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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

Developers can use their own payment systems, and MS take nothing. That's a bit of a kick in the teeth to Apple.

Absolutely. Microsoft doesn't have a large existing Windows Store business to protect, so why not make Apple's life harder?

I think it's also the solution that best meets the reality of apps in 2021. Big third-party devs like Netflix and Amazon will opt out of in-app purchase entirely before giving a cut to the platform owner. May as well let them use their own payment system so users get a better experience than signing up on the web.

> Microsoft doesn't have a large existing Windows Store business to protect,

This is how you GET a large existing Windows Store business.

It's not like Microsoft hasn't tried very hard in the last 10 years to emulate the iOS business model, but I guess Windows users don't like walled gardens.

But they messed up so bad with the Windows store. It is beyond belief:

- By including Candy Crush and other bloatware in the store, the store started with a bad reputation already.

- By allowing manufacturers to define apps you cannot uninstall via the store, this infuriated any power user.

- By no allowing to delete any items from your "purchase history" you could never try out any free apps without them contaminating your history. They did so to prevent people from losing their purchases, but this was just stupid with free apps.

- Discovery in the store was a joke. Search results showed apps with less than 100 installs. Descriptions and screenshots of apps are often so bad that there is no way to figure out what an app does.

- Not finding a way to offer legacy apps in the store was such a fail, it is incomprehensible. It is 2021 and end users still have to download applications from CNet and Sourceforge. A security nightmare. Don't get me started on UWP and the UIs from hell caused by it.

Finally, there is absolutely no reason that the Windows store couldn't have been what Steam is now. Just MS incompetence in their vision of where to start.

-- Edit:

It seems legacy apps are coming to the store with Windows 11. Yeah! Let's see how they mess up this time.

I don't think it helps that MS have been trying to build new UI and app development frameworks for the past several years, each one with varying capabilities. I've lost track, I think UWP is the latest one but it's not UWP any more, or something?

It just seems harder to build and sell software that has that same quality look-and-feel that many MacOS apps have.

I just wonder what they'd be capable of if they had a separate OS that didn't have to concern itself with backwards compatibility. It'd be a monumental undertaking to do all that from scratch, not really worth it from a business standpoint, but it'd be interesting to see what they'd come up with if they started off with Linux.

I think this is similar on Mac. Anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses the Mac App Store to install apps. Everyone I know just downloads the .dmg from whatever website.

It is such a welcome thing. Big platforms like Netflix, Spotify don't owe any revenue share to Apple, Microsoft or others. They made their own brand and have been responsible for their own success.

These big OS/device companies in fact compete with them with unfair advantages like pre installed apps, prominent product placement on AppStore and closed/early integrations.

Alright. So if Netflix wants their app to be hosted and indexed by the App Store, Apple should just provide the costs related to that because of charity? The bandwidth alone I imagine carries a pretty hefty price for an app like Netflix. By your logic, this should all be given free - which actually is negative profit for Apple .. why? Would you create an App Store, dedicate resources on moderation and app curation, as well as infrastructure, and then just give it away free? Would your stakeholders still back you if you did that?

I never understand this line of logic, and the idea that for-profit entities somehow _should_ do lots of charity.

You could give Devs two options

A) Give me X% of revenue, and I will give you free hosting of your app, and some form of promotion.

B) No commission, but you host your own binaries. To be a valid installable app, you need to give me a hash of the binary valid to install, that I have approved before. Each audit of binaries cost X. No promotion for free in the app store.

The main problem with Option B is the potential for bad/inconsistent app download experiences. Many companies may cheap out on binary hosting and have very slow or broken downloads (especially in certain countries), which results in a kind of random "never know if this will work well" patchy UX for iOS/Android users at large.

This isn't an insurmountable problem of course. Perhaps Apple/Google could charge fixed bandwidth rates and host it themselves, or they could contractually set SLA requirements that could be verified regularly with an uptime service.

> The bandwidth alone I imagine carries a pretty hefty price for an app like Netflix.

Apple doesn't pay for Netflix's server costs. They just host the app, there are ways to mitigate the cost of hosting the app as the other reply also mentions.

> Would you create an App Store, dedicate resources on moderation and app curation, as well as infrastructure, and then just give it away free?

Apple is not doing Netlfix any favour here, people signed up for Netflix way before iOS existed. Netflix was a brand in itself before iPhone was.

Also, let us not pretend that the success of iOS has nothing to do with the likes of Netflix, Spotify, YouTube etc. providing first class apps for the platform. Windows Phone died because of app situation despite having a fresh OS with compelling devices.

Apple has more than 40% net margins on iPhone. If they can bundle the cost of their Maps effort with iPhone, even App Store can be taken from that amount. 30% from a business just for gatekeeping is just disgusting and abuse of the duopoly situation we are in.

Thank You for your claim explanation without any rage.

>If they can bundle the cost of their Maps effort with iPhone.....

And just want to add. Apple currently put around ~$3B / year for all of their OS, iCloud, Siri and Map development which are already included in the Net Margin calculation.

Except for, twist, if you are an Android developer. Amazon takes it's 20% cut no doubt, and to avoid the cut you need to make a native Windows app. Which actually isn't an awful incentive structure, but it's not 0% in the Store across the board.

Also it doesn't count if you make Xbox games. Microsoft still takes a cut there.

So it's 0% if it's a native Windows app and it isn't an Xbox Game. So let's just say Epic Games will still not be satisfied with this.

I'd be surprised if they somehow limited side-loading apks on a PC.

Did something change?

(Windows users/developers have always been able to use various distribution systems... likewise for macOS.

I might be wrong (not a developer), but I thought within the official stores, in-app purchases were subject to 30%, as standard, going to the platform provider. At least that's what I understand with regard to Apple and Google stores.

You can install software on Windows and MacOS outside of the app stores jfyi

I mean, you can also do that on Android; in fact Epic was doing that for quite a while with fortnite.

Yes, inarguably true, my omission wasn't implying otherwise.

But now you can have your Windows Store presence and still keep all your money.

Of course that's easy to offer while nobody uses the Windows Store, but e.g. on MacOS that would be quite a big deal.

But more and more applications can only be installed through the app stores on those platforms. That's the issue.

I see now… the Microsoft store will let publishers collect payments in alternative ways.

That’s well and good, but I don’t see that as a big deal because the microsoft app store isn’t that important.

The problem with the Apple ios app store isn’t that they have a specific, restricted payments mechanism. It’s that it’s the only practical way for developers to distribute native software to iOS devices.

I think this is important to Microsoft, and actually quite a smart move. By letting other people use the Microsoft/Windows Store app natively built into windows, with their own billing infrastructure, they basically kill off any reason to have other applications for buying/installing software.

Imagine if Steam allowed Blizzard/Activision/EA to sell their games on the Steam store, and as long as they pay their own hosting/billing infrastructure costs, Valve takes no cut?

I think that would immediately kill the need for EA/Ubisoft/Blizzard/etc. to ever need their own applications to sell software.

They still get value from their apps, those won't go away.

The change is that their current Windows Store is a tumbleweed wasteland with astonishingly little uptake, so Microsoft has offered some partners (I presume it's a subset or it'll just become a scam central) like Adobe to put themselves "on" the store, but not actually on it. Basically a package manager.

The announcement was that "bring-your-own-commerce" platform was going to be open to all developers (it is becoming basically a package manager), except for things categorized as Games, where presumably existing Xbox rules still take priority.

No.

It normalizes OS vendor maintained AppStores which is a huge deal for Apple. The only way to avoid them now is to install Linux.

Windows already had a vendor maintained App Store, though. It will just actually be useful now.

Linux distros also have equivalents to App Stores, and really an app store isn't different than apt-get from a lay persons perspective. Assuming you ignore payment/cuts, but it seems you're opposed to free App Stores too.

Linux distro repos are maintained by the community not a corporation. The only app store like that is f-droid.

Hahahahahhahahaha. You might have a point with the likes of Debian, Arch, and Gentoo, but Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux, Rocky Linux are all maintained by corporations.

Regardless, both the attitude the repo maintainers have and the UX (for both users and developers) is totally different from smartphone app stores.

Not at all. Because the lack of curation will make the ecosystem dead on arrival for 99% of users.

Lack of curation doesn't really matter for apps, where the user will find the software independently, and just use the MS Store for the final download.

And for games, the curation will be where it matters - on Xbox games pass.

I’m talking about filtering out malicious software ala Android App Store

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