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Comment by rogerkirkness | Hacker News Reader

The world of atoms is the same as the world of bits: you really want to control the means of distribution. Uncreative product managers at platform companies target the most successful apps first. You can pick the winners of the evolutionary process, take a skim while you're learning and then copy them with something using private APIs. I don't think that's wrong necessarily but people seem shocked every time it happens to them.

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My question is, why aren't the folks at the platform companies who do this worried about biting the hand that feeds them? Haven't they seen platforms get pilloried before? Aren't they worried about alienating developers and decreasing the value of the platform?

Or is it the death of a thousand cuts, where each product manager thinks "ah, just this one time won't hurt"?

Apple-based developers are especially locked in, sometimes by an entire career of platform-specific experience. Whatever the limit is for how badly Apple can abuse them, it's probably higher on the app store than anywhere else.

I don't develop for mobile OSs precisely because I don't trust them. But I imagine that if I thought I had to I would feel like there is only one place to go, and they are just as bad.

There are business that must have an mobile app and a website, you can't screw half of your customers and tell them to buy other phone. Developers did not like to develop for IE but the businesses had no choice to support IE because the customers were demanding it.

So as a individual you can decide to buy an Android but as a business sometimes(maybe most of the time ?) you can't decide not to support iOS or Android, you have to support both.

> Haven't they seen platforms get pilloried before?

Have you? I haven't.

> Aren't they worried about alienating developers and decreasing the value of the platform?

I think Twitter is a perfect counterexample here; roughly every three years it pulls something that should completely alienate the developers and destroy the platform, but after the first wave of "omg Twitter's new TOS destroys my business" articles falls off the news cycle, developers decide to stay and keep playing that game.

It turns out the allure of making money on someone else's established platform is very strong.

Then what’s the point of even building an app if it’s going to be ripped off as soon as gets traction?

I sometimes wonder what the iOS ecosystem would look like if Apple took stewardship of the App Store seriously. If developers weren’t constantly under threat of some bogus copycat app or IP theft from Apple, what would that do the app ecosystem? It’s hard to see how it would hurt Apple, but perhaps I’m blind to the downsides.

One obvious downside would be that Apple could no longer copy the most successful apps and make money from them.

They make money from the most successful apps that aren't theirs, though. 30% is admittedly less than 100%, but if the market is 4x, Apple wins more with the former. Also, the 30% doesn't require much developer time (sure, you have to maintain the app store, but that is amortized over many many apps).

100% of $0 is always going to be less than the 30% cut. I seek out Apple apps as they're usually of better quality, and not going to be ridden with cruft and most if not all of their consumer level apps are free.

Sure, and that might affect them short term.

But Android’s App Store isn’t any better IMO, and if Apple put effort into drawing talent towards their mobile ecosystem and letting them flourish without being worried about Apple screwing them, they might be better off overall.

Their strategy of ratcheting up phone prices isn’t sustainable and they’re losing users to cheaper phones with similar specs. The relative parity (and lack of quality) between both app stores doesn’t help them, and improving the app ecosystem could help, but idk.

What's the point of even building a website if Google is just going to scrape the information and put in a SERP? You need to add value and build a relationship with your customer.

It’s kinda hard to do that when the company who controls the platform you’re developing on is also building relationships with your customers, and can add far more lifetime value than you ever could building your app.

How many people do you think ditched their iPhones when Spotify published their antitrust complaint towards Apple? And Spotify is a huge company itself.

Anything you can do, the platform owner can do better, and this is particularly true in Apple’s case.

> if it’s going to be ripped off as soon as gets traction

Isn't this called "competition", and isn't the scope of protections you're seeking covered under trademark law?

This is why distribution should be divorced from creation. From cable boxes to phones.

> You can pick the winners of the evolutionary process, take a skim while you're learning and then copy them with something using private APIs.

Right back to the Microsoft-Windows business model from the 1990s.

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