At least on Google phones you're allowed to jailbreak it and install whatever you want if you're a power user, but you can't do this on Apple's phones.
They should allow people to download and install APKs.
In fact Steam kills the whole "Apple store is a gouge" premise stone dead. It literally is just a distribution mechanism on desktop computers, where you absolutely can side load apps and games as much as you like, and they're still considered very much worth 30% by the market.
There's a reasonable discussion to be had about side-loading on iOS, that's a separate issues, but the idea that the App Store cut is unreasonable in the market is clearly bogus.
The other 2 are a total scam unless you get put on a featured page. What’s the value of being alongside 1 million other apps with terrible discoverability?
Developers still have to do all their own promotion and drive customers to the platform for purchase, but then Steam or Apple get 30 % for ringing through the transaction. IMO those 30% fees would drop to 10% very quickly if there were competition.
I think if developers set their price and Steam listed their 30% as a “Steam Fee” you’d see outraged gamers.
Epic Store had to give games for free to start being considered.
Well, how many platforms even run on linux?
There's also the review system, the workshops, automatic updates, easy browsing, communities, friend lists, customer service (getting refunds is easier than on any other platform) etc.
The competing platforms biggest problems is that they assume that all they need to do is set up a HTTP server to download games from and add a few discounts/exclusives to get a customer base. But their UX is miles behind what Steam offers.
Steam also has a ton of social network features like chat/communities/etc.. and they support multiple platforms. They also reduce their cut to 25% and 20% above $10 million and $50 million respectively.
Developers and users are completely free to use or not use Steam, GoG, Epic, Itch.io, or others. Quite a few developers do pre-orders on Humble, and then sell on Steam, etc.. You're stuck with Apple/Google TOS for the vast majority of apps regardless if you're the developer or user. Epic couldn't possibly bring the same lawsuits against Steam, maybe the consoles, but even they allow different in-app purchase payment providers (F2P games collecting credit cards again) and subsidize the consoles quite a bit at the start of each cycle.
Are they?
Look at how insane the backlash from the gaming community has been over Epic opening their own store, or how gamers acted when EA opened up Origin.
Steam also provides significantly more for their 30% than Apple/Google do for their storefronts.
A person in charge of the Apple App Store told the US Congress it takes ~$100 million to run the App Store[1]. That's about $5/developer/year instead of $99/developer/year that Apple charges.
[1] Page 345: https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...
One would imagine that they would try to compete and start offering lower rates to undercut rivals like Epic (which is much smaller than Steam/Apple/Microsoft/Google as a distribution channel) is doing.
The situation here is like all air major travel companies charging exactly the same for tickets for a given route and then justifying that by saying they offer a great value to customers.
Except we also have off the top of my head / quick google search EA origin, bethesda game launcher, rockstar game launcher, ubisoft uplay, blizzard battlenet, and Epic game launcher all of which were almost certainly built because it is cheaper to just write your own distribution software and market your games yourself than give steam such a big cut once you reach a certain scale.
If you become popular, you can de-list yourself off of Steam, and continue running on your website for free.
The issue isn't that the app store takes 30% of your purchases to manage payments. If I'm a startup, I don't wanna deal with all of this complexity, so I'm all for it.
What bothers me is that they control everything that's allowed on your phone. If you want to target iPhone users, you have no choice but to go through them.
App stores are great, but forcing companies to go through them is bad.
Allow people to plug in their phones and install apps from their computer. Easy solution, Google phones already allow this with some technical know-how.
Allow other app stores on your phones.
I wish there were more big name apps that would get on F-Droid or one of the alternative app stores on Android. The more competition there is, the better for developers and users.
That is not really hard to imagine. Most of what we purchase has markups.
I know little about the apple store but there is a lot of content on the play store with most of it bring drek and the search is terrible.
In all fairness, though, while a Store listing doesn't guarantee users, the absence of a Store listing does guarantee no users. Epic found this out with Fornite when they tried to get users to sideload via their own website. So a Store listing is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition.
The user funnel seems to be awareness via non-Store marketing channels -> search on Play/App Store -> install. Remove the second step and your funnel disintegrates.
On the other hand, it's also possible that Fortnite's Android woes were due to artificial hurdles (e.g. requiring users to first navigate menus to allow "unsafe" side-loading). I suspect they don't have this difficulty on PC where it's just a simple go to website->download->install.
I'm not sure how to account for that fairly, it seems wrong to charge for prominent listing, but on the other hand it seems wrong to charge small indie devs the same as the majors while shuffling them in deep in the catalogue. Maybe the discount for small publishers Apple announced recently will help with this, though that system does seem to have it's own flaws.
Major apps don't really need that anyways. One of the promotions on the iOS App Store is "If you love indoor plants". The first three apps in that story are "Get some inspiration: Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest". I sincerely doubt any of those three needed any additional promotion in order to get App Store downloads. The apps that actually would benefit from getting promoted, and also the Ebay app, are further down in the article.
I suspect this is a big part of it. I chickened out installing a 3rd party App Store once because Google’s warnings sort of make it sound like you’ll lose the permission prompts on individual apps. Even side loading a single app I think it might be a bit ambiguous.
No matter what the details are, side loading is always an intentionally degraded experience regardless of platform based on my experience.
BestBuy is always teetering on 'not making money' - their markups are a function of market competition.
Apple is leveraging it's market power on all sides i.e. consumers, suppliers, and 3rd party marketplace vendors.
The massive margins (after markup) are basically a measure of that power.
The alternative to an App store with a 30% cut on everything is a store without free apps and a complete ban of in app purchases.
I personally have never understood the selfish HN user arguments against any particular cut because if you followed those arguments through they would want Apple to give them a negative cut because they only care about themselves with no single though about the consequences of their wishes.
Where do I sign up for this dream store? I’d be pretty happy to see all the low effort skinner box trash disappear overnight.
Why can't people see that mobile phones are just a different form factor of a computer?
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/google-play-store-main-di...
But yes, there is a "supervision required" subset of users. Still, shouldn't calibrate the level of big brother involvement for everyone based on this.
Treating users like idiots that need to be placed in the "pillow room" and building these app platforms under the pretext of security and convenience/ease of use is the reason we're in this swamp where your awesome pocket hardware has been reduced to an ad client which you have 0 control and ownership over.
Everyone's parents have survived the earliest days of computing where security was as its lowest, lack of common knowledge at its highest.
No, absolutely not.
"I personally have never understood the selfish HN user arguments against any particular cut because if you followed those arguments through they would want Apple to give them a negative cut because they only care about themselves with no single though about the consequences of their wishes."
This is ridiculous.
Apple is printing money hand over fist, the richest company in all of history.
The 'alternative' to 30% cut is a 0% cut!
Developers would get 30 percent increase which is might probably 2-3x their profits.
Apple's profits wouldn't be hurt that much.
If they aren’t, what’s the difference?
If they are, then a markup isn’t a function of cost, it’s more accurately a function of pricing power, or how much your customers are willing to pay you over a competitor.
Best Buy can’t markup more because people will buy from Amazon or Walmart or Costco or Target or Aliexpress. Apple can markup more because people can’t get a similar product elsewhere for cheaper.
'Margin' is sometimes 'gross' and sometimes 'net'.
In competitive markets, price ends up being a function of cost: it's always cost + a little bit. That little bit is profit. Anyone who marks up more, gets lost sales.
The fact Apple can take 30% of a software sale, which is in many cases 80% of a companies revenue, and that it's all gravy (i.e. all net), is huge.
Best Buy takes 40% margin because they have underlying costs, meaning other competitors will have similar structures.
Apple takes 30% because they can and that's that.
A more apt point of contention is whether or not you should have the right as a customer to install apps outside the App Store retail experience.
You can actually but it isn’t easy.
Another related issue is whether or not customers acquired outside the Apple store should yield a margin once installing an iPhone app.
Essentially the entire question is if the phone is a general purpose computer owned by the end user, the end user ought to have the right to install apps as they please without having to go through Apple.
How?
Some more variants on the above in this article.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/01/how-to-get-iphone-software-w...
The crux of the argument against Apple is are they a legitimate intervenor in your personal decisions about what software to run on your hardware?
It can happen even if roads are taxpayer owned.
Thankfully nobody buys games on Steam to encourage such awful behavior.
I too long for the low markup over wholesale that we used to enjoy on boxed software before the advent of these predatory app stores.
> At least on Google phones you're allowed to jailbreak it and install whatever you want if you're a power user, but you can't do this on Apple's phones.
It is undoubtely very true that you are allowed to jailbreak Google phones but Apple phones are forbidden. Chalk it up to Apple's absolutely unbreakable security and bug-free OS and the DMCA.
It would be very nice if we could get a DMCA exception to explicitly legalize jailbreaking, like this one from 2018:
I would argue that prices are already as high as the market can bear so that raising prices would not raise total revenue. Instead you would have to imagine publishers making much less in profit, which would still be bad since less people would be inclined to make commercial software.
You can a couple of different ways if you are a power user, but its a bit more work than most are willing to put into it…