Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I've already commented on this subject:

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.

Arguing that Apple is illogical or ought to be smarter or is shooting itself in the foot... A waste of electrons.

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.

This isn't really a refutation of what he said. If enough of the proverbial sharecroppers complain, it MAY be worth it for Apple to improve conditions. You are still at their mercy, however.

Also, it's ridiculous that people are voting raganwald's comment down. What's next, covering your ears and yelling "la la la la"?

>Also, it's ridiculous that people are voting raganwald's comment down.

How often do you see a comment on hn with positive votes that tells people to "Cry me a fucking river"?

When that's not all there is to the comment, and it has legitimate content and value to the discussion, possibly-dissenting opinions aside?

Often.

And he was quoting from his own article, at a particularly identifiable and primary point of inflection.

"What he said" might vary by reader, since reganwald's comment rambled somewhat. But, the gp did refute this line in reganwald's "bottom line" summary:

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.

Arguing with the faceless Apple executives via the internet is wishful thinking, whether you succeed or not.

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.

The argument isn't with faceless executives, or Apple at all---its with people like you and I, the developers at large.

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 doesn't refute the argument about controlled platforms, which I think most people are very familiar with the costs and benefits of.

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.

"In my experience, employees at Apple care very much what users and developers are saying."

Except employee 0.

I'm sure it was rational feedback and criticism that changed Apple's mind about tools and languages. Adobe's complaint to the FTC (and the subsequent probe) had nothing to do with it, right?

>Remember when Apple reversed its decision on 3rd-party developer tools and languages?

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.

The hole I see in your argument is that I have never seen developing free apps on the App Store as some sort of loophole.

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.

What kind of "free" apps are you talking about? I'm talking about a "free" app where I download it for free, then I click a link in my "free" app that takes me to Amazon's web store where I pay with my credit card to buy stuff.

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.

I admit I was talking about the latter. I went with the tl;dr, didn't read your blog post, and made the assumption that you were talking about all free apps, not just the apps with paid subscription content being served through them.

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.

Your opinion isn't the one that counts. Apple's is. A loophole is whatever Apple says it is.

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.

I don't substantially disagree with you, but I would be very displeased if folks took to replicating your tone on HN. Can we change the dial back to "Robust but civil disagreement", please?

Might as well shut the fuck up and not bother expressing unhappiness with a company you're giving money to, right?

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.

It's not a soundbite, it's quoting Tim Bray. If you don't like it, go ahead and call it a strategic partnership, or a mutually beneficial symbiosis, or whatever else floats your boat. Meanwhile, Apple is yanking the rug out from under people.

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.

That the sharecropping analogy can be applied so well at all is fairly disturbing. Even considering that they have the legal right to do that, it doesn't make them any less annoying. And as a platform vendor, it's a bad idea to tick off developers.

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 I won't argue that Apple has the right to change the terms for future buyers of the products, I am upset because it changes the terms for the current owners of the products. I bought my iPhone under a set of assumptions, and they are being changed. Remember, the customer is the one who is handing over money, which for Apple is mostly the people actually buying the iOS devices.

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.

"It’s incorrect to expect iOS to be as “open” to developers and their businesses as Mac or Windows"... Unless there are fundamental limitations, why shouldn't it be as open as Mac OS X? I should be able to download apps directly and purchase them through a curated app store. I should be able to download apps through somebody else's app store. If people value the benefits of a curated app store over the looser conventional OS model, they'll vote with their dollars and only then will developers follow. But I don't buy the notion that iOS should be less free because of arbitrary market conditions and rent-seeking Quasi-monopolies, or that that's just the way it is, and we should just grin and bear it.

Do you have some kind of axe to grind? You write a lot of interesting comments/posts but this comes off as something more than a little hostile. Especially considering Marco didn't write anything remotely inflammatory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com