onto their own iPhone - or any iPhone in their possession (assuming they have access to the source code of the apps they want to load). This will completely bypass the App Store.

Second, there's Ad-Hoc distribution. Many enterprise apps are distributed Ad-Hoc and the process does not require App Store review.

There are several reasons why well executed curation can lead to a healthier market for both buyers and sellers: buyers are more trusting, and therefore more likely to buy, and due to the better buyer dispositions, good sellers can make more sales. This creates a positive feedback loop when better sellers gravitate towards curated platforms first.

At the end of the day, plenty of people are still going to buy Android phones because a large majority of buyers buy on price, not on the quality of their platform's app ecosystem or whatever. This argument of not being able to side load apps, despite not being true, is one you'll often run across in people trying to avoid admitting that they really bought based on the price of their device. Hey I mean, it's their money, who am I to say they made a right or wrong decision with it? But just be honest about it.

The app sandbox argument is a better one, because it's actually true. But it's a matter of whether you think app sandboxing is a good or a bad thing.

But find me an Android user who bought a MORE EXPENSIVE phone then an iPhone, and argues for easy-sideloading and no sandboxing, and their arguments about platform quality become a lot more compelling. Problem is, they are few and far between, if they even exist at all.

What would people do if the web backend that safari and third party browsers are obligated to use refused to let you access a particular site?

Its trivial to censor if you don't have a right to install the software you prefer.

It's true that it would be technically trivial for Apple to censor web access on iPhones. However, they don't do this, and it doesn't seem reasonable to expect them to in the future. Sandboxing apps / discouraging side-loading are categorically different than going the way of Communist China. Where is the user value in censoring web sites?

What if apple agrees to censorship in order to do business with communist china or a future even more authoritarian US.

Hard to control billions of users that own machines easy to strong arm a few vendors that don't want to be excluded from lucrative markets.

Sounds farfetched.

You don't believe the Chinese government would force companies that want to do business in China to censor things they don't agree with or you have failed to notice the US trying to force companies to use compromised encryption so that they can spy on all communication?

Apple can always threaten to walk away from China if they request something like that. Apple also doesn't play nice with the FBI over those kinds of requests. This fantasy of yours is just getting wilder and wilder

Can I get an email address for you so I can send the I told you so in 5 years?

We already have gatekeepers for books. The publisher who decides what to publish, the book store owner who decides what to stock, and the librarian who selects what book stays or goes. Gatekeeping doesn't seem like much of an argument.

There are thankfully many publishers and booksellers, each with their own ideas of how to do business. If you buy an iPhone you only have one place to "shop"

> There are thankfully many publishers and booksellers, each with their own ideas of how to do business.

There are also thankfully many phone manufacturers, each with their own ideas of how to do business.

But only really two phone operating systems to choose from and many reasons why you are stuck with an iPhone (I have one for work, many friends have one so they can use iMessage, group think, etc.).

I think the book analogy is a poor one, sorry!

I guess they aren't thugs - they're just unreasonable rent seekers at this point.

I don't think the app owners should get a free ride but 30% is waaaay too much of a chunk. Even 15% is a lot of money after the first year. I'm almost positive 5% would cover costs and sprinkle some profit on top.

Do you think this argument also applies to personal computers? If not, what's the difference?

I am not 100% sure and able to provide a link, but I'm almost certain the Microsoft store does this too.

Even if it did, on a pc you can still install apps from outside of the store without root access.

> "he 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable."

Not really, the fee's much of big tech often puts on people are draconian, and they are able to continue doing so because of the monopolies they hold. 30% is huge. Just try running a business when you loose 30% strait off the top line.

> "Want to bypass that cut?"

break the monopolies.

The cuts big tech muscle on their constituents actually hurts them in the long run. Facebook's cuts are so deep, its nearly impossible to run a sustainable business and ultimately limits the apps and services people are providing through facebook to their users.

I'd argue the same for mobile.

>Just try running a business when you loose 30% strait off the top line.

Brick and mortar retail does just that. Even online retail, once you factor in the costs of maintaining a secure payment system, managing fulfillment, customer service, etc. it winds up adding up to a lot.

Because instead of having 2 players that ask for 30% cut, having 6 that do the same is going to make Netflix any happier. There's no reason to think other similar platforms wouldn't charge the same. Look at GOG vs Steam, both charge 30% too, even tho GOG is much smaller market and for devs it means spending resources making the GOG version in addition to the Steam version, GOG still charges as much as Steam and doesn't see a reason to lower the cut.

Well in the case of games, you end up with the big players making their own store like EA did with Origin (or Epic, Blizzard....) Which kinda sucks since you now have a bunch of apps with different logins.

I'm also not convinced you would end up with 6 players all taking the same %. Take a smaller cut, and offer a lower price to the consumer so people use your store.

> Just try running a business when you loose 30% strait off the top line.

What's your take on taxes?

Most business owners lose a lot more than 30% straight off the top from governments with no way to opt out (other than not to work at all which isn't really feasible in most countries if you want to enjoy your life).

No, with taxes they lose (typically sub) 30 % off the top of profit, not revenue. This is 30 % off the top on revenue.

> No, with taxes they lose (typically sub) 30 % off the top of profit, not revenue. This is 30 % off the top on revenue.

Getting dinged on revenue is pretty common for things like that.

Stripe takes 2.9% + 30c of your revenue, and PayPal is similar. Udemy also takes 50% of your revenue (a marketplace for courses, but less lock-in than the app store).

There's really no reasonable way for payment gateways, the app store or any online marketplace to take a cut from your profits.

My comparison of the app store and taxes was more on the line of it being a non-negotiable set up where you have no options other than to pay, or be unemployed (not paying taxes) or not selling your app (avoiding the app store's rates).

"Just try running a business when you loose 30% strait off the top line."

Like every retail business ever?

People here seem to have forgotten what it was like to sell something back before Apple's App Store. 30% was considered insane in just how small it was.

But the webapp will still play through apples browser, and apple should still get a cut on all your sales for providing it

They uh, could charge for the operating system if they wanted to recoup their costs.

Or, they could have their app store with their 30% cut, and allow other app stores to be available. Google does this, it solves 99% of the problems available, and seems to be an OK balance.

Apple totally disallows this, has a draconian policy, and does everything in their power to make sideloading borderline impossible - oh, and prevents sales of anything through apps, which makes things like the Kindle app useless.

By your logic, your ISP ran all the lines, runs the service, services your modem, and should be allowed to determine exactly what websites you can and can not visit, and if it wants to charge you $50/month to go to Netflix.com then it can.

1) My ISP got a hefty chunk of my tax dollars to run those lines.

2) They have a monopoly. Rules are different for monopolies.

"Visa and Mastercard not only created the device used for payments, but funded the R&D for it, widely deployed all of the payment readers, created the entire ecosystem of businesses that use it, support all of this infrastructure (for hundreds of millions of users).

So, a 30% cut of every purchase made using a Visa card is more than reasonable."

Yep. The difference is that even though your choice of payment network is still relatively limited, there at least is some genuine competition on price. The Android/iOS duopoly seems to have become stuck at a particularly bad Nash equilibrium. 30% would never survive in a competitive market.

I'm doubtful competition mechanics would work to reduce the app store cut even if it wasn't equal between Android and iOS. If Google were to cut its rate to 10%, then what? App publishers aren't going to stop publishing on iOS. Even if cross-platform apps changed their pricing schemes to be cheaper on Android than iOS, I doubt many iOS users would be particularly put off by the extra 20 points in the cost of their apps.

The point is that the market is not competitive. Tweaking rates doesn’t suddenly make the market competitive.

For just one tiny example, consider web browsers—iOS doesn’t even allow browser engines aside than WebKit. Now compare this situation with that of desktop operating systems, which are still not a super competitive market by any means, but where the fact that Windows users could install browsers other than IE meant that web browsers became a competitive market, leading directly to the increasing capabilities of web apps, leading in turn to the possibility of Google’s office products even existing, making office software more competitive, and that in turn making Chromebooks feasible, which leads all the way back to making desktop operating systems more competitive.

You can’t consider the effects of tweaking one number and conclude that a market would be changed/unchanged by competition—these sorts of things are extremely interdependent.

I mean they already charge 1-3% why not 30% if they can get away with it? What are you going to do, not accept credit cards? Take cash on your website? I think people are rightfully mad when they realize how much leverage someone has over them but it doesn't usually change that fact.

If there are alternatives, people will use them. Starbucks created a whole payment/reward system to avoid credit card fees, for example. If there were cheaper alternatives possible to the app stores, you'd better be sure some developers would use them.

But in a case like Netflix the whole ecosystem that Apple/Google have built aren’t providing any value for Netflix. No one discovers Netflix through the App Store. The iPhone is just one more device that Netflix will try to support because customers want to be able to access Netflix on as many different types of devices as possible. This is way different than for example an indie dev building a game that is best enjoyed on a mobile device.

Netflix can choose to disable subscribing to it's services through the app. Maybe no one "discovers" netflix through an iOS device, but apparently a lot are starting their subscription through it.

Netflix can't disable subscriptions and simply write "please go to Netflix.com to start your trial" or else Apple will reject that app.

> But in a case like Netflix the whole ecosystem that Apple/Google have built aren’t providing any value for Netflix.

There's some added value. I wouldn't have a Netflix subscription without an iPad, since I don't own a TV.

> Apple and Google not only created the device and funded the R & D for the features, but also created the APIs, the tools, the infrastructure, and attracted the (hundreds of millions of) users. The 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable.

Do you believe this with regards to laptops? Laptops masquerading as tablets? Tablets? If not, why? And if it was the case with laptops, i.e. near 100% of users are on only two OS's both (and especially one) of which effectively force native apps through their channel for discovery, would you change your stance or accept that as a reasonable development/computing model for native development?

>Build a web app and make it play well on mobile.

I suspect most of the executives making these decisions not only don't even know such a thing is possible, but probably don't even understand wha the difference is.

The vast VAST majority of apps in the iOS App Store would be better served by just being websites. If those services would just focus on making decent sites for the mobile web instead of expecting all mobile visitors to download a separate app they would be much better.

The only thing that would make web apps better is ways to take advantage of the identity management and authorization stuff you can do by installing through the App Store. If Apple could just create a way to do that the mobile web would be 1000x better.

It's rent-seeking behavior and negative for society. If they don't want to open their platform for competition then the app stores should be regulated like the public utilities they are.

As a counter point consider Microsoft Windows. It also represented a huge investment and R&D and for the most part, you can easily build and deploy and application to anybody without ever having to pay a fee.

That was because Microsoft made money from selling Windows. With Android, Google gives it away free and has to extract money by either monetizing user data, or taking a cut from application developers.

Android OS is free but manufacturers still pay for the Google ecosystem that sits on top https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...

Not thugs, just deceptive and double-dipping (in a short-sighted, money-grabbing way).

I'm the customer when I buy the phone, but then I'm the product when I buy software. This double-aligns the incentives and is the reason why it's such a terrible (non-existent) experience trying to buy digital media on an iPhone.

Sure, Amazon & Netflix could pay the 30% cut and make it seamless for me, but this is similar to a trade tariff. Ultimately the cost will be paid by the users of the phones since companies have to charge those users more to make the same profit.

This is "fair" from a "welcome to capitalism" stance, but it's outright counter to usual mantra of "we make money when people buy devices."

(s/Apple/Google/ if you want)

I don’t know how this came to be accepted as normal. I’m older so I remember when you used to buy a device or OS and software to run on it separately. What you paid for the device or OS was what funded those things. There is no reason why the same shouldn’t be true for Apple iOS/iPhone and Google Android/whatever-they’re-stopping-support-for-next.

App Store takes a cut to use the App Store? Fine. But a reasonable cut simply for that convenience would be more like 10%.

Wonder if we’ll ever see a government crack down on tech company monopolies again (or any monopoly).

They would have to have a monopoly first, yes? Otherwise you're just asking for tighter regulations across the board.

I follow you up until the 30% cut. Users are already paying for the hardware and software. Why is Apple taking a continual cut for value produced by other parties? If anything, they should be paying the writers of the software for selling their phones. Without the apps on the store, they're just a browser and a phone stuck together.

They made a bet that the platform was worth more than any individual app. Seems to be working out so far. Prove 'em wrong.

Of course that’s where the value is. Why are they charging me to use it twice, once on purchase of the phone and then on every app purchase?

The value seems to be for app curation, which is atrocious. This is incredibly harmful to consumer choice.

They are thugs, using their market power to extract more than their fair share. In a competitive market, you may gain an advantage because you came up with the first fancy cafe chain, but then other coffee shops are built and keep the price of fancy coffee at cost plus some reasonable margin.

Apple and Google have raked in tens of billions from their app stores, which has long since surpassed the cost of building them. If the market had fair competition, we would have many other viable app stores, not unlike the way we have so many apps. This is why EU antitrust is starting to scrutinize Google for forcing its app store to be bundled with Android.

Straight out of r/HailCorporate

This is not an indie game that needs exposure and a platform from Apple, this is Netflix and I would argue they receive little to no value from Apple.

I personally find Netflix is being a little bit of a hypocrite there. Netflix is actively using the play store to identify old and unidentified devices and roms to stop them from downloading the app.

Not judging them here, just saying.

I think the number is too high, but a portion of proceeds to Google/Apple is certainly justified.

At least Epic Games is practicing what they preach. UE4 is free to use, and here's their royalty breakdown:

> UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products.

And after the runaway success of Fortnite, they repaid out excess cost to developers: >The increase (of rate paid to creators), from 70 percent of the sales price to a new 88 percent pay rate, will also apply retroactively, with additional payments doled out for all sales since the Unreal Marketplace's 2014 launch.[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/epic-ups-unreal-marke...

Some might say the $600-$1000 price tag paid by consumers should reasonably cover everything.

> The 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable.

When you're a platform vendor, what's reasonable is something you work out collaboratively with the people who use your platform. They will frequently have different ideas of what's reasonable than you do. You can disagree, but if you simply refuse to negotiate the users will eventually get fed up and go somewhere else. To succeed as a platform vendor you need users, so it's in your interest to be flexible enough to find a modus vivendi that both you and your users feel is reasonable -- or at least, close enough to reasonable for everyone to live with.

>Apple and Google not only created the device and funded the R & D for the features,

App developers have to pay for Apple’s and Google’s R&D and devices? Do consumers not pay for this when they buy their devices.

>but also created the APIs, the tools, the infrastructure, and attracted the (hundreds of millions of) users.

These were created for their consumers and not for developers. You think features are added to their devices to please developers? Why do developers have to pay for these things?

>The 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable.

More than reasonable? Do a little experiment. Run a business and have 30% of your revenue taken from you.

> The 30% cut they ask of developers is more than reasonable.

If only we could prove this. Ie, is Apple honestly selling $1,200 phones for a loss such that they need to recoup money from the App Store to turn a profit? If they didn't take the %30 cut, would they still be profitable?

I'm not proving a point, simply asking questions I'm curious about. Would be neat if we knew these answers.

Neither one of those questions is relevant, though.

How so? The comment I was replying to was calling 30% unnecessary/unreasonable. However, that's quite the relative statement, no? If (with an obviously fake example) 30% allowed them to break even, who would call that unreasonable?

I feel like the idea of what is reasonable or not is entirely dependent on how much profit they're making. For ease of discussion, I think it would be very reasonable if customer costs reflected operational costs. Ie, sell the phone for just a bit over phone costs (including R&D/etc), sell iCloud for a bit over operating costs, sell App Store usage for a bit over operating costs, etc.

All of that would be very reasonable, no? So what is reasonable and what is not reasonable seems entirely to do with how much profit they're turning. Which of course, as my question asks, is nearly impossible to understand from the outside.

Following that logic, it should require the 30% until the costs of R&D are covered.

This is monopolistic behaviour. I write an app, can't install on someone's device without paying apple? Want 30% fine but it's my device, I should be able to put whatever I want in there. Let's face it, the best price is when people complain but pay. This is just extracting more money, plain and simple.

30% percent cut is extortionate. Good agents with personal connections and an unearthly ability to land multi-million $currency_unit gigs get 15%.

But back in the naughties Apple's 70/30 split was considered reasonable in contrast to what was available. In the dark ages when flash games were aggregated on sites such as Newgrounds that could demand more than 80% of any revenue.

In that kind of situation the highway robbery of 30% sure looks like a bargain. But it's still highway robbery.

The App store is vehicle for censorship.

The platform fee should be treated as a platform tax, just add it to the price, then user can choose to install via platform store and pay the extra or side load it and pay normal. Or is there something in the publisher agreement that prevents this ?

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