Apple-Developer Relations
marco.org
marco.org
Remember:
- They pretend with a straight face like it was somehow impossible to sell software or reach customers before their magical store made it happen.
- They pretend like the current “search” feature of the App Store is not a sad reduction of what it used to be (or what it could be if a trillion dollar company put any effort into it at all).
- They pretend to have all these problems hosting apps that are somehow solved by fees, while completely ignoring all the free apps that clearly tax that same infrastructure.
- They conveniently ignore the absurd amount of money they must be making from scams that are constantly top-grossing to add insult to injury.
I could go on but there are entire blogs written about this by now.
In the mobile world I think Apple did indeed lay the groundwork for a viable mobile marketplace.
And except for a few apps like Netflix, I'd happily pay 30% on top of what goes to the dev to avoid having to go through that again.
100% of the sticker price on apps could go to the app maker and then have the fees tacked on top. It would put stronger pressure on Apple to bring down the fees and consumers would actually know where their money is going. (I think the same should be required for credit card fees, fwiw.)
I never heard them claim it but speaking as a developer it's obvious that Apple was a driving force here. Sellable desktop software became obsolete due to piracy. Everything is server-based now. Mobile apps, particularly on iOS, is the only place where the general public consistently buys client software. Most people don't want cracked apps on their devices, and they want secure, privacy-focused phones. Apple has had that focus for years.
>Sellable desktop software became obsolete due to piracy.
Is unfounded. Games are sellable desktop software and they're doing just fine. What people want is fair prices and easy availability, which is the business model of every digital store since itunes.
Popular ones require an internet connection, and license authentication piggybacks on that. Blizzard and the original WoW's were among the first to do this successfully and the trend continues. Prior to that, people would either crack software and/or refuse remote connections for games that didn't require internet in order to avoid paying for and licensing them.
> What people want is fair prices and easy availability
And developers and investors want to be able to securely sell software. Apple's store provides ease of use along with a secure platform that users trust.
Steam is a marketplace that gives developers and investors a place to securely sell software and is easy for consumers to use and have fair prices. And it doesn't require users to give up all control of their PC to the manufacturer. Nor do all purchases have to flow through Valve.
And Steam as a game store predates the App Store by a few years too.
Music was completely different. The RIAA was suing pirates for thousands of dollars, and Apple provided both a store and great hardware for their product. People cheered them on for finally convincing the music industry to make content digitally available. It turns out all people wanted was easy access. And now for things that could be desktop software, we have subscriptions, memberships, etc.
I don't know anyone who's bought a PC/Mac game from anywhere that isn't an App Store in the past 5 years. Steam is a juggernaut, and so is Microsoft for that matter.
On Stream, the App Store, console stores, and other similar plaforms.
I currently run a freemium software business just fine for Windows and macOS. Just sign the code for Windows, notorize it on macOS and sell it through a service I use called Paddle that handles payment, international sales tax and licensing for about 6%.
This is almost certainly not true. If anything hurt selling desktop apps, it was Apples policies encouraging dirt cheap apps on the App Store that then led to customer expectations of the cost of apps dropping dramatically.
There were recent stories about how software shops like Panic are going back to selling only desktop apps and ending their iOS apps.
If anything, the technology to prevent piracy had only gotten significantly better by the time ios came out, and companies were doing just fine even before.
I agree - but apple fails on this point.
You should be able to protect your own phone. You should be able to install a firewall or further sandboxing, functions that the app store prohibit.
This is really simple:
- You should be able to find out what an app is doing - you should know what sites an app contacts - you should be able to block this - you should be able to block apple itself
This is so common sense yet not possible using apple's app store.
> - They pretend to have all these problems hosting apps that are somehow solved by fees, while completely ignoring all the free apps that clearly tax that same infrastructure.
Clearly they are not saying that each individual app has to bear its costs, obviously free apps are subsidised by paid apps. And they've never said they are "having problems". They are saying that they are providing a valuable service and want to get paid for that.
> - They conveniently ignore the absurd amount of money they must be making from scams that are constantly top-grossing to add insult to injury.
Do you seriously think that Apple wouldn't prefer a world without scam apps, and without revenues from scam apps. It's very obvious that the presence of scam apps hurts their brand, not to mention their main argument for the walled garden, much more than however many hundreds of million they earn from scam apps, if that.
Apple categorically does not want to make money from scams, even the most rabid Apple hater should acknowledge that.
If they were so concerned about getting paid, they could easily have an arrangement where companies like Facebook actually have to pay proportional to their use/benefit, aligning incentives. Instead, companies making billions per year pay just $99/year, while developers with a lot less are literally paying a lot more. Obviously, that affects the ability to compete. Worse, the App Store’s economy is so warped that pricing cannot actually reflect true development costs. If Apple wanted to cover infrastructure costs so badly, why would they allow the market to twist to the point where developers cannot reasonably charge higher prices (of which Apple gets a cut)?
> Do you seriously think that Apple wouldn't prefer a world without scam apps ...
One of the trial discoveries was an E-mail from Schiller showing that, while he seemed concerned about such apps reaching the top in 2013, eight YEARS ago, it is still happening (see Washington Post article from just today[1]). A trillion dollar company that is still making money from scams eight YEARS later is showing that it does NOT care about scams. In this case, actions matter, not just words. Scams are stealing money from people, and Apple pockets 30%.
Subsidised for what exactly?
I'm not suggesting that hosting is free, but even free apps make Apple $99/yr in developer license fees.
The cost of running the appstore, which are astronomical. Not just hosting and infrastructure, reviewing 10000+ apps a day is not free either.
> even free apps make Apple $99/yr in developer license fees
Hosting probably costs more than that if the app is popular. Not just the app, but potentially icloud, notifications etc. And 99 dollars is per developer, not per app.
I've never heard them claim that. The claim is that for an appliance like a phone - rather than a general purpose computer - device reliability trumps all, including the ability for the consumer to run arbitrary code on the device.
> Opening statement from Apple CEO Tim Cook
> When the App Store was created, the prevailing distribution options available to software developers at the time did not work well. Brick-and-mortar stores charged high fees and had limited reach. Physical media like CDs had to be shipped and were hard to update.
> From the beginning, the App Store was a revolutionary alternative.
> App Store developers set prices for their apps and never pay for “shelf space.”
[...]
> [Apple’s commissions] are vastly lower than the 50 to 70 percent that software developers paid to distribute their work before we launched the App Store.
This isn’t so much a call to action against Apple’s fees.
It’s pointing out something that I’ve felt building over the last couple of years out of Apple, which is an attitude of hubris, contempt, and a “taking for granted” of Apple’s developers.
The WWDC spiel of how much they value us has become trite and transparent.
They do produce some really nice tools and APIs. I can’t knock what they provide developers.
But often times the attitude beneath the veneer is a precursor of things to come, and it’s becoming noticeable that Apple’s culture seems to care less about its developers now than before.
You might say “sure, but so what? Developers are part of the means to an end of selling stuff”, and you’re not wrong.
But one of the things I loved about Apple circa 2009 was their respect for their user. It was palpable and magical, even.
Then, learning Cocoa and Interface Builder coming from Eclipse and Java, that same respect seemed to permeate their dev environment as well.
That seems lost. Following some of their tech leads on Twitter exposes some rather vitriolic feelings towards people in general.
Customers, be they users or devs, deserve respect. Apple used to be great at giving that respect. I fear it’s slipping away culturally, and is worth calling out.
I wish that were true. But Xcode today feels like a bloated, buggy mess. It crashes regularly, and sometimes it lags so badly writing swift code that it drops keystrokes. It feels like permanently beta software, where the team never has time to fix the bugs in the last version before they’re rushing the next version out the door.
Working in javascript and rust sets the bar for tooling and documentation much higher than Apple seems currently able to reach.
Sometimes The Apple Way was awesome, sometimes, meh.
I think a lot of developers discount the platform and think it's all their apps that bring in iOS uses. This was more true in the 90s on the Mac. The platform Apple provided was good but it was the third party software that really made the platform what it was.
There's a handful on Windows applications I remember today. It's only because I used them all the time. On the other hand there's a ton of Mac apps I remember candidly even though I used them far less frequently.
The iOS platform of 2021 is not the Mac platform of 1995 or even 2001. Apple moves more iOS devices in a quarter than they moved Macs for the entirety of the 90s. Third party apps a an important part of the iOS platform but they're not the primary driver of device sales.
Others might have a different perspective. For example, personally I use an iPhone because the following are my requirements in descending order of priority:
1. I now need a smartphone running one of the two major platforms.
2. I do not want anything to do with Google, ever.
3. I don't like a lot of what Apple do but they aren't as bad as Google.
I do use a small number of third party apps on my iPhone, because they are now a practical necessity to function as part of society without extreme restrictions. For example, I do not want to spend 20 minutes trying to navigate a phone system with bad voice recognition in a noisy environment just to pay for 30 minutes of parking, nor do I want to break the law, and that leaves exactly one other option in many of the places I visit: use one of the well-known parking apps.
Other than using those few essential apps when I have to, I mostly use my phone as it was when it came out of the box: for communications, as a poor-but-present web browsing device, and as a general tool with a useful camera, mic and light.
Now there's probably people that get away entirely with just the built in set of apps but I bet that's eroding day by day as more and more things require or are greatly simplified by apps, like banking, parking,eetc .
If it weren't for those, I think personally I would be quite happy to have more of a "dumbphone". A digital Swiss army knife is a very useful device. A poor imitation of general purpose computing is not, and something like a laptop or a desktop workstation is a more suitable tool in that case.
One of the things I really dislike about Apple is that they don't give clear statements of how long they will provide software updates and in particular security updates for on each product. For a device like a phone that is inherently connecting to external networks all the time, I regard those updates as essential. There also seem to be some vulnerabilities inherent in the design of older iPhones that have been addressed in newer models.
Another thing I really dislike about Apple is that iOS Safari lags behind everyone else in the industry when it comes to new features and supporting high performance pages. Regardless of why you believe this is the case, again an older device that either no longer gets updates or is unlikely to get many more is a liability.
Finally, while the camera on older iPhones might be half-decent by today's standards, I prefer one that is actually decent.
The only reason I bought a new iPhone was because that functionality stopped working reliably under iOS 14, and it effectively became and either/or proposition, which wasn't acceptable.
I put on a screen protector, gave it away to a friends kid, and I hear he still uses it.
Bill: Steve’s taste,
Steve: Microsoft’s ability to partner.
Apple is basically repeating a lot of their early mistakes. Some of those lessons Steve took it to heart when he returns to Apple from NeXT.
>This isn’t about the 30%, or the 15%,.......It’s about what Apple’s leadership thinks of us and our work.
There is also another point Marco didn't mention. It is not your customers either. Apple has been very clear in all of their communications. The user of iPhone, are Apple's customers. Even the third party Apps, they are accessing Apple's customers. And hence the relationship is very much not a partnership. Since Apple claims ownership on both the Apps and the customers. In the name of privacy and user experience.
>but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip.
Finally! Someone in the Apple community use the term double-dip! A term Apple has used against Qualcomm and sent a whole PR team to damage their reputation.
>But the leaders have already shown us who they really are, what they really think of us, and how little they value our work.
Unfortunately Tim Cook isn't the type of person who understand this. You should probably listen to his testimony to make your own judgement. But after the Epic Vs Apple trial it became very clear why Steve said Tim Cook isn't a product person. There are quite possibly zero product sensibility within Tim Cook. And I am not sure who is in-charge of the PR now either. Their message are delusional, hypocritical and reminds me a lot of Google in the 00s. I missed Katie Cotton's era.
[1] (76:30 ) https://on.wsj.com/2zWWqPU
Maybe if it had a self hosting dev environment like macs do but certainly not the way it is now.
CPT (cost for a single tap): $2.18
CPA (cost for a single download): $53.43
> App Tracking Transparency allows you to choose whether an app can track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites for the purposes of advertising or sharing with data brokers.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212025
Apple does not track you across other companies' apps and websites so I don't see how this is related. Facebook can still do personalized ads even if you click on "ask app not to track".
I understand the optics of this don't look good, but is it wrong to have multiple sources of revenue derived from the "way"?
1. what happens if supply chain dynamics and smartphone market competition negatively impact the hardware margins? What happens when consumer appetite for innovation in the phone stagnates and margins collapse? This would happen because Apple couldn't leverage new hw+sw features to differentiate itself.
2. How do we know the price of the hardware today isn't offset by services revenue? service revenue disappearing might increase the upfront cost of the phone for everyone.
In either of these scenarios, if Apple got to the point of _needing_ the app store fees to make the iPhone an attractive product to build and support, they couldn't start charging in the future. It needs to be set in advance and continue. They can always decrease the fees, but cannot make them go up. It would not be fair for developers to decide on making an app as a business venture only to find out in the future there is a 30% platform. This is something that has been known and transparent since day, yet developers continue to see the value of the platform.
Just looking at it from their position
However Marco’s argument is spot on. Apple is saying in Senate hearings that App developers are picking up crumbs from the App Store’s floor and should be grateful for what they get, while reassuring devs that they are what makes iPhone so great. Too many of Apples moves against devs on the store recently have bordered on the abusive. Yes they’re greatly trimmed charges for small dev shops, but the rules on that are awkward and are clearly about optics not substance.
To your questions.
1. Then Apple would have failed to offer a compelling product. There are other phones and app stores out there. If Apple can’t compete with Samsung on the quality of their phones, then they’re not the Apple I know and love anymore. It’s up to them to add value, not leech it off others. They do deserve fair recompense for their services, but that’s all.
2. We know very well what their hardware margins are. From their own filings, their phone hardware margins are over 35%.
It's clearly monopolistic - exploitative, monolithic, controlling.
The app store is the biggest source of friction standing between app developers and their customers.
Now - this wouldn't be a problem if Apple did the job they claim they do, improved search so it worked well, provided easy visibility for relevant apps, and threw out the scams and the trash.
That isn't what's happening. And that is a problem.
The security angle is a non-issue. Returning the app ecosystem to some semblance of functionality and fairness would is an orthogonal issue.
Apple can keep its walled garden. But it needs to start treating it like a valuable garden, not like a pile of burning trash that happens to generate huge amounts of free money.
When Apple says they rejected 1 million app submissions in 2020 and cancelled 470,000 developer accounts for fraud in the same period, do you think they’re lying?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/apple-rejected-nearly-1-mill...
If you want to legislate for consumer choice do so but can we stop pretending this is some battle for choice when it's literally about two behemoth corporations arguing over how they split our money.
We disagree about what constitutes "properly empowered".
People have always wished Apple would sell computers with this or that feature, this or that peripheral or option. That’s not how it works though. If they don’t sell a device that suits your needs, you have the same recourse the rest of us have.
But do you really think they would stop with specifications for side loading and App Store APIs, security profiles and associated OS services? How about specs for police and security services back doors, tracking and surveillance. They won’t be able to help themselves. And if the US can pass laws demanding these things, that creates a precedent for Russia, China, Saudi Arabia etc to follow suit.
Unless you want to some doggy NRE number into accounting. Apple's hardware are extremely profitable doesn't matter how you spin or slice it.
But, yes. Today's price are subsidise by their services revenue. The keyword here is price. Apple still gets to keep their same margin. Basically Apple shifted the cost of macOS, cloud and other software expenses from Hardware / Product cost to Services revenue. This was stated in their 2018 investor notes.
Again, Macro's point isn't just about 30%. There is an Anti-Competitive, Anti Trust play here. Of course those two words have difference definition to quite literally everyone, and especially different from a US and EU stand point.
So you’re arguing a straw man.
And if the service revenue was supporting hardware revenue Apple’s services wouldn’t largely be limited to Apple devices.
Besides, Apple is a public company and we can see how those revenues break out. Further, we can guess that even the relatively minuscule service income would largely disappear, if, for example, I could download apps at a 15% discount using a non Apple App Store to an iPhone and not have to jailbreak the iPhone.
Double dip has connotations that they are taking twice when they should only be taking once. I am simply saying that diverse revenue streams to capture value from a product is not wrong. Therefore, calling out "double dipping" behavior is unfair.
If Apple has to raise prices on their hardware to stay is business, that seems much fairer that using addicted mobile gamers to subsidize hardware for everyone else.
Also, my experience aligns with this too. I dont game on my phone and basically use default apps. I use the United app to book flights but could easily use the mobile website. Same with Twitter
Your purchasing habits are not indicative of the mainstream; further, the iPhone isn't priced based on cost to the cost to design or manufacture.
This is also entirely hypothetical because Apple has really good margins on their phone sales.
I also don't want the podcasts I subscribe to to have my email. Podcasters claim to want to own the customer and the flow. They only want this for upselling or cross-selling. No. I will pay you through apple-pay without revealing my email, and you can talk about promotions and things in the podcast but otherwise let's leave it at that.
I really hope they get broken up, with the App Store being extracted into a separate business.
Mobile web for more than 50% of the US users is also restricted to Apple's whims. They should be forced to allow competing browser engines(not just skins on Safari engine) on the platform. If Microsoft couldn't even bundle IE on Windows, it should be possible to make an alternative browser(along with engines) for iOS.
[EDIT] Incidentally, I see the fact that there's an angle for this being beneficial as a comment on the beyond-terrible state of privacy legislation and anti-trust enforcement in the US, same as the reasons that the App Store is a good thing (by which I mean, the worst things it forbids should just be illegal, and those restrictions enforced everywhere)
- Apple holds the gateway to both App Store and Web(through standard support). Having worked on web apps in the past, I truly admire the amazing distribution capability the web provides. I can spin up an obscure Linux distro and my web app works on it as long as a browser with good standard support is available. This gives platforms parity at some level and doesn't concentrate the power in the hands of a single platform. I would want most apps to be just web apps.
- If Apple's marketshare keeps on increasing like it has been, we might run into a situation where just one company controls your hardware, OS, services and even web. This is way more scary.
Chrome would be that platform, is what I'm saying. That would be your new OS, on every "platform". Devs & companies already skip testing on FF fairly often. Chrome good? Mobile Safari good? Ship it. You'll notice that IE/Edge used to be on that short list of must-test browsers, but it's just Chrome now. That's not going to get better for FF or WebKit-derived alternative browsers if mobile Safari gets banner-ad'd ("Google Docs is so much better in Chrome! Click here to download it now!" just like they did on desktop) into irrelevance. Google would get to dictate features, and the Web would just have them, and that's it, no step of trying to get anyone else on board (right now, "anyone else" is, for practical purposes, just Apple)
It seems like every additional sensor or OS feature that is exposed through the browser is used as an additional way to erode privacy and security.
Plus I like that there are incentives for developers to make native apps for anything non-trivial. In my experience well written web apps use too much bandwidth, battery, and memory compared to well written native apps.
While this sounds good in theory, what would likely happen is Safari would be replaced with Chrome.
I really don't want to have multiple browsers installed on my phone & swap between them because some web app works in one browser, but not another. Mobile browsing is already pretty shitty, I don't think fragmentation will make it any better.
Apple created the most anti-developer, anti-computing protection racket our industry has ever seen. They captured 50% of all American consumer computing and won't let you have a relationship with your customer, won't let you bill your customer without extracting obscene margin, make you jump through weird hoops, won't let you deploy at your cadence, and won't let you write software the way you want.
This shouldn't have been allowed to happen. The closed nature of the platform is abnormal and has been anticompetitive from the start, and the DOJ fell asleep at the wheel.
iPhone computing is general purpose computing and commerce. It's not video game toys.
All platforms like this should be open like Microsoft Windows.
Make no question. Apple's stance is about capturing every ingress to American consumers they possibly can so that they can tax it.
They're fleecing American companies.
DOJ has one action to take: Force Apple and Google to allow web-based installs of any software (including non-Safari web browsers!) and prevent both companies from running any form of required payment gateway.
Preinstalling and pushing Apple Music / iCloud (not to mention giving it private entitlements the competitors can't use) is not related to the iOS security model by itself.
There's also no reason that the curator of your app store has to be the same entity that sold you your hardware - there are plenty of even more trustworthy organizations and people that could create curated stores which might be even more relevant than AppStore haphazard and inconsistent curation.
Imagine if AppStore could just be a framework where you can choose curators you trust more than a Californian megacorp.
Apple loves to mix this too - after all, their marketing is spending a lot of money persuading it that those two are related. They're not. Even currently, AppStore is not without malware, so they have failed at that goal and us users have paid too great of a price by distortion of no.1 tenement that makes capitalism a functioning and decent system to live in: competition.
It's like an abused wife being afraid to run away from her husband because she thinks he's the only one that can protect her.
But now 10 years in it is still all or nothing. Either the OS allows all apps to auto-upgrade, or you do it yourself. There is no way to "remove" an app from the update list if you want to keep an old version. There is no way to ever go back to an old version if you accidentally upgrade. Backing up an old version of an app requires a Mac to extract the binary. Each app already has it's own settings screen, why not add an "auto-update" toggle to each (And by default it gets your system-wide setting.)
And from the developer side - no way to have paid upgrades, unless you release the "new" version as a separate app with a bundle discount alongside the old version.
So instead you get either more apps moving to subscriptions, or more abandoned apps because the developer can't support free updates.
The OS already does this for you, no software distribution monopoly (App Store) needed.
This idea that an App Store is the only path to security is FUD. If allowing 3rd party app distribution on iOS actually did allow some sort of destruction of iOS user's privacy and security, then iOS is clearly garbage.
We should not err on the side of creating a locked down Fisher Price playpen for consumers. Not at the expense of our freedoms and the rest of our industry. Think about how much damage this has done to innovation because costs are redirected to Apple's coffers rather than putting more engineers behind novel ideas.
Apple is sitting on mountains -- a continental shelf -- of opportunity cost. What a waste.
Despite selling less than 20% [1] of smartphones across the world, its App Store accounts for over 64% [2] of app revenue. Apple and its developers somehow built an App Store that people are willing to spend more money on.
If it's purely thanks to developers, why isn't there more revenue on Google's Play Store?
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
[2] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-q1-20...
Most of the sales of Android phones are at a lower price bracket which might indicate the purchasing power of customers, so they would naturally have less purchasing power than ones on iOS. People with more purchasing power would spend more on even apps and this reflects in the App Store revenue.
There are certainly people who buy Android flagships because they prefer the platform/device but this might not be true for lower end Android phones. iPhone has an aspirational value in many parts of the world.
Those users will also be more likely to spend on apps and accessories in order to justify or supplement the much bigger phone purchase. Someone who's got the same amount of expendable income but chooses a cheap android for frugality is also more likely to be frugal in extraneous purchases like apps, especially when free but slightly inconvenient alternatives are available. At the end of the day, focus on the customers not the app platforms.
All given the size of the Chinese market, their love of mobile games, and the massive portion of App Store revenue games represent.
That's not to say the App Store isn't more profitable than the Play Store, per user, just in the US, but its a closer margin here, and I think the massive disparity on a global scale has to signal that something else is going on
(in addition to the obvious: Apple doesn't make good cheap phones, just not in their DNA, but Android manufacturers do, so lower income individuals will bias toward Android phones, and these people would spend less in the associated application stores)
Source: I worked on an app with millions of paid subscribers.
As a result iPhones have 50% of the smartphone market in the US, and Americans have the highest disposable income per capita of any large country (>20 million people).
iPhones tend to have much smaller market shares outside of the US. In some places they're maybe around 30% but generally they're much, much lower.
It's a function of wealth, not first mover advantage. Well off people choose iPhones. That should tell you something.
And to the OP's number, Apple has ~25% market share. Not 20%. Those numbers are shipments, not usage. which is for the 100th times meaningless in nearly all topics.
All the data we have on global/domestic smartphone shipments, active users, monthly actives, daily actives, dollars spent, ruples spent, per app category, minus games, fiscal/calendar quarterly, it all comes from these dodgy "Global Insights" app consulting firms. You head to Google and search "App Store Quarterly Revenue" and you find a different Statista or BusinessOfApps or whatever site each quarter, all their data just linear extrapolations from active pings from trackers they pay apps to install which are increasingly getting blocked by OS security controls. Google and Apple almost never share explicit data (this Epic trial has been a nice departure from that, to be fair); if they share anything, its an overtly generalized market segment like "Services", which of course they're using to inflate the apparent revenue of bad business divisions they want to look good by combining them with the actually good divisions (same reason why Microsoft put Azure in the same shareholder-reported category as Office early on; of course, nowadays, its amazing on its own).
And then, re-read that last paragraph and realize I said "Google & Apple" and you didn't even blink. Sure, Google & Apple, that's who we're talking about. No; we're talking about Android & iOS. Android; that operating system that has unlocked computing for the entire world, including vast swaths of people who can barely afford plumbing and electricity, that's side-loaded and hacked to the ends of the earth, that's startlingly popular and preloaded with hardware-specific storefronts in countries that, traditionally, don't like sharing data with the west.
Sure, "your" app was more profitable per-install on iOS than Android. An excellent, informative experiment. The assertion is that iOS has "special sauce" that makes consumers money-drunk, and they spend more. Did we control for income disparity? Surprise; No. Did we aggregate a broad swath of consumer application categories, including (especially) gaming, as gaming is by-far the largest source of consumer application spending, globally? Surprise; No.
How's this sound: People spend a shit-ton of money in apps. This fact, alone, is reason enough that letting a single company gatekeep the experience for any significant number of people is unacceptable. Justifying Apple's monopoly by saying they're better at making consumers money-drunk is psychotic.
Most of my Data were deduced /inferred from Official Apple and Google, Mobile Carrier, Government Numbers. For more numbers Benedict Evans slides has many more details.
Well, we can argue until we go blue about how maybe he's lying, or twisting words, or how the App Store alone represents a business larger than many Fortune 500 companies and its irresponsible/incompetent of them to not track it. Reality is probably a little of all of the above. But it speaks to how insane these conversations are; magical incantations of deductions and inferences to arrive at seemingly significant percentages and magnitudes which have no basis in reality.
Here's a statement I'll agree with: "An application distributed on iOS is likely to return higher per-install revenue than the same application distributed on Android." But if you read that, and believe for a second that it should inform some broader policy or even application development decision making, then we're on completely different pages.
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-05-19-apple-exec...
The more correct analogy is a McDonald's franchise that actively uses every method at their disposal to prevent other fast food restaurants from opening near where you live.
Take a look at the history of Apple's efforts to block jailbreaking in combination with the AppStore rules that disallow 3rd party app stores. It is quite clear that Apple has use multiple methods to successfully fighr off the arisal of any alternative stores.
Apple openly admits to doing this, it really isn't a controversial claim.
McDonald’s will probably, however, make no effort to prevent you from selling lemonade from your driveway, or even prevent Coca-Cola (or Coca-Cola’s direct competitors) from selling soda at McDonald’s direct competitors. (If they did do this, I would agree that it’s anti-competitive behavior that ought to be opposed.)
If Apple wanted to take on development risk for all of the apps on the app store by paying for all that developer time, then we'd be talking about something that is sorta kinda not really the same thing.
I certainly did not say it was. Your whole comment reads like you are replying to someone else.
The best I can tell, you agree that Apple is engaged in anti-competive behavior by preventing developers from selling "lemonade" in other stores (because they prevent those stores from existing.) Not only that, but users aren't even allowed to buy "lemonade" in their own driveway, they are forced to go buy "lemonade" through Apple.
The App Store is a 'store' in this case (it's in the name) and is the only store where you can buy items for your Apple home.
Imagine if Walmart sold homes and you could only put items in it that were bought at Walmart.
I’m not sure why you introduced homes to the analogy. That’s a very different scenario.
In what way is a home that you fill with stuff you bought in a store different from a computer that you fill with stuff you bought in a store?
The users buy the phone, not Apple. It's amazing this is even contraversial.
It's really not a complex idea, hopefully that's enough for you.
Kinda, except that video game consoles, unlike iPhones, usually allow you to play physical media that you can buy from any source (so consoles aren't quite as bad.)
How far this extends into the current day is up for debate, and how much rent keeping Apple should be allowed to do, sure, but being dismissive of the instrumental role Apple played in the past and to this day is turning a blind eye.
Umm.. this is some serious revision of the history.
- People did pay for apps. I along with plenty of other devs happily paid for Sublime Text while not going through an app store.
- There have been app stores that predate 'iOS App Store' like the Steam store, people paid for apps in it as well. It is infact cross platform and competes with other app stores.
Apple did not invent app distribution or the concept of paid apps.
Basically, Apple is a wealthy neighborhood. If you sell nice bags or expensive cars, you want to be near the people who can afford them. So you need to rent store space in the wealthy neighborhood. Where rent is higher than in the outskirts.
Sure you could try to sell your goods in the outskirts (the Play Store) but you won’t sell as much.
To bring it back to non-metaphors. Apple is the only maker of premium phones. Therefor people who are willing to spend on apps are very often iPhone users. So if you want to reach these people and their money you need to be on the App Store. Apple knows this, and charges developers accordingly for the privilege.
So by your own admission, Apple has a monopoly on the premium market, and is using that power to broker their audience for a premium fee to developers who simply want to sell their code to someone who's willing to pay for it?
That is one of the most dystopian arguments I've ever heard, bravo.
I’m not seeing how Apple’s behavior is any different than that of other players who have a stronghold in their markets though?
It’s exactly the same with $10.000 rents in San Francisco or super expensive country clubs where you can mingle/deal with fellow rich people: it’s expensive to get access to a scarce resource.
Apple has the scarce resource (people willing to pay for apps) so they charge you a lot of money to access it (30% of your revenue).
And it is also simply untrue that Apple is the only premium handset maker- plenty of Chinese competition in China and Samsung elsewhere.
It is dominant in the segment but it is at best part of a duopoly.
But if I could, I would terminate my iOS appstore presence in a heartbeat.
This is how different Apple and MS make me feel as a developer. Google falls somewhere in between
Everything these companies do is geared towards making us develop (often for free) the features their users want on their devices in a way that their users increase their appreciation for them, not for us. Youtube "developers" at least get paid for their success. We just get made forced to comply. They also won't doubt to use you as a pawn in their war against other big tech (i.e. mandatory requirement to offer Apple Sign in if you want to offer Google/FB Sign in).
And yes, Apple dropping the annual fee would be a nice start
Be careful what you wish for. MS and Apple constantly build new OS features that 'borrow' ideas from third-party developers.
> And yes, Apple dropping the annual fee would be a nice start
They already dropped the fee to 15%. Well unless you make more than 1 m a year.
It sucks that Apple’s App Store restrictions cause so many problems for the legit app developers, but I actually wish Apple was significantly more restrictive with what makes it into the App Store. Maybe this is a crazy opinion since I’m a programmer myself, but I would honestly prefer to use an iOS ecosystem with no App Store that allows self-serve third-party app distribution than to use an iOS ecosystem that allows unrestricted third-party software.
Does anyone have any insight into the major differences between native and web app in 2021?
The biggest disparity between webapp and native used to be Notifications - but with Twilio, it appears trivial to make an arguably better notifications user flow through SMS and direct link to user content.
For the rest of the differences, it feels like much of the benefit Apple brings to the table (view management, security, continuity between devices, distribution, ...), does appear to carry a premium when placed in comparison to building a monolith web app.
Oh god please no.
I can turn off app-level notifications. I don't want to have to deal with app-level texts instead.
Ha!! See, I think SMS notifications are still stellar! Because right when the offender steps in, in the height of righteous anger, you can yell (text) "STOP" and by law it must bug off!!
Not to mention the cool new commands that could emerge like, "give me a week" or other conversational ways to interact with your notifications on a person level... which to me, is what it was all about in the first place!
Is that the law everywhere in the world?
> Not to mention the cool new (…) conversational ways to interact with your notifications
Which you could achieve by allowing replies from within the notification itself, like Messages on macOS.
And SMSs cost money. It doesn’t matter how cool your conversational interactions are, no one would be happy being charged for international text messages to respond to a bot, especially when the norm today is automated assistants barely understand what you mean.
Running games as web apps is technically possible, but performance tend to be an issue, even for simple 2D games.
I don't think Apple is embracing Webassembly enough to facilitate this transition, this is not their best interest.
Write once, run everywhere has a cost, and one that is largely borne by users.
Twilio or other SMS based services aren’t a solution as in lots of countries they still cost $0.10 per 160 characters, require an active SIM card and cannot be opened into an app.
Maybe something can be done with websockets but that will also require platform support to improve battery life and allow web apps to run in the background.
No general insight, but Telegram has two web apps that try to emulate the native app [1]. They do work fairly well but are definitely glitchier than the native app (or any native chat app).
> For the rest of the differences, it feels like much of the benefit Apple brings to the table (view management, security, continuity between devices, distribution, ...), does appear to carry a premium when placed in comparison to building a monolith web app.
That might be true, but the value free apps like WhatsApp bring to the iPhone is unmeasurable and WhatsApp pays exactly 100$ a year to Apple for access to all the tooling.
[1]: https://telegram.org/blog/payments-2-0-scheduled-voice-chats...
If you want to build a competitive game engine or do any sort of machine learning on device then it has to be native.
It's cross-platform VM-enabled bytecode? Approaching native performance very closely is the best plausible outcome. Measured on all metrics and not just pure number-crunching (start-up time generally, "cold" start-up, memory use, memory use over time, et c., all in real-world applications and not bespoke benchmarking programs) it's unlikely it'll even get very close. Close enough? Maybe, but I'm skeptical that there is such a (realistic) achievable state as "close enough" on a platform that runs on a small battery. Look at Android's decades of playing catch-up on performance & power use, for instance.
[EDIT] Down-voters, please comment: do first-year CS principles and direct observation of existing, long-lived, real-world cross-platform VM systems (the JVM, for example) somehow not apply to WebAssembly?
This is what Flash was already capable of doing in 2011 with CrossBridge, their C++ compiler stack.
https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/
"Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player - Unreal Tournament 3"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y
Here we are 10 years later with WebAssembly still mostly stuck at MVP 1.0, browsers that bork WebGL experience thanks blacklisting, which no matter what will never go beyond OpenGL ES 3.0.
Even if WebGPU gets released tomorrow, I would like to point out that WebGL 2.0 was released in 2017 and still isn't available across all browsers.
Then there are all other native capabilities that I glanced over.
Then why was the Android Flash experience so bad that it got quickly killed off?
There was a time where Adobe could have shown a performant, stable version of mobile Flash, and Apple would have had to find a way to accept it. But it never got there, on any mobile OS.
While everyone was celebrating iOS victory over Flash, they were playing Flash games on iOS, AOT compiled to native code without knowing it.
Adobe eventually let it go thanks to the competition of Cocos, Unreal and Unity.
On what axes are you measuring performance? I care about how quickly and smoothly something runs, but also how much battery, memory, and bandwidth it consumes.
Honestly, if you believe that Apple ever planned for iPhone to be web only you've got to buy this bridge from me. No kidding.
Apple used the "web only apps" angle as a stopgap until their SDK was ready. Then they did everything they could to ensure that web apps ran like crap without making it too obvious.
That's a go ahead email. That's not an email showing the conception of the idea.
We already had app stores on phones before this. You think they didn't come up with the idea until that email? It's perhaps the most obvious idea in the world.
Sorry, y'all are just wrong. This email is evidence that its all been discussed many times before the "go ahead".
Apple told developers that webapps were the solution. They didn’t give any public indication that this would change. Now, one could argue that this was just cover while they got the native SDK ready, but that Bertrand Serlet email from the other thread was the point at which they even officially decided to have a native SDK at all (months after telling devs to write webapps).
I think the real issue is with the phrase “Apple planned”, because Apple is not one person, and the people disagree on “the plan”. We mythologize them sometimes as an all-planning “the Vatican thinks in centuries” kind of organization. But as emails like that one and others show, there are often legitimate arguments within Apple. In this case, some folks[0]were arguing that native apps would be too much of a security nightmare to be worth it, and that anything that needed to be native could just be built by Apple themselves.
So in conclusion: “Apple” planned nothing, some people at Apple had clear plans to push through a native SDK from day zero, and some people at Apple spent months being deadset that that would never happen.
[0] I’m too lazy to look up these sources right now, check out Melton and Ganatra’s multi-part interview on the Debug podcast.
Obviously, This is something that has been discussed over and over and over since they started planning the iPhone. I've watched Apple work, they don't hash out what their products are going to do through emails.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The idea had clearly occurred to them way before any of these emails that you're referencing.
Users don’t choose an app store based on how good the processor or download is, or even on discovery, but on trust. Some portion of this fee, arguably much of it, is a friction and trust gap between one experience and the experiences they have elsewhere.
Just as someone doesn’t choose their hospital based on patient outcomes but patient experience, normals buy from the app store because they believe it’s easy and pro user, while their experience buying software directly elsewhere has felt cumbersome or even user hostile.
All that said, I 100% agree that if people buy your app because of who you are, instead of what the app is, Apple’s app store model is not set up for you.
Yes. For instance if people could install the Steam store on their phones, gamers would do so in droves and Apple don’t want people to be given that choice.
That would cut into their ability to tax and control all commerce happening on the user’s device, which to be clear, is not Apple’s property.
The monopolistic AppStore we’re forced to use is a BS arrangement and Apple is just afraid of what real competition would bring.
Are droves doing that? (I am.)
> normals buy from the app store because they believe it’s easy and pro user
This is iOS, people don't choose an app store at all. People buy from the Apple App Store because there's literally no alternative that isn't incredibly convoluted and well beyond all but technical users.
Blast from a year's past:
Apple can argue that their App Store should be the only way to sell apps in Apple phones because security and other stuff. But they can't take huge markup unless they are actually spending most of it into security and providing App Store (they are not).
If they drop their cut into 5% or so, and they would 3% of that running App Store, it's still handsome 40% gross margin and regulators would leave them be.
It sucks that they simultaneously have (1) such restrictive policies on what you can do with your device and (2) a well-designed hardware and software ecosystem that serves as a foundation that's hard to move away from.
However, what's stopping others from coming out with a better, less restrictive alternative that benefits from the publicly visible work and lessons that Apple has done/taught us to get us to the great products we have today?
This would be a lot of work. It would require lots of investment of resources. But there's nothing explicitly stopping anyone else from doing this. With global hardware and software advances, and the mobile ecosystem becoming more mature and less changing, the technical moat between only Apple being able to make a good phone vs others doing the same is decreasing.
If Apple's behavior is unacceptable, we should move on to an alternative even if we have to create one to do so. An analogy of a relationship seems fitting. At the start of the relationship, it was all love, roses and fun dates. Now, years into the relationship, we are seeing that Apple is actually kind of a control freak and maybe not so good for us after all. Instead of futilely fighting with someone who won't change after so many fights, maybe we should use the free market to move on to a healthier relationship. There is no gun to our head forcing us to stay with Apple.
I personally dislike the fact that we aren't free to do what we want on our iPhones. But instead of being obsessed with Apple, maybe we should let Apple be Apple, and appreciate what they have contributed to the world. And then create the change in the world that we would like to see.
They all fell down on the lack of apps.
If your phone doesn't have apps for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp, LINE, tens of thousands of banks across the globe, credit cards, transit cards, various government ID schemes (try booking your vaccine in Sweden without an iPhone/Android) etc etc you'll never make it.
You have to start somewhere. If there were a good alternative, then adoption of it would drive gradual availability of these apps.
Look at the desktop - we have Windows and Mac (and for a while it looked like we'd lose the Mac), Linux is still a desktop also-ran.
Look at the web - it took Microsoft completely neglecting IE for 5 years before there was any momentum at all towards other browsers. And now we're back to web developers mostly neglecting Firefox and praying for the day they can drop Safari support so we're 100% Chrome.
Linux never became mainstream because of how poor the user experience was, not necessarily because there’s only room for 2 at the top. Even technically experienced people don’t want to muck around with drivers and deep-dive into configuration. Since few used linux, few apps were written for it.
I think there is usually room for new players, whether they have to usurp an existing one or have compatibility with others to do it.
Cook is a bean counter and should be restricted to CFO.
1. Apps, as a rule, absolutely add value to the iOS ecosystem, and are a necessity.
2. But any single specific application doesn't.
iOS needs podcasting apps, but if Overcast disappeared, something else would just take its place. "Developers" as a whole are important for Apple to keep happy, but no specific developer matters all that much to them.
You can ignore everything else from this post. The developer gripes with the App Store have always been a contractual dispute between businesses over terms. Marco would like Apple to have the Mac business model apply to the iPhone. He wants to be able to use the SDK and tools for free (or for the nominal developer program annual fee).
This is understandable from a business perspective; everyone wants lower costs and higher profits. But it's certainly not in Apple's customers' interests for their business model to change to accommodate developers.
I’ll bite. Why not?
Party 1: Apple's store hurts consumers and contributes to making their devices not even real computers, just consumption devices, not for creation! It's a shame and they should be broken up or made to allow other app stores. It's plainly anti-competitive, and anti-choice.
Party 2: Hi, I'm a consumer, and I like that they force 3rd parties not to be shitty. I don't really care how that hurts 3rd parties, as long as Apple's big enough that the 3rd parties can't afford to turn down that slice of the pie so they keep providing me the apps I want. Also I do work & creation on iOS devices, often. So. (here party 2 may or may not concede that it is anti-competitive and they simply don't care since it happens to be benefiting them, and may or may not argue that it's not anti-choice, since without Apple's model the kinds of app store ecosystem model the consumer can choose would be reduced by one)
Party 1: 3rd party stores wouldn't hurt you, you could just not use the apps that move to those if you don't like what they're able to do on the other stores. (this is usually where insults to Party 2's intelligence are placed, and in fact this post is often mostly that, and probably also push-back on allowing other stores representing a reduction of choice, if Party 2 chose to advance that line in the previous post)
Party 2: But... right now I have all the apps I want, and none of them can do things I don't like because Apple doesn't let them. How's it better to replace this situation with multiple app stores, so I might have to choose between privacy and using the apps I want? That seems strictly worse for me. (if the which-kind-of-choice-matters argument is in play, an argument that the ecosystem of Apple's store will be harmed by adding more stores, so in fact Party 2's preferred choice of the current, non-so-harmed App Store ecosystem will be removed by adding more, may be employed)
From here things mostly just go in circles and hypotheticals and examples from Android's Play store, which probably won't be particularly relevant to the much-more-restricted Apple App Store and any hypothetical changes to its position given 3rd party app stores.
This also happens to be more environmentally sustainable, so it's not in society's broader interest for Apple to change their business model.
A world in which Apple only earns profits from hardware sales removes those incentives. Not only would they try to get you to upgrade more often, they'd also invest less R&D in the hardware as well. Instead of doing the iPhone X redesign, with its higher component costs, they'd try to milk the iPhone 6 design for as long as possible.
- banding together and suing Apple together
- still writing apps for Apple and giving them money?
Aren't iPhones about 20% of the smartphone market? Wouldn't you make more money from the Google Store or are they extorting the same rates?
Apple captured 50% of the American economy. You have no choice. This is why the DOJ must act to bring an end to these anticompetitive behaviors.
In the US, this is further narrowed to include "harm to the consumer". For example: increased prices or deception. Under this guideline, Apple's on shaky ground.
You can't get them anymore because Apple has them locked up.
It doesn't matter if you're a video game or a dating app or a movie marketplace. You have to pay the Piper.
I don't think this is true. It may be an unfortunate end. I'm actually intending to move to a flip phone since...
Clearly a strong argument...
iOS was initially completely closed, for bullshit reasons.
Helping developers is never a priority, and it is easy to feel when you try to build something running on their products.
This is unfortunate and I think it is highly irrational.
> similar to Palm Pre and WebOS.
not quite. webOS was more than 'tech based applets'. webOS tried to leverage HTML and CSS as the programming language for native apps much like Android leveraged Java. It was not the same philosophy as iPhone OS 1.0
Looking at my iPhone I see no 3rd party apps. I use safari to access websites and eschew any service that wants me to "use our app" and doesn't have a web version.
Because, as a musician - I should just use the Web App version of GarageBand, right?
Because I'm sure the Web App version of GarageBand will run circles around the native version, right? :P And it'll have all the support for things like Audio Bus, USB Midi support, and USB Audio card I/O - of course. And that'll all be totally secure, too!
...
(GarageBand adds immense and completely irreplaceable value for iOS for me...it's actually the reason I use iOS/iPadOS as I can import those creations into Logic Pro on my Mac and that ease of workflow is absolutely impossible to reproduce anywhere else. I'd pay $200 for GarageBand if it wasn't shockingly free, minus the requirement to stick with iOS/iPadOS.)
Plus - who could forget about that fantastic Web-only version of ProCreate, for all the millions of hobbyist and professional designers who buy an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for - y'know - art.
I love using the Apple Pencil to manipulate extremely high-resolution art in the browser - it never crashes and it's so much more responsive than a native app!
...
(Obviously there is not - nor ever will there be - a Web version of ProCreate. Or GarageBand. And the replacements will certainly not perform better or support awesome things like AudioBus.)
Gotta love how well Garageband, ProCreate; and all those native video games hundreds of millions of people like to play and use work in a browser on iOS - you're right - better scrap the App Store altogether!
Clearly nobody installs apps and there are no potential use cases for tens of or hundreds of millions of users to do so.
...okay, I'm done. :P
Web apps certainly could have this if Apple wanted them to. Works perfectly find on computers and Android devices.
>Obviously there is not - nor ever will there be - a Web version of ProCreate. Or GarageBand
There absolutely could be, just needs a talented team. Figma is a web app and runs circles around any native app in the design space, nothing too magical going on in ProCreate or Garageband that couldn't be done on the web with a talented team and an OS that didn't intentionally limit it's power.
iPad? Oh hell no. I'd not bother with one, at all, without third-party apps. With them it's amazing, probably my single favorite computer platform for anything that's not programming. Without them it's just a huge, worse (there's not even a calculator!) iPhone.
What I care about is getting charged for a developer licence that was never delivered.
Needing a licence to use hardware I paid money for. Without the licence I cannot put apps on the iPad I own connected to the Mac I own, apps I write on said Mac.
Buggy developer tools that they will not fix. Xcode (and its Swift ecosystem) work well for a small project, really great. Until you realise that the debugger is lying about the state of your variables.
Get to 100,000+ lines of code (or whatever measure of size you like, big) Xcode stops working, the tools to navigate your code start getting flaky, the editor with its slick features gets very slow....
And the debugger: It tells lies - but the worst, the very worst, is that in Swift, on iOs comparing a optional to `nil` is unreliable. No shit, this is needed:
if foo == nil { if let _ = nil { // foo is not really nil
About 1% of nil comparisons fail...
A trillion dollar company built off the work of developers and the tools are like this? They take money for access?
Times like this I am glad I am on a salary...
What are you actually trying to do? "if let _ = nil" makes no sense and doesn't compile.
if the_variable_that_might_be_nil == nil {
if let _ = the_variable_that_might_be_nil
// Nope not really nil
The Swift ecosystem has important bugs in some corner cases.
Fact.
If the inner block is actually called, that's an extremely serious bug. I know people in the Swift core team, can you share a code sample with me the exposes the bug and I will bring it up?
This is my point: The flagship development system of the most valuable company in the world is buggy. It is one example, but I have several examples of flaws like this.