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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> I think Apple should either charge considerably less than they do for distribution via their App Stores

The biggest problem for many people is not the %, but the rules and limitations of the platform that comes from Apple being the intermediary between devs and users.

For example, game streaming services should exist on the app store. It is preposterous that apple rejects these apps. They are actively harming thier own platform, making it less featureful by doing this.

Being this intermediary is both a pro and a con for both devs and users, but they disallow anyone else to innovate on the platform. If Apple is so confident that their IAP is what users prefer, then they should give users (and developers) the choice and let the market speak!

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They don’t actually reject game streaming services. They just reject game streaming storefronts. They have already said they are fine with streaming games, as long as each title is in the App Store.

Which is unfeasable for game streaming services, so in practice they do reject any game streaming service that functions as consumers expect them to.

It was a deliberate decision that was made to make it highly impractical to actually do. GeForce now has over 2000 games available to stream - do they actually expect Nvidia to submit 2000 apps? From a dev-infra POV that’s obviously largely impractical. Would Apple even allow that?

It’s also a baffling from the user’s point of view. What happens a single game is available on multiple platforms? I search for “Destiny 2” on the App Store and there’s 3 different listings for it on Stadia, GeForce Now and Xbox GPU.

Would it be reasonable for Apple to require Netflix to submit each movie and TV show to the App Store, and then say "no no, we do allow streaming tv!"

Does Nvidia even have the proper licenses to do that? Seems like one thing to stream the games vs. upload the standalone apps to the store (implying they are available in full-featured form).

> It’s also a baffling from the user’s point of view. What happens a single game is available on multiple platforms? I search for “Destiny 2” on the App Store and there’s 3 different listings for it on Stadia, GeForce Now and Xbox GPU.

this is gross...

Sounds a lot like those game streaming services are just an end run around the App Store.

In any case it seems like the point is moot now because streaming games will be delivered to iOS via the web.

> GeForce now has over 2000 games available to stream - do they actually expect Nvidia to submit 2000 apps? From a dev-infra POV that’s obviously largely impractical.

This isn’t impractical – it’s entirely possible to set up a build / deploy pipeline to the App Store for mass submission of applications. It’s annoying in places, but Apple are slowly getting better at providing APIs to make this easier, and there are third-party tools like Fastlane which also help.

> Would Apple even allow that?

If they were all instances of a single white-labelled streaming application, Apple would probably require the games to be published using developer accounts belonging to the rights holders for the games instead of publishing everything through an Nvidia account. This is an established requirement in those circumstances. It depends upon how they view the ownership of what is being published. Again, setting up a pipeline for this is annoying but doable.

Guess who makes it hard to submit many templated apps in an automated fashion? You guessed it, it's Apple.

Given that they claim to individually review each app within a short timeframe, a bulk upload would make it impractical for them to provide this service.

> Given that they claim to individually review each app within a short timeframe, a bulk upload would make it impractical for them to provide this service.

And they do a super good job at reviewing apps, right? /s

I knew someone would make this comment, but sarcasm aside, you don’t seem to be disagreeing.

I am not agreeing with you, sorry. If they made good reviews, impartial reviews I could agree with you, but the way they do it nowadays could mostly be automatized (or at least do in a bulk, this is essentially what they do anyway in terms of quality).

Then they shouldn’t require it by creating stupid rules that require submitting hundreds of largely identifiable apps.

So now you need a build farm of Macs to submit 2000 updates to <= 2000 developers accounts every time the host streaming app needs to be updated?

This is impractical, considering the alternative.

It takes a few minutes to inject a config into a build and re-sign it, plus it’s easily parallel. This is not impractical. Annoying, yes.

Obviously it’s possible to build a pipeline for mass submission of apps.

However it’s not so obvious how Apple would manage the review process with the sudden changes in volume this would produce.

There are two million applications on the App Store. An extra few thousand wouldn’t be such a big change in volume that Apple would be unable to cope.

The absolute number of apps isn’t the issue. It’s the rate at which new ones are added that matters.

Many of those apps are old and simple.

2000 new games at once would be a significant volume change.

The App Store has more than 30k releases every month. The GeoForce Now entire catalogue is only a couple of thousand. Apple would cope fine.

30k new releases? Or 30k updates?

Would that not be analogous to them requiring Netflix or Amazon Prime Video having to list all of their videos one by one in Apple TV? I can buy that for games that you purchase through another storefront, but not for something like XBox Games Pass which gives you access to a number of games for one monthly fee.

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