OP here, happy to answer any questions. I know Apple gets a lot of well-deserved flack, but for a small-time dev like me, them taking a 15% cut makes things a lot simpler for me.
There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.
It's not one time unless you want to do the setup and teardown for every purchase, but the £15 monthly fee includes phone and other insurance and the app exports your account ledger to Excel and CSV. Customer service and vanishing transactions from the app ledger have been worrying me but I was promptly put in touch with management as soon as I dusted off a smidgeon of English idiomatic equivalents to "wtf" and this seems to have been caused by Transport For London running adjustments for the daily Oyster journey payment limit (via taking a holding charge placeholder payment in the way hotels ring fence for your stay on debit cards) so the final amount is adjusted the following day to enable the 0400 end of their day.
The entire banking industry is so ripe for re-imagining, yet their strangle hold onto the old ways is super preventative from us evolving as a species.
4am is the cut off time between “days” for TFL (London Transit) services - if you buy a ‘day travelcard’ it is good until 4am the following day.
It is guaranteed that if you make several transactions in the same day on TFL (by swiping in/out with a contactless card - or an Oyster card - at the ticket gates), the amount paid will be capped at the value of a day travelcard. I’m quite sure no employee is involved in any of this, and computers handle it end-to-end.
Banking in the UK is actually quite reasonable - largely because companies like Monzo have pushed it forward.
It’s a constant surprise to me quite how _bad_ banking in the US is in comparison though - and most of your points seem to reflect how US banking works rather than UK banking - as indicated both by the spelling of “cheque” and the notion of using them in the first place.
[0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.
But 15% of gross?
I have been thinking it was 30 percent of gross for the longest time and I can't believe myself for getting this so wrong.
I worked in advertising sales when the industry was freaking out over losing the universal 15% gross "agency fee" [2] for a multitude of hopeless performance contracts [3] and on the other side, when I sold space for a major publisher my own commission was 15% of gross.
A good salesman is worth 15%. At least to me.
The thing that's drawing me, now far more strongly, to publishing via the store is that although vexing problems exist, this looks like the most transparent platform to my eyes because the developer community is surfacing the issues and not burying problems with FUD and MVP-speak. Credit obviously to the community above all. But even giants struggle with enabling any community.
[0] Gabapentin. 2016: "NOT addictive don't worry John." 2019:"can I have you signature and ID?" - the UK government classified Gabapentin Schedule A along with heroin and cocaine. 8 months of dystopia and another 5 remembering how to think later the top "user reviews" found in the wild still praise Gabapentin to high heaven. Yes it does temporary wonders for concentration. I never took my full dose which was the minimum adult dose and broke regime regularly for at least two weeks a time and I don't even know how to describe the 8 months of "hell" because they were just too messed up. Gabapentin probably has amazing off label potential but now it's scheduled forget about intelligent prescribing.
[1] deep into the data structures for a advertising scheduler with fun like network flow limits (since we discussed on Shannon, if this is enough to tickle you I'd love to hear from you, I've got man decades in this needing fresh eyes.
[1] gross percentage fees wreck trading advertising simply. Google plus all mighty consortium wrote off $350MM in 2004 and AdAge said they were stuck on things we solved early. We hadn't solved lots they had. My Cofounder tragically died before the close of a critical stock placement and key man (that I insisted on afraid to ever lose a wonderful friend as well as Cofounder - replying to a snark about business and friendship he snapped (to a old friend of his no less I learned) "I don't know what kind of person you want to be in business with then but I hope you think better of your investors")
[2] my original paper of 1995 cited the total economic capture of the agencies to be 60% of the gross total industry budget. I didn't hear anything similar until in 2018 the former chairman of Mediacom the UKs biggest buyer pull the exact same figure out of thin air.
[3] the recent highly acclaimed book "Manslaughter On Madison Avenue" explains how the problems that made me light out for the territory in 1995 remain not only not fixed but not even addressed. Briefly I felt terrible pangs for trying to help the agencies who threw vexatious criminal copyright breach torts in the High Court at us within days of opening. Then I realised that anyone who can tell the problems just ran for the hills. Only being a partnership let us survive. A limited company requires professional counsel. I learned IP law the hard way with my entire net worth and that of the one person who believed in me on the line. Still a partnership but a Limited Partnership. The 1907 act is only 7 pages long and protects your wealth from rogue partners creation of severality.
They announced the change a month ago, and it goes into effect at the end of this year. It is a "small business" program, and only applies to developers making less than $1 million in sales.
But when you are small, you have enough problems to solve to bring a quality product to market, this is one headache you can happily avoid.
For better or worse Apple can do no wrong and the eyes of its customers, so even if they did somehow get hacked, you wouldn't have hundreds of angry emails headed your way.
I personally really do love the walled garden of owning a Mac, when I'm working on a song or music video, I just want it to work using final cut and logic. If I really feel like compiling the Linux kernel from scratch, I have a PC for that
It's incredibly shortsighted.
I don't know why anyone even bothers with the app store on the macOS (or other platforms). We have been doing fine without it on the desktop for decades now, and suddenly every developer is supposed to drink the kool-aid that PAYING corporates for the privilege of adding value to that platform by developing and distributing your wares on that platform is supposed to be a GREAT thing?
For how long? Apple has already crippled application firewalls on macOS Big Sur to allow Apple authorised softwares to bypass them (and even VPN), even if the user explicitly chooses to block them. That's another move to make it a closed system like ios, where the user no longer has control over what apps can or cannot access the internet and Apple decides it for them. Does that seem like the old Mac platform to you?
The day SIP can’t be disabled we’ll know things are changing, but until then the machines are only as locked down as you want them to be.
People pay for convenience all the time. Apple thrives on convenience - the overall experience. You also completely disregarded the point he made that for him the value Apple brings now that they have discounted their fee to 15% for small developers far outweighs the 15% they charge.
Paying for convenience. It's the key to their success and also the thing that many geeks seem to discount the most (just like you completely glossed over); hence the continual geek mystification of how Apple can be so successful.
I sincerely doubt he's going to loose that many sales by being Mac app store exclusive. These days for the vast majority of apps I'm interested in I'm more than willing to buy them from the Mac App store. The only time I avoid the app store is if the sandboxing restrictions limit the app I want in some way; and there are very few apps that fall into that category - mostly utility or audio apps. So I buy them outside the store - which is a PITA to track all the relevant bits (payments, updates, keys, etc.). 1Password helps significantly with the license/payment tracking and thankfully more Mac developers are adding 1 click import of all your license details into password managers like 1Password - but it's still more stuff to track that you don't have to do when using the app store.
I pointed out that this is extremely short-sighted for developers.
App Store on macOS doesn't have the kind of stranglehold it does on macOS like the ios platform. The more App store gains control, and the more developers are forced to distribute their apps on the platform, the more you give leverage to Apple to extort more money out of you.
All the current lawsuits against the app store are indicative of this. We developers would be fools to ignore that.
Apps like Coda have offered mechanisms for people to update from the App Store version to a non-Store version for free, by looking for a Store downloaded .app, so it's not impossible.
OP owes the world, outside of their paying customers, nothing.
Short sighted profiteering.
They've been slowly making it more and more difficult for people to install apps outside of the app store on the macOS. The latest version of macOS has already crippled application firewalls, allowing Apple authorised code special privileges to bypass any firewall / VPN to access the internet, even if the user wants to block them. Apple ARM processors further limit what OS you can run on it, even with virtualisation, without needing Apple's permission.
All these criticisms are genuine and valid - that it aims to turn the macOS platform into a more closed system like ios.
It's demonstrative of the knee-jerk reactions from people who see the mere mention of the words 'Apple' or "App Store" and immediately come to piss all over everybody's cereal without actually knowing the full story.
All I see are baseless assumptions coupled with a condescending, know-it-all tone from those unwilling to engage with either OP's points, more prone to redefine the discussion to allow their soapboxing. Worse, it's delivered with a tone that screams "oh, the silly thing, why didn't they come to me first? I could have told them better!".
Pardon the rant but it gets tiresome in every damn thread about anything vaguely Apple-related.
They have tremendous influence and it strongly affects the world. Through that influence, they ruined the openess of mp3 players, GUIs, and then cellphones. Now the writing is on the wall: personal computers are next.
Forgive me if I care about this stuff.