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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The fact that we have to have humans look at our software before we can go to market in 2019 is absurd. I had high hopes for the future as a teen growing up with Napster, Bittorrent, IRC, Trillian/Pidgin, and an explosive WWW. Look at what a pinheaded mess everything has become.

Greed destroyed the open and experimental Internet.

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Painting this as "greed" is really quite ridiculous. Apple's 30% cut is completely orthogonal to their human review. The human review is to try and protect users and keep the app store a safe and trustworthy place to buy software. As with all human curation, there are problems, but on the whole it does keep the app store a remarkably safe place to acquire software.

> I had high hopes for the future as a teen growing up with Napster, Bittorrent

In light of the above, this is pretty funny, because Napster and Bittorrent were great way to get viruses.

So Apple is the modern Elsevier? Asking high prices for peer review.

  "orthogonal"

If the human review is the reason for the 30% cut why not charge a flat fee per review? I doubt that's the reason for their cut.

lilyball said it’s orthogonal, meaning there is no relation between the 30% fee and the cost of human review.

The price a seller charges is what a buyer is willing to pay.

The reason Apple charges the 30% is probably partly because of the whole infrastructure and services needed for the app-store, and mostly Apple's desire to profit.

The reason developers pay the 30% is probably because there's no other channel that offers access to such a huge market for free, and mostly because they still profit.

Every app could be cheaper from the buyer's perspective. Maybe even yours. Should or will they be cheaper? Probably not. The best price is the one everyone complains about but are still willing to pay.

> The reason developers pay the 30% is probably because there's no other channel that offers access to such a huge market for free, and mostly because they still profit.

Because there's no choice you mean? When the developers have choice, on the Mac or on Windows, they generally avoid the store. The AppStore still works on mobile because they force it.

> on the Mac or on Windows

Let's look at something closer to this situation rather than general purpose computers. Mobiles work with different paradigms all around, especially when compared to Windows (or Linux).

There are free alternatives to Google's Play Store and yet developers still choose to pay Google's cut to have access to it. This tells me whatever benefits the "official" app store provides on each platform outweigh the disadvantages (costs) even when free alternatives are available.

> The AppStore still works on mobile because they force it.

Is there any solid reason to believe the AppStore only works because they force it, while seeing the Play Store work just fine even with free alternatives around? And users even go out of their way to get access to it.

> There are free alternatives to Google's Play Store and yet developers still choose to pay Google's cut to have access to it. This tells me whatever benefits the "official" app store provides on each platform outweigh the disadvantages (costs) even when free alternatives are available.

That's only because it's pretty hard for the casual user to install third-party apps on Android and even with those artificial barriers, some popular apps are available outside of it, I could mention Fortnite.

It's not that hard to install an app from outside of the Play Store. It's just that people are perfectly comfortable using the most easily accessible option. In the HN bubble it's easy to overestimate how much people care about using some other app store. Developers do because it impacts the bottom line but for users to care it would have to be a pretty massive cost saving or some other obvious drawback of the official store to care about alternatives.

How often did you wonder where your car parts come from? How easy is it to mod your ECU? If there are "open source" parts for your fridge? Etc. - insert any topic that's mostly transparent only for the people who actually care about it and dive deeper into the technicalities. Chances are you care less about that but a car tinkerer feels the same way you do about your app store and wonders why you aren't protesting more.

Why do you not see mobile the same as general purpose computer? What's the difference besides form factor?

Because that's how the industry built the mobile devices regardless of the app store model. The phone is a "disposable" black box and the use cases of most users support this: almost nobody cares about accessing the file system directly for example. There's no support for anything "legacy", the form factor makes difference because it keeps most people away from tinkering with the system, all (most?) of the HW components are custom and the SW that comes with them is just as obscure. Everything relies on the cloud to the point where cutting a smartphone's internet connection pretty much takes away all the smarts. And most users don't have a problem with this, they probably never even stopped to ponder these issues.

For better or worse your PC is a vastly different beast. I'm not saying it should be like this, I'm saying it is.

> As with all human curation, there are problems, but on the whole it does keep the app store a remarkably safe place to acquire software.

Yes, that touches the old but increasingly pressing question of how the internet should be governed.

So far the discussed answers seem to be "anarchy" or "corpocracy" which honestly sound both equally sucky. Maybe we could come up with some additional options to discuss at some point.

However, back to Apple's point, of course there are problems - as everywhere - however, Apple does not seem interested in fixing them, as described in the article. (Not that other app stores would be better here probably)

I remember when the App Stores first came online and everyone was fine to pay the 30% cut because before that, other retail channels were charging way more.

Now the 30% is too much.

What? where? no one was charging fees for using channels because there were no channels other than direct marketing. (Unless you talking about actually selling a physical box in retail, which is completely different)

A decade ago I was making shareware. The combination of payment-handler fees and website bandwidth worked out not to far from 30%, from what I remember.

Sprint had an “app store” where you could buy J2ME apps for feature phones.

Yes, I mean vs bricks and mortar.

It’s completely different, but the App Store severely lowered the barrier of entry to writing commercial software. Even I made a few grand from it.

It sucks that some types of apps will never pass review, but I’m not sure that 30% is too much.

If you're not fine with 30% what's your alternative? Apple never offered an alternative. 30% or nothing on iOS.

The changes with the Save as dialog, how are they protecting the customer? It almost seems like they want to have creative control of the application, dictating how it should work.

> often review rejected for text, images, random issues

> random censorship of whatever Apple does not like

That’s a pretty disingenuous way to put it. Another phrasing could be “Apple enforcing their human interface guidelines”.

To borrow a phrase: haters gonna hate.

Apple used to violate their HIG when they felt like it. Apparently they are Human interface regulations now, no longer guidelines.

Yes, I don't like closed platforms, I think the mac should be a platform for general computing and not turn into iOS.

> Apple's 30% cut is completely orthogonal to their human review.

Several billion in income allows them to hire more staff. It's up to them to view this as orthogonal.

> Greed destroyed the open and experimental Internet.

Did it? Or did it expand the open and experimental internet to also include profit-making ventures?

This meme crops up a lot on HN, but I can't see what's stopping the same internet thriving - there's still self hosting, there's still an open public internet (apart from some newer restrictions around copyright which were inevitable), there's still P2P for those less concerned with the previous point.

The "open and experimental internet" catered to a minority, and the minority can still, largely, enjoy it as is. It's just that the whole internet is no longer just the open and experimental version.

> Or did it expand the open and experimental internet to also include profit-making ventures?

Why not both?

If it wasn't clear, that's kinda my point. We used to have one strand of the internet, now we have two. They can seemingly coexist, it's just the majority of people have a preference to the one that isn't the older one.

> The fact that we have to have humans look at our software before we can go to market in 2019 is absurd.

Random internet friend trust me. I would rather have 5 humans to check my app on App Store than have a stupid AI automated checking that Play Store has where, even they get 30% cut, you can't get to contact to a real person unless you are a huge player. The reasons for app suspension on Play Store are sometimes ridiculous.

Is it weird that I'm not comfortable installing apps on my phone that haven't been reviewed?

Phones seem much more personal to me than computers. They have our location and are able to interrupt many of us at any moment.

I'd love to see an easy to install and use open OS. I don't know who's incentivized to build that and maintain it.

I don’t know if greed destroyed the open and experimental Internet. It has certainly helped shape it in both some good and some bad ways. I was in my 20s when the Internet became widely available. People published hard-copy yellow pages to help you find sites back then because there weren’t any good search engines. Animated GIFs would visually abuse your senses. 14.4k and later 28.8k modems were how most people watched the Internet slowly load in their browsers, Usenet clients, etc. I think things have gotten a lot better since then and entrepreneurship has driven most of those improvements.

Spam and malware destroyed the open experimental Internet.

Only partially. Spam can be filtered, as PG himself was early to point out, and malware can be countered with better security. This could have been fixed, given enough time.

The kill shot, instead, has been delivered by ad-sponsored media; clickbait, fake news, mass rage-storms, fake reviews, etc.

Advertising as a business model causes real damage to the open internet: advertisers censor perfectly good sites because they object to something in there. Slowly but surely, a wide spectrum of ideas and self-expression gets reduced to nothing but sanitized advertiser-friendly content. People can and do censor speech they don't like by targeting the advertisers backing the host.

I agree that advertising as a business model incentivizes bad things, but as for censorship the only things I'm aware of advertisers aggressively rejecting are things like Naziism and its relatives.

This is because advertisers don't want to alienate vast populations of people. They don't want stuff like "blacks and women are intellectually inferior, brought to you by Coca Cola!"

I see mainstream ads in "fringe" content of a variety of types, so they don't seem to care much about things being off-beat or strange. They don't seem to care about indirectly sponsoring UFO videos or fringe views of history that aren't transparent efforts to dehumanize people.

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