Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
apple.com
apple.com
If I understand correctly though, since it's a hard cutoff it creates this gap between 1m and ~1.2m where you're actually worse off by making more money pre-tax.
999k --[-15%]--> 849k
1000k --[-30%]--> 700k
1213k --[-30%]--> 849kEDIT: It looks like I am wrong, ignore me.
If you get kicked out, you're stuck paying 30% for at least a year.
The relevant sentence seems to be "If a participating developer surpasses the $1 million threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year." (emphasis mine)
Apple takes the comission as you go, so it sounds like they take 15% of each sale until you hit $1M, and then 30% for every sale after that.
The next year they'd take 30% right from the start though, so a good year followed by a bad one would be unfortunate.
I wonder why they're not doing that and creating all kinds of weird edge cases that will encourage hacky workarounds.
I guess they didn't want to lose out on the first million from those who are above the first bracket.
Year 1: 999k --[-15%]--> 849k (This year doesn't trip the "limit"
Year 2: 1000k --[-15%]-->850k (Limit is tripped, next year is 30%)
Year 3: 999k --[-30%]-->699k (Fell below the limit, next year is 15% again)
Basically if you are close to the limit at the end of the year, you should immediately stop all advertising/marketing spend to ensure you don't go over the peak :)
I'm not really sure why they did it this way as it really screws over people that are just at the 1m/yr mark, vs a progressive system that would "just work."
Or, they could've just picked $1 million because it's a nice round number and looks good in a press release.
Why cant it just be simple where your First $1M will be 15% bracket regardless of total sales.
Yet they have 2 full year to see how it goes and work around all the edge case. I bet nobody except professional haters will complain if they soften the rules in 18 months.
I would like if there is any solution to this other than to apply the same percentage to all income.
You'd pay let's say 15% over the first 30k, and then 30% over the remainder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax (See the Computation section for how the higher rates only apply to the higher portions of a person's income, with their lower portions taxed less.)
0-9000€ [0%] -> 0€
9000-20.000€ [10%] -> 1100€
20.000-40.000€ [15%] -> 3000€
Total = 4400€
So if you're in the 15% bracket you pay 4400€ which is actually 12.5% in total, and not 5250€ (15%) as some people seem to believe.
Cyberpunk always wins, in the long run.
999k --[-15%] --> 849k
1000k --[-15%x1000k] [-30%x0] --> 850k
1213k --[-15%x1000k] [-30%x213k]--> 999kMy guess is that creating apps for the App store is actually far less profitable than Apple wants us to believe. That is, unless you are a large publisher.
I'd really like to see the distribution here, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a huge income gap.
"In a gold rush, you don't get rich by digging for gold - you get rich by selling shovels"
250k-500k - 5% 500k-1000k - 20% 1000k- ∞ - 30% (figures in INR)
the brackets varies every FY, but are same more or less.
It doesn't discriminate with border cases.
That would be dangerous, because imagine being under 1million all year, and in December you make 1 dollar too much - suddenly you would have to pay Apple a lot of money you may have already spent. You never pay Apple though, they just keep their cut.
Fixed. ;)
Then there are the indie musicians in Apple Music and indie video publishers in Apple TV. I don't know how much their rates are, but if it's anything like Spotify or Amazon Prime it's not much.
Will these other indie producers get a break too, or is it just developers?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but with the current plan I can actually _lose_ money year over year around the $1m mark. For example if I make $1.01m in year one and then my sales tick up to $1.1m in year two my Apple tax is ~150k in year 1 but balloons to 330k in year 2, leading to a net loss in profits despite a gain in revenue?
>If a participating developer surpasses the $1 million threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year.
I think it's exactly like you wish it was.
> For all sales between $10 million and $50 million, the split goes to 25 percent. And for every sale after the initial $50 million, Steam will take just a 20 percent cut.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-gam...
Valve's strategy looks like to maximise revenue and get big companies on board that do $10+ mil in sales giving them incentives and discounts to be on the platform. (I think of it as tax break to incentivise high-earners to stay in the state/country)
Apple's strategy looks like to put more money into small companies/developers, while still charging the usual rate it had for 10 years to everyone else to access market of 1+ billion users. (tax break for small business to get up and running)
Apple is clearly attempting to reverse some of the bad PR, and divide the Dev Community so the calls for Anti-Trust action is lessened as the "small devs" will consider Apple "on their side" by giving them a competitive advantage over larger shops
Clever move, time will tell if anyone buys it for more than what it really is, a PR stunt designed to ensure no real change happens
Steam wants to disincentivize big companies making their own distribution, which is why they have the regressive split.
Sure, if you want your business to go bankrupt.
Itch? I love the place but good luck supporting your business with the number of sales you’ll make if you’re only available there. Epic? GoG? Humble? Those are curated stores; you have to be invited in; you can’t just choose to sell there. And even if you could, they still don’t have anything even remotely remotely remotely like the number of shoppers on Steam.
As a practical matter, today, Steam is the only realistic option for mainstream non-hobbyist digital PC game publishing. You can do other stores plus Steam, but Steam has to be in the mix if you’re hoping to support yourself by your sales. (and yes, you can point to a small handful of digital games which were highly financially successful without primarily selling through Steam, but those are the hyper-viral one-in-a-million exceptions, not representative business cases that you should be betting your business on replicating)
(Exception: if one of the other stores is going to pay you to be exclusive to their store (preferably only for a certain duration so that you can get onto Steam right after that period), then that can absolutely make up for losing out on the early Steam sales. But again, that sort of deal isn’t available to everybody)
Neither does Fortnite come to think of it.
This just isn't true, Steam had almost no competition in 2008. Microsoft didn't even have an app store till 2012, Epic certainly didn't, EA Origin is 2011.
> and yes, you can point to a small handful of digital games which were highly financially successful without primarily selling through Steam, but those are the hyper-viral one-in-a-million exceptions, not representative business cases that you should be betting your business on replicating
I'm not arguing that either is good, but I think there is a fundamental difference. Apple is reacting to the threat of regulation, which is at least theoretically aimed at protecting small business owners. Valve is fundamentally competing for the business of large companies that actually can afford to forego the exposure Steam offers.
I'm not sure that the App Store's position is as stable as Steam's, either. I don't really have a clear sense of what impact it would have on their sales if Humble Bundle could sell iOS games.
The reason Apple doesn't use this normal model is that the mobile app market is completely screwed up - you get exactly two real choices for distribution if you want to make any money at all as a small developer.
The main issue is not the exorbitant commission rate. Apple is hurting the consumers via its anti-competitive behavior with regards to what apps people are and are not allowed to install on a device that they've paid for. They are blocking value creation up and down the stack in a manner that "if we can't extract it, you're not allowed to create it."
It's intolerable that Apple has been allowed to lockdown their device for 10 years, completely control the market for apps and when it looks like regulators will take action they reduce their price and claim to be acting in the interest of small business.
Third party app stores must be allowed. Apple should not be allowed to dictate what software I can and cannot have on my device.
Smartphones have seen explosive growth because normal people can use them safely.
This advice would work for clothes/home appliances/furniture and other competitive markets, but not to mobile OSes.
Mobile OSes are natural monopoly/duopolies. There isn't enough room in the world for 100 OSes for us to get a competitive market. There isn't even room for 3. There is barely room for 2 with great downside. Companies spend a lot of money developing an app for one OS and basically re-creating it for the other.
I'm looking at my phone's home screen. Most of these apps are available in the other OS too, with almost the exact same functionality, but completely different codebases. Each of these duplicate efforts represent anything from X×100K $ to X×10M $ of development cost. This is just part of the cost of having more OSes. And the consumer ultimately pays for these costs.
Arguably not to OSes in general. Each platform type (desktop, server, mobile) effectively has only a couple of realistic choices when it comes to the OS. The network effects are very strong and winners take all.
Can you back this claim with a source? How do you explain that Android smartphones has grown even more than iOS, despite the fact that they allow you to install whatever apps you choose?
> How do you explain that Android smartphones has grown even more than iOS, despite the fact that they allow you to install whatever apps you choose?
1. Android is free for OEMs, iOS is unavailable. If you want to make a phone then its a great choice, and a free one. 2. Most flavors have a dominant store built in (android store, amazon store, Chinese-oem stores like Xiaomi) that are "safe" or offer that illusion. The important thing here is the built-in-trust of the default settings 3. Piggy-backing off point 1, cheap phone OS means people can make cheap phones -> Cheaper leads to more available for more people, and most of the world is poor compared to US iPhone users
I don’t particularly like it but the "trickle down theory" non marginally applies to fashionable or otherwise luxury items. iPhone creating a desire later satisfied by a cheaper option. Or something like that.
Practically speaking, the only big thing a web app can’t do on an iPhone that most app writers would like to do is notifications. Most other locked down things like call recording aren’t available to App Store approved apps either (and APIs are being removed from Android)
My 82-year-old mom's desktop computer is riddled with spyware, browser toolbars, and other garbage. Her iPhone is pristine and works as well as it did the day she got it. That's because Apple refuses to allow that garbage to make it to the App Store.
Yes, there's some collateral damage for us nerds. And perhaps there should be an easier way to - for those who really care - install more low-level tools and apps. But it shouldn't be easy, and it shouldn't put the majority of users at risk.
Your 82-year-old mum's iphone wouldn't behave any differently but other people will be able to go into the developer settings and tick an option that will allow them to install non-app store apps. That's how it works on Android.
But what's obviously anti-consumer to me is the in app payment system. They take their 30% cut and forbid you from even hinting at alternative means to pay for something to use in an app.
It means I have one place to manage subscriptions, one place with my credit card details, one place to manage family payments and all of it is from a company that can be trusted to do things in a secure and private way.
Do you really want the likes of PayPal or Epic to dominate mobile App Store payments ?
Only that it is user-hostile which services like Paypal absolutely are.
You are right. Choices and options just are messy. We should just have one company that does everything. Lets just merge everything together.
> all of it is from a company that can be trusted to do things in a secure and private way.
Are you for real? Apple is one of the greediest immoral and anti-competitive companies in the world. Not just in terms of tax avoidance via offshore shenanigans or slave labor in china, but their overall ethos of closed platform. But trust Saint Apple if you must.
> Do you really want the likes of PayPal or Epic to dominate mobile App Store payments?
What's wrong with nobody dominating anything and having competition?
Apple is saying that most developer teams make under $1M so this will help them (which is true and great for those teams!). I’m sure most make $0
But what is being missed is that the majority of purchases are done by teams making more than $1M like Spotify and Epic.
For Apple, this concession appeases a lot of angry devs, without giving up a lot of money. I’d wager that most operations struggle to hire a full team and make ongoing product updates for less then $1M of revenue
And of course the actual problem with the App Store isn’t the 30%. It’s Apple’s control and ability to make and enforce arbitrary rules on a whim - as evidenced by today’s changed.
This really slaps down the ability to use that.
Again, you calculated that how?
If you produce a food product, you should expect the store to take a cut of the price before it gets to you.
If you produce a food product you can also set up your own store, but you can't in case of Apple.
Imagine if you had to develop or pay for all of those services individually. Your own download site, product promotion, services, a third party transaction processor, a content delivery network, bespoke cloud syncing, etc, etc.
If you had to develop all of those services yourself, it would look a lot like the internet. None of the things you mention are particularly challenging for the modern web.
You can be quite a small business and still go over a million in revenue. This is more like "single small team" as a threshold.
I made 42k in the last 365 days after Apple's 30% cut (or 60k in sales). That means I will get to keep an extra 9k next year, assuming revenue stays flat (it mostly has).
> New program reduces App Store commission to 15 percent for small businesses earning up to $1 million per year
This is great and will really help smaller developers, 15% is much more of a palatable tax than the 30% they had previously.
If there are no exceptions, it would mean that 3rd-party publishers lose tons of their value proposition.
$1,000,000 = $150,000
$1,000,001 = >$300,000?
It feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the ongoing complaints without much forethought other than an arbitrary change in the percentage below some round number.
Fire sale prices on apps around the holidays sounds like a consumer win to me.
Looks like the next year (after exceeding $1m) the first dollar will be taxed at 30%, though.
They should just make this work like income tax: the first $1m is taxed at 15%, and everything above that is at 30%. (Same rules every year, no flip-flop.)
(e.g. if it looks like you're going to earn a little bit over $1m, increase prices by a lot (to discourage purchases), but tell people the app will be "cheap" again in January. Or even make the app free for a while.)
As a point of reference, HumbleBundle charges 5% for the Humble payment widget. They handle hosting your data, all the payment systems for taking payments from most of the world, handling chargebacks on your behalf etc etc.
If you want to sell your game on the Humble Store on the other hand, well then they take a 25% cut. That’s the value in being able to deliver a customer.
Apple’s fixed 30% cut is effectively saying: our brand is more important than yours in delivering customers to your App. The imprinteur of being in our App Store and bringing you a customer is worth 30% of your income. Your ability to deliver your own customers is irrelevant; we’re taking 30% either way. Unsurprisingly this sticks in the craw of some companies.
The fact that Apple’s systems make it almost impossible to effectively communicate with your own customer is an even bigger problem for a customer-focused company who’s income & branding depend on a close relationship with their customers: those companies are completely stuffed by the Apple App model & are the reason the App Store has not lead to the explosion of innovation some of us expected - it’s just not possible for a company to sustain themselves outside a very narrow set of income generation patterns.
Do you see effective communication with customers being interrupted by the App Store page itself? For example, the UX on the app description where the only link is to Developer Website at the bottom under Information? Or a mix of things?
Can you propose or point at a set of proposed changes that would improve the opportunity for direct communication between app developers and their customers?
As an App seller, one might reasonably want to:
. Carry out market research on a representative cross section of users.
. Communicate directly with users for bug reports and errors.
. Have a channel for real, high touch end user support.
. Sell to end-users in ways that are not limited by the App store model that Apple enforces
. Communicate with end users (on an opt-in basis) for marketing & cross-selling other Apps.
In general, the App store model works fine for low-priced, low-sales touch, high sales numbers Apps. It’s terrible for high-touch, high value applications, which is why you simply don’t see very many of those being developed for the App store - they’re just not viable. It’s this lack that Gruber especially complains about & I think he’s right. Where are the $100 Apps that fulfill a need that only a small number of people have? No-where, because they can’t reach their customers on the App store, so there’s no point even developing them.
(Obviously this is talking in sweeping generalities here: there are some high value Apps, but none of them are sold through the App store - the App is supporting some service that is sold elsewhere.)
Some may disagree, saying "bringing in customers is worth more than that". Regardless of that discussion, the anti competitive move is that there are no alternative app stores on iOS. Also, no alternative payment processor in the apple store.
1. I invest loads of time and effort developing an app
2. Apple rejects it
-or-
2. Apple approves it
3. I ship a new update
4. Apple rejects the update and now decides my app should have been rejected retroactively.
I'm especially concerned about what happened to Hey and others but my customers are demanding smartphone apps and there are still limits to what can be done with a mobile web browser.
Edit: as others have pointed out iSH isn't the best example of this.
iSH tried to circumvent this with a technicality, and it seems to have initially "worked", but I think it's a poor example of an app unfairly/inconsistently targeted.
What Apple is really trying to do is prevent apps from changing their behavior after they review them in a silent way to bypass the usual process. The real issue here is that their guidelines don't reflect this and this confuses the reviewers (and evidently commenters here on Hacker News). What needs to happen here is Apple clarifies their guidelines so that we don't have rules that can be inconsistently enforced.
(If you need more to convince you, I'll point you at the stuff I wrote when that was going on: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/11/08/fixing-section-2-5-2/).
That said, briefly looking over some scripting/IDE environments not from Apple, it looks like most of them ship "batteries included" and don't allow for content to be pulled from online.
It seems to me the equivalent of iSH shouldn't be, say, a Python interpreter/IDE, but a Python runtime including pip and the ability to pull modules from pypi.org.
OTOH, Python itself is so reflective, I imagine there's probably some way to self-inject modules within a script, if you have any sort of web access. And since you can tunnel TCP over DNS, even a hostname lookup is enough. So I'll conceded the point, since most scripting runtimes probably have some kind of EVAL routine to invoke the interpreter, or a porthole into the interpreter's bytecode.
That said, my own original point was about developers/businesses feeling uncertainty about Apple's rules, and worrying if an app would even be accepted. I feel like almost any developer would instinctively thing iSH's premise of being a program interpreter for the Linux ABI would be rejected by Apple.
Whether or not the underlying rule is fairly applied aside, it's clearly something Apple wants to prohibit. Albeit, I'm kind of baffled myself at why, especially in iSH's case where the emulated runtime is completely separate from the "real program text", with no escape hatches out IIRC. Seems utterly ridiculous to me, especially when you can accomplish something similar in WebKit/JSC I'm sure, just not offline. :-/
OP is just saying 99% of apps being developed are clearly within the rules, rather than really pushing against the boundaries of what is allowed.
When we made the appeal for iSH we correctly surmised that the point of the rule that was cited was to prevent apps from bypassing App Store review, which iSH does not do in the slightest. Taken from the real perspective from which the app should have been judged, iSH is not at the boundary at all; instead it's the apps that do things like undisclosed A/B testing and feature flags to hide things from review. So what happens is developers like us who are actually clearly within the rules as they are meant to be applied get caught in limbo at the whim of reviewers who misunderstand the guidelines because they aren't written as they are supposed to be enforced.
I don't think I'm competing with Apple at all today, but who knows what they're planning for their next features?
As counterexamples: Apple sell Logic, yet it has numerous competitors, also all fairly successful: ProTools, Live, Cubase, Reaper, Ardour, FruityLoops. Apple give their customers Notes, Reminders and Mail for free, on all their devices (i.e. you don't even need to get hold of apps for these functions), and yet we also have Evernote, Notion, Airmail, Spark etc etc.
Does the App Store monopoly significantly change the nature of app competition? I'm not convinced, but I'm open to learning about it.
It wasn't a simple matter of "Apple releases product that does X, then bans all products that do X from the App Store;" the products they banned had to use some seriously sketchy tactics to monitor and restrict other apps on the iPhone without system-level access.
Apple clearly thought they were valuable enough to customers to keep around before the release of Screen Time, even with the sketchy method they had to use.
iOS has always been designed as not to offer APIs that can be used for particularly harmful purposes.
I'm still not a fan of Apple sherlocking popular apps and then proceeding to ban those apps that carved out the market for them... that's a very anticompetitive move.
No, this is very unique to Apple, and only on iOS. Its the reason why iPhone web browsers have to use Safari under the hood.
All the browser-makers successfully compete on features, as proved by the continued existence of multiple browsers on the App Store. Hell, Firefox can even afford to cannibalise its own market with two versions of Firefox (FF, and FF Focus).
Furthermore all the big name browser makers sell their offering at "free". In my view, this makes browsers an outlier in any discussion of Apple's anti-competitive behaviour. It doesn't shut down the conversation, just takes browsers out of it.
So now the developer is stuck -- he can't update his app on the Mac App Store, and what recourse does he have as a 1-man-shop vs Apple?! =|
As a developer I find it absurd, as a consumer [who bought the app on MAS and wondered why I had the non-latest version], I find it absolutely baffling & anti-consumer.
What you want is for those stores to be on equal footing - which I would like as well, but is harder to argue for because alternatives do exist.
We will ultimately build more apps and invest more time in supporting and improving our current apps.
I doubt this was the aim. It suspect its aim was to fend off all this scrutiny on their App Store business.
Who knows whether it'll work in avoiding attention from law makers and regulators, but this will do nothing to address the developer's concerns and problem with the App Store.
It still doesn't solve the fundamental issue.
Let users have the option of using third-party stores, but losing Apple's safety net. They claim users want that net. If so, the third party stores will go bust. If not, they're simply being anti-consumer.
Although I could see how they are trying to appease antitrust regulators with this move - although they should have gone with 0 - 2% range for that. 15% is a substantial markup to price consumers would pay for using apples monopolized mobile software distribution store.
Apple gets all the headlines, and certainly gets more chatter on HN, but they aren’t alone in this bullshit. As an example... Fortnite was also banned by Google.
I think the main reason this wasn't as newsworthy is that sideloading it was trivial for Android users. Untick a warning and install it yourself.
If you want a better experiment, have a play version with normal fees, and a sideload version where v-bucks are cheaper.
I think you're taking "trivial" to mean "completely frictionless with no downsides" which is not the sense in which I intended it to be taken.
To quote myself above:
> It's not a contradiction to say both "sideloading makes banning from the the Play Store less of an issue" and "it's better to be on the Play Store".
Security is a non-issue. If Apple were really worried about that, they would allow appstores in a regulated form with certain security rules.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/22/fortnite-...
Without push notifications, PWAs are not really viable and Apple knows it. Apple wants developers to use the App Store and be subject to their fees and review process.
At least Google supports push notifications for PWAs, making them a legitimate alternative on Android.
As do I, an end-user of Apple's platforms.
Safari PWAs protect your privacy better than native apps, because Safari trusts no one. The App Store review process is trying to find a malicious needle in a haystack because iOS by default trusts native apps more than it should, due to the existence of that nebulous review process. Apple is slowly locking down native apps with each successive iOS version... but PWAs have always been extremely private, and they're still the gold standard as far as I've seen.
PWAs are actually completely isolated from each other and from the rest of Safari, so there is no cross-contamination for tracking purposes.
If you don’t want more choice and more privacy... that’s up to you. I really don’t know what to tell you.
PWAs aren't the "wild west" that sideloading apps would be, yet you're trying to use the classic anti-sideloading argument against PWAs, and that argument simply doesn't work here. Apple has supported PWAs since before there was even an Apple App Store for native apps!
PWAs already exist, and PWAs are already extremely private. Apple just needs to give PWAs push notification support. Users would still have complete control over notifications, just like any native app.
Apple heavily pushes native apps because of the profit they get from it, not because of concerns about user privacy. They have already built Safari to protect your privacy on the open web.
If I never release it for iOS at all, you're also not welcome to buy it through the App Store! See how that works? The developer/publisher obviously does get a say in what happens to their app... this is not even slightly shocking. Apple can't force me to develop and release an app for the App Store, which is what you seem to be hoping?
However, there are many publishers competing for your attention. You have a choice, and many of those developers will always choose to use the App Store, since a lot of users browse the App Store. Users vote with their wallets, and developers who don't publish on the App Store would be keenly aware of the uphill battle they might have in convincing users to download their PWA.
> It enables publisher choice and creates this loop where publishers who have a customer bases just move to the store with the fewest restrictions and fees. It's a race to the bottom where the user loses.
Android has supported both sideloading and PWAs with push notifications for many years. Ever notice how the Google Play Store isn't a ghost town? Most Android users still only download apps through the Google Play Store. This is fine -- the users have made their choice, and that's the important thing.
Your doomsday, slippery slope hypothesis of developers vacating the Play Store en masse never occurred on Android. It seems equally unlikely to occur on iOS, unless Apple seriously mismanages their App Store. Still, users and developers should have the choice for meaningful apps to be distributed as PWAs, which essentially requires push notification support.
This isn't just for the cut Apple takes from App Store sales. It's also about differentiating their operating system and hardware from competitors products too. Operating system and hardware matter a lot less if the battlefield is the browser. So I think the argument that native apps are key and essential to Apple's existence is a sound one.
Google for example is pulling in a totally different direction, towards a world where only Chrome matters. In China, it appears that WeChat won that battle already.
I think it's great having so many different and opposing visions for what computing may look like. It would be a great tragedy if we ever ended up in a situation where there was only one remaining vision of what computing should be (unless maybe it was RMS's vision, which I think would be pretty good).
Because of that, I think it would be a mistake for Apple to act against its own interest by giving PWA's any kind of breathing room.
Also I may be wrong, but I suspect that users don't really care for or about PWA's, and that the only people who want push notifications for PWA's are PWA developers.
Your whole comment is predicated on the interpretation of one word. Apple just needs to support push notifications for PWAs if they want to make PWAs useful and competitive, and it would be helpful for Apple in the antitrust battles that they seem to be facing. That's what I meant by "need". Previously, Apple also needed to add offline support, but they eventually did... so now that isn't a "need" for PWAs to be useful and competitive, even if Apple's offline support for PWAs is limited.
Apple doesn't "need" to implement it from whatever abstract interpretation of the word "need" that you're using... I'm not saying Apple will starve to death if they don't implement it -- it isn't a fundamental business "need" that they currently have.
They should do it, and I really want them to do it.
This is true, but perhaps not as many as some may think! Progressive Web Applications can now do quite a lot on mobile and tablets, with a notable exception of push notifications on iOS.
They are an increasingly interesting option for those whose use case allows it.
https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-suppor...
As an iPhone owner, the inability for PWAs to have notifications is probably my single biggest gripe at the moment.
I wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643185
Apple provides screenshots and human written explanation on rejection. I have even talked on the phone with review team several times to discuss the problem.
Yes, it sucks that the update may be rejected by some reviewer and another one may approve the same update.
Care to elaborate on that statement?
I was more than glad to receive a f..g phone call from the reviewer telling me why he will reject my update, why is it this way and what I can do to make it pass and give me his phone number to call if I need further assistance.
I become die hard Apple AppStore review process fanboy by getting a rejection!
You know what happens when you get a rejection from some other place? You get a template e-mail with no specifics, good luck figure it out. Tough luck if your livelihood depends on it.
I closed the phone and 5 min later I received the rejection together with the talking points that we went through on the phone.
I also suspect that Apple is trying to make sure that the same app is reviewed by the same employees. I think I dealt with the same 2 people in multiple review issues in later updates.
Sometimes it was frustrating when I have a rejection about something that was previously approved but it was resolved every time when I explain the problem and the solution in the notes to the reviewer section. I think I have a friendly reviewer that sends my updates straight to the store in 6 hours and there's another one who is being hard on me and needs to be convinced every time. Regardless, I am happy to be able to explain things to people.
As long as they treat big companies like royalty and small devs like trash (like they do now) I couldn't care less about their fee.
Something around 1 out of 10 updates to our app gets rejected for some random old core feature. So far it's always been resolved, but it's nerve wracking every single time.
Too bad Epic Games took so long to direct regulators' gaze on App Store practices (:
30% is a case for antitrust given how big Apple App Store today is. 15% seems reasonable, 10% would be ideal.
Though it should be 15% for everybody, no artificial caps. Moreover, I believe once you become a platform there should be an independent nano-courthouse where you can appeal.
Today being rejected by Apple, Amazon, or Google platform is equivalent to the economical death penalty for many individuals.
It should be possible to pay $100 by individuals and appeal to an independent nano-courthouse if the original platform rejects or blocks you. If you win, the appeal fee is refunded and the platform has to cover the cost. If you lose, your $100 is gone.
Fee could be adjusted to your earnings, but basic mechanism should stay the same.
You strategy played out very well in pre 2008 days with Windows Mobile. It also played out very well for Microsoft paying developers to create apps for Windows Phone, before Microsoft admitted defeat and left the phone market they were in since 1996.
About the 15%.
Have you tried running a business to make a living?
Have you tried building something yourself?
Have you tried selling it in 155 countries?
Have you tried getting access to a market of 1+ billion people?
Have you tried monitoring you don't breach regulations and tax thresholds in 155 countries?
Have you tried registering for VAT MOSS in one of the EU countries?
Have you tried implementing IP geo-location for your European customers, to charge a correct VAT amount out of 27 options?
Just because you can create a store with Shopify, or build a website with Wix, doesn't mean you get access to a marketplace with billion people in it.
There's a reason why sellers want to be on Amazon, even when they have their own Shopify shops.
> about the 15%
Yeah, about that. As it is, it’s monopoly rent (and before you bring up consoles - yes, there too). Nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I wouldn’t be happy with 5% or 1% either, because the point is not how you measure the tax, but the tax itself and the fact that it’s not set by the market. Once they allow third-party appstores they can charge 50% for all I care.
Was BlackBerry undone by rebuilding the platform 3 times from scratch too? And Symbian too?
> Paying developers to make apps is just fine, if done well.
Of course. But it hasn't been done well in the mobile world, has it? So why is it relevant here?
I remember pre 2008 when carriers controlled apps on phones. I also remember xda-developers days. Discoverability, distribution and quality was disaster compared to what we have today. And do you know what developers earned from their applications compared to today?
People take marketplaces and what has been done in the last 10 years for granted.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to go through the catalogue of failures in the mobile world. Nokia afaik didn’t even pay developers, certainly not when they were spinning around trying to reboot their fossil OS - no app, paid or otherwise, could save that pile of crap. Blackberry I never followed, but I understand they also crumbled largely from within, I don’t think they ever paid developers either.
> why is it relevant here
It’s relevant in the sense that the lack of success of one particular effort does not mean the strategy is absolutely bad, as you were arguing.
You may need to rethink your arguments as I found them indistinguishable from parody!!
In the end, a lot of Apple customers would never have bought an iPhone if it couldn't run their essential apps (like Whatsapp, Spotify, Youtube, etc).
It seems to me the real question is whether the Apple App Store should be regulated or not. If it reaches the legal threshold to be regulated, then either they should open up to competition and let the market do the price discovery or be regulated like a utility and have the price set for them. If they don't reach the threshold, then they should be free to set whatever price they want, and you're free to go elsewhere if you don't like it.
Of course, the big question is whether the app store reaches that threshold, but I'm not sure whether they charge 30% or 20 changes anything.
I don't think anyone liked 30% before either but anyone that can get away with charging 30% is probably already in a monopoly position so nobody has ever been able to do anything about it. Apple are only change now because of the threat of a lawsuit.
Maybe folks in industry saw it differently but I definitely beg to differ.
Not it isn't a case for anti-trust. 70/30 split whether people on here like it or not is a standard agreement for these types of business relationship.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...
The judge in the case agreed.
> Judge says the 30% rate is the industry rate— references Steam, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have the same rate.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/28/judge-so-far-not-...
Apple are effectively an affialite for your app i.e. they drive traffic to your app through their store.
Most affiliate style relationships the affiliate will receive 30% of whatever is made. It not only these companies it in almost every industry. e.g. Gambling Affiliate deals typically have 30% of whatever the customer loses on the site.
I really do not like Apple. I don't like the app store policies. But 30% is not a case for anything.
> Not it isn't. 70/30 split whether people on here like it or not is a standard agreement for these types of business relationship.
Huh? They didn't say "standard", they said "reasonable" and "ideal".
> Apple are effectively an affialite for your app i.e. they drive traffic to your app through their store.
The problem is that they charge that fee no matter where the customers come from, and you can't opt out either.
I should have clarified. They was saying it (the 30%) was a case for antitrust.
> The problem is that they charge that fee no matter where the customers come from, and you can't opt out either.
Can they come from anywhere other than the actual store?
In any event that is a different issue.
If I have a link on my site that takes a customer directly to the store page, and they buy it, then Apple did nothing at all to earn an "affiliate" level payout. They didn't drive any traffic. Or if the customer puts in the exact app name and buys it.
> In any event that is a different issue.
It's very relevant to whether 30% is reasonable. Apple acts as a legitimate affiliate some of the time, but they forcibly take that fee all of the time.
The store provides you visibility through promotion on the store page, being listed in search and taking payment for the purchase.
This would be no different than if a boxed piece of software was in a brick and mortar retailer and you told your customers you could by it at those stores.
In a brick and mortar retailer they display your product in your store and people come in, take the box and go to the checkout.
Conceptually the process is exactly the same. The only difference is that it is happening over the internet.
> Or if the customer puts in the exact app name and buys it.
The user is still using the store to buy the app. It would be no different than a boxed piece of software being on display in brick and mortar retailer. The customer may only go in there to pick up the game and nothing else. They are still buying through apple.
> It's very relevant to whether 30% is reasonable. Apple acts as a legitimate affiliate some of the time, but they forcibly take that fee all of the time.
No it isn't. You are conflating the issues of them having absolute control over the app store and whether 30% is reasonable. 30% is reasonable because that is the standard rate in most of these relationships.
If it wasn't reasonable people wouldn't publish with Steam, Gog, Nintendo (nintendo lowered the rate if you look at the IGN link to 30% to match other stores).
Also if it wasn't financially viable with the 30% fee (which has been there since 2011) then people wouldn't publish apps there.
Only the first two are affiliate behavior, and they don't apply to every purchase, and you can't opt out.
> They are still buying through apple.
Right. But that's just facilitating a transaction, which is usually not a 30% cut.
> 30% is reasonable because that is the standard rate in most of these relationships.
Again, standard and reasonable are different things. And again, the problem is you can't choose the type of relationship.
> If it wasn't reasonable people wouldn't publish with Steam, Gog, Nintendo (nintendo lowered the rate if you look at the IGN link to 30% to match other stores).
People get pressured into unreasonable rates all the time...
> Also if it wasn't financially viable with the 30% fee (which has been there since 2011) then people wouldn't publish apps there.
It's always going to be viable for someone to publish. Even with a 90% fee. But surely we can agree that 90% would not be reasonable, even if it was standard?
What is and isn't affiliate behaviour isn't important. They are acting like an affiliate I said. It is close enough.
> Right. But that's just facilitating a transaction, which is usually not a 30% cut.
Yes it is a 30% cut. We have already established it is on other stores.
> Again, standard and reasonable are different things. And again, the problem is you can't choose the type of relationship.
You can choose not to do business with Apple.
> People get pressured into unreasonable rates all the time...
These aren't unreasonable rates though. If they were unreasonable people would not publish there. End of. I don't understand how people can say something is unreasonable when there are lots of people using it and making money just fine. So for a lot of people they obviously think it is reasonable.
> Again, standard and reasonable are different things. And again, the problem is you can't choose the type of relationship.
You can. You can not deal with the app store.
> It's always going to be viable for someone to publish. Even with a 90% fee. But surely we can agree that 90% would not be reasonable, even if it was standard?
No we cannot agree. Firstly 90% is not viable to anyone, nobody would agree to that and people wouldn't publish on the app store. So to start your premise is completely absurd.
Pretend for a moment Apple did raise it tomorrow to 90% cut to them. The vast majority of would just pull their apps and Apple would have to lower the rate again. Every company chooses 30% because it is what everyone else does because it is more or less fair to both parties. Now if another player releases a new phone with a store and they have a better market rate and a decent market share then Apple will lower their rates (like Nintendo did).
It's really not. The difference is the part that actually motivates you to pay an affiliate.
> We have already established it is on other stores.
When you look at other services that are just doing payment/download, it's far cheaper than 30%.
> You can choose not to do business with Apple.
That doesn't disagree with what I said, which is that you can't choose the type of relationship with Apple.
> You can. You can not deal with the app store.
"Take it or leave it" is the opposite of choosing the type of relationship. I'm so confused by your response here.
> No we cannot agree. Firstly 90% is not viable to anyone, nobody would agree to that and people wouldn't publish on the app store. So to start your premise is completely absurd.
It's not absurd. People still made apps when the market was a lot smaller. People make apps for android. If revenue is greater than cost, then apps will get made. And a cut like that would remove a lot of competition, so the actual drop in pay wouldn't be as extreme.
But okay, what if I said 75% instead? If you get 3x the market share while getting paid 25% of gross revenue, you actually make more money than if you were paid 70% on 1x market share. So there would absolutely be viable apps for some developers. But at the same time, if Apple took a 75% cut that would be unreasonable.
> The vast majority of would just pull their apps and Apple would have to lower the rate again.
They wouldn't if Apple was really committed. The app already exists, removing it would mean less money.
> Now if another player releases a new phone with a store and they have a better market rate and a decent market share then Apple will lower their rates (like Nintendo did).
Even with a better rate, Android's app payment market is smaller. It wouldn't do enough to make the apps there significantly better, and the number of people willing to switch off iphone for the marginal difference wouldn't do anything.
Except if you look at the link that compares all similar stores. It is around about 30% except for EPIC. EPIC can afford such a low rate because they are flush with cash from Fortnite and Unreal Engine dominates the professional game engine market. EPIC are trying to buy their way into the market, if it works then steam and other game stores will have to lower their rates.
> It's not absurd. People still made apps when the market was a lot smaller. People make apps for android. If revenue is greater than cost, then apps will get made. And a cut like that would remove a lot of competition, so the actual drop in pay wouldn't be as extreme.
We weren't talking about market. We were talking about the revenue split.
It was never 90% rate. Apple has had the 30% rate since 2011. Npbody had a problem with the 30% rate back then. Why is it suddenly such an issue?
> But okay, what if I said 75% instead? If you get 3x the market share while getting paid 25% of gross revenue, you actually make more money than if you were paid 70% on 1x market share. So there would absolutely be viable apps for some developers. But at the same time, if Apple took a 75% cut that would be unreasonable.
If people were happy with the arrangement then it is fine. So yes. However nobody would release anything to the app store back in 2011 if it was that high (70% to apple).
> They wouldn't if Apple was really committed. The app already exists, removing it would mean less money.
If everyone did it all at the same time as a protest. Apple would have to respond and everyone certainly would.
> Even with a better rate, Android's app payment market is smaller. It wouldn't do enough to make the apps there significantly better, and the number of people willing to switch off iphone for the marginal difference wouldn't do anything.
So you are saying paying the 30% on the App store is worth it as you get a larger paying market. Which is what makes the 30% reasonable because it is worth it.
Your list is companies being paid an affiliate rate. If I start linking companies that don't do affiliate stuff, they charge a lot less.
Which is to say that 30% could be a reasonable amount if you had any choice in the matter of what services you want to purchase from apple.
> It was never 90% rate. Apple has had the 30% rate since 2011.
All that matters is revenue vs. cost.
Apple's app store brings in about 80 billion a year right now.
In 2013 it was 10 billion.
People made apps in 2013, even though 70% of 10 billion is less than 10% of 80 billion.
They'd make apps for 10% of 80 billion and they'd definitely make apps for 25% of 80 billion.
> If everyone did it all at the same time as a protest. Apple would have to respond and everyone certainly would.
Everyone standing up and refusing those billions of dollars in solidarity is more outlandish than anything I've said.
> So you are saying paying the 30% on the App store is worth it as you get a larger paying market. Which is what makes the 30% reasonable because it is worth it.
It's much easier for a fee to be "worth it" than to be "reasonable".
If an airline started charging a fee of $5 for "Breathable air or whatever, screw you.", it would still be worth buying a ticket, but the fee would not be reasonable.
I listed like for like companies.
> In 2013 it was 10 billion.
> People made apps in 2013, even though 70% of 10 billion is less than 10% of 80 billion.
> They'd make apps for 10% of 80 billion and they'd definitely make apps for 25% of 80 billion.
I don't think you understand how percentages work. You are comparing the total amount of revenue available to the revenue share per purchase. That just isn't a valid way of comparing the two.
> Everyone standing up and refusing those billions of dollars in solidarity is more outlandish than anything I've said.
If they raised the rate soo high that it was unreasonable then yes the would be a mass exodus.
> It's much easier for a fee to be "worth it" than to be "reasonable".
Now you are just playing semantics. I think we will leave this here.
The rake on the former, where HumbleBundle brings the customer? 25%
The rake on the latter, where the game dev embeds the widget on their own website & HB handles the payments infrastructure for them? 5%
For App devs able to drive customer engagement directly themselves, Apple is effectively taking an extra ~20% of profit for themselves. Apple is treating every sale as if they were the ones delivering the customer. For $1 shovelware Apps this seems fair enough. For franchises where the Dev has an already established customer base through their own marketing efforts it seems completely egregious.
This actions prevents other app stores from undercutting apple's prices.
Epic's app store, for example, would take 12%, instead of 30%. This would help consumers if they were allowed to use it.
And that has nothing to do with the revenue share.
> This actions prevents other app stores from undercutting apple's prices.
Sure. But it doesn't mean the revenue share they currently have is unfair.
Other companies have a similar revenue share on their platforms on open platforms. So that suggests to me that it is fair.
> Epic's app store, for example, would take 12%, instead of 30%. This would help consumers if they were allowed to use it.
Would it? It will help developers but it wouldn't necessarily reduce the prices for the games because the market price for a AAA game is still what £50? The devs would make more money per unit sold I would suspect.
Sure it does. That is because competition is being prevented.
> Other companies have a similar revenue share
Except for epic! They charge 12%. So that is one specific example right there, that would reduce the fee below the current fee that Apple charges.
All I need is a singular example to prove my point. And we have that example. Epic's app store is being prevented, and they charge less money.
> It will help developers but it wouldn't necessarily reduce the prices
Even if you are willing to ignore basic economic theory completely by saying it would have no effect on price, giving more money to developers indirectly helps consumers even if prices stay exactly the same.
It helps them because more resources can be spent on the game to make it better.
And to go even further, even if such benefits don't exist, it is still better to give the money to the people who made the game, who I think deserve that money more than Apple.
No it doesn't. The 30/70 split for revenue share is a standard thing across industries. This includes other industries that aren't related to IT at all.
> Except for epic! They charge 12%. So that is one specific example right there, that would reduce the fee below the current fee that Apple charges.
Epic are trying to buy their way into the market. They are flush with cash from fortnite and unreal engine. Once they wedge themselves in it will raise their take I would wager.
Every other player is at 30%. Nintendo have lowered it to 30% to be inline with others.
Every brainlet brings up EPIC as a gotcha, ignoring the fact that EPIC are buying their way into the market. Which is very important thing to consider.
> All I need is a singular example to prove my point. And we have that example. Epic's app store is being prevented, and they charge less money.
A singular example where a company is buying it way into the market is not representative of the whole. There were banks that had interest rates of 16% back in the 1970s. That doesn't mean that the other banks should have offered that or that it is fair (those banks with high interests rates would always collapse).
So no that isn't true.
> Even if you are willing to ignore basic economic theory completely by saying it would have no effect on price, giving more money to developers indirectly helps consumers even if prices stay exactly the same.
I am not ignoring basic economic theory. You are. If people buy a triple A game for £50 or £60 in the sufficient numbers then the prices won't be lowered.
As for developers getting more money helps consumer. Absolute nonsense. The company will pocket the cash. You are living in fantasy land if you think anything else.
> It helps them because more resources can be spent on the game to make it better.
That is good for developers by not necessarily for consumers. And no it won't be spent on making the game better.
> And to go even further, even if such benefits don't exist, it is still better to give the money to the people who made the game, who I think deserve that money more than Apple.
Apple deserve the money because the devs agreed to put their software on their store and the stipulation (until now) is that Apple got 30% of the purchase.
So then you agree that what they offer is cheaper, and that this cheaper option is being prevent by Apple. Cool. Glad you agree!
> ignoring the fact that EPIC are buying their way into the market. Which is very important thing to consider.
Cheaper is cheaper. Thats all that I care about. I care about the end result of lower fees.
> it is not representative of the whole.
It is representative of Apple actions unfairly causing prices to be higher for this specific competitor is being kept out though!
All I need is a single example, to show that Apple's actions have prevented a lower priced option from competing.
> Once they wedge themselves in it will raise their take I would wager.
Even so, that still means that prices are lower for this previous period of time! Thats still lower pricing, for a period of time.
> The company will pocket the cash. You are living in fantasy land if you think anything else.
Even if we agree that this is the case, I would still prefer this to Apple receiving any of the money.
I would still rather the game companies receive all of the money, even if they pocketed it, because I want more money to go to game devs, and less to go to Apple.
> Apple deserve the money because the devs agreed to put their software on their store
Nope! Because their actions are illegally anti-competitive, and Apple has significant market power.
Regardless if game devs agreed to the contract, the contract can still be illegally anti-competitive. And the law can be used against Apple on that.
And even further more, I still want any and all actions to be taken, through whatever means possible, whether they be through the existing laws/court system, or that is through changing the law to retroactively target Apple and its employees, or if it through game devs working together to oppose apple, so as to make the game companies get more of the money, and for Apple to receive less of it, no matter how it happens.
Nope. Not at all. It isn't cheaper to the consumer. You keep on conflating revenue share between who owns the store and the dev, with the amount the customer pays at the checkout.
> Cheaper is cheaper. Thats all that I care about. I care about the end result of lower fees.
That won't be the end result as I have already explained.
> It is representative of Apple actions unfairly causing prices to be higher for this specific competitor is being kept out though!
No it isn't. Prices aren't higher. You keep on conflating the price to the end user with the revenue share. They are not the same thing.
Even on revenue split everyone except for EPIC (which are buying their way in) are about the same in their respective stores.
> All I need is a single example, to show that Apple's actions have prevented a lower priced option from competing.
You are the not the arbiter of what is a valid example. I've already explained why in a previous comment why one example isn't representative of a whole, you chose to ignore it. That is on you and not I.
> Nope! Because their actions are illegally anti-competitive, and Apple has significant market power.
If* it is proven so in court than I may agree with you. IIRC the case is still ongoing. Your opinion isn't a fact. Google have significant market power, Steam has it, Microsoft has it (to a lesser extent). You keep on pretending that there is only one phone manufacturer on the market. All of this is nonsense.
> Regardless if game devs agreed to the contract, the contract can still be illegally anti-competitive. And the law can be used against Apple on that.
We will see if that is the case in court.
> And even further more, I still want any and all actions to be taken, through whatever means possible, whether they be through the existing laws/court system, or that is through changing the law to retroactively target Apple and its employees, or if it through game devs working together to oppose apple, so as to make the game companies get more of the money, and for Apple to receive less of it, no matter how it happens.
You want the market to be legislated because you don't like Apple. How foolish.
If people argued from the fact that there should be able to sideload applications. Then I maybe inclined to agree with you.
I suspect the conversation from here on out will be a waste of time because you keep on selectively ignoring caveats to your arguments.
So then the game devs get more revenue share for the specific example of the Epic Game store. Great. Glad you agree.
> everyone except for EPIC
So epic gives a larger revenue share to game devs. Great. And Apple's actions are preventing this revenue share increase to game developers, for that game store, at the very least.
> You are the not the arbiter of what is a valid example.
What? Even you agree that epic is giving game developers a large revenue share. That is an example right there, that exists.
> isn't representative of a whole
Its representative of at least one example though! So that means that Apple is preventing at least 1 competing app store that would have a better revenue share, for game developers. That single example, is an example of harm done to game developers.
> If* it is proven so in court than I may agree with you.
So then your previous statement about who "deserves" the money could be invalid.
> You keep on pretending that there is only one phone manufacturer
Anti-competitive practices do not require a literal singular monopoly, for them to be illegal. Instead, all that is required is them having significant market power. Which Apple clearly has.
> Your opinion isn't a fact.
Ok, then your opinion, of Apple "deserving" anything is also not a fact, because the court case could prove that the actions are anti-competitive.
You cannot at all say that Apple "deserves" this money, if the courts prove their actions to be anti-competitive.
> You want the market to be legislated because you don't like Apple.
No, it is because philosophically I want game devs to get more of the revenue split. Why? Because they developed the game.
> If people argued from the fact that there should be able to sideload applications.
What? Thats basically what this is about. Allowing other competing app stores on the platform.
No I don't. How disingenous. The claim was that it would reduce the cost. There is no guarantee this will happen.
> So epic gives a larger revenue share to game devs. Great. And Apple's actions are preventing this revenue share increase to game developers, for that game store, at the very least.
At the moment they do. But they won't in the future. You need to actually see EPIC's stance on this. If you read some of the interviews of the guy that runs it (I can't remember his name now) you would come to the same conclusion as I have.
All you are doing is thinking short term. I am thinking long term. So in the long-term there it won't benefit anyone except for EPIC.
> Its representative of at least one example though! So that means that Apple is preventing at least 1 competing app store that would have a better revenue share, for game developers.
You keep on reframing (dishonestly) the subject. When I originally replied to this thread I was specifically debunking the 30/70 split as being unreasonable as it simply isn't true as it something that exists outside of the IT industry. It just a split that people over the course of time have decided is reasonable. Maybe it is vestigial remnant of the past, but it is still seen as reasonable in similar types of relationships. To say otherwise (despite your protests) is a nonsense.
Also EPIC are buying their way in. They won't be able to keep it up forever (sooner or later people will stop buying skins on fortnite). Which means they will have to up their take at some point. If you don't think this will happen you are simply foolish.
> That single example, is an example of harm done to game developers.
The way the term harm is used these days is disgraceful.
> So then your previous statement about who "deserves" the money could be invalid.
No. The operative word in there is if.
> Anti-competitive practices do not require a literal singular monopoly, for them to be illegal. Instead, all that is required is them having significant market power. Which Apple clearly has.
That hasn't been decided by anyone. So you cannot claim that.
>Ok, then your opinion, of Apple "deserving" anything is also not a fact, because the court case could prove that the actions are anti-competitive.
Because something can be decided in the future doesn't mean it can be considered anti-competitive. This is a nonsense.
> You cannot at all say that Apple "deserves" this money, if the courts prove their actions to be anti-competitive.
Yes I can. If you want to be on the App Store, the agreement until recently was that it is a 30/70 split. That was the agreement between them and the app publisher. They are owed that money because that was what was in the agreement.
> No, it is because philosophically I want game devs to get more of the revenue split. Why? Because they developed the game.
I doubt that is the case. You wouldn't be supporting EPIC if that was the case. EPIC want a sea of launchers and return us to the days of game publishers which Steam btw broke that bullshit (for PC at least).
> What? Thats basically what this is about. Allowing other competing app stores on the platform.
No it isn't. It is about one large company EPIC trying to force another large company's hand (Apple) and trying to convince you that it is for your benefit. Both companies are doing PR and you are stupid enough to fall for the BS.
If EPIC wins. Do you know what will happen? There will be two dominate app stores. One owned by EPIC where 99% of the money taken through it will be for fortnite skins the Apple one. There will be others and nobody will use them because most normies will just use whatever is already on the phone. Independent devs will still get most of their revenue from Apple's store and nothing will change for them.
The only people that is likely to get any benefit out of this if they win is EPIC and it won't be the indie dev hacker. You are foolish to think otherwise.
Anyway this deffo will be last reply to you are you seem to be disingenous.
But you agree that it would increase the developer split. Thats good enough for me. Glad you agree that it would increase the developer revenue split.
> At the moment they do.
Ok, and it is still a good thing, that in the moment, for a certain period of time, that developers would get a better revenue split. Thats still good.
> it won't benefit anyone except for EPIC.
I would still rather that a game developer get more of the money that their game makes. Thats still good.
> Also EPIC are buying their way in.
Ok. Even so. That means that in the mean time, developers could benefit from Epic buying their way in. Thats still good.
> That was the agreement between them and the app publisher.
But the agreement could be illegally anti-competitive. Therefore your argument would not be valid in that case.
> They are owed that money
You have no basis for claiming this to be the case, because the lawsuit could still find the arrangement to be illegal, and also the law could be changed later.
> . EPIC want a sea of launchers
If a game company wants to have their own launcher, that should be their right to do so. I would be happy that they get a larger cut, from having their own launcher.
> It is about one large company EPIC trying to force another large company's hand
The precendent that is set would allow other app stores to be on the IPhone as well. Even if you think Epic is doing it for its own benefits, the precent set would allow other game developers or app stores, to be on the IPhone. That helps those groups.
> There will be two dominate app stores.
I still prefer 2 app stores to 1 app store. Also, it would allow a 3rd and 4th or 4th app store to be in the Iphone, if anyone wanted to do that.
> it won't be the indie dev hacker
Well, it would help any indie dev hacker that is now allowed to be on the IPhone, without being forced to go through apple. Those people would benefit.
> But you agree that it would increase the developer split. Thats good enough for me. Glad you agree that it would increase the developer revenue split.
I never agreed. Please don't put words into my mouth. It is soo disingenous. I haven't done it to you so don't do it to me.
As for the rest of the points. You aren't accepting the reality of the situation. It will benefit nobody other than EPIC which have a money printer called fortnite. EPIC doesn't care about other developers it cares about itself,. Nobody will benefit from this in the long run other than EPIC and the other huge companies. But you keep on talking about the theorectical benefits, it is the same sort of mental masturbation that GPL zealots engage it. It is mostly pointless and doesn't address reality.
Also your concern trolling for the devs is cute. I imagine the vast number of developers are fine with the current revenue splits on storesm, unless you prove otherwise all you are doing is concern trolling to avoid the real issue.
As for future court rulings about "anti-competitive" practices. We will see. You and I don't know what will happen.
The 70/30 split which I was originally replying to is not anti-competitive or unfair. It is a normaly split and I will keep on re-iterating this because people on here because they are ignorant think it is unfair when it is perfectly normal.
As for app stores. More app stores won't benefit the consumer or the developers in the long run as I don't think the vast majority of Apple users will use anything other than the official App Store. You can claim theorectically it will be better but in practice that won't be the case. It will be a pyrrhic victory at best.
Even if you think it is only a short term benefit, that is still a good thing that the benefit would exist in the short term. Great. Glad you agree that there would be at the very least, a short term benefit.
> More app stores won't benefit the consumer or the developers in the long run
Even a short term benefit is still a benefit and is still a very good thing! Glad you agree that there is a short term benefit.
Never agreed. You are obviously trolling. Goodbye.
You agreed that "EPIC is buying their way in" to the market.
Buying their way into the market helps developers in the short term at the very least, which is a good thing.
So you agree that they were "buying their way in" to the market, in the short term. Great! Glad you think that.
This results in developers getting more money, in the short term, at the very least.
This may also be applicable to Steam, Sony and others.
Not seeking a cut of almost every transaction going through your OS just because you built the foundations and gatekeep the door was standard too.
assuming the distribution of app store devs follows a usual power law, this will impact a large number of devs whose revenue makes up a small percent of apple's total take from the app store. 80/20, 90/10, whatever it may be. so id guess their actual revenue hit is probably 5-10% in this specific category. great sounding relative numbers but not much in absolute values.
they'll also play the other side and use the great sounding absolute numbers - ex: "We cut app store commissions in half for over a million small businesses, helping to stimulate the economy in these tough, unprecedented times".
disclaimer: no one expects apple to be a charity, they created and own the app store, their platform their rules, etc. all fine and good but as others have mentioned, without antitrust scrutiny the chances of this happening are far slimmer.
But what a lot of folks are missing is how much this will help indie-developers and small businesses that want to pay themselves and their employees better and more easily put food on the table.
So while we can still be critical of the current app store limitations and costs - let's still celebrate a move in the right direction and something that is going to enable a lot of people to live better lives.
So a developer making $1,000,001 in year 1 will pay ~$150,000 in fees because they would just pass the threshold, but then makes $1,000,001 in year 2 will pay ~$300,000.
As a developer and growing business, I think I'd prefer a higher rate over on revenue above the threshold and reset it every year. A bit like how the tax system work in the UK.
But I guess it might be harder to implement, not only for Apple, but also for developers to keep track of etc.
Why not implement this like a tax bracket? For the first $1 million each year, Apple's commission is 15%. For each dollar after that, the commission rate is 30%. No programs, no application process.
Edit: just read the sibling comment... that seems... unnecessarily complicated and non-reactive to short term changes...?
> If a developer’s business falls below the $1 million threshold in a future calendar year, they can requalify for the 15 percent commission the year after.
So they take 15% commission from first million and 30% from later sales until developer falls below million in a calendar year.
I mean, would you say “The Epic tax on the Unreal engine suddenly goes up by a factor of infinity” when you reach the $1 million threshold?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/unreal-engine-is-now-...
A developer with revenues over $1m in the current year but under $1m in the next year would not qualify for the reduced tax rate.
They should have implemented a progressive tax system for everyone, not just those who qualify on a yearly basis.
But if you're a developer who isn't making more than $50 million (like me!) you end up paying more than the enormous corporations. Unless you're on the App Store, where it's the opposite. It's funny how the focus is different here.
Everything else is paid for already by the end user of the device (who consciously pay a premium to use Apple's ecosystem), and has no reason to scale linearly with developer revenue.
The payment processing? That's usualy 3% for credit card operators.
The IDE and language? That's the $100 per year per developer account.
Apple can afford to not make 15%/30% off of developers. They are just greedy for short-term profit, as any publicly traded company is. The only reason this cut happened is because they started getting threatened with lawsuits, so they had to slightly slow down their free money printer.
It doesn't really make sense.
The food product producer is not selling to me directly, they sell to the store, who then sells to me.
Apple is not selling me the app, they are very clear about this, my relationship is with the App Developer, they are just a "payment processor"
So comparing the App Store to traditional retail store is no where near a proper analogy
There is a moral imperative that copying of software, which costs almost 0, is taxed per unit, just like physical goods, where there is a storage cost, a transport cost, etc.
I'm being ironic, obviously. Apple's App Store profits show that they're basically just sharecropping developers. Their operating costs are minimal and the fact that they're allowed to charge per unit, like they're Walmart and have to stock actual shelves, is quite ridiculous.
It won’t be long till they make more changes to make sure they get that value out of you on the desktop too.
This aurgument is the same as Comcast claiming Netflix is a "free loader" on their network because Netflix was not paying Comcast...
hello, Comcast's customers pay comcast for the use of the network
In the same way, Apples hardware and iOS software are paid for by the END USER of the phone, users pay a HUGE and Excessive cost for these phones, why on earth then should Devs pay a second time
Like with last mile broadband, this is double dipping, in other contexts that would be considered fraud
The only concern I have is Apple has incentive to promote higher take apps over lower take, so they benefit more from pushing the 30% take apps over the 15% take.
As long as we don't end up with a tiered App Store like XBOX Arcade or Steam Greenlight back in the day then all good. If the 15% apps become pushed less that is no fun.
There is some benefit to a standard price market, most stores are 30% [1]. Tencent MyApp was even 55% until 2019 [1]. Epic Games is 12% but they said they are profitable around 7%-8% [1][2]. Steam, Sony, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all 30%[1].
If everyone went to 15-20% across the board it would be better. I am concerned about tiering of the market and down the line lower take apps being less pushed.
[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SimonCarless/20200903/369516...
[2] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/341249/Heres_why_the_Epi...
Roughly 80% of App Store Revenue are from Gaming. I would not be surprised if 95%+ of those Gaming Developers does not fall into Sub $1M Annual Revenue. What is left are Apps which many falls into this category. Even if half of the remaining 20% of App Store revenue fall into Sub $1M AR, Apple is only looking at a maximum of 10% hit from its Total App Store revenue.
This is even better than my idea of splitting Game into a separate Game Store and retain its 30%, while letting App Store with 15%. This new system gives all the incentives to low revenue developers which really needed the help, without sacrificing more revenue than needed.
Although I really wish they had done this earlier, and now it is looking more like damage control than anything. And it still doesn't fix their App Store review process becoming increasingly hostile. Along with many other complains.
Edit: I am reading into it, it seems like once you cross the $1M this year your next year will remain on the 30% bracket. And only if your next year revenue drop below 1M will you be move back to 15% the year after.
If you earn slightly over 1M at year 1, (being taxed 15% on most of your profits), then you will be taxed 30% for all of year 2, even if you fall under the 1M. So you have a big incentive to keep under 1M a year if you don't plan on a big revenue increase the year after.
For an Epic-sized business these things are somewhat small. These costs go down as a percentage of size, not up. So it's almost as if Apple is saying that "bigness" can only happen as a consequence of being on their platform, which I think most people would disagree with.
The attractive thing here is that it is now in Apple's interest to "grow" a bunch of indie developers into bigger companies.
But I'm also thinking about the lackluster state of the Mac App Store, which is getting more important now with M1 Macs running iOS apps but also all platforms supporting Catalyst apps. Apple could use some momentum for it's larger screen devices (tablets and PC's) and a lower App Store cut together with a larger audience for your products could help new developers enter the ecosystem or to help developers that turned their backs on the App Store to return.
But all in all the main reason is probably the battle with Epic. It really helps to thin out the choir of complainers when all of the smaller developers stop supporting or at least stop being interested in Epic's cause.
“If you are only a $1M company, we will tax 15%, when you pass the $1B threshold, your tax will increase to 30%, and when you pass the $1T threshold, your tax will increase to 60%”
Isn’t the goal of progressive taxes to introduce a kind of ‘you won at life, there is no need for it to be easy to go higher’ mantra?
I make no moral judgment that we should tax someone more highly in order to make things progressively more difficult for them.
I think in the long-term the 30% comission should disappear, but it can be gradual.
Also, I'm new to App Store, does it mean they hold your money for (up to) a year so they can decide which bracket you fall into?
So they won't be holding on to money.
It means you'll have a 15% cut taken out of your revenue until you exceed $1.176m (which becomes $1m of your post commission revenue) at which point all future revenue for that year will have a 30% cut (year 1).
You'll continue to pay 30% the following year (year 2).
If at the end of that year, your post commission revenue is less than $1m (ie you earned less than $1.42m pre-commission), then the year after that you'll be back on the 15% rate (year 3).
So there's a gap there that will mean that if you are close to that initial $1.176m near the end of the year, you should stop your sales, unless you expect the following year to have at least an additional ~$300K in sales to make up for the increased commission.
It would be better and more logical to apply the same rule for each calendar year. Start at 15% and ramp to 30% as the equivalent of a marginal tax.
On the other hand, the costs to Apple are essentially flat for all apps, so other than their own revenue, there's no justification for the increased commission.
People can argue about whether developers get value for money from the app store (ie, what commission is appropriate for someone providing billing, local taxation, debt collection, all receivables risk etc).
People can also argue about whether Apple has a monopoly. If they do, it's on their own hardware. So it's not a market monopoly. If you define the market as "app stores for Apple hardware".
People can also argue that Google and Apple have a price fixing arrangement.
They could argue back that they don't, they both independently came to the same commission rates (or that Google followed Apple, so that's not Apple's fault).
They could also argue that they don't control the market, depending on how the market is defined, eg "mobile phone applications" as a market has numerous other app stores.
I wonder if there will even be a choice in future.
The change will affect roughly 98% of developers who pay the commission -- but they account for less than 5% of Apple’s overall App Store revenues, according to @SensorTower"
"Nice" deflection, Apple. If I had a penny for every time somebody used this reasoning ala "it's fine because others are doing the same thing" I wouldn't have to worry about a thing.
Small business size definitions in US are managed by SBA and they have very specific revenue ranges that defines what that is for each NAISC code https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2019-08/SBA%20Table%...
Black hat on. Wouldn't it make sense to create a parent company which own various child companies each of which runs a single app ?
I hope this does not deter the courts in their decisions regarding the App Store monopoly. Apple should just be careful with moves like these, some see it as a sign of good will, some see it as a sign of weakness (and smell blood). Give an inch, they'll take a mile.
The way it is phrased, there will be some income around $1M dollars where you would want to prevent anyone from purchasing an app and pushing you into the 30% fee zone, as it doesn’t seem to apply a 30% fee on earnings above $1M.
So .. by invigorating the cottage shops with this generous relaxation, while holding the >$1million brick and mortars on the same leash, Apple seems to be trying for more upheaval in their app zeitgeist.
Trouble is, I still see serious issues with discoverability and interaction through the App Store to be a major barrier for all players. This handout is nice, but there is still a huge issue with small devs having to depend on Apple to keep the $>million guys off from dominating eyeballs.
Perhaps they should add another category of App to the Store: "built by budget/small-business" ...
This is basically worthless to "serious" small businesses on the app store.
I said it before, but Epic went about this all wrong. They should have started this out as a grass roots campaign focused on their indie devs that licensed Unreal.
Epic should have advocated for Apple to reduce low revenue App Store royalty payments to these people. Then used that win as a springboard toward trying to get their own reduced as well.
That will lead to some wonky behaviors.
My question: what is stopping us from demanding a legislative solution that requires Apple to open up the iOS platform to allow installation of apps outside its sanctioned ecosystem?
With ARM Macs now on the market, the hardware architecture / software differences between their mobile and desktop platforms is becoming smaller and smaller. The argument that mobile devices should be treated differently from any other general computing device has always been weird. But now the disparity is now ever more glaring given how similar iPhones, iPads, and Macs have become. We should be demanding openness and the right to modify software as the end user sees fit. This does not preclude users looking for a more secure experience to continue exclusively loading apps from the App Store.
It would be a race to the bottom where they all ended up with zero margins but where your data is sold to third parties.
It's the third party app stores that would sell the aggregate data instead of taking a cut off sales.
there already are lots of third-party android app stores, if you look at the variants of android packaged and shipped on new-in-box phones in mainland china.
Both Google and Apple have kept a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market for over a decade now.
I completely disagree. I'm not sure how they could make it much easier without defaulting to allowing it. Download the APK, open it, click install (or if the setting disallows it, follow the prompt to change the setting).
Third party app stores on Android are not allowed to compete with the Play Store on feature parity because of limitations put in place by Google.
Again, the only way to implement automatic upgrading, background installation or batch upgrading/installation of apps is via the Play Store.
It is still far better than iOS, and it might get better: I have seen Google employees comment on here that the next release of Android could allow the install apps permission to non-system apps.
Apple is already tying two products together (App Store commissions and iOS). I think the answer is to have a court opinion declare that app store commissions are not naturally related to iOS. It shouldn't be too hard to prove this given that third-party developers are not the same developers that created iOS and that iOS is a fully-featured enough to be considered a general computing device.
There's already legal precedence for this with United Sates v. Microsoft where Microsoft tried to ban Netscape and Java from being installed on Windows [1]. Epic could/should be using that in their lawsuit in order to be allowed to run on iOS. The App Store is Apple's territory, and that's fine. iOS isn't the App Store and the user should have the right in deciding what code runs on the device they purchased.
> Tying is the practice of selling one product or service (ie: commissions from App Store) as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service (ie: iPhone). In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related. In the United States, most states have laws against tying, which are enforced by state governments. In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice enforces federal laws against tying through its Antitrust Division. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
And it's completely unrelated to any commissions from the App store.
If you read more of the wikipedia article, you'll see Apple and Microsoft come up - but either entirely different issues that are wholly unrelated to their App Store pricing.
Microsoft didn't lose their antitrust case because of any of that - they lost because they were paying OEMs to not install software - and if they did, they were punishing them. The rebate scheme was really central to the issue.
Then, they didn't clearly say "you can't install software" or "everyone who wants to install software has to do X" they just made installing Netscape or removing IE functionally broken.
That's really different than "everyone who wants to make money through my platform has to pay me 30%".
The place Apple might actually have trouble would be Spotify - where Apple is competing with their product, allowing subscriptions in-app for their own platform, but not for Spotify unless they cough up 30% or whatever.
Back in the day, it was novel that google had an influential chief economist. It made sense. Adwords is an auction. Doubleclick's novelties in search ad auctions were proven levers, big levers.
The interesting part (to me) was that the auction didn't just optimize price. It regulated advertiser behaviour. Explicit feedback. Black box. Commentary on black box. It all played a role influencing advertiser behaviour in an economist/regulator way.
These days, that would be quaint. Google has the android ecosystem and play store marketplace. Adwords/adsense is a market too, one that has been dinged for >$1bn monopolism fines. Youtube is a marketplace. Youtube affect content with monetisation algorithms and policies, the recommendation engine, censorship/classification. Appstore. Amazon. Big "markets," with corporate policies looking increasingly like state-scale economic policies.
Even stuff like social media is market-ish. Lots of participants are interacting. Attention& influence stand in for prices, but there are still producers and consumers. Many of them. More than FB can understand in all but the most abstract ways.
The search/seo/antispam codependency was an early exhibit.
Anyway.... besides the superficial similarity, I suspect the logic to this new app store policy is more "tax cut" than "price decrease." My guess: Apple's trying "fix market failures" showing up in data.
I welcome the 15% change but it's more PR than actually helping. More helpful would also be better tools to increase visibility in the App Store.
PWAs are still second-class citizens on iOS.
Still no third party browser engines.
Apple can reject your app for whatever reason and everything you've invested into producing iOS code vanishes into thin air.
Seriously, that's entirely unacceptable.
And the Spotify and Amazon issue is textbook antitrust. Amazon won't sell ebooks on iOS devices because Apple will take 30%, which is too much for Amazon's commission structure. Apple also sells ebooks. Spotify has offered a music streaming service for years, and Apple demands 30% of every month's payment if purchased through iOS...and now Apple offers a competing service at the same price point.
They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.
Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.
Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.
Apple and Google have a model where they make lots MORE money outside the system and if the price of software is ZERO they would be happy.
In Apple's case, even free software sells their phone.
In Google's case, even free software funnels users to their ad platform.
[1] "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements."
1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
(joel's a smart guy, he should write more often)
That 30% matters to them a lot.
Naturally, the 30% take from the app store is bigger, but that's a matter of overall volume, not growth. The app store is a cash cow and will remain so even if its numbers start trending down.
Increasing prices on top-of-the-line iPhones beg to differ.
The app store sold about $50bln worth of stuff in 2019, Apple's 30% cut would therefore mean $15bln in revenue. If they operated the app store at a least a 70% margin (and really, if they didn't, then I'd be rather surprised), that would mean a good $10bln in net profit from the app store, or 17% of their total net profit.
And that's still not accounting for the network effect the app store creates, or the business intelligence.
It might not be the biggest elephant ever, but it's not what I'd call a tiny baby elephant either.
I don't see how this helps with antitrust though. Either way, it is an actual policy. Newsworthy, at least.
Also, a comment isn't necessarily positive or negative. This isn't a poll on Apple's HN approval rating. It's an announcement of a thing Apple is doing.
To me it seems like those comments are in the minority while the popular opinion is the cynical take.
The FAANG are random assortment of companies that share little in common aside from being large. Facebook and Google monetize eyeballs but in very different ways. Amazon is a logistics and retail and PaaS powerhouse. Netflix streams movies. Apple sells hardware and services and, in stark contrast to Facebook and Google, temperamentally despises performance advertising. Google and Apple (and Microsoft and Salesforce and Nintendo and…) have walled garden marketplaces.
Apropos a dubious assertion the grandparent made, Google and Apple are also the driving forces behind the two most feature-filled web browsers that enable ever more sophisticated web apps to run on smartphones outside of their walled gardens at no charge.
So, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions to make a company a FAANG, aside for assisting with the construction of a snappy acronym, and what are the conclusions that flow from those conditions that justify your assuming every one of their acts is best assumed to have been done in bad faith?
Oh please.
Has it ever occurred in the history of the world that the selfish motives of two different parties aligned? i.e. Apple gets good press for helping smaller developers and the smaller developers get increased revenues. It happens all the times, and it's called "good business".
You can keep waiting for Apple's App Store executives to cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes and repent of their terrible policies. Let me know how that works out.
This announcement means Apple knows that neither public opinion nor the law is on their side and they're about to lose really, really big. And they're hoping if they can flip this around a bit and get control of the narrative, they can convince regulators they will self-regulate... while continuing to get a third of the revenue from all the most lucrative developers.
Google's new Gmail privacy settings fall in the same boat: They'd rather lose data from a small portion of their users if it might deter the government from taking away all of it.
Why not 50%? 75%? 100%? 150%?
It could also be that they are seeking the optimal rate of return, balancing developer incentives, bringing in new developers, etc.
I think many factors play into the decision, including lawsuits and public scrutiny.
I think it will be really interesting to watch and see if google mirrors the pricing.
So what?
Seriously, who cares if Epic earns 14 bzillionty dollars this month, or 20 bzillionty dollars?
At that scale, the 30% is such a terrible thorn in your side?
Come on. Cry me a damn river.
The 'narrative' here is Epic pretending they care about anyone except themselves and that this ridiculous song and dance is about it being 'good for everyone'.
Let's try something positive instead:
What should they have done then to make you happy?
Seriously; if this is such a cynical, terrible move, what should they have done?
The narrative here is amazing, because you're not sympathizing with Epic because they're so big and have so much money... but they're still the little guy compared to Apple. The scale of Apple's monopoly profit makes Epic look like a corner pharmacy in Montana.
Epic is fore casting earning something like 5 billion dollars this financial year.
You'll have to try a bit harder to get a bit of sympathy for them than 'they're smaller than apple'.
...
5 billion dollars.
...
And you want me to care that another company is shaking you down for a couple of million?
Boo hoo. Poor epic. I wonder how they pay the bills.
Oh, I know! They use some that 5 billion dollars they made to do it.
--
I think maybe there are some, you know, real people, who will get some tangible benefits from these rate cuts.
If Epic loses out.. or... you know, if they get them too? Really, it makes no difference to them at all. So.. I really. Do. Not. Care.
Epic's definitely not a little guy, but compared to Apple, it looks more like a respectable medium-sized company.
I find Apple's revenue numbers and market value truly staggering. Few companies seem to be able to compare.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/15/epic-games-shareholders-s...
[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/26/what-to-expect-fr...
Of course nobody ‘compares’.
But compared to almost any other iOS developer Epic is a giant.
Yes, Apple sells one of the most successful products in human history... and they also illegally use that power to control the market and extract revenue from thousands of other companies who have no choice but to do business with them.
False: Epic wants to pay less commission themselves, and to be able to take a cut of other developers work.
One big difference between Apple and Epic is that Epic didn’t do any work to create the platform.
As to those smaller developers. Apple just cut the commission for them in half. A lower level than Epic was promising. Apple seems to care about the smaller developers.
Epic is not fighting for anyone but themselves.
Let’s note that more than half of Epic’s profits belong to just one man.
Although, if we're going by how popular the apps are on the store...I could see how Epic would be considered a heavyweight on the App Store.
But separately, the only reason to root for ‘the little guy’ is if the little guy is somehow hard done by.
We dislike the fact that Apple makes some money by charging developers 30% for payment services, software delivery, and operating a storefront that users feel safe to buy from.
We say 30% is too much to change for that, because the margin is way too high. Fair enough.
Epic on the other hand makes its money from selling in game currency to children.
That practice needs to be banned altogether.
Sweeney may technically still have the majority vote, but he can’t do anything they seriously oppose, or not do anything they are strongly in favor of without facing serious consequences.
Epic didn't bow to China like other American companies did. And Epic didn't even stay silent. Epic made a clear statement in opposition to China.
That should've put to bed any of this silly "it's controlled by China" nonsense. Tencent just likes having a good stake in a company that prints money.
Support Hong Kong?
How is that in opposition to China? Hong Kong is part of China, and I’m pretty sure the Chinese government thinks of itself as supporting Hong Kong.
All Sweeney actually did was make some carefully worded statements about free speech and said that they wouldn’t filter messages on their platform.
He made no statement encouraging support of any particular political stance.
It’s a way to monetize addictive videogames without providing any additional value.
Do you think we should sell cigarettes to children? If not, why not?
If you buy in-game currency from epic, you have nothing except the memory of a dopamine hit.
macOS has that; Apple will even certify third party developers so that the system can still validate software outside of the Mac App Store. That kind of security model would be perfect for iOS and would moot pretty much all the substantive parts of Epic's complaint.
It’s not as convenient as the main store, of course, but there are convenience tools (altstore.io) that make it close.
Opening up the platform to other app stores means they have less control over the experience on their platform it opens more avenues for malware.
If you want a more open platform use Android.
A single source of application signing will always be abused to entrench dangerous governments and prejudice. It is toxic, and needs to be outlawed.
I value the customer's ability to install programs of their choosing on a phone they purchased. It seems strange that we see it as desirable to concentrate authority over billions of devices this way. Taking a step back, it's sort of a "what could possibly go wrong" scenario.
And let others use the Epic app store for Fortnight.
"Safer for kids" isn't a factor here; Apple already provides tools for parents to lock down their children's devices should that be necessary. This would also presumably have an option (or default) to disable third-party apps, in the same way parents can already disable specific App Store and built-in apps.
That's a really good point. Why isn't the dev community talking about getting Apple to do this on iOS?
It would allow sideloading while maintaining security, and a somewhat more fair amount of control from Apple.
Except they have done exactly that in the past. In June 2016 Apple introduced a subscription billing model which reduces the fee to 15% after the first year a customer is subscribed.
Subscription revenue on Apple's store was $3.6B of ~$50B in 2019, so 7.2% of app store revenue overall.
It's absolutely true that Apple doesn't have a lot of pricing pressure on their 30% fee, since their platform is so compelling and especially since most competitor App Stores charge the same amount. But it's also absolutely false that they have never lowered their rate.
The more damning implication is that Apple, one of the world's most highly valued brands, a brand name that has historically commanded 50%+ gross profit margins on commodity goods sold as luxury goods, is losing a 'popularity' contest to a video game company. Talk of changing times!
This program came in after more than decade after the app store was created and when Apple is finally under increased public scrutiny for anti-competitive behaviour. Apple made an estimated $20 billion from the app store last year alone with estimated profits from that revenue being around 90% [1]. Being able to afford to half the commission over night speaks to how disconnected the commission is to the costs in running the store.
Why were they able to take 30% and continue to take 15% commission off of all sales? Because the value of the app store is only created via continued practices of anti-competitive behaviour. Ex:
1) Banning competing app stores (restricting customers choice)
2) Banning the mention of alternate methods of payment (restricted customers harmed by paying higher fees)
The argument that the app store charged "market rate" is also not a fair comparison. Your comparing one completely closed market to other open markets that Microsoft and Google produced. Both main competitors allow for competing app stores from their own for example.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/10/the-app-store-is-s...
Also, because Apple created the most valuable mobile software market in the world, by creating the iPhone, continuing to release top-notch phones year after year, and by creating the App Store itself.
It remains true that iPhone users buy software at a rate that totally dwarfs Android. This could be traced to a number of reasons, but I wouldn't dismiss the App Store monopoly as one of them.
You can describe this as anti-competitive, just keep in mind that you're assuming your own conclusion. You could make the same argument for Apple's refusal to license their OSes for hardware they don't manufacture, I would be similarly unimpressed.
As a user, I would like a stress-free way to sideload apps which don't meet Apple's standards for inclusion on the App Store. Don't see why Apple would want to give away their competitive advantage by letting other stores sell software for their phones, but I could imagine them making side-loading less onerous, that would be nice.
No, they created the possibility for the most valuable mobile software market in the world. Third-party developers were the ones that created it into the most valuable mobile software market in the world.
> by creating the iPhone
Creating the iPhone does not explain the source of the App Store's value, only that one is "tied" to the other. Which leads to my next point.
> You can describe this as anti-competitive, just keep in mind that you're assuming your own conclusion.
It's anti-competitive according to the law. The practice of selling a service (ie: commissions from App Store) as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product (ie: iPhone) is called tying. In the United States, most states have laws against tying, which are enforced by state governments. In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice enforces federal laws against tying through its Antitrust Division [1].
No, they literally created the market. The products sold in my supermarket don't create the supermarket either.
Whether what Apple does meets the legal definition of tying is an open question. I doubt it, clearly you're convinced, which is to say, you're assuming your own conclusion.
I would have agreed with you if Apple had,
Paused and in any sort of PR, Marketing, or answer direct from the executive team that they are at least thinking about the issue. Except they double down on thinking they deserved that 30% if not more. ( Perfectly Fine )
Did not take hard stand against developers and thinking themselves as so righteous. ( Also Fine )
But then suddenly turn around and act like Santa to Help SME or smaller developers, when Apple are under pressure in multiple countries for their App Store policy.
May be Tim Cook did not realise, Apple has turned into hypocrite just like Google did in their Do No Evil era.
Correct. True Character is what you do when nobody is watching. :)
Considering their volume fifteen percent should still allow them to rake in ridiculous amounts of money. However one area I still support Apple is selling of additional product within the store should still be subject to a charge; as in the Epic store selling additional games should be subject to the same rules as selling any content on the store yet you should be able to purchase outside the store and redeem codes within apps to use them; similar to how Steam allows developers to sell keys outside of Steam
> Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here
No. They both built a distribution channel on which developers build, but they're not open markets. Those app stores are the property of their respective creators (this is a flaw of the app store paradigm in general, at least for those who want full control over their software).
Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute. It's the same as traditional book publishers writing their contracts with authors they publish. Which is why open platforms and device jailbreaking remain valuable for those of us who believe in personal ownership of our software.
If not, what's the difference with phones/tablets?
They probably did. The industry was small. Attracting developers in significant numbers meant convincing people to become developers. That is a huge hurdle. Platforms with entry fees didn't build app ecosystems that attracted end users.
By the time the iPhone was announced, developers were plenty and the software business model proven. Apple had resources to subsidize onboarding with a well-documented, rich API and good native apps.
The difference I see is more about Apple specifically, because unlike, say, Google with Android, they have full vertical integration. They make both the hardware and the OS. Everything about Apple is focused on complete corporate control over the experience.
If Apple decided to only permit apps distributed through App Store X on OS X, I wouldn't be at all surprised. That's Apple's MO. And there is a customer segment I think that serves, which is the consumer market which doesn't want to think about maintaining their own digital security, because Apple seems like a reasonably benevolent dictator in this respect, as much as developers dislike the cut they take. Requiring Apple to open their devices to third-party app stores would break this vice grip they have on the experience and, IMO, degrade the experience for Apple's end users (even if it might make things nicer for developers).
Hard to fault a business for realizing that they have a stupid amount of leverage because people have made themselves dependent on you and charging more.
What? If a business is causing a large negative externality, that's a bad thing.
Just because you can't "fault" people for pursuing profit doesn't mean they should be allowed to do it any way possible?
I just really don't understand this worldview.
Your comparisons with book publishers are specious: if I write a book today I can go to any of a number of publishers, none of whom have any kind of control over access to readers. Or I can even self-publish and sell direct.
Jailbreaking is a complete irrelevance in market terms: It’s effectively impossible to sell on Apple devices without paying Apple’s tax & very difficult to sell on Android devices (which Google controls via carefully written contracts with mobile phone manufacturers) without paying Google 30%. We have anti-monopoly + market collusion laws for good reasons. It’s about time they were enforced.
I'm sure you can release niche apps on these stores, but the general market isn't moving away from the Play Store any time soon, and that's where the money is.
What happens to a phone manufacturer who ships a phone with an alternate App store?
You get to be the best selling Android phone every year. Are we all forgetting that Samsung ships their own app store? Nobody uses it because it's garbage but that's not Google Play's fault.
My Amazon income is less than 2% of the Google income.
Amazon made a half-hearted effort to compete in the space and the result is “less than 2%” in your case.
That's... one way to look at it.
Another way is that they'd be spending even more if there were more healthy competition in the alternative app store market.
Amazon is incentived to run an Android app store now, in the same way Microsoft was incentivized to maintain an ARM build of Windows: it's not a corporate priority, because it doesn't make business sense for it to be until the playing field changes.
Users don’t want an “alternative App Store market”. They want a place where they know the apps they download won’t steal their data or crash their device, where the billing policies are clear and predictable, where you can set parental controls and get refunds on accidental purchases.
Apple doesn’t have customers because they are the only one who you can buy water, electricity, or internet from at your home address. Apple has customers because people willingly and happily shovel their hard-earned money at them because their products are freaking amazing.
In no universe can anyone say that the progression / advancement of smartphones and smartphone applications indicates a stagnant market or one in need of forced government intervention.
From what I can see iPhone 1 with its 400MHz Samsung CPU and 320x480 display and its half dozen apps -> iPhone 12 with its 8 core 3GHz A14, 2532x1170 display, and millions of apps demonstrates conclusively that consumers are winning out tremendously over the last 13 years due to a highly competitive market driving truly massive R&D investment in this space.
I think the problem that people actually have with Apple is that they are so far ahead of the pack, and people don’t see where the inevitable disruption is going to come from just yet.
I.e. what would you look at and say "That's anti-competitive"?
IMO, as long as there are viable competitors to Apple, and as long as Apple is not colluding with its competitors, Apple should be able to implement any lawful policy on its own device that it chooses.
Apple can't violate its existing contracts with its customers or developers (e.g. threatening to kick off all Unreal Engine apps, e.g. lock customer data unless a ransom is paid). Apple can't use App Store policy to commit crimes, like extortion (e.g. offering to buy an app developer, and saying they will ban them from the store or increase their commissions to 50% if they don't accept the buyout).
As long as their policies have a justifiable and legal business purpose (whether you personally agree with the policy is irrelevant) that's applied consistently (within human limits of consistency) they should be free to make their own product however they want, and charge what they want for it.
What would one or both of these stores need to do, to qualify as 'anti-competitive' to you?
That's a good first step towards competition that would allow Apple to keep the AppStore exclusivity -- for now.
1) No need to re-enter billing information across apps
2) A centralized UI for the user to manage all their
subscriptions, enforce consistent billing policies,
request refunds, etc.
3) Enforce parental controls and family approval
policies which may be configured on the account
4) Prevent any surprise billings or unauthorized charges
5) Ability for Apple to force a refund even if the app dev won't
In the end, the payment processor is a red herring. Apple isn't charging 30% for the payment processing -- they probably pay less to run the charge than Stripe does. For example, for $0.99 charges, the app developer pays Apple less for their entire fee than Stripe would charge them just to run charge.
The 30% fee is Apple's share for creating the entire ecosystem. Everything from the programming language, the platform, the API's, the security framework / secure enclave, the app review, the distribution model, the billing system, the cloud services for software delivery/push notifications/updates/shared storage, all the way up to Apple's customer support lines. Actually running the payment gateway is perhaps the very least of it.
Not in the context of introducing competition.
This simply isn't true. Android is much more open yet app spend is way lower compared to the smaller marketshare iPhone.
An open app market means a flood of free apps which means less money spent. Good Devs will absolutely lose in this scenario. Outsourced sweatshop devs will do everything cheaper.
My apps would have to be designed to comply with all of the rules of all of the stores.
No thanks.
If Google has 99% current market share for mobile OS, props to them. They deserve it for working like heck, delivering something amazing, and finding a model that allows them to distribute for free.
If Google has 99% market share, and ensures it keeps 99% market share in the future by setting up licensing deals to tie Google Apps + App Store together... that deserves a lot more scrutiny.
If we look at market share for mobile app distribution, the vast, vast majority of it goes to the App Store and the Play Store. The competition isn't even a blip on the radar.
I did a search on Google and nothing really came up. Did you just invent the term? I love the name. It might end up in Main Stream Media soon.
Google and Apple spent Millions 'claiming' Patents/IP, monopolizing new discoveries, and 'earning' Billions.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]
Isn't that what a duopoly is, by definition?
Both Google and especially Apple have also spent millions of resources and money, making sure they are the only app store in use (by default).
They could have spent some of those millions creating a set of rules for independent app marketplaces to be able to distribute content on their platform instead of locking everyone in to theirs'.
How is this any different?
The whole problem with monopolies is that they actually harm the consumer by protecting their monopoly from encroachment by someone else. So yes people really think decisions are being made by a monopoly to protect their monopoly (and their profits). A chunk of those billions they have is actually money generated by these monopolistic practices.
It's juvenile to imagine them sitting at board meeting and discussing "How can we protect our monopoly?", that's like saying the NSA is discussing by board meetings "how can we further invade everyones privacy?". But they most definitely are discussing how they can protect their market share and how to edge out competition.
Well, not anymore they don't.
Kind of undermines your cartel argument, if you think about it. Clever on Apple's part...
> Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute.
actually isn't always true - especially when it hurts consumers. of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does. remember that private doesn't mean unregulated.
“Hurting consumers” would be an almost Orwellian characterization of the smartphone technology revolution driven predominantly by the competition between Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei, etc.
The problem is when by "competing like hell", you compete so hard that you suppress your competition. The issue that anti-competition laws seek to redress is the suppression of other competition.
What we have is a pretty clear case of a minuscule minority of users bitterly complaining that a company isn’t making its products exactly the way they want them to.
A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores.
It just so happens that Apple’s customers absolutely love its products, and that Apple’s products are absolute technological leaders in their space.
Apple didn’t get there, e.g. like Facebook by buying up the competition any time it started to emerge as a threat. They got there through decades of focused development and investment.
A store is allowed to block you from using any other store? These aren't natural continuations or logical extensions of meatspace, stop pretending they are.
Apple doesn’t get to tell Google, Samsung, Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Fairphone, etc. how to build their devices.
The one device they do get to decide how it works is the iPhone. Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.
Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not. Overwhelmingly, they decide that they do.
Maybe the above is how you think things ought to be (I disagree), but anti-trust jurisprudence does not agree with your pseudo-libertarian worldview.
Anti-trust only applies if there’s a finding that Apple is a monopoly. The jury, so to speak, is still out.
If Apple was found to be a monopoly, then there may need to be some restrictions placed on how they operate.
But I think controlling how your own product works is the presumed default, even if that product is wildly successful, as long as that success is through actual product merit, and not done deceptively or through illegal collusion.
Wrong again, you can violate anti-competition law without being a monopoly. You're correct that it hasn't been decided in a court of law.
I'm saying that I think they are engaging in anti-competitive behavior, you are saying "actually it is okay because they haven't been judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior in a court of law", which does not seem contrary to my claim, which is that I think they should be judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
The case law on this is not as definitive as you are claiming. I don’t think their behavior is illegally anti-competitive.
Sure, you can say that not supporting a specific 3rd party application (e.g. an App Store) on your device is “anti-competitive” but obviously not illegally so for any business.
Behavior which is totally legal can become illegal in a monopoly situation.
> Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not.
and now you're telling me that the case law isn't definitive?
That's my whole point - you're making strong assertions as if they are the way the law works, when they are just your personal opinion on how things ought to work. Numerous decisions in the past have required companies to change how they do things on their devices. I'm not saying the case will be decided against Apple.
To somewhat oversimplify, you are allowed to not invite competitors to sell to your customers in your own backyard. Unless you are a monopoly. Because then that “backyard” isn’t rightfully yours to control.
At the moment I am inclined to believe the iPhone is Apple’s own backyard and they should have dominion over what happens there.
If you want to confiscate Apple’s backyard, you do it at the risk that you damage a company that has done a great service for the world, and a company that IMO deserves the benefit of controlling its own destiny and should be left to continue innovating on its own terms.
If someone thinks they can do better then there’s trillions of dollars in market cap on the line and I welcome them to try. Apple won’t stop them from trying, but will certainly compete fiercely on the merits.
The same exact argument could be used regarding the desktop PC.
Do you think that microsoft could prevent competing web browser from being installed on the PC, if it choose to do so?
I think not. They would lose that anti-trust lawsuit.
> Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.
No, actually they dont get to decide that. If they are breaking anti-trust law, via anti-competitive behavior, then there are certain actions that they cannot do.
> The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not.
The consumers, or other companies, can also sue them for breaking anti-trust law, which Apple is required by law to follow.
Once I buy an iPhone, I own it and it is my device.
I also think it shouldn't be up to courts. It should be up to the consumers themselves. They generally seem quite happy with Apple and Google.
On the other hand, if there is a consumer need that is not being met by Google or Apple, it is a prime opportunity to disrupt the market with a new offering that fulfills that need. If Google or Apple stamp that out or have done so in the past, then I will agree it's an anti-competition issue.
Regardless of what you think "should" happen, the reality is that you massively understated the scope of the applicable law.
How would a consumer even know if they were happy given the lack of options? Are they actually happy, or do they just have bigger issues to worry about? That's why we hire experts to act as regulators for new industries.
Who defines what those rights are? I don't agree with this dictatorial definition of rights. This mindset needs to change.
I don't want Microsoft "owning" Windows and banning Firefox and Chrome because its their "right".
They are within their right to charge what they want. But it is anti-competitive for them to use significant market power to leverage themselves in other markets.
The lawsuit is not about the 30% cut. Instead, the anti-competitive behavior is that Apple prevent competing Apple stores using its significant market power.
Thats how anti-trust law works.
(70% share of revenue -> 85% share of revenue)
It's already impossible on iOS, due to the fact that you cannot install any software except via the App Store, which requires an Apple ID.
At the moment it is possible to continue to use a mac and download and run software without an Apple ID, but if the trend of only releasing software via the App Store continues, that will become more and more difficult.
Even totally free apps in the App Store require that you identify yourself to Apple to download and use them.
Fredaspaghetti!
I was told this by the WireGuard team when I inquired why the WireGuard macOS VPN app is only available via MAS and not direct download (such as the Windows wg client).
I'm not 100% sure it's true, though, and am testing now. ProtonVPN claims to be working, with packet filtering for non-VPN traffic (kill switch) on 11.x, and they've a direct download, so it's possible that the wg devs are mistaken.
Apple leadership is answering in the implied context of "someone with an Apple ID". I'm never using my Apple ID again on a mac for any reason.
And for any dev with more than 0% marginal cost the increase in profit is even higher.
But it also shows behavioral economics at work: developers have been so anchored to the 30% split that this change looks amazing, but why isn't the 15% the norm regardless of revenue size? Effectively Apple is "settling" or "bribing" small developers with this change, so they aren't compelled to join the antitrust movement led by bigger players.
From a business standpoint, Apple is trying to splinter the critics into various factions. A bit extreme analogy but it's akin to inciting conflict within the opposition - actually almost textbook monopolistic behavior. Segment the market by offering tiered incentives.
This reminds me a bit of the Netflix stance on net neutrality. They were for until they grew big enough and could pay off ISPs. ISPs essentially created the proverbial moat for Netflix.
Apple keeps trying to spin the app store as a way for users to discover apps, when in reality, the reason developers publish their apps there is that it's the only way onto the millions of iOS devices worldwide.
Your app/game won't be 24h on the play store without the apk popping up on some random site, ready to be downloaded.
I don't see a way to do proper sideloading without opening this avenue. Maybe a mac os style notarization scheme, but apple gets a lot of flack for that too.
That said, I'd choose to have control, even as an app developer. Piracy is a fact of life.
One benefit is that if an app is successful but expensive, it opens up for competitors to undercut by price. With piracy, many users would rather pirate the expensive #1 game than to run the lower cost #1938 game. With such a closed system, users will choose cheaper applications and it will help #1938 to rise to #45.This is very good for indie developers.
Another benefit is for the consumers. When developers overprice their software, and users can pirate - they might. Then the developer blames lack of sales on piracy. However, when piracy is impossible, the developer can't blame piracy and must seek the true cause of poor sales, be it a high price or lack of quality.
There's a lot of coverage already on the negatives with a closed store.
I mean, I've been making Android apps since 2011, and I think that the role of app stores themselves is vastly overrated too. They have their place and they're nice to have, sure, but it's silly that OS vendors are allowed to have their own ones and either demote or outright ban anything that doesn't go through them. The transition to "always-online" was supposed to be more empowering, not more limiting.
"But people would install malware..."
It's okay for new technology to require education before one can make use of it. It's about time we get over it and stop treating users like children.
It’s something I’ve been torn on for a while, on the one hand 30% seems way too high for most apps (maybe you could make an argument for a few that rely more heavily on apple infrastructure). But on the other app stores do provide a lot of benefits like auto-update, malware scanning, reviews, distribution, etc. that most apps couldn’t or wouldn’t do by themselves.
It also reduces their anti-competitive effect on new entrants. Now they have a beachhead. Sounds like a win-win.
There should be an additional tier between e.g. $1mm and $25mm. Though that still wouldn't satisfy an absolutist constituency. So maybe this is the most efficient compromise.
> This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing”
Who cares? I'll take effective solutions from self-interested actors over well-intentioned bumbling.
> everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs
Sounds like a responsive political system.
If your concern is the App Store's 30% take from large developers, good news: they have the resources to find recourse in courts. Small developers don't. Given this has zero effect on Epic, it has zero effect on their case. (Just, perhaps, its lobbying effect in Congress.)
First, most Apple devs don't care about alternate app stores. Those provide nearly zero additional revenues to devs on every platform they are available.
Second, most Apple devs don't want the Apple App Store to lose it's primacy, they realize that it's hugely beneficial to their revenues. The security, the app vetting, the single sign on, single purchase account, and easy subscription management and refund features, is a huge reason that we make far more from the App Store than Google Play, despite Androids SIX TIMES larger installed base. Apple attracts the best app customers and makes them super comfortable with buying and subscribing to apps.
Most Apple developers by far largest concern was the large percentage of revenues Apple took. And they addressed that today.
At 15% we can use App Store purchasing for far more things, and I'm already having those discussions with clients today.
Meanwhile, Apple continues to use their dominant position to extract 30% of the revenue of the most profitable Apps, whilst people like you go out to bat for them. Must be great to be in Apple PR :)
It should also solidly put down all of the arguments we were seeing about whether indie devs and lawsuits putting pressure on Apple and legislators are at all worthwhile. A drop in app fees by 15% is a substantial win, and the reason that drop happened is because Apple is now scared of critics, bad PR, and how that might impact future legislation against them.
The number of hot takes I was seeing about how the Apple/Epic fight benefited literally no one and it was just two companies arguing about who got to take all the money... it's very clear from this program that the overall pressure on Apple has been making a difference.
It's not so large a difference that devs should now stop fighting for better terms, but it's positive to see Apple at least partially show signs of cracking, or at least acknowledge on some level that they're frightened about the potential outcome of this fight. And there are a lot of small devs who are going to be making a lot more money just because of this minor victory.
Most of the people I saw who I knew using these takes had a substantial vested interest in Apple prevailing, so I doubt it'll change their opinion.
It's good news unless it diffuses the momentum for more.
Apple just showed they care about their image. If they really cared about small devs, they can allow third-party app stores or platforms like Epic's, which would really help developers by bringing down processing costs.
Allowing multiple stores would increase costs doe small developers, because of the overhead of dealing with many stores and many sets of rules.
Any cost saving would disappear into one or two levels of middlemen, otherwise known as publishing companies.
Tim Sweeney provides one of the most advanced game engine technologies in the world completely for free for all revenue under 1 million. After 1 million you pay 5% on revenue over that, if your game makes $1,200,000 you pay Tim Sweeney $10,000.
If you make 2 games and both games equally make 600K you pay Sweeney nothing.
It's definitely a business but not sure "greedy" describes this.
TenCent controls Epic’s access to the Chinese market.
Together, they decided to put Epic’s customers in harms way.
I don’t think Epic will prevail, but I respect the investors right to make a bet on Sweeney if they so choose. They can sell their stake if they like.
Not so the customers, who Epic could clearly have protected but chose not to for publicity reasons alone.
Most of that comes from selling in-game currency to children.
He wants a higher cut.
Does that make him greedy?
Not really relevant to what we're talking about.
> Apple has made rev share changes in the past unprovoked (like 15% for sustained subs)
That wasn't an unprovoked change, it was an olive branch to companies like Amazon that were pressuring Apple for more attractive terms.
> But I would bet in that case Apple did it to take wind out of Epic’s sails around standing up for little devs.
Right, that's what I said. Apple is facing pressure from Epic, it's getting bad PR in press releases from other large companies like Microsoft, indie devs are starting to get mad, and legislators are starting to float ideas about antitrust.
Apple is in a position where they need a positive PR push about their app store policies; they need to be able to hit back at the negative press and claim that they're offering more attractive terms than the competition. They're in that position because the negative pressure is working; it's forcing them to respond.
> Zero proof this 15% reduction has anything to do with pressure from that legal battle.
Short of email leaks or Apple publicly admitting that they're doing this to take public pressure off of their store policies, what would convince you that these changes are related to the current legal battle(s) they're facing?
My take is that we've seen this happen multiple times with multiple companies. Steam went through the same process with Epic: they got slammed by publishers for doing very little work in courting them, and as a result, they changed some of their terms to be more attractive to large studios. Microsoft originally ported IE to Macs to help try and rein in suspicions that they were trying to turn the web into a Windows only platform. Apple's recent review process overhauls are minor concessions to try and get people to stop talking about the negative experiences that publishers like Basecamp have had with opaque rules and rejections.
At some point, when you look at the broader industry, you start to see patterns, and those patterns are that broad, uniform negative press and lawsuits are often (but not always) effective tools when it comes to forcing companies to at least make small concessions on their policies. I think it's very reasonable to look at this change as an indication that Apple is scared of antitrust and thinks that it is possible that further antitrust efforts might succeed.
Very true! This new change by Apple, although obviously a PR move, is still evidence that these legal fights against Apple are working.
This is a very clear example of why the lawsuit against Apple was a good thing, and why people should continue to put on more pressure against Apple. Because it forces them to make changes like this.
In the old days, when telecommunications devices and networks were getting monopolized like this, we'd break the company up into smaller entities, and then regulate the hell out of them, especially on monopolized/duopolized prices.
In a just world, Apple would never be allowed to set the app store tax at all, a group of state or federal regulators would have strict price caps set by the public at large and enforced by state or federal law. (This is how many places still handle Electricity and Natural Gas. This is approximately what we did to AT&T, when they tried this same crap).
If you own a monopoly/duopoly, you should expect to be heavily regulated like one. If you don't like that, stop monopolizing that market. This isn't rocket science, it's the conservative position on this issue.
Steam reduced it for publishers with bargaining power. No one has real bargaining power on the App Store.
In other words, what should Apple have done here? What is the right cut, and how did you come to that figure?
This is a great question that assumes the responses here are mostly rational (not to minimize how anti-Apple folks feel, which is also legitimate). This is awesome news for small developers.
Captive platforms are not new. iOS devices are consoles.
Nintendo also takes a 30% cut, although it used to be 35% for WiiWare games. This does NOT include the cost of acquiring development hardware, which usually sets you back $1000 at most. 30% is actually the industry standard; Steam takes 30% and Epic Games takes 30% for smaller titles.
Regarding your comment on captive platforms, I think there's a bit of a difference between a home console and a smartphone. A home console is considered a luxury item, while a smartphone has quickly become a necessity in today's connected world.
For home consoles, market competition is fierce. Not only is there Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, but there's also the PC gaming market, which includes devices in a variety of form factors. There's also multiple storefronts. You can buy console games from physical stores, in which case physical retailers take a cut, purchase Steam keys from other vendors, trade physical games, etc. In summary, there's a lot of ways to acquire your games.
In contrast, smartphones are seen as a necessity by many, and there are really only two options: Android or iOS. Each has a dedicated storefront that captures almost their entire user base. This gives Apple and Google a LOT of power over what people can run on their devices, and it practically gives them a guaranteed source of income. I can see why people's attitudes are different towards the Apple/Google duopoly, and that few people are complaining about Nintendo's monopoly on the eShop.
Now, you subtly moved the goalposts here. I'm not even saying you did it on purpose, just drawing attention to it.
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, are hardware manufacturers with integrated, proprietary software stacks, just like Apple. Androids are made by dozens of manufacturers, and you can side load, use the App Store of your choice, and so on.
The fact that Play Store does the lions share of business is the sum of: doing a great job, and nudging users in that direction through various defaults. Fact is, you can load what you want on an Android, and to me that undermines the case for forcing Apple to do likewise.
I'd still like the ability to sideload apps on my iPhone, and think it's worth pushing on Apple to get there. But as long as there are general-purpose phones available for purchase, and there are, I don't see the anticompetitive argument in the iPhone being a console: either put up with it or don't buy one.
I'm drawing a distinction between a bad business decision which customers should push Apple to change, and anticompetitive behavior which governments should force Apple to stop engaging in. I don't see the case for the latter.
I'm just struggling to figure out why the PERCEPTION is very different between iOS and the home console market. It feels like many iPhone users do not believe their smartphone can be substituted with one from another manufacturer. Those same users also complain that they're locked into the App Store. (I think there's a few people in the comments here that have done exactly that.)
At the same time, the majority of mobile app revenue is coming from iOS, which is pushing app developers to the platform, even though they dislike the terms of the App Store.
I'm not sure what the solution is here, but an ecosystem with a large number of members who are unhappy with the status quo doesn't seem very sustainable.
I think a lot of it is the Hacker News effect. Folks around here take free-as-in-free-software seriously, and good for them (us). I'm confident the median iPhone user just downloads apps and uses them; they haven't thought much about alternate app stores and probably wouldn't use them if they were available. I'm pretty sure that iPhone users who complain about software freedom are a tiny minority of all users, especially since the wild world of rooted Android phones is out there for people who feel strongly about such things.
I do get your point, though: consoles are luxury playthings if you're not in professional esports, and phones are a de facto necessity of modern life. It doesn't follow that most, or even many, iPhone users, are discontented with Apple's policies: I figure the bulk of them haven't thought about it once, quite sure my mother and brother haven't.
Well, this is a big change to a core part of their App Store business model.
It’s hard to reduce that to a PR move.
Consider the revenue at stake here.
Indeed, that's small potatoes for Apple. But then, everything is small potatoes compared to iPhone sales.
But far, far bigger than even a big PR stunt. Orders of magnitude bigger.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...
The 30% is really not the elephant in the room.
What makes it so hard to make money on the App Store is the speed at which knock offs can appear.
The App Store supports deep work that is hard to copy and work where there is a backend with network effects.
For everything else it’s just a lottery.
30% isn’t the issue.
A lot of people complain about how hard it is to make money on the App Store. Typically we hear only about the 30% as if that is the cause of people’s woes.
Clearly the 30% is a factor, but there are other more significant factors that determine success.
Locking in developers to only use their AppStore and not anything else, taking %15 of small businesses revenue for payment processing, and all this in the middle of a pandemic and still taking credit for being "generous" and "industry leading". All this while the average payment processor take around %3.
And don't forget the reason they're doing it is to diffuse criticism of their monopolistic restrictions, to help them in their fight against Epic, which is actually fighting for the same rights that these small time developers really need.
If you sell 100 installs on the App Store as a small developer. How many would you sell if there wasn’t an App Store? You’d have to advertise — people just don’t show up at your website. PPC is expensive. And you have to learn how to do it. It’s hard for someone that doesn’t spend their time learning about PPC. It’s hard to get good ROIs even when you do know what you are doing. If you spend $0.50 per click and you sell your app for $3, and you have a 25% conversion rate (which is extremely high,) how much did it cost you to get that sale?
Then once they do get to your website, they have to pay. Ok, 2.9% + $0.30. Now they have to securely download the app. Where is your app hosted? Apparently that’s free and doesn’t cost you anything? Who maintains that system? How pays for that electricity? And updates? And security? Apparently all of that is free and takes zero time?
Chargeback? Uh oh. That’s a $20 fee while you have to fight and document the dispute. Maybe that takes 20 minutes, but more like 45 minutes by the time you write the challenge letter. Digital products, especially games, have a high rate of fraud compared to many industries.
Then there are sales taxes. Are you collecting and remitting the precise amounts to the various jurisdictions where you are selling? How about a sales tax permit? Do you have that?
And trust? I’ll buy an App Store app, but installing an app from some random developer without any assurances I am not installing something nefarious?
If you sold 200 downloads from your website but 300 downloads from the App Store but pay the 15-30%. What makes you more money?
Have you ever sold a product to a retail store? A $10 product in a retail store is purchased from the manufacturer at $5. If there is a distributor involved, that $10 product is purchased from the manufacturer at $2.50. Physical products are obviously different than digital, but the product distribution model for any product has markup across the chain. A manufacturer selling DTC has to have the infrastructure to sell to consumers, thus they aren’t selling at $2.50 anymore. Shipping 100 cases of a product to a distributor is a lot less work than shipping that same volume to individual customers. If you think of the App Store as a distributor — 30% is a bargain.
I think that many app developers don’t realize what things actually cost — when they do, they’d quickly realize they make far more money from the App Store than they would make selling it directly.
Your comment shows the glaringly obvious problem. We don't need two monopolized appstores to "decide" how much of a cut should go to appstore maintainers for all the (real) work they do. Opening u the ecosystem for more appstores or more venues to get apps will keep the prices to a market-driven norm as opposed to a monopolized fixed percentage.
It's not just the rate that's anti-competitive, it's that these two companies have stifled competition in mobile app distribution for over a decade now.
There is no viable competition in this space because Google and Apple never allowed for real competitors to the App Store and Play Store to exist. You have to use the App Store to distribute mobile apps on iPhones and iPads, and if you want automatic updates, background updates or batch installations/upgrades on Android, you have to use the Play Store.
These days, if you want to install an app whose developers didn't pay the Apple tax, macOS will make the app appear radioactive, and as if it is either broken or malicious. Same goes for Android, where apps distributed outside of the Play Store invoke scary warnings, and are hindered when it comes to automatic updates, background updates, or batch installs.
When you put it like that, it sounds pretty good!
This percentage is something that small businesses feel, but is not really what makes the marketplace for apps “anti-competitive”, and personally I think it’s a distraction from the main issue:
Is the total addressable market for “apps” defined by and exclusive to a single platform (iOS, Android, etc.) or not?
How you answer this makes the percentage either a number arrived at through a competitive market or a “tax”.
Moreover, I expect that this announcement is mostly paving the way for Apple to force all Mac OS apps to be distributed via the Mac App Store (as they do on iOS).
The optimist in me doesn't want to believe it. But this is probably consistent with Apple's economic incentives. Especially because the major role of Macs in the world is to provide a platform for developing iOS apps.
This week I ordered an M1 Macbook Air. Not because I really need it, but because a couple years from now I will be happy I have a machine that can run Big Sur, which will be remembered as the least restrictive OS of the Apple Silicon era.
Apple is the biggest corporation in the world. We can like their products, but we shouldn't give them more credit than, say, ExxonMobil or Foxconn or Goldman Sachs. They will make choices based on what creates the most profit, nothing more. That's not cynicism; it's why corporations exist at all.
And if the Mac software scene stagnates, Apple eventually loses their core constituency.
The noise around the app store reminds me of all the complaints when Adobe said it would move its apps into the Creative Cloud on a subscription basis. Yes, a certain percentage of customers left. But the extra revenue more than made up for the loss.
As a note I feel especially bad for the (global) poor who can't access 100% of humans because Apple charges luxury pricing.
Apple knows what they are doing.
Basecamp co-founder @dhh criticizes $AAPL's new App Store Small Business Program calling the announcement "insignificant." https://twitter.com/SquawkAlley/status/1329106646556094464?s...
> The change will affect roughly 98 percent of the companies that pay Apple a commission, according to estimates from Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. But those developers accounted for less than 5 percent of App Store revenues last year, Sensor Tower said. Apple said the new rate would affect the “vast majority” of its developers, but declined to offer specific numbers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/technology/apple-app-stor...
800 Euro for the smallest iPhone? Well, that is incredible much. Okay Apple provides reliable upgrades and updates. And then you beat out 30% of 2 Euro for a small application out from a developer? Wow. That's capitalistic greed. Aside from that Apple earned already money with selling an expensive Mac to the developer at minimum and another 100 $ for the developer access.
And all of that after Trump has allowed you to legalize all earnings for which Apple didn't payed taxes. It's incredible how a company like Apple still plays the role of "the good hip guys company".
Disclaimer: I used to work for Apple years ago