Comment by terracatta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by terracatta | Hacker News Reader

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This letter is actually astonishing. In this letter Apple:

* Chastises them for making free apps in the past

* Reminds them they've had to distribute their apps for free (almost as if they should be grateful and now give them some money)

* States they would accept their app if it provided unrelated functionality or access to competitor products (who are oddly not subject to the same rules).

* Implies that everyone is following the rules but them (which is demonstrably false even if you accept the "Reader" and "Business" definitions they provide)

Also, according to DHH, they leaked this letter to the press before sending it to the Basecamp CEO. Nice.

The argument is so strange, it's almost as if "email" is a special term of art that causes Apple to categorize this app in a way that is not is not consistent with other SaaS products. Even with that said, there are no other similar email apps like Superhuman that are subject to these rules. If I was a Chat or Email based SaaS company CEO and I relied on the iPhone to complete my multi-platform value prop, I would be very worried about this happening to my already approved app.

>Reminds they've had to distribute their apps for free

Apple has never had to distribute any application for free since you need to pay $99 per year to have anything listed on the App Store.

but that $99 charge is really a way to reduce trolls and scams. For regular us devs it almost meaningless, it blocks poor people in the west and third world devs.

If there were 10,000 developers on the App Store, their yearly membership fees come to a total of $990,000.

That's pretty good revenue for troll/scam reduction.

Now do the same math for the actual number of active App Store devs.

Apple's revenue in 2019 was 260.2 billion dollars.

Yes and?

That million doesn't mean anything to them is what 200 billion in revenue means

It should probably be pointed out that this whole fight is about Apple not getting 30% of $99 on whatever signups the iOS application for a pre-release email platform would generate.

And Apple has boasted about having over 20 million registered iOS developers. Who knows how many of them are actively paying the subscription at the same time, but it's probably still a very large number.

If you think that developer licenses are even in the same order of magnitude as the value of 30% of in-app purchases I think your intuition is way off.

30% of in app purchases where the frictionless Apple IAP approach is deemed less valuable by the developer*

There's a very important distinction here. If Apple made their own in-app purchase API optional instead of mandatory, it isn't like every single developer would ditch it overnight. Apple's system is legitimately useful in a huge number of situations, and everyone knows that. It just isn't wanted _here_, and that should be okay.

Isn't Superhuman using TestFlight to get around the App Store problem? That was the case last I heard of it.

I believe Superhuman added the in app purchase.

Yup seems like that just happened and they're still charging the $30. That means $108 lost to Apple in the first subscription-year and $54 every subscription-year thereafter. I'd be surprised if Superhuman isn't trying to find a way to pivot their customers onto their own billing behind the scenes.

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