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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

I think this is mostly a response to David Cicilline's comment that Apple's 30% is "highway robbery" [1]. It compares it to other marketplace take rates showing that Apple's 30% isn't "highway robbery", but also that Apple does much more to earn their 30% than say GrubHub given that iOS apps rely heavily on Apple tools and technologies to create and distribute apps.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295778/apple-app-store-...

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Don't Microsoft and Google create these tools too? They don't explicitly stop you from installing content from outside of their stores. I can easily install any APK on an android phone and any EXE on a Windows computer (maybe a bad example, because Mac).

When I say "tools and technologies" I'm not referring to just Xcode but all the SDKs and APIs as well.

Don't Google and MS provide those then?

Google does it, although it is a bit debatable given that most stuff on Android is actually based on stuff developed by others. Java, Kotlin, InteliJ/Clion, Gradle,Linux,..., that Google cleverly packs together into Android.

Microsoft provides the Community edition, which is only free for small business up to 5 developers or specific cap of revenue, beyond that you must buy the professional/enterprise/architect edition, or an MSDN yearly license.

The Windows SDKs and APIs are free to use and the documentation is freely available. Microsoft has many free tools to help write code for Windows platforms.

That said, the MSDN has never been free. The software used for development and testing are only available with annual subscriptions. This include all Windows operating systems; applications such as Excel, SQL Server, and Exchange; cloud services such as Azure and Windows Store; and the venerable Visual Studio (not VSC). The old MSDN has morphed into Visual Studio subscriptions at several levels. I pay $800 for the Professional level.

If you want access to dev releases, etc you need to pay Apple too. So to me, the comment I responded to doesn't seem like a good argument for the 30% cut when comparing to actual competitors:

> Apple does much more to earn their 30% than say GrubHub given that iOS apps rely heavily on Apple tools and technologies to create and distribute apps.

Do developers have a reasonable choice other than to use Apple tools? You can't even compile an iOS app on a server-class operating system and instead have to overpay for low-spec Macs for CI.

No, but the market wouldn't even exist if not for Apple creating it. iOS apps by its nature depend on Apple's technology. It isn't the same as restaurants or hotels that acquire customers through GrubHub or Booking.

I'm pretty sure if Apple hadn't created the modern smartphone someone else would have, and they'd probably have been less controlling and overall better than Apple too. The structural conditions for smartphones existed, Apple (and Google) just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I don’t see why that matters. Outside health and safety or merchantability, do we really want anyone dictating what features software can or cannot have, and how they may or may not be implemented? There is no requirement on Apple, or any other manufacturer to have an App Store at all, or to facilitate the installation of software from potentially competing firms, or any regulations requiring how they may or may not go about doing it. It’s not obvious to me that’s a route we really need to go down.

Yes, of course I want society to have a greater degree of democratic control over massive trusts like Apple!

And do you think Microsoft or Blackberry or whoever else would have done it better?

Probably not Microsoft or Blackberry, but in a society oriented in a more worker-friendly direction there would have been better outcomes in terms of freedoms than what Apple has produced.

>I'm pretty sure if Apple hadn't created the modern smartphone someone else would have

Whether they would have or not is beside my point. The app marketplace for Apple's platforms is inextricably tied to their technology. A restaurant and a hotel don't have the same relationship with the platform that a macOS or iOS app do.

Whether the app store is "inextricably tied" to Apple's platforms is beside my point. The state could simply force Apple to allow other app stores, or to write into law a maximum profit margin (similar to profit caps on the health insurance industry in Obamacare), or require worker representatives on the board of directors, or so many other things to keep one of the largest firms in the world in check.

Your point was that smartphones would have existed without Apple making the iPhone but it doesn't make any sense as a response to what I said. I'm not making an argument about market definitions that would concern an antitrust regulator or court, but the nature of the relationship between the platform and sellers being materially different with Apple than GrubHub. And thus who does more work to actually earn their take rate.

There were other smartphones at that time that were just as good if not better. Mr Jobs did something no one else did. He attached a good data plan to it. At that time think along the lines of 20-50 dollars for a couple of megabytes per month. The iPhone basically had unlimited he insisted upon it AT&T was the only one who did it because they wanted that on their network. That was the real game changer. Google about a year later did the same thing.

I was already enjoying a nice dataplan in Europe with Symbian phones.

It's not practical to cross-compile an iOS app on Linux (or a macOS app, for that matter), but it's not an App Store policy to forbid you. Apple just hasn't shipped any software or documentation to let you do it.

Is it your view that Apple has an ethical responsibility to ship cross-compilation build tools for Linux? (Is that because it's unethical to ship a closed-source operating system with a closed-source build tool?)

I'm not sure what you mean by "not practical". It is definitely possible for macOS apps, and it seems to be possible for iOS apps too.

I have worked on an open source game, we cross compile for macOS on Linux without any Apple hardware.

As far as I understand - or have been told, this violates some Apple license terms.

Surely building a binary that links against their SDK, as long as your are not using their toolchain, must be fine?

It's possible, but it's cheaper and easier to just use a Mac, and the resulting builds will typically work better.

For example, does your open-source game notarize your macOS builds? It's easy in Xcode, PITA on Linux, and if you don't, your game is difficult to launch on macOS 10.15 Catalina.

It's contractually forbidden.

If you know the right people, you can get access to complete toolchains built in secret for compiling iOS apps on Linux. It's a lot of engineering work but not technically impossible. But it's all very hush-hush because going up against Apple in court is terrifying.

The App Store rules are right here. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ There's nothing in here about cross-compiling.

macOS's license terms forbid running it on non-Apple hardware (even in a VM), and Xcode's license terms only permit running it on macOS, but people can and do compile iOS and macOS builds on open-source operating systems in a purely open-source reverse-engineered stack.

It's just more practical to use a Mac for CI than it is to reverse-engineer the iOS toolchain.

That's not what at least one lawyer has told me, though lawyers tend to be a pretty cautious bunch.

As I said, you've got to know the right people to get access to the stuff I'm talking about. (There are also other conditions, such as you can't be a current or former Apple employee.)

It's also almost certainly setting up for an anti-trust fight over the app-store. See Apple v Pepper from last year allowing a suit to go forward about the App Store and lot of other anti-trust news against the tech sector in general.

Apple is trying to show regulators that they're not the only ones taking a platform-wide 30% rake.

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