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Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

It’s not exactly a publishing fee, but today you have to pay Apple $99/year to distribute software into Apple’s ecosystem; otherwise they’ll hide your application behind a non-obvious ctrl+click+run flow. To my knowledge, this fee is collected regardless of your distribution channel.

I wouldn’t call $99/year “not paying.”

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The $99/year gives you additional developer tools and access to the App Store storefront. It's up to Apple what constitutes a sufficient license fee for the commercial use of Apple's proprietary software libraries.

Apple's libraries are licensed to developers under whatever license Apple chooses. They could require a certain revenue share regardless of which payment gateway is used. Heck, they could license it under the GPL and require all developers who build programs against their libraries to release their source code. It's their code, it's up to them.

Similarly, Epic Games can decide when developers might have to pay Epic for software they distribute with Unreal Engine. Whether it's a flat fee, a revenue share, a profit share, if there are discounts or incentives—all of that is entirely for Epic to decide.

>It's their code, it's up to them.

Well, until the regulators step in (again).

Are you suggesting that regulators can force Apple to give away their stuff for free if they want to participate in that market? That doesn't sound right to me.

Why yes, regulators can force Apple to do what they want in their country. And they can very easily dictate how much Apple is allowed to charge for licensing. Fair licensing agreements already exist in the patent space.

No, Apple is free to stop operating in countries with such regulators. No business activity => No violation of competition-related regulations.

Yes, regulators can do that, and they would have pretty clear antitrust grounds to do it as well.

The difference between random people using the GPL and Apple is that Apple is worth a trillion dollars. That matters quite a bit.

It matters if you're making an emotional argument, but I'm not sure it's relevant to any legal argument.

Antitrust regulators don't care about the size of the trusts they're meant to regulate? Interesting.

I am genuinely confused what your point is. Are you saying that "the difference between random people using the GPL and Apple is" nobody is making billions of dollars from GPL code? That it's an anti-trust violation which is ignored because nobody is making any money?

The thought that a government could force your favorite, richest, international megacorporation might feel not right to you, but that is actually how the world works. Apple does not get to dictate how its products are available, no matter how much they would like to.

They are free, however to not come sell in places it feels the rules are unfair towards it.

You seem to be making a weird argument. Obviously Apple isn't allowed to sell a smartphone that contains a large chunk of plutonium, or that is fake and doesn't actually contain any electronics. There are limits to what corporations can do.

But they are free to choose the price. They can sell the next iPhone for $10,000 if they really wanted. Perfectly legal.

They are free to choose under which terms they license their intellectual property to third parties, so long as those terms are lawful.

No no no no. I'm making the argument that if the people of Ohgodplsnoistan pass a law that forbids Apple to sell their phone for anything above $200, that is legal. And that Apple can either cry and sell to my population of two people, or exit this market. In the same way, the government of Plsnoistan decides what is a legal license and what is not. Hell, I can pass a law that requires Apple to give out a free cookie to anyone buying one of their phones.

The point of all this is, Apple has absolutely no say in any of this. They are free to set the terms of their sales according to the law in the country, and that is it. It doesn't get anything more.

I think we agree? I'm confused. Here's what I wrote a few posts up, I'm not sure how this disagrees with what you said just now:

> > > Are you suggesting that regulators can force Apple to give away their stuff for free if they want to participate in that market?

It seems your answer is yes.

> The $99/year is predominantly for access to the App Store. It's up to Apple what constitutes a license fee for developers to have commercial use of Apple's proprietary software libraries.

Interestingly, the $99/year fee is to access the app store, but there's a a $299/year fee to bypass the appstore.

https://developer.apple.com/support/enrollment/ notes: The Apple Developer Program annual fee is 99 USD and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program annual fee is 299 USD

It is hypothesised that the main reason Apple persists with the $99/year fee is as a glorified CAPTCHA, to stop developers from mechanically creating account after account in order to upload scummy app after scummy app. If that's the reason, I wouldn't entirely blame them.

The $299 enterprise program probably costs Apple substantially more than $299 per customer/enterprise in order to run. While I have no idea about the numbers, I wouldn't be surprised that it is a substantial loss-maker for Apple, justified only because it's necessary to keep the iPhone/iPad relevant in some enterprises.

I’m not sure I agree. In order to distribute my Electron app to Mac users via a direct download from my website, I must pay Apple $99. Otherwise Apple will present my users with a scare dialogue that gives the impression the software can’t be run.

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