Hacker News Reader

I see you missing the point here. As a consumer, I don't want to be your customer.

When I buy stuff at the grocery store, I'm not the customer of the companies that produce food. Similarly, I just want to get your app, not become a marketing target for dozens of software vendors with varying privacy and data retention policies. I don't want you to upsell me on anything, it's literally the opposite of friendly to me as a consumer.

That is what I said. It is not about upselling stuff for those who do not want it. It is about making it easier to connect with people who do. This makes sense for some situations but not for others. The grocery shop example you mentioned is great, I agree with you there. People who don't want to be contacted, should not be contacted.

I'm not saying that the way Paddle implemented it is the correct way forward. Personally, I'd rather there was an opt-in option to share data on the payment form. This way, if you want to be in contact with the seller, you can flag it and the default option is not sharing. This is simple and would allow you to remain "not a customer" while letting those who want to be in touch to have an easy path forward. This is not possible inside the App Store.

The App Store model —and Amazon and others as well— make it really hard for you to find who the customer is. That is not because they're thinking of you. They're doing that as yet another vendor lock-in mechanism to prevent the seller from leaving or doing any kind of business with that customer away from them.

As ~NhanH said in another comment in this thread, you can put a form on an app. Yes, you can jump through a lot of hops, and maybe Apple will allow it through. It is death by a thousand paper cuts. From their PoV it is their customer, not yours. From their PoV, the seller is a customer as well.

I feel like responsible people (such as yourself) have a hard time seeing that the problem is that the vast majority of people are not responsible and will happily abuse my information.

I don't think Apple is necessarily altruistic here. But I am able to essentially use them to protect me against people who will abuse my information.

And I also think that developers miss the fact that, at least for a lot of us, this model makes it MORE likely that we will purchase your product. I'm much more likely to try a new app out knowing that it's not going to generate a ton of emails or that my credit card information will leak.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't want to hear a single peep out of a company that manufactures a product I bought. I don't want to be "connected". I don't want to know when their next great thing is available. I don't care what the manufacturer thinks is a really useful, totally non-spam message for me. I don't want that relationship at all.

Maybe others are less dogmatic about it, but I truly appreciate having Apple as a "connection shield" between me and hundreds of thirsty app developers wanting to reach out and tell me all the great things they want to tell me.

I thought this way until I realized I personally value portability over simplicity of signup. Most apps I use often I use on my phone and laptop. When I had an iPhone, I ran most subscriptions through IAP. As soon as I wanted to try Android, moving everything over was nearly impossible.

For most services I now sign up directly through a developer. I also find for services I subscribe to developers provide WAY better customer support than Apple.

There are more than one grocery stores, but there's only one app store. The point is valid, but I'm not sure if it's the whole story.

Then why buy something from them at all? I don’t want spam as much as the next person, but the people I pay money are least likely to spam me.

Through the Apple App Store they are not able to spam me.

I don’t get any spam from Apple either.

I want to buy things and not be bothered by follow up emails and whatnot.

That's not true at all. Psychologically speaking, you're more likely to spend money with a company that you've already spent money with in the past. It's exactly that sentiment that marketers try to take advantage of.

The problem here is that you might consider yourself a good actor here; polite, contact your fans only and only rarely with what they would consider valuable notifications.

However.

The world is not full of good actors, because bad actors can make $$$$ by selling your information to third party spam and scammers.

There is no way, currently, to reward good actors, and punish bad actors… and the downside of the bad actors far out weighs the benefit provided by the good actors.

So, while I see your point, the issue here is that in a wider context people are actively abusing that channel, and there no way to stop them without stopping everyone.

So, sympathetic, but the problem here isn’t apple, it’s the folk who abuse and resale customer data… and I certainly don’t have a solution to that; but no one else seems to have one either.

>, but I enjoy writing books. The best way to sell books, is to build a mailing list of fans so that you can reach them when you have another book ready. It is not about reaching people who do not want to receive your comms. It is about having a direct and reliable connection to people who actually want to engage with you.

I have a friend who is a voracious reader of Kindle ebooks. She uses Amazon's tools to "follow" certain authors and get notified by any new releases. Yes, she has visited some authors' websites directly and even though they have the aggressive popup for "sign up for my mailing list", she deliberately avoids submitting her email and having a direct relationship with the author.

She'd be one of the buyers that's "really Amazon's customer" instead of soapdog's customer. But being shielded from you via Amazon is what she wants. Have you considered that millions of customers think like her?

Let me go on a brief tangent about Amazon. First, they are very hostile to the author. They force the price down on the eBook by leveraging their royalty range. Basically ~75% if the book costs up to ~9.99, if the book is more expensive than that, you get 35%. This means that the author loses money if they price a book higher than 9 bucks but less than 20 bucks (these numbers are not exact, treat them as an impressionist painting, not a botanical drawing).

An author on Amazon has the option of being exclusive to them, which unlocks some perks. Amazon algorithm will push exclusives more often then it pushes non-exclusives.

The reason I mentioning this is because Amazon makes it harder for the author by disguising all its non-competitive practices as them thinking about the reader. It is not, all these are vendor lock-in schemes.

There are many other stores for eBooks. Selling on them prevents you from being exclusive to Amazon, which in turns makes it push your book less often than it pushes those in the exclusive program. Trying to price your book higher makes you lose money.

Your friend has every right not to be forced into contact with an author. That is how it should be. The reason why most authors are trying to get your friend on a mailing list is so that they can have a platform that is not 100% controlled by Amazon algos. It is a hard business being an author, and it is much harder if you have no control whatsoever over your own platform.

I think that they key aspect I want to highlight here is that I don't think your friend or anyone should be put into a mailing list against their will. I hate upsells too. What I'm saying is that all those platforms make it extra hard for you to make sure you can contact the customers who actually want to be in contact with you.

Can't you put in a form in your app, stating "Could you please give us your email so we can contact you when we have a new product?"

Of course, I will never touch that form, and most people won't, but that's not because Apple prevent us.

The App Store's abusive rules will not not even let you use a collected email opted in to promotions to notify of better pricing:

"Developers cannot use information obtained within the app to target individual users outside of the app to use purchasing methods other than in-app purchase (such as sending an individual user an email about other purchasing methods after that individual signs up for an account within the app)."

You have to flag that user's email in your database as permanently tainted and unable to learn certain truths even if they have long switched to another competitors' device.

Hard to say how their IAP setup will work, but this isn't far from how Paddle works for online checkouts today. They separately track your customers and your 'audience' - the people who tick the 'send me marketing' box during checkout (https://paddle.com/support/what-is-paddle-audience/).

Customer emails are available, but it's explicit that they haven't opted-in for marketing, so if you're subject to GDPR or anything similar (most Paddle vendors, since I think the EU is Paddle's core market) then you can't use the email for anything but necessary account setup & support. Meanwhile audience emails are explicitly fair game for upsells/offers/etc.

This is what gdpr gets wrong. Tons of popups and notifications you shouldn't use email or cookies for x - but sellers collect them and WILL abuse them - apple u avoid this issue by simply not giving the seller your info

>I'm not in the business of selling apps, but I enjoy writing books. The best way to sell books, is to build a mailing list of fans so that you can reach them when you have another book ready.

No thanks. That's what I use book stores (either physical or electronic for)

I have a very hard time keeping track of when my favorite authors have released a new book, primarily as I do not trust Amazon/Goodreads. And no one else (electronic) can reliably notify me about this. Heck Kobo, Powell's etc, can't even reliably show books by authors they know I read on their websites.

(Also it's hours in a car to the nearest physical new book store.)

> The best way to sell books, is to build a mailing list of fans so that you can reach them when you have another book ready

Feel free to put a link to your mailing list at the end of the book, and I might sign up. Please don't sign me up because I purchase a book from you.