Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

Macworld considers this change to be a very minor concession to Apple's anti-steering rules:

> It doesn’t sound like the new guidelines will allow the apps to even state that subscriptions or purchases are available on the web. Rather, the apps will be allowed to, “share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account,” according to Apple’s release. That account management might include purchasing or renewing subscriptions, but it sounds from Apple’s release as if the single link in the app may not be allowed to say “subscribe for just $9.99 a month” and instead must say something like “Account Management” or “set up your account.”

https://www.macworld.com/article/354963/japan-fair-trade-com...

If this is the case, the change simply does not go far enough. Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service, and how the money they pay gets distributed. Any less is anti-competitive.

We've changed the URL to that article from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/japan-fair-trade-comm..., which is a corporate press release. Thanks!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

>Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service

Why? Do you know how the money is distributed when you buy groceries, when you buy a meal at a restaurant, when you buy your clothes, when you buy a book, etc? Does that get you riled up to not know? Why is it different?

I have a choice about where to buy groceries, a meal, clothes, and books. Is it really that hard to understand Apple's hegemony on iOS should be regulated similar to the way Microsoft was.. I guess for Apple stockholders it might be different.

Ask people that live in towns where Walmart has cleared out all of the other stores to see what choices are.

When people sell items through big box stores, those stores buy the items at wholesale. What happens if Apple changes from the 30% structure to a 50% wholesale/retail?

You'll notice I compared with Microsoft, another maker of an OS. I don't think analogies work that well when comparing something that is Turing complete vs. not.

Fitness apps compete with gyms, movie apps compete with theaters, learning apps might even compete with schools, etc.. an OS provides the capabilities to do all of these things. I'm sorry, but your analogies make zero sense to me. Apple should be regulated at least the same way Microsoft was, and the Open App Markets Act does this, and I'm glad to see it. I don't think small changes like this are really the way to fix what's wrong with iOS and Android, even though the latter is more open.

Group think here appears to be that apps are not retail products. What are they? Services? Group think here is also that Adobe is evilCorp #1 because of their software as a service model vs a single purchase. Yet that goes contrary to the app devs wanting to constantly hit the user for in-app purchases. It's software as a service in a different manner, but still gotta keep paying to keep using.

App devs should have an honest conversation with the devs of pre-app days. You had to have a release completed so that it could be sent to the facilities to make the dis[c|k]s. These had to be way more complete than today with the ability to 100% re-download the actual product that has had extra time to complete. There's also the cost involved in getting those physical objects made. Today's app devs have it so much easier, and yet want so much more.

I think devices, OSes, apps and services are all retail products. The extent to which Apple sells a locked down device is the the extent to which it's trying to unfairly control multiple secondary markets.

It's irrelevant how easy or hard developers have it, the consumer can pick if they want to pay once or have a subscription for the feature set they want in apps.

>The extent to which Apple sells a locked down device

The closed nature is the only argument that carries water with me as far as being anti-competitive. Every business has to pay to have their product distributed, and the 30% just never sounded unfair to me.

What would be the percentage where you think it starts becoming “unfair”? And how did you arrive at that figure?

Honest question.

I have to deal with physical retail products where you have a wholesale price hopefully at least doubling your cost for the product. The MSRP is ususally double the wholesale. So if you sell the product directly, you get to earn the reatil rate directly. If you offer your product directly to a retailer, you only get to make the wholesale value for that sale. If you get to a size where you are selling to a big box store, they will negotiate further into your wholesale rate on the lure of larger volume of sales.

So, all of that to say I'm used to getting 50% of the retail price by selling to wholesellers, so being able to have a 70/30 split being offered by Apple would be 20% increase in my earnings.

Ebay and Amazon take ~10%, you can also sell on your own website through advertising. No options exist for mobile app devs other than the two app stores on two platforms, except for Samsung and Amazon device owners which offer their own stores, and possibly F-Droid.

30% isn't unfair if you provide enough services, it's the lack of competition stemming from iOS being closed that's the problem. Google _had_ to do what Apple did with 15% for small developers. Google didn't do it on their own, they had no reason to because Apple wouldn't change until it saw regulatory and legal pressure. Is that a normally functioning market?

Allow alternate app stores, and you'll likely see as much competition on mobile as there is when comparing Itch vs. Steam.

You seem upset by this discussion, calling disagreements to your idea "group think". Perhaps you should take a break before continuing.

Not upset at all. I can have a conversation with people that have differing opinions than I do with out getting upset. However, would you care to explain how you feel "group think" shows. someone being upset? Would you prefer "majority opinion", as it clearly is. How is group think different than majority opinion and why has it offended you?

Is there anybody except Wallmart who will say it's a good thing when the only store in an entire town is Wallmart itself?

Why are we trying to hold Apple to standards that we know are bad, but just happen to exist in the real world anyway?

Wouldn't this be like Walmart preventing Kellogs from advertising on their boxes that they can buy this from Amazon for less?

Why would Walmart allow Kelloggs to advertise their products availability for less in a different store, on Walmart's shelves? Or Kelloggs saying that you can pay them direct and the just help yourself to their product from Walmart? It undermines the whole premise of commerce. If you want direct sales (sideloading, which should be optional), pay for the infrastructure. Don't expect to sell rent free on someone elses...

Exactly, which is why it doesn’t make sense to allow Apps to advertise themselves to cost less from other places.

I mean you have a choice where to buy "reader apps" as well.

After a purchase the app developer is the one providing content, customer service, app updates and bug fixes, etc. It stands to reason that a customer is doing business with the App developer not Apple. In all of your examples, they are products where the company setting the rules of the transaction is the same one that is standing by the product itself.

It seems completely reasonable to me that the provider of a good or service should be able to communicate freely and directly with their customer about something as core to the transaction as their options for paying for the service.

When you buy those products previously mentioned, what options do you have to pay? You don't pay Nike for the shoes when you buy them from the store. You don't pay the author or the publisher for the book. Those people have already been paid by the vendor at the wholesale rate. You are reimbursing the store plus their markup.

The retail analogy doesn't quite fit. Apple isn't just the shoe retailer[0] they're also the company which supplied Nike with all of the sewing machines and stitching yarn that was used to assemble shoes made with Nike leather and rubber. Nike signed an agreement with Apple which says that in return for an endless supply of sewing machines and yarn, Nike must split the final revenue with Apple.

[0] And even retailer isn't quite right. What the App Store does is less akin to the wholesale-retail model and more like the agency sales model.

I use as little Apple technology as possible, using frameworks like https://www.electronjs.org/ - to reduce my dependency on Apple.

App Store is not unique, it is a platform copied from other vendors such as Nokia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovi_(Nokia).

Users pay for the phones.

There is no 'merit' left for Apple (or Google) to collect fees or to impose rules.

In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.

I think the issue is that once you become a monopoly (as Apple's store is: users choose--for any number of reasons where this is frankly likely only one small one where they might be as pissed off as anyone else--between two stores that also-frankly have similar terms anyway, meaning they don't really have a choice anyway, but then developers can't choose: they are held hostage to access that market), you lose some of the "rights" you have as there is no way to compete on terms. If Apple were to separately say "you can either build on UIKit and Metal, in which case we take 30% of your revenue... or you could use HTML and OpenGL, in which case, well, good luck?" then I think a lot of developers would avoid Apple's frameworks... and if they could explain why to the user--that every time you buy a movie from us you are spending an additional $1 for the UI framework Apple is providing--they would agree wholeheartedly, as that shit adds up fast.

I think the more reasonable analogy is that Apple is a Mall and the different apps are stores in that mall, but in this mall they don't charge you a flat monthly fee, they charge you a percentage of your revenue and to make sure you aren't cheating on that they make you use their cash registers and credit card machines.

As a consequence there are incentives for the stores to decrease the amount of money they make in the normal way and they instead try to find strange ways to make money that the mall doesn't get a cut of.

For example if you buy shoes at the shoe store they will send you new colorful shoelaces every month if you mail them money.

But every now and then a store will come up with clever new way to make money that doesn't give the mall its cut and then the mall throws the store out and leases its space to a competitor. Or just announces method X of making money also needs to give us our share.

The store also doesn't generally review the boxes of shoes and ensure there's no references to nike.com on them, and if they did, there's plenty of other stores for Nike to sell at.

If you want the analogy to make sense, let's assume there's exactly two places that sell shoes and they have a stranglehold on the market, and they both mark shoes up the same amount and far more than they would if there was competition between them on price, and they refused to allow any reference to nike.com and how you can get shoes far cheaper there on or in any of the packaging.

That would be a very dysfunctional market, and I think the reason would clearly be the anticompetitive practices that prevented competitors and that resulted from them not competing on price.

It is even worse than this, btw, as the markets are disjoint: there are two places to buy shoes, but virtually all customers shop at either one store or the other store (for practical reasons of cost and convenience that are similar to those seen with someone having to buy things from a store in a different physical region of the country than where they chose to live), making each store separately a monopoly over its relevant market.

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