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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

You are not. If Epic wins kiss free App Store apps goodbye as Apple will surely charge everyone to put things in their store. After all neither Walmart nor Amazon allows you to sell your products there and give them 0%. I see no economic difference, a store is a store; storekeepers are allowed to make money with your products. Just because it's a pile of bits makes no difference.

If I want to sell art in a gallery, the gallery probably takes 50%; sure I could sell it online, but no one will see it, whereas the gallery brings customers to the art.

Epic wants profit without cost at Apple's expense, and if Apple if forced to accept this, then everyone else will suffer, except Epic.

You could make an argument that 30% is too high, but it's not a binary choice, 30% vs 0%. Epic thinks that it is.

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I think you're sort of wrong here. Epic would likely be just fine with sideloading Fortnite and handling the distribution themselves (like they did with Android). What they're contesting is that only Apple is allowed to sell software on the phone, and in doing so also collects 30% of the cost. Apple could just get out of the way but chooses not to.

Okay but here's the thing. Such a change is good for the app publisher at the expense of the customer except in some vague second order effect about improbable price improvement.

Right now you have no choice but to buy Fortnite on the App Store. In the future you will have no choice but to buy Fortnite on the Epic Games Store. Customers don't really gain anything here.

I'm sympathetic to the whole software freedom angle and that end-users should be able to run whatever they want on their devices unrestricted but I could care less about publishers wanting to get around Apple's platform fees and store rules which for all their flaws genuinely benefit me as a user.

Like it sucks that it took total control, thousands of human reviewers and an iron fist to keep companies from getting away from bright line screwing over their customers but here we are.

Epic can just offer their app in both Apple's store and its own store. It's just that Apple store prices will be higher according to Apple's commissions. If you like convenience of only using Apple's payment services, who's stopping you from buying it in App Store with higher prices?

If Apple rejects the app from being available in its store, then again that doesn't affect you because you want to use only Apple approved apps anyway.

You are ignoring the world of products that Apple prevents using their control over the App Store, which they absolutely do use to exclude or hobble competitors and stifle controversy (such as how they have pulled multiple apps that were commentary about smartphones being made in sweatshops). Apple is already past the "live long enough to become the villain" half of "you either die a hero or". The anticompetitive effects of having a duopoly--both of whom being interested in complete vertical integration--in control over all software distribution is devastating, and it isn't just some improbable/vague second order effect (which is also a ridiculous assertion even for price improvements: there are tons of products that are having to charge more only because of Apple... mine is one of them! it really depends on the app's sales mechanism whether 30% is fair or not, and this is coming from someone who has run a successful competitor to Apple on their own platform, despite the users having to be rabid for it due to how many hurdles they had to jump... before Apple finally "won" :/).

are you the ```saurik``` of Cydia?

If so, many thanks to you for your labor of love. I have been jailbreaking iPhones since 2012 with your help. I'm sorry that the corporate structure railroaded you.

> Apple will surely charge everyone to put things in their store

Apple already charges everyone to put things in their store. $100 per year.

And it will be 300$ if you are a company. If you don't have a company account, you can't really work in team because of how signing apps work.

That’s for an enterprise account, used for internal release apps (not test!). Enterprise accounts are often misused by companies that just want to abuse the device provision list, it’s not required.

I’ve built widely downloaded apps for companies, featured in the App Store, with a small team of devs sharing one standard $100 account.

Neither app store is free to publish

>If Epic wins kiss free App Store apps goodbye as Apple will surely charge everyone to put things in their store

The goal here isn't to remove the 30%, it's to give the option for someone to develop an alternative way to host their apps, typically by use of their own store.

As we see on Android and even PC: many, many, many developers are fine paying 30% for that visibility, even if FreeDroid or Itch.io will let them keep 100% of their profits. This won't change much except for the billionaire companies who have the capacity to advertise themselves and deem 30% too much.

If Epic wins I would gladly pay Apple for access to the app store. Apple’s review process and the standards they implement provide a lot of value to me. My fear if Epic wins is the iPhone app store becoming like the Mac app store: mostly empty. Because if there’s a way to escape compliance with Apple’s standards and still distribute your app then many developers will take the easy road.

You reply hints at these <issues> when you allow developers to distribute their software but doesn't give any specifics. What is your specific issue with how app distribution works on macOS? Are you running into low quality software that you purchased that's full of malware?

I enjoy the freedom of going to a repository and building or download a binary without having to use Apple's centralized system. I like paying the developer directly if you want. I've done it with 1Password and other applications. They're high quality software.

So you are saying that App store provides so little value to developers that nobody will want to use it unless they are forced to do so? Maybe once Apple faces competition, they will have to improve their store and attract developers by offering a better experience?

Why not give consumers the choice to shop at whatever store they want?

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