Resetting the App Store
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
It's important to keep in mind that this "explosion" of developer revenue is mostly in scammy pay to play games. Apple's app store rules have made it very difficult to build the kind of software business that flourished in the older model where users paid for significant feature upgrades. Apple's answer to this is pushing everything into a subscription model or awkward bundles of in-app purchases which I argue has not been to the benefit of users or most developers.
Even for games, I wouldn't blink at spending $50 on a PC or Nintendo Switch game, but for some reason I would never spend more than $5 for a mobile game.
It lets you charge a smaller amount up front, to get more people trying, and paying for your software, but keeps an ongoing revenue stream to keep the business going as well.
Sometimes the simplest app having a subscription seems like pure greed from the developer. The excuses are generally that of increase in development costs. But maybe that is equivalent to increasing the cost of development like increasing the cost of living when there is extra money coming in.
The only recurring charge I pay for is Amazon Prime, because I don't want to think about shipping costs and I like Prime Video (replaces Netflix) and Fresh (free grocery delivery, no need for Instacart)
Other than that, anything that requires a subscription, I can do without.
I've bought one mobile app in my life: Backcountry Navigator. It lets me download detailed maps for hiking and then use them where there's no cellphone towers. The free version was good enough, but it was so useful that it felt better to pay the developer his $7 for lifetime usage (no recurring charge)
But I think the sentence you're quoting is referring to the following: BC Navigator allows you to download maps for offline use from a variety of sources. Most of these sources are free (e.g. Open Cycle Map [related to OpenStreetMap], US Forest Service, etc) and some require a paid account with the map provider (e.g. CalTopo). So if you want to use the CalTopo maps, you need to pay CalTopo. But it's perfectly fine with the free maps.
The UI used to be pretty difficult to figure out. After a year I got used to it and it's fine. But they released a new version for iPhone which is supposedly quite different from the early Android version, and they claim they put more effort into making it easier to use.
Another thing that's very useful about BC Navigator is that you can easily import GPX tracks (e.g. planned routes) and overlay them on the map in different colors. So you can have your main route for the day, and maybe some alternate routes for a section where you're not sure if the original route is going to work out. You can keep an entire library of routes in the app, and select which ones you want to show that day.
It's just a perfect app for what I love to do - mountain biking in places where few people go.
To be more specific https://www.opencyclemap.org/ is generated from OpenStreetMap data and some terrain data, likely SRTM.
I'm happy that I can get by without paying for monthly subscriptions. I am also happy if there are lots of other people who find enough value in these services to make it worth paying for.
We would prefer the traditional model of "pay for major feature updates every years" but the app store does not support that.
This era was remembered with fondness, but there were hardly any of these businesses compared to the number of software companies that exist today.
This makes no sense whatsoever. High quality apps are in Apple’s interest because they need to compete against Android and the web.
The reason the app business model is hard, is that there is a lot of money, enormous competition now, and no intellectual property protection. Nothing more. If anything the App Store has slowed the commodification.
You can charge hundreds in the MacOS appstore and no one blinks.
People expect mobile apps to cost a few dollars. This might not be fair but isn't really due to the appstore in any way I can see.
I don’t like it but that’s not a result of the App Store model.
It’s a result of the democratization and globalization of software development.
Meanwhile: scams, unnecessary restrictions on what the device can do, no automatic support for age-old income models like free trials or paid upgrades, etc.
Proof? Do users get more value and developers make more money with mobile apps? Does software become significantly better? Vast majority of mobile games are copycats with a different skin.
Showing the total app revenue which correlates with the total number of iphone users isn't telling much.
Vast majority of games are crap anyway. Same as vast majority of apps.
There are 1.5 million apps in the App Store. Who really expected 1.5 million GOOD apps? Or even close?
If there are, say, 10.000 good apps, that still leaves ~1.5 million crap apps. And, still, 10.000 good apps are plenty enough.
In graphics work, for example, this includes anything from Photoshop and Procreate, to Vectornator, Lightroom, Pixelmator, Affinity Designer and Photo and 10-20 more very good apps. These are more than enough to cover the whole field from bitmap to vector to photo editing.
Same for music work - I can find anything from Garageband and Logic remote, to Cubasis, FL, Audio Units by top brands, controllers, sequencers, and so on.
Even more so for regular office apps, productivity, etc.
And there are tons of good games as well.
The fact that everybody with $100 to spare can put up a BS game, means little, given the plethora of good stuff there.
It's telling if you compare what music software is available in the app store vs on the open market. On the open market where devs can charge higher prices and charge for upgrades there is an enormous range of options from cheap, simple tools to professional tools with incredible depth and range. Most of what's available on the app store is a joke in comparison and several of the top virtual instrument devs have said they won't touch the app store because of the restrictions and the race to the bottom on pricing.
My immediate response to this is that if this is possible, then how do we stop MaliciousPaymentSkimmerApp from social engineering people into becoming the default in-app payment provider for every app on their phone?
I mean, sure, I would like the option to replace the default camera app too, but now I'm asking myself how we make sure MaliciousCloneOfCoolCameraApp isn't sending every photo it takes to a remote server that scans for anything its owners think might be able to make it money?
(There is some prior art for this in iOS' custom keyboard world, I suppose. I was excited for those but that quickly faded when every damn custom keyboard demanded Internet access, which is not a thing I want my keyboard to have, whatever their excuse may have been.)
There’s a lot more people than developers. And to a user, it doesn’t matter who takes what money. As long the transaction is frictionless and Apple’s advertisements about privacy sell, there won’t be much push from the consumer side.
It would be possible to require a bank/money transmission license in order to integrate with the iOS NFC payment scheme.
That would prevent scammers / untrusty startups to hijack the instant payment markets.
If reasonable Apple could require some technical capabilities (time to transfer) as long as they are fair and reachable for up-to-date participants.
On Android my local German bank offers a NFC payment system which works just as well as Google Pay and Apple Pay as far as I can tell.
But then again, I am just talking generally, not you specifically.
Do these app stores (try to) verify that apps behave appropriately once given access to carrier cellular networks?
We submitted an app with access to Firebase and immediately started seeing data being added and deleted from a non-test IP.
It's automated, but sometimes underpaid contractors are given a few minutes to inspect an app.
However, due to the lack of competition, there's no pressure for better screening of apps. A free market for mobile app distribution would gives users more security, better efficiency and experiences, and lower prices as companies competed to provide better mobile app distribution methods.
Or it could just end up as a race to the bottom as the market for paid apps is completely eliminated by a few ad based platforms.
It could also just end up that the community, or even non-profits, step up and provide great distributions methods. In fact, I'd say this is the one of the most likely outcomes based on the past, given Maemo's user-supplied apt repositories[1], webOS's Preware[2], or Android's F-Droid[3].
We can also look at the prevailing commercial app stores on platforms with multiple app distribution methods to see what's most likely. They aren't ad based platforms, like Ubuntu's Snap Store[4], Amazon's AppStore[5] for Android, and Samsung's Galaxy Store[6] for Android.
Game distribution stores aren't like that, like Steam, GOG, Humble Store, Microsoft store, etc.
Even on iOS, Cydia[7] wasn't an ad based platform, and you could purchase paid apps on it.
[1] https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-repositories-and-c...
[2] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware
[4] https://snapcraft.io/store
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore
Hasn’t it? Pretty much everyone else seems to think it has. The cottage industry of high quality Mac software makers is practically dead and even the Omni Group is struggling.
As for Cydia, that was too small to be a model for anything. It’s also from another era. Remember Facebook was just a web app in those days, and nowhere near the behemoth it is today.
Android stores other than Google play are all second class citizens and so not relevant.
The proposals for alternate app stores on iOS are all explicit that they cannot be second class citizens.
Facebook would love to approve apps that have a tracking identifier and don’t ask permission to track. What would stop them if they ran their own store?
There's two separate but related issues:
1. The App Store lockout
2. The requirement to use Apple's royalty-bearing payment methods for digital goods
#1 is evidence of monopolistic intent, but #2 is the actual market harm. If the law considers #2 to be a market harm, then it's going to demand Apple hand direct payments in Spotify to you on a silver platter, not hide it in a back room with a bunch of safety warnings on it.
Remember: Antitrust is not about freedom, it's about competition in recognized markets. If it was purely about freedom, they would've just repealed copyright and patents, and had the government directly subsidize all art and invention through monetary grants instead of monopoly rights.
As an example of this... the EU fined Google billions of dollars for just having their own services come up first in Search. There is literally no coercion of users involved there; Google Search customers aren't required to use Google Shopping at all. The EU just considers the top of the SERP to be so valuable that they don't think Google should have any of it.
You could install software apple doesn't give you permission to have, like a firewall (seriously!)
Seriously, we need apps that lets you find out what your phone is doing, and who it is talking to
It would be nice to have free software available, and also compile and install your own software
Google prevents mobile app distribution competitors from competing with the Play Store on feature parity because user installable 3rd party mobile app stores cannot implement automatic upgrades, background installation of apps, or batch installs of apps like the Play Store can.
> The user could do it at their own risk.
There's also this issue. Currently on Android and macOS, if you try to run an app that wasn't downloaded from the Play Store, or notarized by Apple in the case of macOS, the systems prevent the user from running it, and show them scary warnings that they don't see if Google or Apple distributed the app to them. macOS in particular will treat un-notarized apps as if they're radioactive, even refusing to open the apps when double-clicking them. Users must know the magic ritual to open those apps, by disabling Gatekeeper and by using the right-click context menu to launch them.
The result is that apps supplied or authorized by Google and Apple run without a problem, but if the developer didn't pay the Google or Apple tax to distribute or authorize their apps, users are led to believe that those apps are either malicious or not working.
I struggle to imagine anything proprietary about Spotify fronted app. Same for Facebook, Uber, Slack etc. Obviously doesn’t work well for games.
I think the figure depends on estimate, some point it at closer to 80%. But either way it is the vast majority of their profit. And I think Apple should break the App Store into App And Game Store. The Games continue to charge a 30%, all integrated model. Along with much more curation. No more one min of game play and one minutes of ads.
Then Apple can spend time to think about the rest. The App Store and how to move forward.
Simply by doing so Apple would have protected 80-90% of their current App Store revenue.
App Store could also have a App Credit Model, where every new "App" would have 90 days payment terms. So any time a scam do go through App Store Apple could refund at least 90 days of credit. Any high refund rate of an App should also trigger alarm for additional review.
Basically returning to the original point of the App Store which is to help its Customers, and your business partners. Right now it is not doing that. It is only helping Apple's services revenue.