However, if your app happens to be a game (a "free" game, for instance) and your in-app purchases enhance that game in some way (e.g. unlocking features) then Apple gets a cut of that.
The "core app experience" of Floatplane is "you get to watch videos in high quality" and "you get to chat during live streams". Their app is an amalgamation of Patreon and the Youtube video player, both of which are on the App Store already.
I don't know why buying video access would be so different from making ads show up. Both are purely digital services. There's probably some vague notion of "consumption" that determines if the fee is mandatory or not, but the rules are as vague as they are arbitrary when you get down to that level.
It's clear that the actual rule is "we can make a deal if you're big enough". Apps like Uber have gotten warnings for pulling stunts that smaller developers would get their dev account banned for. Adding 30% on top of Facebook would kill the feature on iOS and subsequently kill iPhone presence among marketeers.
[1]: https://www.floatplane.com/ [2]: https://youtu.be/Rs4hTm6B9QQ?t=368
Quote:
"Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits — including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, tvOS apps, universal search, Siri support and, where applicable, single or zero sign-on. On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal+, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription."
Why does this bypass exist for Premium Streaming Apps, but not exist for Game Streaming? What's the fundamental difference between streaming video and streaming a game, or purchasing an Ebook?
Apple's 'we apply the rules to everyone' defense is a bit like a store-owner saying, "I'm not playing favorites, I'm giving a special discount to anyone with green eyes, a buzzcut, and a striped t-shirt. It just so happens that my friend Tim fits that description."
The thing that's really interesting here is that their whole shtick now is privacy, which implies paying for things rather than funding them with advertising. But then they're taking 30% of the things you pay for and not 30% of the advertising, which pushes developers toward funding from advertising. So who is supposed to be the favorite?
Why does it even exist?
You can say ‘they are fundamentally the same’ in the sense that bits are traveling in both ways across the network.
But everyone does in fact make a distinction between games and movies. That’s why we have two different words for them.
It’s true that one day, the distinction between interactive movies - e.g. Bandernatch, and real-time interactive games may go away.
That day is not here yet.
It’s also true that if Apple won’t sell us what we want, we’ll buy it from someone else.
It's very obvious that the reason why Apple chose the largely meaningless difference between a video and a game to make this category is because they were negotiating with Amazon, and that was a convenient distinction to build a category around.
To extend from your argument, everyone also in fact makes a distinction between striped shirts vs solid shirts, and buzzcuts vs crewcuts, and green eyes vs blue eyes. Everyone would agree that those are different things.
So does that mean giving a discount to my friend Tim is totally fine, and I'm not carving out special exceptions that are designed to target him specifically?
A games streaming platform is interactive whereas a video streaming platform isn't (unless you want to split hairs and call "picking something to watch" interactive.) That's both a consumer-facing and technical difference. Whether it's enough to treat them fundamentally differently, I have no idea (but I'm sure lawyers will have plenty.)
It’s hard to believe you don’t see this. Do you really not?
If your argument is that all apps are just like different colors of a shirt, then if movies are no different from games, movies are also no different from programming languages, or telemedicine apps.
If your argument is that Apple shouldn’t be allowed to make rules based on distinctions between what apps do, that is a reasonable position to argue on its own merits.
Claiming there is no distinction between what classes of app do, is not reasonable.
Your argument about making an exception for your friend Tim doesn’t apply here.
If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t.
And yes, there are huge consumer facing and technical differences between game streaming and video streaming services.
The biggest one is that a game streaming service can stream any kind of app, and bypass app review and apple’s payment services.
We might want people to be able to do that, but that’s a different matter.
The technical difference is very obvious, and it’s exactly what Apple has said - they don’t want apps bypassing app review.
Honestly, no, I genuinely don't. I do think the shirt colors are analogous.
The technical differences you and others are talking about are not differences that affect Apple in any way. It's not harder on Apple's infrastructure for someone to stream a game instead of a movie, it doesn't take Apple any extra engineering effort or development time. The technical differences people are talking about are mostly outside the iPhone and its core APIs. They don't affect Apple or users in way that's relevant to Apple's policies.
Likewise with the user-facing distinctions -- I don't think the distinctions that you're talking about are something that users care about, and I don't think there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is thinking about users when it makes those distinctions. I don't see how users benefit from games and Ebooks being treated differently than movies. From a user perspective, this is all just 'content'.
> If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t.
Oh, no. Anyone with a striped shirt, buzzcut, and blue eyes can get a discount. There are likely multiple people who fit that description, it's not just Tim.
But I don't want to get hung up on that analogy if you think that's too direct or contrived. Another analogy I'd point towards is VPNs and video streaming in regards to net neutrality. In fact, ISPs actually had a much stronger argument for treating video bits differently from other bits on the network, since services like Netflix did genuinely consume more bandwidth than services in other categories. However, we all (mostly) still recognized that the differences between streaming a video and streaming any other kinds of data weren't relevant to ISPs.
I think the distinctions people are raising between video and game streaming are the same -- they're not relevant to an app distribution platform. I don't think the Bandersnatch comparison is splitting hairs, I think it's a reasonable comparison to make. I don't think that bypassing app review is relevant to consumers for a streaming platform, since bypassing app review within a streaming platform introduces no security or privacy risks for the end user. The business-facing reason apps can't bypass app review and payment services is because Apple is providing a service that needs to be payed for -- but streaming apps fundamentally do not take advantage of any of those services. It makes about as much commercial sense to charge them as it makes to charge for transactions made inside a web browser.
I especially don't see a difference between a games streaming platform and a virtual desktop, another distinction that Apple seems to think is worthy of entirely separate rules. Consumers do not care about whether a virtual computer immediately boots into a game or whether it forces them to click on an icon first.
Even from a purely practical perspective, I don't think there's strong evidence that games streaming would break Apple's entire revenue model. There's a tangible, consumer-facing benefit to apps working offline that some app-makers will want to take advantage of. Streaming games is not an existential threat to the app store, at least certainly not a larger existential threat than web browsers are.
Finally, I don't think it's possible to separate the theoretical differences between games/videos/ebooks/virtual desktops from the context in which Apple chose to split along those categories. Apple didn't come up with those categories and then afterwards check to see what the market looked like. Sure there are theoretical reasons (weak as they are) that Apple could have chosen to build its policies around esoteric "what is a game" arguments, but the simplest explanation for why Apple chose to put so much weight on those distinctions is because it allowed them to bend to large players on the market who they could not ignore, while still restricting and gouging smaller players and upstarts who could not challenge them.
The way I read your argument is that you actually do think the distinctions are real, buy they shouldn’t be used by Apple to control the marketplace.
I think that’s a reasonable position and one worth exploring.
I actually agree with you that the distinctions are in place to allow Apple to retain control of the marketplace.
I just don’t think it makes sense to pretend they aren’t meaningful distinctions. Not do I think we can assume the reason is mainly about gouging. If you want to make a case for that - by all means, but it’s not a given.
I don’t agree that steaming games are no more of a threat to Apple than the web.
For one thing, the web as a platform is slow to evolve because of interoperability issues.
These would not be present with steaming Apps.
If you don’t think Games are a distinct category then you must concede that streaming games means streaming apps of all kinds.
Yes - offline is an issue still, but it’s becoming less of one over time.
Streaming Apps don’t need to be an existential threat to Apple or have access to local data in order to be harmful.
They can bypass age restrictions, phish, be scams, collect credit card numbers, do social engineering, promote hate etc.
More importantly - your argument seems to be that Apple shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what apps do.
If that is the case, then you’re not arguing for a narrow carve out for steaming games since you’ve already denied they are a category that Apple should be using.
You real argument is against Apple being able to control what goes on the store or on their platform.
I think that’s a valid argument, however I think it can’t meaningfully be just about Apple. If we are going to say Apple shouldn’t have this control, then nobody should be allowed it.
And then of course we have to articulate how we’d deal with all the security, malware and trust issues in such a world.
Well, but this is the rub: Apple does allow virtual desktop streaming on the app store. Streaming an app is allowed, as long as the user clicks on an icon on a virtual desktop. Can we think of a consumer-relevant difference between streaming a game and booting up a game by clicking on an icon on a virtual desktop? Is it relevant enough that one of those two things should be banned?
The only difference that seems credible to me is that the distinction allows Apple to directly target Google Stadia and Microsoft.
> They can bypass age restrictions, phish, be scams, collect credit card numbers, do social engineering, promote hate etc.
But is this a distinction that it's reasonable to think that Apple actually cares about? You can buy illicit ebooks on an Apple platform as long as Apple gets a 30% cut from the purchase screen. Apple isn't filtering the content of 3rd-party digital purchases.
And if the distinction that we're drawing is, "we need to make sure that we're blocking hate speech", make a policy that streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, and Google Stadia can't make hate speech available. Given what we know about Apple's current policies, is a ban on games the type of thing you would expect from an app store worried about hate speech, or would you expect something direct that actually targeted the real problem?
> your argument seems to be that Apple shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what apps do.
I don't think I'm claiming anything quite that broad. I'm arguing that if discrimination exists only to target a specific market, and if the company involved is one half of a duopoly, then we should consider antitrust implications.
There are technical reasons to restrict what apps can do: for example, limitations around the platform and hardware. There are also consumer-facing reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block malware, spyware, and security risks. There are even moral reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block hate speech, or to make safe spaces for younger users.
The distinction between a game and movie for an entirely off-device experience doesn't fit any of those reasons. There's no moral reason to treat games differently than movies; if you were worried about morals you'd create a general policy against hate speech that applied to all 3rd-party content. There's no technical reason; the engineering resources to support both use-cases are exactly the same. And there's no consumer-facing reason; remote applications are all sandboxed from the user's phone.
The only reason to choose that specific distinction -- games vs videos vs ebooks vs applications -- is because of what companies are involved in each market. We can theoretically imagine a world where Apple might make a distinction there for non-malicious reasons, but the most logical, obvious explanation for those rules is that Apple isn't interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams, it's interested in blocking markets. We know what it looks like when Apple gets interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams or improving privacy, and generally it looks different than this.
To go back to the original analogy, I can come up with some tortured reasons why maybe consumers really care about the color of people's shirts (fashion is a giant industry after all), and I can say I want to create a shopping experience where everyone is dressed well and that maybe a solid red shirt might have bad words written on it, and obviously I can filter on clothing in general because I'm allowed to say that my customers can't be naked. These are all theoretically possible explanations for my policy, it's just that they're obviously lies. It's obvious that if I cared about people showing up naked, I'd target that specifically. It's obvious that in this scenario I'm coming up with the policy first, and then trying to justify it afterwards as if it's a neutral decision.
To flip your earlier incredulity back at you: do you really, honestly believe that if Amazon, Hulu, and other streaming services weren't essential apps for iOS, that Apple would still be looking at them right now and saying, "clearly video purchases should be treated differently than ebook purchases."? We can intuit something of Apple's motivation here.
The clothing store analogy is not relevant in this argument, because it assumes there are no technical differences, but that isn’t actually something we agree on. I.e. it’s a case of affirming the consequent.
It doesn’t explain anything - it just hides the point of disagreement by talking about clothes instead of software, which in fact work very differently.
Streaming games can clearly do things that other interactive malware can do, and that includes fraud, phishing, collecting credit card information, promoting hate, funding terrorism, and any number of other things.
Movies can’t do things like phishing or collecting credit card numbers etc.
They can of course promote hate, and Apple has removed streaming video services when they have done so.
So there is a difference.
As for claiming Apple is lying - well you clearly want to make that case, but it’s not at all obvious to me that they are lying about anything.
Nobody is pretending Apple doesn’t want to block competitors from establishing their own storefronts.
Apple is quite clear that they are banning streaming video because they want to retain control of what goes in the store.
I also think they are quite clear that they don’t want anything that does an end run around their control, and their collection of in app payments.
Nobody is lying about that.
As for you ‘flipping’ incredulity round on me - is there something I’ve said that you don’t think I believe?
Everything Apple does with the store rules involves enabling classes of apps they think will be essential to their users while preserving their control of the storefront.
Streaming game stores would be competition with the App Store itself, and allow it to be bypassed.
Streaming video services obviously don’t allow the App Store to be bypassed.
There’s nothing secret or hidden about this.
As for ‘duopoly’ - as I say, if you want to make the case that they shouldn’t be allowed to block competing storefronts based on a legal theory that they are too powerful to be permitted to do that, fine.
But that’s not what this discussion has been about. You are claiming streaming games and streaming videos are the same for the purposes of this argument.
They are obviously not and I’ve articulated the reasons.
If you want to continue to disagree on that point, be my guest.
No official source qualifies and the article you linked just guesses based on screenshots. It also tells you that Apple does take the 30% cut if you trick the user into not realizing there's an Apple tax.
The video I linked (I know, it's long) discusses limitations as decreed by Apple itself. There's another video on that channel with even more in-depth information from Apple. There's no offer to make a deal and become a "premium service". I'm sure these guys would love to get their app available on more platforms, providing more value than they already can with just smartphone apps.
"The requirement: those platforms must be able to integrate core Apple services, apps, and features — including AirPlay 2, universal search and Siri support, and single or zero sign-on, among others."
Spotify is a subscription service.
To be honest I don't understand the rationale here - the criteria seem somewhat arbitrary - but I don't think Apple is being inconsistent in applying the criteria.
In contrast from what you’re describing floatplane purchases are for subscriptions that will show up directly in the app.
That shows they've indexed three results from the domain. Maybe they rejected ddg trawlers?
Linus Media Group made an alternative to Youtube to not put all of their eggs in one basket, that's what eventually became Floatplane. There's more creators on there, basically all in the tech Youtube space, but they do extensively use their own streaming platform of course.
If you install the Netflix app, you'll be hit with a login screen and no way to proceed until you go online, create an account, and pay.
However, if you were to make a game that had the same UI, it would be refused access to the store - apps must have some level of functionality without requiring a purchase outside the app, except if they are in the 'reader' category.
The policy as is exists to allow Apple Arcade to fit the rules, and basically nobody else.
How many headlines have you seen about parents getting a huge credit card bill from their kids going wild in a video streaming app?
The games market is predatory enough on iOS with reviews without being able to push down whatever unreviewed pay-to-win, lootbox, "hit the lever!" garbage people like Epic, EA, and Ubisoft churn out. I shudder to think what it'd be like with the floodgates opened.
Apple refused to approve the app unless we added a storefront to our app and used in-app purchases. But that’s not something we consider a core feature of the app.
I've seen various demos and showcases, some of them with pretty impressive UIs, but I've never encountered PWAs outside of exploring them as a novelty.
We made the change after reassessing the PWA landscape and seeing that iOS 13 and Android's level of support for PWA features makes it worthwhile. Apple is dragging its feet with PWAs - but the way our app works means we don't need any of the missing functionality (like Web Push) and iOS's weird PWA app lifecycle suits our application fine as it isn't intended to be used offline for more than a few hours anyway.
Would love to be corrected on this btw.
Covid killed our product though so for us I'm relieved I don't have to deal with Apple's shit anymore to get the app deployed.
Still have to deal with it for other clients though :/
Content that’s consumed on the device to be more precise.
You can sell domains and hosting etc. using alternative payment methods. For example I use namecheap’s App to buy domains and I would use CC to do so.
So why not ads then? Well Apple doesn't have insight into the ad spending, and they are not a middle man to the cash transfer. They could try to force themselves into that position, say "if you want to have ads in your app, you have to use our SDK for that". But if they tried such a stunt, then Google and Facebook, would become very powerful very motivated enemies.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203294/amazon-prime-vide...
Interestingly they also allow you to deposit with Apple Pay (along with many other payment processors, which the user can choose).
My guess would be that the rule is that there's no Apple cut if you're selling a physical thing and there's a digital attachment. But Apple probably reserves the right to disregard sham physical transactions, where the physical item is de minimis in value compared to the digital item.
Supposing I have a B2B (not B2C) web-application + SaaS for a hypothetical professional studio photographers’s portfolio app. The app is entirely free (gratis) with self-service signup in the app for a free SaaS service tier - the app itself is only used for uploading photos to the SaaS service (I.e. it’s a utility/companion app).
Now, supposing that users on the free tier can pay a one-off fee (in the iOS app or on the web) to enable the ability to set a custom colour scheme for their portfolio page (which doesn’t affect the appearance of the iOS app at all) - that doesn’t count as a purchase which enhances the app experience - it doesn’t enable/disable or change anything in the app - should that be an IAP with the 30% tax - or an Apple Pay purchase with only ~3% processing fees?
Now, what if instead of selling that digital-only, app-irrelevant good in the app instead users could buy a physical “welcome pack” in the app which consists of a cheap Zazzle tote-bag with the company logo on - and as a bonus to the user enables the same custom-colour-scheme feature as a “thank you” to the user (like how Reddit and GitHub add flair to your account if you’re a paying user). Does (or should) Apple get 30% or 3% of that? If the cost of selling the tote bag is less than Apple’s 30% fee then I’ve found a loophole in IAP vs. AP.
That is not a thing at Reddit (I'm a paying user and there is no special flair nor any setting to add one).
On GitHub, you get the purple "PRO" badge next to your username on your profile page and in the profile-tooltips elsewhere on GitHub.
Not legally, in most jurisdictions.
The only way to compete with Apple in the browsers space on iOS is to build your own app marketplace/store, since Apple controls distribution through the App Store.
The only way to compete with Apple in the app store space is to build your own OS, since iOS only allows the Apple App Store, not competing ones.
The only way to compete with Apple in the OS space is to build your own hardware (or buy from someone else and distribute), since Apple hardware locks out other operating systems from running.
So the only way to compete with Apple in a space where they've decided you aren't allowed to is to replace their entire platform stack, and compete with them at the platform level.
So to compete with Apple in the browser space you have to compete at the level of Google, where you make hardware, the OS, and the marketplace, and hope people move over wholesale to your hardware and OS just so they can use your browser.
That's why Apple's behavior is anti-competitive. They've put walls to competition in place at every possible level to make it so the amount of money and expertise required to compete at any level is the same to competing at almost all levels.
You say "many smartphone manufacturers" but in practice there aren't actually that many smartphone manufacturers. Moreover, there is only really one -- Google -- which has actually done it. All the others license their software stack from Google. Even Microsoft made a serious attempt to do this and failed.
Your claim is that an individual app developer who wants to compete with an Apple app on iOS could feasibly do this?
Yes, if you're already poised at the lowest part of the platform stack, you can sell hardware that competes with Apple's hardware, but it can't fully compete, because you can't offer a better solution to host iOS on, you can only offer to be part of platform that competes. You cannot compete with Apple hardware directly on just the hardware level.
> Apple has a very small global market share on smartphones and only around 50% in the US.
I'm not making a case that Apple is a monopoly. I'm making a case that their action are anti-competitive (I'm using this term divorced from any specific legal meaning), and thus bad for their users in that respect.
Would allowing other hardware to run iOS be better or worse for users of iOS and the rest of the Apple ecosystem? In some ways better, in some ways worse, but we can't rely on the market to tell us the result of that specific question, because the market is constrained. We can look at each level of the platform stack similarly.
This is usually brought up as a matter of user choice, but I think it's important to distil that to what it means, competition. Choice means there are at least two competing things to choose from, an given that our economic model requires choice (among other things, such as information about choices) to function correctly.
Do I think Apple has a monopoly, as previously defined by law? No. But I think it's important to note that nobody had a monopoly as defined by law before the late 1800's, because that legal definition didn't exist, and was created to deal with harms we saw because of anti-competitive actions. So, I think Apple isn't a monopoly as we currently define it, but I do think their actions are anti-competitive in large and obvious ways, and that we may need to address that in some manner legislatively. That may mean altering the legal definition of monopoly so it matches, or it may just mean putting some select laws in place to hamper specific anti-competitive behavior (for example, a consumer right to be able to run whatever software you want on your hardware would address some small aspect of this).
That said, I've been a bit loose here in verifying some of my terminology about legal points, and IIRC you have experience in that domain, so I'm sure you can correct me on that if you feel it warranted (and I would welcome it, as well of course as any specific problems you think my argument has).
Apple explicitly allow for loading your own apps, your opening gambit is a flat out lie.
The context of this discussion distributing software on Apple's platform, not installing your own software. Your own software is not market competition. The comments up-thread specifically cover this, so I don't know why you would think I was stating otherwise in a general sense, rather than working within the context of the discussion.
So, can sideloading be used as a way to distribute software you want to sell? Not legally, based on the restrictions Apple has put in place for sideloading. The closest you could get to my knowledge would be the enterprise program, which is only intended to be used to distribute software to employees.
There's also the point that the hoops required to successfully sideload an app are themselves a fairly large wall to being able to use it even at the level of a single person wanting to install something, even if it wasn't disallowed by different agreements you must make to do so.
Edit: This made more sense when I realized the headline was about purchasing ad placement within the app, not viewing ads.
No buying a kindle book, you'll be forced to open a web browser and do it that way. No purchasing movies, or music.
Physical goods that are delivered to your home, all good. Not an issue.
Also I don’t think you can subscribe to amazon prime via the iOS app — you certainly can’t buy video via the prime video app!
Ultimately, large corporations can get side deals because they wield more power and influence than smaller companies.
Inst Facebook timeline carefully curated based on that ?
Is Epic obligated to censor them because of Apple's rules?
I think there is a very good case to be made that the in-app experience is improved by allowing these purchases in-app, and the in-app experience and value would be significantly reduced if Facebook did not allow marketers to buy ads using their iPhone or iPad.
Maybe a case can be made for adspace having a real cost too?
Though one could argue that more likes/conversions/CTAs improve's a business's app experience
You can borrow KindleUnlimited titles, provided you've purchased that subscription outside of the app. Same thing with Audible, you can use existing credits within the app, but can't purchase more.
Seems to me FB ads fit the definition. FB core product isn’t a consumer social network, it’s a targeted ad platform, and their actual customers are advertisers that serve ads on the platform.
Clearly ad buying/managing enriches the core app experience for FB’s advertisers.
Just more favoritism and unequal treatment between the tech giants.
I think Apple is absolutely abusive and I would love for that to be stopped, but this doesn't sound malicious to me on the surface.
Lots of apps do this, and they are not exempt from the 30% fee. Basically paywalling an existing part of your app is exactly what the 30% from IAP is for.