A Rare Disagreement
marco.org
marco.org
https://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-eat-pizza
The tl;dr is where I say "Cry me a fucking river." When will people learn? A closed, proprietary system is a closed, proprietary system.
Marco is arguing that the Massah is being too rough on the sharecroppers, he's beating them inconsistently and in ways they couldn't reasonably predict. Let me see if I understand: These poor indentured servants built a business around what they perceived as a loophole in Apple's iOS terms. Their plan was to make millions of dollars off their "free" iOS apps while Apple got nothing. Then Apple shook them down for 30%.
Well I couldn't have predicted exactly how Apple would react, but I don't imagine anyone ought to be surprised that they did something. They're the landlord. That's what landlords do: They extract rents from the sharecroppers, and if rents aren't enough they kick the sharecroppers out and take over the land for themselves.
You can bitch and whine, you can figure out how to make money while Apple tolerates your presence, or you can stop building on proprietary platforms. Arguing that Apple is illogical or ought to be smarter or is shooting itself in the foot... A waste of electrons. Does Apple look like the kind of company that takes our advice on how to run a business? If it listened to people like us, it would be selling Windows PCs right now.
iOS and Kindles and Java and everything else controlled by a profit-seeking corporation are all the same things to developers. Of course Apple markets your work to end users and pretends you're happy with your cut of the two billion dollars in app store revenue. That's like a dating site marketing you to other users.
The bottom line is this: If you are developing for a proprietary system, you aren't in the business, you are the business. Trying to argue that Apple's proprietary system ought to be less closed or more free or have more pixie dust than Amazon's is wishful thinking. If you develop for any of these proprietary platforms, you are a sharecropper. You work at the landlord's pleasure to improve the land he owns.
Period.
The sharecropper analogy is so absolute it's useless. It makes for a lovely soundbite, though, I'm sure it's fun to repeat ad nauseam.
Given that I'm using this term in the middle of a debate where the subject being debated is Apple's draconian behaviour towards iOS developers, I think that if you want a different analogy, the onus is on you to find one that is a better fit, not on me to defend it.
In my experience, employees at Apple care very much what users and developers are saying. Many of them read Marco and Gruber. Quite a few even read the Apple support forums. Although they can't publicly respond to them, it helps inform their thinking about future decisions.
Remember when Apple reversed its decision on 3rd-party developer tools and languages? Rational feedback and criticism can work.
Also, it's ridiculous that people are voting raganwald's comment down. What's next, covering your ears and yelling "la la la la"?
How often do you see a comment on hn with positive votes that tells people to "Cry me a fucking river"?
Often.
And he was quoting from his own article, at a particularly identifiable and primary point of inflection.
Trying to argue that Apple's proprietary system ought to be less closed or more free or have more pixie dust than Amazon's is wishful thinking.
It's not wishful thinking, it's a tactic that has proven effective in the past. I voted reganwald down because his line of argument seems to have been refuted.
Also, you don't downvote comments because you consider them wrong or refuted, you downvote because a comment was not beneficial to the discussion. It's people like you that slowly chip away at what HN is intended to be.
If we are convinced that what is Apple is doing is wrong, we might be turned away from their ecosystem--thus denying them of profit---or better still we may stand in solidarity if the current complainers try to take more drastic measures such as shifting to another platform all together.
It does, however, refute the much more insidious argument that criticizing the company that controls your platform is not worthwhile. It is worthwhile, and in fact vital to the health of the platform.
Except employee 0.
This is essentially comparing apples and oranges, though. That decision was (presumably) based on maximizing application performance for users - but plenty of non-obj-C applications can perform quickly enough, so they went back and allowed them. And more applications means more sales means more money for Apple.
It's equivalent to sharecroppers first preventing use of externally-developed tools, then discovering that they could make more money if they allowed them. I don't see a comparable situation in Apple pulling 30% from subscriptions.
I do think that 30% is a bit high, as they're recurring sources of revenue and people tend to decide "$1/month? sure. It's cheaper than that $10 app." and then keep it for two years rather than switch to the $10 and waste a buck. People are pretty predictable in this manner - just look at WoW.
Apple has supported the existence of free apps. On paid apps, they get their 30% cut. On free apps, they get a token $99/year fee and all the profits from their hardware sales.
The above arrangement is both profitable and sustainable for Apple. And Apple's interests are in keeping their end users and developers happy in a virtuous cycle.
I just don't agree that developers should be called foolish unless they adopt the utmost cynical view of things.
Is that the kind of "free" app you're talking about? Or are you talking about something else? Because I don't think Apple is taking 30% of the other kind of free apps, the ones that don't involve me paying for things with my credit card.
That still leaves a lot of app developers who aren't Amazon or a large publishing house. Could be a pure SaaS company (whatever that means) that later came out with a native app. Or an app that falls in the gray area of charging a subscription for functionality but yet still handles "content," such as Readability or Instapaper.
Were all these developers expected to assume that they would become targets? I imagine this is where we still disagree. But do let me know if you were only talking about Amazon and other large content publishers.
Edit: small clarification question at the end.
Yesterday, an ebook reader tied to your store wasn't a loophole, today it is. Today, SaaS may not be a loophole, but who knows about tomorrow? Today non-Apple ads aren't a loophole, but some have speculated that iAds may be required in the future. And so on.
It won't kill them, but it will have a negative effect, especially as people have more and more choices of platforms. The landlord will be better off if he treats his tenants well.
While Apple naturally might like to get money everywhere it can, it should also be obvious that the most important thing is to get people to keep buying their devices. Without services such as Spotify available, I have many friends here in Sweden in all age brackets and from non-technological back-grounds who would not buy an iOS device. In the long term, it might very well be in Apples interest to actually let a good deal of sharecroppers exist.
This seems like laziness or intentional dishonesty on Gruber's part. There are huge differences between the two. The biggest being Amazon doesn't have a Kindle app ecosystem so there isn't the [huge] problem of requiring a subscription option (which is the real issue--charge 90% if you want, it just becomes unfair when you require me to use it). Amazon also funds the delivery of the content to the subscriber, which considering it's often over 3G can be considerable.
In the current state of things if you are a publisher with an iOS app, Apple changed the rules to either require you to cough up 30% of your business or stop being a publisher. Also, you get the joy of delivering all content, that's not included in your 30% vig.
What do you expect from the freelance Apple PR department?
The people I do have sympathy for are users. They are not going to understand why some of their favorite applications and services on iOS stop being updated / eventually disappear altogether. Among other things, Apple sold devices using the availability of apps. I didn't see any fine print saying "your favorite apps might get rejected in the future" in those ads. And I can't think of a similar platform that might have given users those expectations. So users have a genuine beef. Developers are just not being honest with themselves about the consequences of their own choices.
Apple has a monopoly on selling iOS devices because of Copyright law - and that is how Copyright law is supposed to work. Apple develops iOS, and so aren't breaking any laws by making their App Store the default. Apple operates their App Store; selling access to the App Store under reasonable terms is also perfectly legitimate.
However, a particular sequence of actions can be illegal even though each of the individual actions that makes it up are legal. It is legal to ask someone nicely to stand in front of you (obviously they don't have to), and it is legal to move a knife and twist it in front of you; that doesn't mean it is legal to do the first then the second!
IANAL, but Apple's conduct around the 30% charge, while made up of individually legal actions, appears to be a straightforward breach of US anti-trust law. 15USCs14 (part of the Clayton Act) says that it is illegal to sell something on an agreement that someone won't purchase something else. So making developers agree that they can buy App Store services unless they don't buy payment processing for use within their app from anyone except Apple is not allowed in the United States, if the effect "may be to substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce".
Even if it wasn't illegal, it would still be wrong to try to lessen competition for their advantage, and it would be entirely appropriate for developers to criticise Apple heavily for it.
Whereas if you've developed an iOS app, transitioning that to another platform is often going to be a large amount of work where you're basically starting over from the spec and not bringing over any code.
Which means you're going to generally hear a lot more squawking from iOS software vendors than book vendors, because their migration costs are prohibitive relative to those of book publishers.
It's much harder to find a substitute for the App Store ecosystem than it is to replace the code. The proverbial rock and hard place.
Who says people aren't criticizing Amazon? Their DRM-infested marketplace is very customer-hostile. The difference is that you can use the hardware without using their marketplace.
What can you do with a Kindle except buying books from Amazon? As far as I know, you can read books without DRM and you can surf the web. That’s equally true for all iOS devices. What else does a Kindle allow you to do that you cannot do on an iOS device sans apps?
Right now I'm in "wait and see" mode where I don't want to invest in the iPad 2 unless I know for sure that Hulu will still be able to function.
Killing unborn applications is more speculative. Who knows which apps didn't get built for what reason?
http://www.marco.org/3044068415
Context:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/21/readability
It doesn't invalidate his points at all but as an advisor to a company deeply affected by this policy, the honest thing to do would be to make that agenda clear. If he wants the trust of his readers, it's worth letting them decide "Is he saying this because he believes it or because it benefits his associates to convince people this is true? Both?"
The problem with Apple's recent fumblings is that it leaves the iOS platform wide open to slippery slope scenarios. While Readability was flat-out denied upon app submission, others were yanked post-approval, which creates a Damoclean sword in the minds of every current and prospective app developer.
You don't need to play the degrees of separation game; Marco's Instapaper subscriptions can be rendered null and void at the whims of Apple's incongruous and incomprehensible "policy".
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As a user, it's also unsettling, because I honestly don't know where this leaves current and future apps. I recently read that Apple allowed a tabloid's app that contains a daily photo of a nude woman. What happened to Apple's no-pornography policy? Remember Steve's e-mail that replied that people looking for such filth could try out Android?
This is the App Store brouhaha all over again, except it now affects approved apps as well, meaning that we as users and developers will live in perpetual fear of a trap door opening beneath the most cherished apps. Not for sake of consistency or "policy", but the behest of whatever incomprehensible whims the guys at Infinite Loop have.
At the same time: Paying out $2 billion to devs and having 200 million credit card accounts means never having to say you're sorry.
Yet. He can change his mind at any time. If SaaS looks as promising as publishing does, who's to say he won't?
I agree with the GP: what bothers me most is the inconsistent, capricious nature of the judgments being handed down.
I guess we'll see if any of that actually has an effect on the number of developers/quality of apps in the app store.
Expecting every reader of this post to know who Marco is, who he consults for and which of his previous posts references his employment situation is a bit much.
Also, your self-aggrandizing condescension is not appreciated here.
I noticed your account is fairly new, if you haven't seen the guidelines for HN yet, I suggest checking them out here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Welcome to HN!
No. A traditional journalist has a conflict of interest when their personal investment or other relationship conflicts with their duty of care to their employer the newspaper or magazine or whatever. That's the conflict: Between their interest and their employer's interest.
If any of these people are self-employed or representing their own personal views and not speaking on behalf of their employer, they have no conflict of interest because they have no second interest. There is only their own interest.
You as a reader may have an interest and it may conflict with a blogger's interest, but the blogger owes you nothing unless you pay them to give you impartial research, in which case you are a client, not a reader.
A blog is no different from one of those ghost-written business hagiographies, full of self-serving writing and written to further the author's interests. If you want to be sure you are getting an impartial viewpoint, then please do your research and decide for yourself whether a particular blogger's viewpoint is biased or not.
The duty to disclose happens any time you want to maintain the trust of others in your objectivity.
Example: Say I'm having a beef with my girlfriend. My fictional co-worker Billy really wants to date her. If he gives me advice to break up with her while keeping his desire a secret, he commits a breach of trust. His interest in advising me soundly has now conflicted with his interest in hooking up. When I later discover this breach, the trust is eroded.
He doesn't have to disclose anything. But if he wants people to continue reading his blog while trusting his position comes from ideals instead of self-interest, it might be a good idea.
However, I reject the suggestion that failing to do so is like serving unclean food. If writing is like food, it is clean or it isn't and washing your hands is like spell-checking or fact-checking, not like disclosing your personal interests.
Otherwise, I accept the analogy that writing a blog post is like using the john. Or at least, looking at my writing, I see the comparison is apt.
Marco.org is not the NYT, the WSJ, or even TechCrunch. It's someone's Tumblr.
[1] http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_stores#Dealers_and_Pu...
While I understand the appeal for wanting in on the app store for a variety of reasons, this is going to keep happening over and over again.
For content distributors, app stores are a short sighted vision.
Unfortunately, all the above applies to Android, and others. Apple gets the blame IMO because they set the precedent. There's no reason they couldn't have made their initial cut 10%. 10% is still high, but reasonable.
Furthermore, it wouldn't be so outrageous if they provided some value or tangible services for it, but they don't. They don't give advice, or contribute in any tangible way, it's essentially an outrageous tax without any real services in return.
Sounds like Python's Life of Brian.
For subscriptions at least the bandwidth is funded by the publisher. Yes you get access to lots of customers, but you have to charge them the same as ones you sell yourself and if you want to have an app you are required to let your users purchase from within it. It adds up to 30% being ridiculously high. If it was opt-in and/or non price matching I don't think many would care, but as it stands it's a huge tax that if enforced will mean the end to many of the killer apps of iOS.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but 30% of your revenue for that service is absurd.
30% is like a godsend in comparison. And, with competition heating up with Android and Amazon, app stores will either compete on payouts or cartelize and price-fix.
AFAIK, Apple has never owned up to one of its policy decisions having been a mistake, let alone apologized for it. They've changed their policies -- witness the short-lived language choice terms -- but never issued anything even suggestive of a mea culpa.
Imagine that happening to dead-tree books, someone shows up on your doorstep to reclaim the book 'because it violates copyright'. You'd tell them to bugger off, and it's no different in this case.
Once you bought a book, digital or analog, it should stay in your possession for as long as you want.
Also, Amazon is not the police. If they take something you rightfully bought, they are the thieves.
Exactly, it's the classic bait and switch. Now after spending the time, money, and effort involved in developing the apps developers are forced to either cut their losses and abandon ship, or continue giving into Apple's demands.
Kindle is a tougher call. I think Apple may try to pull them and see if they can do it or not.
That depends on whether or not you believe what Steve said in the keynote about having over 90% of the tablet market.
I was addressing the claim about market share and only that.
Let's see the numbers for books on Kindle and compare notes.
IE. What if Apple decides that they'd rather have only the top 1 or two apps for a category? That having only one throwing physics game, or one tower defense game, is what customers really want? Sure, that's ridiculous, but it's not THAT far from Apple's history.
Or, maybe apps that let you play musical instruments compete too much with the new Garage Band.
The point is, there is no limit to what Apple can change.