Hacker News Reader

Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com