Apple execs: Let's take a 30% cut of Uber and Lyft's membership programs (2018)
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Yeah, it's like being at the meeting where planned obsolelense was first invented, or when a telco devised the "jump through hoops to to cancel your service" concept...
Uber Eats is almost everywhere (45 countries). [2]
Also there are some very big players outside of the US, e.g. Rappi in LATAM (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, etc). [3]
[1] https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Where-is-DoorDas...
[2] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/article/when-and-where-is-ube...
With this they now also have quite a large presence in Europe.
[1] https://blog.wolt.com/hq/2021/11/09/wolt-joins-forces-with-d...
Narrator: "it won't. As the whole American startup scene nowadays is based on the idea of losing unlimited investor money for years and decades with literally zero plans to change that"
Not a fraud issue but in Miami over the break I ordered food from Uber eats, I got 5 different drivers who all got assigned then dropped the order.
On doordash none of this bs ever happens.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city for some tier rankings. They usually start with London and New York.
> Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)
Oh wow, that sucks. Not sure how I never experienced that, though when I was in SF I used it a bit less often than I do now (NY). If anything, I would've thought it would be way worse in NY: systems/platforms seem creakier here in general.
as for tiering, i think it's a rough estimate of the population density. getting delivery/drivers in suburbs is plain harder given their physical sparseness
Yes we got our money back, but what a pain.
Even plain Uber keeps trial to sell me on their subscription every single ride.
Aside, the sibling comments are quite uncharitable, I don't see why anyone would reasonably believe that the founder invented subscriptions. If one thinks for even a second, they know this isn't true, so why not think for another second about what they really mean? I don't see the need to complain and hem and haw about how the "world's gone crazy."
The emotional labor of having to be fully responsible for precision is under-appreciated. That burden is where the grumpiness comes from.
They hide behind “precision”, which is the other person’s fault when really they lack communication (griper’s fault).
For me as well the first content is strange, that "I've invented subscription". It is basically just applying an existing pattern from not-so-much-different other field?
indeed amazon prime is the same, gym subscription is the same etc etc. Not sure what justifies the "no one ever done it"
Your account is brand new, so this comment is doubly weird.
I am happy to hear from people with something apropos to add.
Being out of touch with the everyman isn't overly weird for a founder of a company.
restec-p
WAT? Adobe launched "Creative Cloud" (which at the time was basically desktop-software-as-a-service) on July 17, 2013; if I recall correctly they had been trialing that for about 1year in Australia before deciding it's a good idea and doing the global launch. Not sure if Adobe was first, but they definitely preceded you by half a decade!
Could someone share their thoughts on this? When does an all you can eat type membership (or any other type) work?
I'd say prime is similar because you get free shipping but clearly Amazon.com makes money on each sale so the more they sell the more they earn.
On the other hand, movie pass is a fixed price. You pay the same regardless of whether you watch one movie or a hundred. What makes Netflix work with all you can eat but not movie pass? Is there a way to know ahead of time what works with all you can eat?
Arguably, Netflix started this trend even earlier - with their exclusively-subscription model for renting DVDs (something that one used to at least be able to pay-per-rental).
At this point I’d be happy if Apple just let me install apps outside their ecosystem, then they could at least defend themselves by saying if the developers aren’t happy with the terms of the App Store they can offer alternative methods.
Is it worth 30%? In 2013? Maybe In 2021? Definitely not. It should be closer to 5%.
That being said I do like using Apple subscriptions because they make it REALLY easy to cancel them, all in one place, something that can't be said for a lot of other services.
I also wish Apple would make it easier to switch to a different credit card for a one-off purchase. And stop forcing everyone in a Family Sharing group to use the same credit card for all purchases
But of course, when you've just come off of a plane at 2 AM and want to get a ride to your hotel so you can get a few hours of sleep before checkout time, this is probably not something users will think about.
I had to fight NY Times like crazy (it was sign up online, call to cancel kind of thing).
Match is also in the "alliance" fighting apple with Facebook. They also have scummy practices (either tracking you or again duping you).
The other thing I like with Apple, the trial periods are REALLY clear. When you sign up with comcast it's like $29/month (and then in tiny tiny print 10 pages later you find out that after 6 months it's $69/month or whatever).
So until these folks clean things up where they ALREADY have full control (on the web) I'm willing to cut apple a ton of slack.
Apple will remind you to cancel a subscription when you delete a related app. It reminds you if a subscription will renew and you can cancel then. I willing spend money through the app store I'd not spend ANYWHERE else. For folks willing to spend money but who don't want to f'ed around with constantly apple is the place to be. And it is super easy these days. Double tap or touch and done.
Apple allows you to block the company from doing tracking of you and connecting that to other info. These things are hard to block technically sometimes.
I had a company threaten collections action over an unpaid subscription because they continued to provide the service (that I didn't want) and I hadn't paid. It doesn't matter that I had an email saying please cancel. You have to dial XXX.
On the business side we are seeing more deals where you have to provide written notice 60 days BEFORE the end of the 5 year term but not more than 90 days (check your copier lease agreements). All these are essentially tricks to force renewals in my view (and are totally allowed).
The bar has been set so low, that allowing customers to cancel easily is worthy of praise! This is a shitty situation for ordinary people to be in.
Another thing to think about - if Apple were a bit more nicer to developers, they can have the developer loyalty for ever and ever. But they are so big and their competition is so bad that they don’t think developers have a choice. Short term profits is apparently more important than long term goodwill. Of course, they aren’t alone in this.
The saddest part is - after all their shenanigans, they are still better than other companies:(
Why this level of DOJ involvement against apple (with very little CONSUMER harm) when your grandma is LITERALLY getting scammed by fake tech support etc and they do jake crap over any of that.
Millions of consumers get screwed over, in big ways and small, day in and day out. Crickets.
Apple creates a small ecosystem that is completely optional for consumers to use that does a few things right (little tracking, fights all these companies on everything from tracking to trial periods to cancellations and more). And now that is a crime. The App store is the LEAST of my consumer protection worries.
Most of the "alliance" of folks fighting apple run scammy business. Loot boxes for kids (Epic/Fornighte type folks) / Zynga / Facebook data exploiters / Match.com fake profile type players / NY Times impossible to cancel people.
Also - Apple has infinite resources. They can be nice to everyone if they want. They choose to be arrogant, just because they can.
None of the companies you listed have a cult following, Apple does. Nobody gives Facebook or Zynga a tenth of the respect they give Apple (I think it is justified, those companies suck real bad).
Is it unfair to expect Apple to behave better than others? In my opinion, no. Others might disagree.
What (businesses) say is "sucky" behavior I like.
CVS blocked apple pay forever. So did Walmart. They said Apple sucks for wanting control (and providing privacy etc). They launched their competitor CurrentC I think which was of course totally hacked:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/29/retailer-backed-apple-pay-...
The reality is that a lot of these startups have almost NO controls over user data relative to inside actor threats. So I'd much rather sign up and have all my details / home address etc on apple's servers. Is this walmart alliance designed with privacy in mind or to exploit my data? I'm serious?
Ny Times is a good example. My subscription let me use their app, but I couldn't cancel it inside the app. Instead its the phone call BS (maybe they've stopped that).
So as a user, I actually kind of want apple to have a ton of market power, because the folks like DOJ / SEC etc are toothless in these areas. The only thing these agencies seem good at is stupid cookie banners (which are pointless).
Apple pay has a tiny fee.
Maybe they should let apps use Apple pay?
> Is it unfair to expect Apple to behave better than others? In my opinion, no. Others might disagree.
Culturally, expect what every you want to expect. But legally, they should all have the same requirements.
A lot of what you're describing here are things that absolutely should be illegal, and a properly-funded government should be investigating and prosecuting. What Apple has done is turn iOS into their own sovereign territory, written their own laws, and levied their own taxes. In other words, they are a digital warlord. If we are going to ban loot boxes or data exploitation, we should be passing actual laws in actual Congresses and Parliaments to ban loot boxes or data exploitation.
Yes, the consumer harm might be minimal, but the consumer is not the end-all, be-all of the economy[0]. Apple bossing developers around creates compliance costs and higher barriers to entry for smaller businesses. This is inherent to monopolies of any kind, pro-consumer or otherwise. Yes, I can absolutely point to scams that Apple has judiciously removed from the App Store; but for every one of those I can also find stories where Apple just absolutely dicked around with a smaller developer and held up their app for no reason. In contrast, large companies like Zynga, Facebook, or Match Group have dedicated staff for making the Apple warlords happy, and know exactly what they can get away with. This isn't an open and vibrant marketplace; it's a group of warlords negotiating who owns what.
[0] More generally, the "consumer welfare" standard that modern antitrust enforcement has adopted is effectively a tacit agreement to not prosecute antitrust violations.
Ah. You mean they did exactly what is expected of a business? And exactly what all businesses have been doing since the dawn of time?
It's not so much as applauding Apple for providing basic features to their users, but as saying that unlike a lot of other companies, they do provide those features. If things were _okay_ elsewhere, we wouldn't need Apple's ecosystem and they couldn't make billions with it.
Yes, they take as much advantage as possible of their position, but if they're where they are, its partly because nobody is providing what they do.
For most business if you said, hey, I'll take 30% for marketing but get you 100% more revenue they would do that right away. Are Apple app store customers really that cheap relative to android? Androids marketshare is FAR FAR bigger, but apple has just sorted out the give us money safely story.
My own glance is that iOS users spend easily 4x as much as google play users AND are much less likely to steal apps. If that's not worth it to devs apple should be able to unlock and really give users freedom (including to download from anywhere online and install). I wonder if android has a bigger app piracy problem then iOS (which devs apparently don't care about).
Not in the US. Apple has 60% of the mobile market compared to Google's 40%[1], and Apple's App Store is responsible for 100% more revenue than the Play Store.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...
This is same with The Times. I would not expect such scammy practice from these companies.
Next day or week after expiry they offered me 4 bucks. I was happily paying 8 but they made me figure 4 was possible so now that's my bar.
I spent years working at a place where apple wouldn't allow us to even link to a website to manage your account if the signup wasn't sourced by apple, so I feel like any marketing they have around being customer focused is really just window dressing.
Apple, who charges for exposure and access to their users, I think is reasonably annoyed that people are trying to get that for free.
But that's not at all what I meant by opting out. I meant "If this is the price for 'exposure', just stop giving me 'exposure' and let me sell digital goods in my app."
Also it's not just 'digital goods', it applies to services too. You can currently manage a netflix subscription in the app, I think, but it's been unavailable a lot and netflix seems to have a special exception that doesn't apply to video services in general.
If it's so great to use Apple Pay (one click, easy to revoke payment -- sounds great!), why would a customer not use it over browsing to a random page, entering CC details, and worrying if it will be hard to cancel?
I'd guess the convenience is not worth 10%, much less 30%, to most users.
And Apple charges 30% for sales of digital goods on their platform. You're trying to get what Apple is selling without paying for it. Don't sell on their platform them -- do what Amazon does with Audible or what Netflix does.
> If it's so great to use Apple Pay (one click, easy to revoke payment -- sounds great!)
Because that isn't what Apple is charging for, users don't pay this fee -- publishers do. They're charging publishers for the privilege to sell to Apple customers. I'm sure users like the convenience, I do, but the fee isn't for me. You're absolutely right that it's not worth 30% to me. But it's absolutely worth 30% to you when the alternative is not being able to sell on iOS and Apple knows it.
It's nuts that in threads like this that people begrudgingly pay Apple's 30% fee while in the same breath saying that they're overcharging. Well clearly not since you're paying it. If they were actually overcharging then you wouldn't be complaining because you just wouldn't have an iOS app.
Do you seriously believe you're not, in the end, paying that?
I find it hard to believe that you do. Seems far more likey you're gaslighting for your idol, as Apple fanbois so often do.
So what is the right fee for access to iOS users, and in turn, paying for iOS development itself? This isn't just a transactional payment system, it's an end-to-end payment platform designed to take high-value customers and turn them into sales with minimal friction. iOS is that system, not just IAP.
It's one thing to say Apple has the right to do what it wants with its own platform, but it's another thing entirely to set up a straw man in order to justify those rights.
You not paying for “publicity” in a marketing sense you’re paying for high-value shelf space in a store that brings in a lot of customers — iOS devices.
If MS wants to charge publishers 30% for all sales done on Windows then power to them.
I had that issue several years ago with Sonic (the broadband provider).
However, if you're in California, it should be possible to cancel a subscription by the same means that one subscribed to the service in the first place. For example, if one signed up online for a newspaper, they should be able to cancel online as well. This has been in place since July of 2018 I believe.
New restrictions coming into effect in July 2022 require having a link or button to cancel a subscription as part of a customer's profile page, as well as notifying customers of an impending renewal for trials that have an extended free trial period.
Sorry, but its easy to say that if they're not grabbing 30% of sales from YOUR small business. If you think this fight is about Facebook or Match or NY, you're missing the whole point. Those big guys can take care of themselves just fine.
They're not grabbing 30% of the sales from ANY small business. They lowered their fees to 15% for the first million dollars (I think both per year and per app).
Not only do Apple take 30% of this, they screwed over all those developers by removing their (ad platforms mostly) ability to track users, thus breaking the developers monetisation model.
I honestly find it hard to believe that they didn't realise that this was going to hit them hard with IAP revenue, but then I've always been surprised at the lack of joined up thinking in large companies.
Therefore, I suspect that this will be substantially weakened/rolled back over the next few years (this process has already started, btw).
If you go with SBA definitions, they use a $1 million to about $40 million range for revenue, and a maximum of 100 to 1,500 employees depending on the industry[1].
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-sma...
Meanwhile, when someone says "small businesses" cannot afford something, and that small business is a 1,500 person software company with $40 million in revenue, I think more "that is no longer a small business" than "poor small business". And if it turns out I'm technically wrong about a legal definition of small business, that's not going to change how concerned I am about that 1,500 person company - it's going to make me specify my concern is around supersmall businesses or whatever. That is, me being wrong about terminology is primarily going to make me change the terms I use.
I doubt they did it for generosity or for PR. I do think there was some amount of goodwill. I think it's Apple's way of ensuring that more apps get made. That is, they are "subsidizing(ish)" the creation of many small apps they make almost no money off of anyway in the hopes more small apps will be created which might contain a breakout success. If lowering the revenue on all small apps leads someone to try to make an app and fall into viral like Candy Crush, well Apple is probably going to make more on that one app than they "lost" on all the small apps they charged 15% on combined.
I think there's a better middle ground somewhere.
Haven't Lyft and Uber already collected that payment information to charge per ride today? Is there even any friction savings here? What justifies the 30% cut when these companies seem to have done just fine not using the Apple Payment infrastructure?
Power.
Prices in capitalism don't reflect moral justifications, they reflect power.
Yeah, that's annoying, but for new vendors I just use Paypal.
Using PayPal won’t help an app company escape its agreements with Apple.
Like… within months.
Why do people not get this?
Apple wants their cut. This is the only way for them to get any cut at all. It’s either this rule or $0 revenue.
It's reasonable to assume that Apple chose 30% because that was the prevailing standard in the physical retail world.Apple provides developers access to an enormous marketplace that they run. A marketplace with hundreds of millions of "high value" customers pre-configured for payments. All sorts of related services are included, such as fraud detection, currency conversion, etc...
What do you think Apple does? Just skim 30% off the top without doing anything else?
Seriously, some people live in this fantasy world where all products should be worth 100% of their raw material cost, and services should cost only what the showroom rent+aircon costs to provide.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...
Why do they deserve a cut?
Uber and Lyft, deliver a material service, Apple have not contributed to that in any way beyond existing as a general purpose computer manufacturer.
Take an alternative, food delivery service, you pay a monthly subscription for a set selection of fruit and veg delivered every week. The cost is made up of food cost and delivery cost... You could sign up through a website, or you could sign up through an app on Apple's app store, in the later case the only option would be to increase the price by 30%, because there is no where near 30% profit left over.
Not convinced? Ok lets go to an extreme, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay? Does their App store really deliver that much value?
Before, it was sort of justifiable when people were trying their get rich quick schemes with flappy bird clones... because the argument from the other side was a weak "but that's my get rich quick scheme", Apple's platform and what they shove in front of users faces made a real difference to the almost pure profit of those Apps, the apps simply would not be popular without Apple... but as soon as we start talking about apps that deliver material services and other significant value it makes no sense to argue that Apple deserve even 1 penny. Apple have gone completely fucking mental with their own greed, they think they deserve a slice of the entire world.
If the iPhone was a general purpose computer, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Allow users to do that and they can put whatever rules they want on their store.
I mostly support the argument that EVERY middleman is useless but…we kinda live in a world of middlemen.
There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).
Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.
In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.
> There is some reasonable cost involved […]
Apple is just taking a profit like your corner store, COOP, Migros, etc. Is it reasonable? Don’t know! Are profit margins how most business operate? That is for sure.
I don't know if you're trolling or not... but are you seriously unaware of the value they're providing? Is this some kind of mystery to many people?
In the PC/Linux space -- where traditionally no online marketplace existed with wide reach -- if you want to sell your software you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps:
1. Create a website.
2. Market your software. Nobody will see it. Spend more money on more marketing, and then maybe -- just maybe -- you might reach 1-10% of your potential market.
3. Sign up with a credit card payment processor. Find out that people will navigate all the way to your store page, see the CC entry form, and click cancel. A lot of people. Like... 50%.
4. Discover that you're treated like the dirt stuck to the bottom of the payment processor's shoes, and they charge a lot of overhead too. Especially for small transcations. You have no hope, ever, of selling 1 million copies of your small app for $1 and make anywhere near a million dollars.
5. Get hacked because you can't afford a full security team to babysit your online store 24/7.
6. Discover that you're on the second page of Google's search results for your exact product name because of competitor's SEO.
7. And so on. And on, and on...
Apple's 30% cut is cheap. It's notably less than doing it yourself at a small scale, under one million dollars or so.
They instantly provide you with hundreds of millions of potential customers, free marketing and exposure, frictionless payment processing that goes down to the single-dollar range efficiently, secure systems for all of that, and more.
Everybody in the mobile app industry knows that while there are more Android devices out there, the profit is in the Apple ecosystem.
An ecosystem Apple created at enormous expense.
An ecosystem that has devices that are mostly kept up-to-date (by Apple! For 6+ years! At huge expense!), massively reducing development and test effort. Notably, unlike the Android platform which is a shit-show of bargain basement garbage with either zero vendor support, or next to zero.
An ecosystem where customers feel safe because of the security guarantees provided by Apple! Confident customers spend more. A lot more. The Android marketplace is like 30% malware at this point, for comparison. Customers don't feel safe spending their money there. I know I don't.
I could go on like this for pages and pages, but I hope you get the point.
You're getting the end-result of the main product of the world's biggest company. If you think this is worthless, literally without value, then you're probably one of those people that also think that they could reproduce the Uber app over a weekend...
Price is not based on cost.
But Apple didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent the barcode scanner. Apple sells a hardware with a ridiculous profit margin. Devices that only have value through the software that is written for them, Uber is not selling a device with a GPS, they are selling a taxi service (for better or worse), and they will use whatever is available on the device to make that work well.
So maybe Apple did something “right” to deserve millions of developers and billion+ consumers to chose them instead of others?
It’s awesome to be in 2022 and act like “Apple doesn’t deserve anything”. Look at last 15 years of mobile history and what Apple has done to this industry.
I don't have a stake in this, I don't own an iPhone or Android phone, or any smart phone and never have... I just see a rent seeker abusing their position as much as possible.
> Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs [...]
Note that we are discussing a huge markup on a material service, not merely software.
Fairly certain that I, the iPhone owner, paid for that in full. Plus a healthy margin.
Amazon operates this way, DoorDash operates this way. You aren't paying the cost of your deliveries, sure you get charged a fee but the bulk is paid by the seller forking over 30% of their revenue for the privilege of selling to you.
Just because you're paying doesn't mean you aren't the product.
And Apple's not asking for a cut of that. Apple is asking for 30% of the monthly Uber Membership fees, created as an IAP. The part that is completely non-scaling to the amount of rides the person takes. The part that is practically guaranteed to come from Uber's profits and not from the end users or from drivers.
So, I really find it hard to care about big companies fighting about it.
> e, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay?
Apple's made it a point that they don't collect 30% on real (non-digital) purchases. Like a mortgage. They would be collecting 30% of the $25 convenience fee your bank slaps on, not the mortgage payment. Which may make it less likely a bank decides to add those fees.
A platform is largely "made" by external developers who contribute to the platform. It is unfair to start charging them (or anyone who comes later) for being on the platform.
Of course, Apple execs, who have no pride in making things but only in extracting money out of things, will have a different opinion on this.
> Of course, Apple execs, who have no pride in making things but only in extracting money out of things, will have a different opinion on this.
I think they've always known, that's why they created an artificial ecosystem where this equation is backwards. No developer can harm Apple, but Apple can harm the biggest of developers on a whim.
- Ability to unlock bootloader if I want to
- Ability to load software on the device unrestricted
Computers always worked like this, so we never had to regulate it, but now that corporations have discovered the loophole we really need to impose regulations. If we don't then markets like the App Store will never be fair.
In each of these categories Apple are competing unfairly by demanding their competitors pay them 30% for the privilege of reaching over half the population of every first world country.
It's clear as day they know the minute they allowed alternatives, a giant fraction of the App Store would depart because they can get a better deal either elsewhere.
As an user of an iPhone I don't want this. I bought an iPhone because I deal with enough technology in my day to day job and I want a phone that's straightforward to use and doesn't need any attention. So no I don't want to install three app stores on my iPhone and have to deal with 20 different payment providers.
In the end it's important to make the distinction between consumer interests and the interest of businesses that want to sell their product on the iOS platform. I get that this sucks for developers because iOS is from what I've heard much more profitable than Android. In my opinion consumers interests should be weighed higher here and Apple's policies for the App store are mostly pro consumer, at least compared with the situation on different platforms.
Consumers that want a more open platform can always choose Android or Linux phones.
Apple can put however many constraints it wants on external app stores. It can make them present a uniform interface for payment, delivery etc etc. Just like it puts those constraints already on the apps. Pretending it's powerless and all these terrible outcomes will ensue when it literally already controls every detail of every single app on the existing store is one of Apple's "big lies" (but one clearly a lot of people have fallen for).
I doubt you mean that. All apps must be served from server farms in the Oort Cloud and be in Esperanto would be acceptable constraints?
But it's actually not a false dichotomy. Things I want are vendors who make iOS apps forced to use other parts of the Apple ecosystem. Forced to use Safari. Forced to offer Apple Single Sign On (if they use anyone's). Forced to offer Apple's payment methods. Those are the very things they are trying to get out of by having alternate app stores.
If you want to make the argument that because of the substantial number of free apps that apple needs to subsidize the costs of review etc. then I'm 100% sure that these companies would rather pay for the underlying resources than get raked over by this pricing scheme.
Apple's payments are extremely pro-user friendly. Do I wish they charged less? Yes. But if it's open to competition no one will use Apple payments even if they are the cheapest, because they are tilted more in the user's favor than other payment methods (subscription cancellation, etc.)
Sure, but even then Stripe charges half a percent extra to handle subscriptions. Given Uber One is 10$, my original assessment still stands that Apple wants ~4x what equivalent processors wants on their marketplace.
> But if it's open to competition no one will use Apple payments even if they are the cheapest
You're assuming that all subscription businesses would prefer to engage unethically with their customers. Many businesses are much more interested in the customer acquisition funnel and building up trust, and if Apple payments eliminates dropoff in subscribers because their payment credentials are already there or it just has strong user trust then many companies will prefer it even if they aren't the cheapest (but competitive).
And if Apple wants to enforce standard such that even the unethical companies have to play in their garden, then they need to be pegged at a fair and reasonable cost of services delivered which we can ascertain from everybody else who is doing this.
I'm assuming some do. Apple protects me from those companies. I also think most people aren't going to steal from me, but I still lock my door. Meanwhile, you have far more faith than I do that businesses will pay a fairly high additional cost (say 4x) to signal that cancelling is trustworthy - whether it makes sense or not.
Basically, Apple currently protects me over app developers, and I want that to continue.
I don't understand why you think Apple couldn't make those requirements? They already do for the apps on their own store, why couldn't the require it for apps on other stores? Apple can still control the signature process to allow apps to install on devices, they can just not sign anything they don't like.
(Putting aside whether those are reasonable constraints or not, I don't necessarily agree with them, but it's a separate matter).
That's exactly my point. There are no real improvements I can see coming from any new store. Please explain how it will be better and why any actor would make it better.
In the emails linked, even Apple acknowledges that the 30% will be passed to the customers.
However, I have no reason to believe that Uber would actually follow through. It seemed like a bluff. Certainly, any economic theory I'm aware of would have Uber and customers split that 30%, with Uber paying the vast majority out of profits.
That's a huge issue actually. See the story the other day about Optional Chaining operator breaking iOS 12 Safari[1] and there's nothing users can do about it even if the hardware is perfectly capable of handling Optional Chaining operators.
If I could just install another browser then that issue disappears. But I can't do that, because Apple will never allow any other web renderers on the App Store.
Even Microsoft, which invested huge amounts of money in Edge, packed it in when Google kept telling people that Edge was going to kill their firstborn (or whatever other tactics they use, like allegedly making YouTube not work properly.)
So, yeah, I'm fine with allowing other browsers - a few years after we've seen Google successfully broken up.
Meanwhile, I'm fine with websites just not using Optional Chaining operators. It's syntactical sugar. And frankly, rapid iterations on JavaScript, adding optional features only supported on Chrome and then making people think the web is broken without them, is a huge source of Google's ability to bully people into using Chrome.
I don’t see how iOS requires a 30% cut but Macs and transactions through Safari don’t.
The justification is the same, they make and maintain all the tech behind those the same as they do iOS. So really iOS shouldn’t have a cut or MacOS and Safari should. To be consistent.
Their tech is solid. M1 completely obliterates the competition for laptops, and is getting there for desktop. Their desktop positioning is mostly self-made to be honest, they haven't really focused on it.
Phones are so overpowered these days that the only thing that really matters is battery life, and Apples chips accomplish so much more than the competition with a lot less battery.
IMO, you are both wrong. The M1 is fine as a laptop CPU, because what it needs to do well, it does very well - which is power efficiency. However, if what you need is computational power, and you don't particularly prioritize power consumption, then the M1 not only does not obliterate the competition, it significantly under-performs. And this is before you add in a dedicated GPU that solves some of those tasks much, much faster.
Take Cinebench R23, where M1 Pro (10+16) has about the same performance as the top contenders that do not have dedicated GPU cores, e.g. Ryzen 9 5900HX and Core i9-11980HK. Throw in a dedicated GPU for a work task that can properly utilize it, and the performance difference is at least 3x that of the M1.
Now, I'm not saying that the M1 is bad. It's just that.... "Completely obliterates the competition for laptops" is a strange way to describe "yeah, if both systems do very little, the M1 will use much less power!". For many, this results in it being the best laptop CPU for the tradeoffs they want, especially if the MacOS is an added positive.
However, that the M1 competes and outperforms in terms of computation performance, would be just wrong.
Obliterates was a bit strong I guess hehe.
It's not uncommon to hear unrealistic praise of the M1 on HN.
Developers want less
Customer don’t care, and want what Apple is selling.
Developers feel it’s not fair because they think they are losing money but customers seem happy to pay for Apple’s premium service.
If I want it cheaper in exchange for having to deal with onerous cancellation methods, I can just go direct to the developer’s website and buy it.
I suspect if the UI offered customers to pay now using Apple's thing, or have a button to get 30% off by going to some more convoluted flow, a lot of people would choose the rebate.
Plus, I think another commenter pointed out that the end user is still getting the same price on Android - I don't know if that's because Apple mandates something or a business decision on the company's side?
And, of course, you can also use a different smart phone ecosystem. Android makes it comparatively easier to sideload apps and mess with stuff.
It’s not 30% of ongoing revenue though. You only have to pay 30% in one situation: you are already earning millions of dollars in the App Store AND it’s the first year of the subscription.
If you earn less than a million dollars, you qualify for the small business program and the rate is 15%:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
If your subscriber has been subscribed for a year or more, the rate is 15%:
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/#revenue...
Android allows it, usage of alt stores is marginal.
> These companies and developers are greedy. They want even more than 70%! Uber and Lyft should be kicked out of the App Store.
> Laws and Regulations wants to fine Apple for Anti-Trust and Anti Competitive practice, Apple should pull out those market, that is the EU common market, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, India!
I wish I made these sentiment up, except you will find many Apple apologist supporting Apple writing exactly that.
But none of these matters to the general public. Apple is Three Trillion Market Cap company, they are very successful, selling iPhone and Mac in record numbers. Tim Cook will continue to tell you Apple is making the world a better place. To enrich people's lives. And privacy is a fundamental human right. [ Subject to Terms and Condition ]. With a big smile on the face.
On another note it is interesting this isn't the first time Phil Schiller has been fighting the battle for users and developers. But now he is "promoted" ( cough ) to Apple Fellow. And Eddy Cue......
Seems like we're kind of at the point where actual nation states should take that as a sign of peer competition and do something about it because I honestly have no idea why we're tolerating this.
As far as regulations go, I think those points could be an argument that more regulation could be warranted.
0: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-purcha...
The tech industry (of which Apple is the largest representative) is, and increasingly becoming even more, the second largest center of power within any modern nation. As evidenced by the fact that they can and have removed elected representatives (most of which I'm not a fan of to make that clear) from public debate.
For something that costs $10 on Android, charge $13 for iPhone.
This is a win-win solution. The app companies get more money and Apple gets positioning as a premium brand.
There should be the iPhone price and the Android price. Just charge iPhone users more.
I am not sure what $400 for an iPhone gets me. Other then Airtags. I might get a cheap used iPhone just for Airtags.
Right now, Im on an iPhone SE 1st gen I bought in 2016 for $400. Still runs well, and Im on the latest iOS.
(However, I agree with your statement generally. I believe that globally the iPhone is a premium phone)
Apple's best selling main-line product in 2021 was not the iPhone. Not Mac. Not the Watch or iPad. It was Airpods. Normal Airpods, not even the Pros. The cheapest product to ever be graced with a top-page tab on apple.com, Apple sells tens of millions more Airpods than iPhones. And why wouldn't they? They're cheap! Because, hate to break it, but Apple isn't a premium brand; they're just a brand.
The iPhone is about as premium a smartphone as Target is a premium store, and this notion that Apple still exclusively services the premium segment probably comes from some combination of Apple users wishing they were rich & special, and even Android users looking to play the everyman victim. None of that is valid. But it gets applied to justify Apple's unprecedented control & tax over commerce on their platform; its alright because it only impacts rich people, if you want access to the rich people you gotta charge the rich people more, and make the rich gatekeeper even richer. In reality, all it serves to do is make everyone poorer; it serves to limit affordable access to goods and services; and it makes Apple rich.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple...
AirPods are not cheap to the average person. You can get earbuds for under ten bucks. AirPods are a premium option for most people. AirPods being for rich people was even a popular meme for a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2019/feb/10...
Personally; I steal a bit of copper wire from whoever had the misfortune of parking outside my box, I mean, house, then wire it up to a couple styrofoam cups I dig out of the garbage can down on the corner. With how compressed MP3s are, I doubt anyone could tell the difference. I can't imagine why anyone buys headphones, really.
Then again... Airpods & Airpods Pro are reported by many sources to be the best selling headphones of 2021... but I'm sure, in aggregate, all those wish.com $10 cans outnumber their sales... and let's also, you know, not consider the more fair comparison of aggregating Alexa Buds, Sony XM4s, Bose Buds, Surface Buds, Galaxy Buds, Galaxy Buds Pro, Galaxy Buds Live, Pixel Buds, Beats Buds... If there's a reason why every company and their mother churns out Beans like they're going out of style, it probably isn't because they're, uh, selling. They're all Premium Brands making Premium Products for Select Clientele.
It'd be $10 on android and $14.29 on iPhone to break even.
Apple will not let you do that at first place. It's against their guidelines and apps that do that and get caught get the boot.
Here's a 2011 article about Apple revising that policy: https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/09/apple_backs_down_...
With company's total control over locked down hardware, software, software delivery and browser (and other, fresh endeavors like identity management aka AppleId, payments etc) it will be very interesting time and quite a show to observe.
Um...yeah, that's pretty damning.
Of course it is a good indication that it is overpriced.
If not using IAP is worse for users, wouldn't users then immediately gravitate to apps that do use IAP? Meaning not using IAP would be a competitive disadvantage and tada, capitalism magic--especially given iOS users are the most valuable segment in the world (typically wealthier and much more willing to spend $1.99 on an app than their Android counterparts)
The counter-argument is it is better for users in ways they are oblivious to (i.e. security), but even that should eventually make its way to the user. If eventually all but IAP cards are compromised or abused, users will eventually change their behavior, especially iOS users (typically more educated).
* all iOS user characterizations are based on 3rd party research and not my own opinions
What if we flip it to: "Why do app developers deserve access to Apple's customers?"
30% is the price to access Apple's customers.
If you're a developer and don't like this, then don't build an iOS app. Build Android-only, or build a web app.
If you're a customer and don't like this, then don't buy an iPhone. Vote with your feet. Buy an Android. Or a Pinephone/Fairphone/Librem which are as close to a general purpose computer-as-a-phone outside of the Apple-Google duopoly that there is at the current time.
I understand that the value of the Apple ecosystem is not just what Apple bring to the table. It's the ecosphere of apps available. So there's definitely a symbiosis here. But Apple is like China here. No matter how ethically questionable, there will always be those for whom the market that Apple represents is too tempting to ignore. Even with a 30% cost of doing business. Meaning there will always be app developers building apps for iOS.
If having access to the Apple customer segment is the difference between success or failure - even despite the 30% tariff - then why is it strange that access to that segment has a price? This is a market.
That’s why the market isn’t fair. Because two companies control essentially all app distribution, and can charge whatever fees they want with no credible challenge from any market force.
These companies have also shown they intend to squeeze the market for whatever they can without any sympathy for consumers or app developers. I think the only reasonable option is for the government to step in with antitrust measures.
It would (a) make the tariff visible to all consumers not just the techies, and subsequently (b) create significant customer-led pressure to lower the tarrif (I suspect something on the order of 10% would probably be acceptable to most customers as that aligns with typical sales taxes give or take).
They weren't when they started the App Store, should they change their policies reflecting their current market worth?
As I posted in another comment, part of the reason Apple has so many customers is that their platform has so many apps. If all developers left the App Store overnight, would anyone go out and buy an iPhone the next day?
Apple benefits greatly from their app ecosystem, even ignoring the 30% App Store cut. They should be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
If I'm an app developer, from a purely financial perspective, why would I forego a market of Apple's size, even with a 30% tariff? Sure, I may lobby for change, or even go to court to try to reduce that tariff. But while I'm doing that, I sure won't be leaving money on the table. And there's little chance I'll abandon that market in the interim, in order to maintain an ethical position.
>30% is the price to access Apple's customers.
That goes both ways. Would Apple's products be as popular as they are without 3rd party apps? The apps are what is bringing in those users.
Alright, so then if microsoft wanted to ban alternative web browsers, or engage in anti-competitive practices that are currently illegal, and they lost the court case for, your answer is "Yes, that should be allowed for microsoft to do"?
Most of society would agree that laws that outlaw anti-competitive behavior are a good thing.
And if you opinion is the naive "just vote with your feet, lol" position, then you need to bite the bullet and just straight up say that you think that anti-trust law is bad. Just say that you support the standard oil monopoly, or the microsoft monopoly and be honest about it.
Apple's share of the smartphone market is around 15% globally, and 55% within the US. Under no definition can Apple be said to be in the same position that Microsoft was. You can indeed vote with your feet and many do (in both directions).
Anti-trust law is designed to do two things. Prevent companies from becoming monopolies in a market, and break up companies that are monopolies. By the numbers, Apple is not a monopoly, and there are plenty of healthy alternatives to Apple. Anti-trust law is just fine and dandy and I support it. It just does not apply here.
We have court precedent that says otherwise. The Epic vs Apple case had at least 1 count that defined Apple's behavior as being illegally anti-competitive.
> Under no definition
Yes there is a definition. Under the definition that Judge Gonzalez Rogers used, they are large enough that some behavior is illegally anti-competitive.
So yes. An actual judge, who is the authority on the matter, disagrees with you, that it is impossible for apple to engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
> It just does not apply here.
Actually, it already did apply. Judge Gonzalez Rogers applied it to Apple.
Apple are currently appealing the anti-steering restriction.
So then, yes, on 1 count it did engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
See, you were the one trying to claim that it is completely impossible, that any definition of anti-trust law would cover Apple's behavior. And we have evidence that this is false.
Clearly, your previous extremely strong claim, of zero possibility of anti-trust behavior, is wrong. Because on 1 count, it was ruled that it was illegally anti-competitive.
Glad we could clear that up.
If you wanted to be more accurate, you could have instead said something like "Apple's position in the market is complicated. It does not have complete control of the market, but it has a large enough control of the market, that some of its most egregiously bad behavior, could be illegal. Really, things could go either way on some of its actions".
That would be a much better, and more nuanced statement, that opens the possibility for some of Apple's behavior to fall under anti-trust law, but not all. Clearly it is not as absurdly in Apple's favor you were trying to claim, and it is not as simple as "just vote with your feet, they aren't doing anything illegal or anti-competitive".
Because Apple's actions are illegally anti-competitive, and I support existing anti-trust laws.
If you think that it is totally OK to engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior, then just say that. Otherwise this is the answer.
The answer is that we have anti-trust law for a reason. So if you disagree then you need to say that you want anti-competitive behavior to be legal and bite that bullet of being in favor of that stuff.
So go ahead and just say that you support microsoft anti-competitive behavior or if you think that it is not OK, then whatever reason you have for saying that anti-competitive behavior is bad, I can use whatever reason that is.
> Because Apple's actions are illegally anti-competitive, and I support existing anti-trust laws.
Sorry but that's not a reason. You indeed can choose a different smartphone and smartphone ecosystem (as a customer), and you can choose to boycot Apple as a developer, and tell your customers that iPhone users are stuck with the web app while Android users get the benefit of better integration and features. These are real choices that people and companies are making today.
As I said in another comment, you absolutely can pursue legal remedies either through the courts and/or the political process - which is also happening right now. But absolutely nothing is stopping you from buying and using a Samsung/LG/Pixel/etc phone right now, and having a really good (by all accounts) experience.
And to make myself completely clear to you - I do not want anti-competitive behaviour to be legal. I just don't think this is anti-competitive.
Also worth noting that Microsoft filed an amicus brief in support of Epic in its fight against Apple. Google did not.
Ok, then that is not a reason that you can use against microsoft or standard oil. Thats your position that you have that you have to bite the bullet on.
> These are real choices that people and companies are making today.
Ok. Then in your opinion, those are "real choices" that people can use against microsoft or standard oil.
Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive practices. As well as how Apple has engaged in illegal anti-competitive practices, as according to the decision of Judge Gonzalez Rogers.
> Microsoft's share of the desktop market at the time was very close to unity.
> Apple's share of the smartphone market is around... 55% within the US.
At what percentage of the market should Apple be required to loosen their grip over their platform / open up their marketplace? Is there a specific number they could reach where you'd feel comfortable placing more restrictions on these practices?
It should not be about how many consumers using X anymore. It should be about how many consumers are related to consumers using X.
The reality is internet network effects create too much concentration of power. The question is how hard is it for a new business to build a dense network? And who profits from it being difficult?
Microsoft's anti-trust charges arrived in 1998, years before endemic Internetification of social interaction and making use of business's services. There were charged for attempting to control the Internet.
Apple's hypothetical anti-trust charges in 2022 would arrive years before endemic open APIs and personal data ownership. They would be charged for attempting to control people's freedom to interact with each other regardless of each others chosen platform.
There have been laws that disallow you to limit customer choice. For one example, a company can't force you to buy 1st party parts for repairs
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2018/04/...
You're position seems to be if they can prevent people from doing something with their device they don't like and people still buy it then that's ok. So if a sofa manufacture found a way to prevent people of color from sitting on it and people bought it that would be perfectly fine by your position I guess. I could certain make a fridge that complained if you put something in it that had no RFID tag and that those tags must correspond to items they've licensed.
In any case, my position is, no company should have that kind of power, period. A house company shouldn't be able to decide who my guests are who what items I put in it. A fridge company shouldn't be able to decide what items I keep cold. A cabinet company shouldn't be able to to decide what I store in my cabinets. And a computer company should not be able to decide what I can run on my computer (smartphones are computers).
Apple has to pay to keep your app hosted in the store. They have to pay to check your app for safety. They have to pay developers to maintain the store. Your fridge doesn't have that. Your fridge manufacturer made something to host your food. It costs them zero dollars to perform the hosting. In fact, you have to pay another company (the electric company) that hosting cost. If a fridge manufacturer decided to become the electrical company, then it would make more sense.
Apple has to pay costs to maintain the app store, the operating system for the app store, and the hosting costs in-between.
All of which should be covered by the $99 annual App Store developer fee.
The benefit of such a simple fee structure is that it becomes insidiously difficult to ask questions and receive legitimate answers about equity. How much does it cost to host the app? To pay engineers & marketers to build security scanning and storefront features?
These are not questions we generally ask of private institutions. But Apple's products are decreasingly operating like a private institution; they're looking a lot more like a public institution; a critical platform that hundreds of millions of people worldwide rely on for productivity, entertainment, communication, and commerce. We do ask these questions of our governments; we want to know how much we're spending on things like the military, roads, NASA, because knowing these numbers is critical in assessing effectiveness and accountability.
Here's a question: Apple does invest some amount of money into application security scanning and reviews. Now there's an important domain; keeping your users safe. How much? We don't know. What we do know: They're REALLY bad at it. Inarguably, the worst in the industry; right down there with Microsoft Teams and Log4J. They keep many things quiet, but they can't keep that quiet. Are they spending billions, and seeing such poor outcomes? Are they spending thousands, and should be spending far more, but won't? We don't know.
This always leads to: If users had an issue with the platform, they would leave. Let's play in the space where this is true; where the smartphone market is full of fungible platforms (it isn't, but:). Would users leave if they knew just how bad the App Store & iOS was at keeping them safe? Many users don't even know what those two things are. But they still deserve to be kept safe; maybe even more-so than more experienced users like us. The onus is on Apple to keep them safe, and Apple has spent a decade failing at it. Where does the onus fall, then? To the void? It's reasonable to argue: Experts, and the Government. Someone needs to hold them accountable. If a bridge fails, injuring dozens of people, we don't say "well, they tried their best! just think on all the cars that were able to use it without it falling." Nor, do we expect drivers to do an engineering deep dive on every bridge they cross, so they can make an informed decision about which one they want to take to work today.
[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/tim-cook-s-gut-says-t...
The builder brings in the customers, and the bathroom and kitchen suppliers seem to be happy to share a ~30% commission for it.
(note: this is in Belgium, but I assume similar setups are commonplace in other places)
Huh, maybe there's an opportunity to make an app that appifies appfiable sites. Like a captive browser. That app could be free. But Apple would find a way to say it's not OK with their rules and boot it from the store.
> 30% is the price to access Apple's customers.
Perhaps, but you'll notice many people don't agree, and those people participate in politics, and some of them will say "company store!!" and demand statutory or judicial intervention, and who knows, they might get it. Lucky for Apple 99.9% of their customers aren't those people.
That's a good option. At the same time I can also work together with other citizens of my country to force Apple to allow alternative app stores. Our reason would be that we think society stands to benefit from this. Whether or not Apple "deserves" [1] a third of app revenue doesn't matter.
Allowing alternative app stores would then be the price Apple has to pay to access our market. They might not like this, but they're free to ignore this market. Other companies will be happy to comply.
[1]: I'm not sure that it's meaningful to say a trillion-dollar company does or does not deserve something.
It's absolutely reasonable for a government to impose its own market rules - but even there, the government follows its own logic for what to impose. Either to benefit consumers, protect local industries or industry segments (e.g. smaller companies), or increase tax revenue. What's the logic behind such a restriction? Unless applied to all app stores, this would be unfair to Apple.
For both customers and app-developers, we make an assessment of value and decide which phone to buy or which phone to target with apps. For app developers this involves a contractual obligation they freely sign on to. Making an assessment of value that is based on not meeting the obligations you agreed to is an act of bad faith. You don't "deserve" to play on my turf if you're not following my rules. Go play in someone else's yard. I can see how it makes sense for a government to assess whether everyone's yards needs to be follow a basic set of rules. That currently exists in the sense that no contract or agreement can upend the laws of the land. Is new law required here? Perhaps, but then it won't be Apple specific. Depending on how its worded it may apply more broadly than to just app stores. In which case there's a whole raft of rent-seekers who may not want such laws.
Fundamentally, it boils down to this (in my view):
Are smartphone ecosystems private property upon which third parties are allowed to conduct commerce subject to the property owners rules?
OR
Are smartphone ecosystems a public commons upon which third parties are free to conduct commerce as they wish?
Because it’s better for customers if they do, than if they don’t.
Good luck! Safari is crippled. The examples are too numerous to list but even the UX around existing features that would bring Web apps closer to on-par with App Store apps is terrible. For example my friend was sad that Wordle wasn't an app because they wanted it on their home screen. No problem I said! I know you can add shortcuts on iOS. But they couldn't find the option. They even game me the phone and I couldn't find it in the 30s I looked! I'm sure it is there somewhere but it is clear that the UX is damanaged to keep the moat between native and web artificially high.
Not to mention the yearly fees you pay to apple if you want to publish to the App Store. I really hope the anti-trust laws come down heavy on Apple, Google, and et al.
Especially when both have done everything in their power to make the lives of "competing platforms" as difficult as possible. It's hardly a winning VC pitch.
Strong language is coming, skip my post if you're delicate.
They're cowards. Plain and simple. They want a "safe" investment with a pre-defined path to an IPO in 2-10 years so they can cash out. Makes me fuckin' sick. We could have a third alternative to iOS and Android, but it won't be easy, it won't be fast, and it won't be cheap. These VC vultures don't have the goddamned balls to put significant amounts of money on the line with the prospect of absolutely no return ever, and that's why it'll take a miracle straight from Heaven for us to get a third option - because these people have no real grand vision and no damned backbone.
No one on Planet Earth is going to convince me that the best the human species can do is Android and iOS.
Of course household names like Uber are different, but it would also be difficult for Apple to have a policy like "The top 100 most recognizeable brand only pay 10% because we're not providing exposure value to them since people already know who they are."
I think a regulation that requires the ability for competing app stores that can be installed without Apple or Android putting scary security warnings in user's eyeballs before installing them would be a cleaner move.
Admittedly, even then I'm not sure where to draw the line-- should Xbox also then be required to allow competing game stores? Samsung smart watches? Fitbits? I don't have an easy answer to that.
> That means I can't subscribe to postmates or uber?
Those are available on Apple devices, don’t know why you think you can’t subscribe to them?
Monopolies have a few characteristics like barriers to entry and competition. Apple doesn’t command this because the market is mostly not Apple.
Apple has 60% of the mobile market in the US[1], and the App Store is responsible for more than 100% more revenue than the Play Store, too[2].
Regulatory bodies aren't concerned with layman definitions of monopoly[3]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...
[2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/
[3] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
"Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages."
Most anti-trust cases have historically been against companies with 90+% market share: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, Microsoft. I'd love to see an example of a company that was found to have a monopoly with only 60% market share.
To get much beyond that I think you need some special advantage like govt protection. I suspect the patent system, which literally guarantees monopolies to companies in return for a fixed fee, creates a big advantage for the leaders in tech markets. Hence modern leaders last a lot longer with more market share (and way higher margins) than they should.
This includes:
* the app store
* subscription management
* payments
* any sort of digital media (music, movies, tv shows)
* browser engines...there literally is no way to release a different browser on iOS, even iOS "Firefox" and "Chrome" have to use Apple's WebKit binary
From myself in a lower thread
Interoperability has never been legally mandated in the past, but for most of history it has just "happened" because people could get around hostile designs (IBM PC clones anyone?).
The problem with the complexity of today's technology is that, it's no longer feasible for an upstart to make a "compatible" device. You can't engineer an "iOS capable" non Apple device or an Apple-compatible non-Apple OS, not because it is not legal but because it is not feasible technologically. There are ways to do legally clean reverse engineering (ReactOS anyone?) but you cannot get around chip level signature checks nor can you fab your own state-of-the-art chips.
This is pretty similar domain where it's happened:
No. This can't help the customer who already bought a device, because Apple can (and does) change the terms on which the device is used. It would be more fair to use the word 'rent' when you buy Apple's devices, because you don't truly own them, Apple does: It decides which apps you can run, and it can pull off the apps you need from the Appstore, and so on.
When Apple alters the deal, all their customers can do is pray Apple doesn't alter them any further. This IS a monopoly, and you can't use a different operating system on your iPhone if it would be rendered useless to you by Apple.
I don't like Apple's business practices either, but labels like monopoly and "rent"ing a device have clear definitions and Apple doesn't hit them. If anything this is a failure of regulations to catch up to the reality of technology.
The focus in the future should be mandating things like repair and interoperability.
> You can't use a different operating system on your iPhone if it would be rendered useless to you by Apple.
This is not true. First, all apps already installed are not automatically uninstalled just because they've been pulled from the store, you just stop getting updates. Secondly, even if Apple completely drops all app support for your phone, it does not make it "useless". The phone still does all of the basic functions it was advertised to do. Having a device get new features in the form of apps is not required, it's a nice to have. At best you maybe could make an argument for misleading advertising if any launch features were gone (see PlayStation otheros) but Apple have been very diligent to make sure that's not the case.
Apple certainly has a duopoly with Google in the mobile device market, mobile operating systems market, mobile app distribution market and the mobile app payments market.
(Of course, if you do, you can livestream from another app whose access they probably control)
Ultimately - it's the user choice where they're going to do it - and if the user wants to reward the company, they could subscribe through other means. Most users don't know this, obviously, but it is a possibility. And if we reach them through a different acquisition channel, the users won't subscribe through Apple, they will subscribe elsewhere.
However, the customers who subscribe through Apple are usually a lot more valuable to us (more affluent, stable payments, more engaged), and even with the 30% cut, having Apple as an acquisition channel is valuable. It is not worth it for us to go out of Apple's ecosystem.
Apple know this - and are just playing the economics. They are aware the added benefits to the user and the marketing pull they have in their store. The next step for App Store is going to be changing the 30% to fit the business model of whatever they're marketing - if they're rational. There was already suggestion that for streaming apps (very high operating cost, very low margin) they might drop to 15% - because they'll try matching the economics to the barely positive tradeoff for the businesses using the app store.
I see nothing wrong with the Apple model from a business standpoint of a multi-platform business. When something is specifically an app business it becomes more tricky because essentially in order to acquire the customer they have to install the app so the app store becomes your main acquisition channel. But even there you could argue that your business model wouldn't exist if Apple wasn't providing the customers, OS, app store and marketing. So it makes sense for Apple to take a larger cut (in relative terms per acquisition volumes).
The entire mobile app market essentially has to pay either company a significant chunk of their revenue just to exist. That's insane.
Finding land, that is suitable, renting the land, matching the crop to the land, acquiring the seeds, planting, watering, weeding for many months. Losing crops due to weather, harvesting, storing (renting a structure to store in), preparing for transport.
Then transporting them to market, then selling them etc.
A bridge the cart crosses twice (once to and once from market) provides perhaps 1% of the necessary effort.
If Apple charged 1% of revenue, or perhaps 5% of profit, that might be fair for the bridge.
Many/most things have expenses nearly matching revenue, so their profit is low. If it costs $90 to hire land, hire a shed, hire a cart, hire labour, get wiped out by weather sometimes, hire a market stall, hire market sellers and so forth, and your revenue from the sales is $100, then your profit margin is 10%. Apple would honestly be asking too much at 30% of profit. But in this situation Apple is taking 30% of REVENUE.
Drivers.
Netflix ran a global quasi experiment[1] to see if it was worth dropping IAP with Apple's rates. Consumers want to watch a movie and are willing to pay for it. The same as they just want to get home safe after a bar session and are willing to pay for it.
Netflix was able to drop IAP because the web is a viable platform. Apple's platform is their justification for their slice of the pie, but it pales into comparison to what drivers and filmmakers actually do day in and day out to actually add value to the economy.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/21/17764424/netflix-feature-...
I don't see that follows. Does Uber provide that number explicitly? And what is the net for driver/hour?
I'm not saying that 30% is the right amount - I really don't know. But the mall comparison doesn't seem like a cut-and-dry case to me at all.
The second problem I have as someone who is offering subscriptions himself, is how Apple earns money with scam subscriptions. I could have justified the closed Appstore in the past by saying that they take care that you do not get trash on your phone, but - the App Store is full of trash. Check the top two guitar tuners, they are free. Open them up and you will see a 8$/week subscription, that you accidentally agree to with the finger on your home button. The ratings are full of people complaining, but Apple puts them at the top. There is no way they don't see this shady business. Wonder how much of their revenue comes from shitty scam apps.
People who suggest to just not be present on the app store, it is just not an option for many businesses, as the App Store is basically a monopoly.
I think Apple realised that to some degree as they have much lower commission for certain categories like 1:1 tutoring etcetera.
Anyway, I think Apple might have crossed a line on these commissions and we see rulings all over the world requiring Apple to allow alternate payment methods.
With my user hat put on, I'm not excited about that because it's actually much much pleasant experience to use IAP because you have all your subscriptions in one place and Apple is super good on refunds.
What I would like to see one day is some kind of "Universal payment protocol" that provides standardised UI for mobile payments. Imagine the IAP interface being able to accept any kind of payment(like paying with your card of choice with Apple Pay) and keeps track of these payments in your iDevice with a button for cancelling subscriptions that makes an API call to the payment provider.
If Comcast (Google) and Verizon (Apple) both charged 30% markup on anything you bought on Amazon, would you think that's reasonable? Without them, you wouldn't be able to purchase anything at all, of course!
Electric, water utilities are private companies.
There will likely be a legal framework that develops to define a threshold and definition for when something constitutes a "platform" with sufficient market size such that competition within the platform be allowed.
The App Store is a more premium alternative to the Web. It’ll never be a monopoly — every iPhone comes loaded with Safari for alternative ways to engage with customers.
Pretty evident when you go through the thought experiment that ecosystems/platforms, with high costs of switching, are a new form of monopoly (at sufficient scale)
Most teenagers use an apple, but it's not impossible to switch. In the 90's, almost all computer users were on PC's, and a big problem for apple was a lack of software offerings on their OS to compete with windows. It seems like some executives are interested in short term profits to the point that they are comfortable creating an environment that would seriously disincentivize use of apple products and the math on that is nuts - if it's no longer profitable (and I can't imagine it is at a flat 30% increased costs) then you remove the service.
Technology can increase ease while also lowering prices, but it’s just so easy for it to go the other way.
I think Uber and Seamless are most obvious to me in NYC. The overall cost of doing basic stuff was initially depressed and now has increased way over inflation.
Regulators have played their part.
Contrast with Amazon who we all like to hate on, and who may be abusive to retailers and manufacturers, but the savings is clearly passed on to the consumer.
No real ideas. Just an observation.
I think these lines of thought miss the point. This discussion demonstrates, IMO, the mentality & reality of bigness/monopoly.
Mentality-wise, Sheree & Lindsey are expressing something more akin to "We feel that Apple is entitled to a 30% cut of this" than a business idea. Second it's obviously more about power than anything else. The "window of opportunity to set a precedent and claim this cut" is the reality.
Whether or not Apple adds value that reflects or justifies the revenue is irrelevant. That's not how they are making the revenue either way.
They get a big cut of Google's ad revenue on iphones via their default search deal. This is about getting a cut of ecommerce & such. Smaller developers are entirely exposed to their whims. It's too much power, and they are abusing it.
There are two levels to monopolism. One is simple prices. You own the only highway to MetroX. You charge truck drivers a high toll. They have to pay it, if they want to truck at all. The second level is when the highway owner wants a cut of all goods sold in MetroX stores. That's what's happening hered.
The 30% might suck as a developer, but then just charge more for Apple customers. As long as the rule is applied to all apps on the platform then everyone is playing by the same rules. Nobody is forcing you to release your app on the Apple Ecosystem, you -want- to because it's a huge potential customer base. If you want to participate then play by their rules. If it's too expensive, then don't build your app there. If more developers refused to release their app on iOS they would start to re-evaluate their 30% fee.
My only qualm is the news that in certain situations they have lowered their fee's which isn't fair as it gives those companies a competitive advantage as they can charge less.
Funnily enough, this applies to Uber and Lyft too. These middlemen companies have too much power to unilaterally dictate what cut they get from their service.
If you look at demographics, iOS devices are the gateway to the most affluent and lucrative market segment. That's the value proposition of Apple, and also why app always ship first on iOS then get ported to Android.
Physical goods have about a 100% markup between manufacturer and what a customer pays.
I think it should be less for digital goods, but you wanted a good argument. Apple charges because they are between you and the app makers, like Walmart and target and stuff.
The fascination with making Apple a boogey man on this is bizarre. Your local corner store — which you should very much support! — has a markup that makes Apple look lazy.
The two SF owners I know very well and have helped with their books aim for 300%. They routinely hit this.
Edit: for context the one in Noe did 2m last year.
Unlike a store, Apple wants the margin without doing any of the work.
According to you, I can jailbreak and sideload my iPhone 13? Or iOS 15?
Huh, doesn't appear so: https://www.getdroidtips.com/jailbreak-iphone-13-pro-max/
There is no way I'm flying to South America for a banana or to Taiwan for a toaster. Their profit is payment for this service.
Your oem provided you a device which is perfectly capable via your ISP and your vendors infrastructure of arranging products and services. Your oem is only an essential part because they insist on it.
FedEx and ford could have in theory done the same or Dell and Verizon.
Moving "across town" from the apple store involves an IT project and hundreds of dollars in order to save dozens of dollars.
Also for IT, Walmart requires IT interfaces from its suppliers.
I think people could consider Walmarts markup to be unjust or no value or whatever.
That’s your problem right there. We don’t allocate resources or make business deals based on how deserving a group or person is. They can charge it right now so they are
Where it get’s ugly is when Apple wants a cut of everything that happens after the sale of the app, too, like wanting a cut when I buy a new book in the Kindle app (and Amazon refusing, instead making it impossible to buy books in the app).
If the "store" is now the app then how does Steam get their cut? Do they just disallow any product that has a "store" inside of it? What constitutes a "store"?
This is the hard question. Apple has already reduced subscription cut to 15% after 1 year, but do they deserve even that?
Steam gets their cut by developers listing their games there directly. Epic already has a store app and yet Valve still makes money because the steam store and ecosystem provide value that justifies the cost even when alternatives exist.
I'd ask this instead. Would it be beneficial for society as a whole if iOS had to allow alternative app stores?
It is likely beneficial for society as a whole for iOS to allow alternative app stores, but that doesn't make it right for the government to force them to do so.
What makes it fair is that Apple is a private company, entitled to these kind of business decisions. As such, free market forces should then determine if the true cost of distribution (which is basically what App store provides) is more or less than what Apple charges for it. It does seem that this is still one of the most efficient ways to distribute an app to the end user, as witnessed by the sheer number of developers (silent majority) willing to take the 30% cut vs a loud minority (usually big companies on their own) that isn't.
And you can frame it however you want, the price for iOS distribution is not determined by market forces because there is no competition for it. Distributing an application on android is not an alternative, but complimentary. It's like if there were two delivery services in the US, each covering one part of the country. It doesn't matter that there isn't only one delivery service, both of them still have a monopoly because they're not competing in regards to what they actually sell.
> the price for iOS distribution is not determined by market forces because there is no competition for it.
Perhaps you misunderstood. The price for iOS distribution is determined by Apple; whether that price is a good value is determined by market forces. Again, it seems that it is indeed a great deal, because vast (and silent majority) of developers accept it.
> It's like if there were two delivery services in the US, each covering one part of the country.
But it is not. You can reach your user via Web or if they are mobile via Android or Windows phone. Apple can not be blamed if your user prefers to use iPhone (despite it being most expensive) and now you have 30% cost of distribution to reach them. That is exactly type of an outcome a free market would produce. The freedom here is expressed in your user's ability to pick their mobile device and by no stretch of imagination Apple has a monopoly there.
The famous monopoly cases (e.g. Standard oil or Bell system) also had tons of customers, that's what happens when demand is rather inelastic. If you want to say that artificially inflated prices due to e.g. a monopoly can still be a good deal because people are still willing to buy it, then we shouldn't be content with just good deals because they still cause harm to society overall by not being pareto efficient. Apple can't charge the rate they do purely by the strength of their distribution service - it's the device base that is the real value and only by anti-competitive measures can they keep the price up.
>But it is not. You can reach your user via Web or if they are mobile via Android or Windows phone.
What if Apple also decided that every transaction made through their browser had to give them a cut? The situation doesn't fundamentally change (you could still just offer your app to android/desktop users), but I think it's pretty clear that this would be anti-competitive. They might not have a monopoly on smartphones/devices, but they have such a large share that boycotting them isn't really an option.
Users are also currently funneled into apps due to how web is limited in functionality as determined by Apple. e.g. if your app needs long term local storage you now need an 'real' app because Apple changed it so that web app local storage gets cleared on the regular. Windows phone has also been dead for years now.
Perhaps you misread, but I am saying opposite of both. I am saying that both Apple's prices are not high, proven by number of people agreeing to pay them in a market where other options to distribute an app exist, and that Apple does not have a monopoly.
> What if Apple also decided that every transaction made through their browser had to give them a cut... but I think it's pretty clear that this would be anti-competitive.
It is not pretty clear? There are plenty other options on the market in terms of a browser.
> They might not have a monopoly on smartphones/devices, but they have such a large share that boycotting them isn't really an option.
At least we can agree that Apple does not have a monopoly. Everything else is market forces at play. My argument was that the price set by Apple for distribution is such that it is acceptable to majority of developers. If Apple set an unreasonable price instead, say 70% cut, I am sure that a lot of developers would simply not develop for iOS, nor would iOS achieve same reach it has. Thus we can only conclude that Apple carefully picked a price which is both acceptable by vast number of people and maximizes Apple's revenue at the same time. This is free market at its finest.
This discussion is about where Apple as a private company has a right to charge 30% for the distribution on its platform and I argue that it has every right to do so.
Same with Apple, of course they will do this as long as they can. There is no moral or ethical reason why they are doing this, simply they can get away with it.
I mean if you found a hack where you could get 1% of all the world's transactions, would you really say no to that, or try to find out why you deserve it?
More like apps that also happen to use iOS as a frontend in addition to other funnels/marketplaces. Costco is one of the examples cited, and I frankly didn't even know that they had an app even though I have a membership. How exactly Apple is planning on justifying taking a cut of this membership fee is completely beyond me.
If you say “X doesn’t deserve Y”, then roughly I hear, “I don’t like that X is getting Y”. It’s like you’re asking, “Why should I like Apple’s revenue streams?” I don’t think I can answer that, but can you tell me why I should care about whether you like Apple’s revenue streams or not?
There's an element of symbiosis between Apple and app developers.
Which is why they take a 30% cut.
If the user chose app A over app B then specifically what help has Apple provided to the App creator of A to justify the 30%? Apple's argument is they're bringing customers. But even if they do nothing one App is going to get the customer anyway. Also, Apple gets paid for advertising Apps and services to end users, so again, what are they doing to bring in customers to specific apps?
They are making all the devices your app runs on. They are putting your app in their app store. They could remove your app from the app store and 0 customers would come to your app.
>They are putting your app in their app store. They could remove your app from the app store and 0 customers would come to your app.
They're getting paid for that, so they're doing their job.
I don't know. I have released 0 apps and own 0 apple devices. I have never used their app store, so I do not have enough information to answer. I believe that question is irrelevant because apple is providing you a platform regardless about what apps they try to get people to install.
You are using their intellectual property? As in the App Store? Thus, as long as you are using that to distribute your app, they are entitled to collect the commission from where-ever they want and it doesn't matter if it is IAP, Web, etc.
From [0] of page 66
> Under all models, Apple would be entitled to a commission or licensing fee, even if IAP was optional.
From [0] of page 112 (b)
> The Court agrees with the general proposition that Apple is entitled to be paid for its intellectual property. The inquiry though does not end with the bald conclusion. Apple provides evidence that it invests enormous sums into developing new tools and features for iOS.
If you don't like it, There's always PWAs.
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17442392/812/epic-games...
If you don't like the landlord, don't move into the building. It's not the only building in town, but just the one with the most lucrative customers. If you want them to be your customers, you gotta pay to play.
But the funny thing is that even with the premium, Apple users spend far more on app purchases than Android users. And in turn developers make more money on IOS app sales - which is why they flock to the platform.
To sum up: developers make more money on the platform, Apple makes lots of money from running the platform, and customers are indicating they are getting value on the platform (even if you personally don't see why) by spending more on the platform. I don't see grounds for outrage here.
dumb
It is Apple sharing more than TWO THIRD of those revenue back to you.
There are an infinite supply of bullshit apps that have been scamming people with subscriptions that are impossible to cancel. Apple/Google both just send out lip service.
Ten former members of Apple's supplier responsibility team told The Information that Suyin wasn't an isolated incident, and that Apple had refused or was slow to stop doing business with suppliers that had repeatedly violated labor laws or failed to improve workplace safety when it would have cut into its profits.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...
If you're going to use child labor, i don't see any issue with charging 30% for anything you can get your hands on.
It's about protecting Apple's ~80% profit margins on the App Store[1], not protecting customers.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...
I think one of the biggest issue is that Apple is trying to capture all of the revenue from the App eco system from a single function, the in app billing. Which is an extremely bad value prop for any large corporation, and also means a lot of big apps get to use the AppStore completely free.
I think Apple needs to do some shuffling in how they charge for the AppStore.
I think it's a good comparison and would give insight into how a similar scenario has played out in adjacent industries
I mean microsoft didn't sell hardware, and now Apple sells hardware and software and takes a cut from software sales.
What is apple offering the other companies for the pleasure of paying apple?
I feel like I'm missing something.
I really wish politicians and everyone would focus on USER experience here.
Apple benefits because there is a ton of crap and user harm in the marketplace that goes COMPLETELY unaddressed. We are just getting around to rules on subscription cancellation practices on the web more generally. Apple has this solved.
Additionally, with a lot of these big players, only apple has negotiating leverage, no individual user could EVER force them to accept things like hide my email or clear trial periods or non-scam cancellation policies. So USERS benefit from the power apple has in some cases.
Is it worth the apple tax? For some it is worth it even though apple has relatively small smartphone marketshare.
Like Roblox which only pays developers 25%. But even that is better than Peloton where I can't even install any other apps.
All I see there is talk of how to make even more money.
SWEs too, just use linux.
Why do some people buy an expensive Mercedes if basically any car can drive you from A to B?
I am a Linux user and I love FOSS, GNU CLI tools, etc. But it takes more time, crashes and nerves to edit a video using Kdenlive than it would by using iMovie. FOSS software is awesome but it is hard for their authors to compete with commercial SW made by highly-paid full-time professionals. And commercial software on Linux is often non-existent or problematic (mainly due to ensuring support for so many distributions).
Like the classic example is someone setting up a barrier on the river and charging boats that want to pass through. There's no value being added by the person blocking the river.
Just the same, when Apple says "Let's charge for this", what value are they adding for doing so? They make money off the current system. They just want to make more money while providing zero additional value to consumers or to app makers.
All I can ask is "How do you sleep at night?" but I'm sure I'll get the Rainier Wolfcastle's answer.[0]
I think fundamentally corporations should only exist for the purpose of the public good. That is what's wrong with America and capitalism in many ways. It's not the shareholders but the public that they should answer to. If it does not serve the public good to take a 30% cut, then they should not be allowed to do so. As easy as that.
What's the narrative?
They can make up whatever number they want.
I couldn't find it, but i really want to know the margins of the app store compared to the revenue. How much ripping off are they doing? If the margins are 50%, it's way too high!
Misusing monopoly power is.
In terms of overall downloads, Google Play Store probably exceeds what Apple's store processes.
Interestingly, lawyers/regulators can define a "market" any way they want. The courts can decide.
But, while iPhones are part of the "phone market", "iOS Apps" are their own unique market. Probably only a matter of time before regulators think of it that way.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012615/what-are-leg...
This includes:
* the app store
* subscription management
* payments
* any sort of digital media (music, movies, tv shows)
* browser engines...there literally is no way to release a different browser on iOS, even iOS "Firefox" and "Chrome" have to use Apple's WebKit binary
When we are talking about monopolies in this context, we mean monopoly power, monopsony etc. For example, when a firm’s ability to charge a price higher than its marginal cost with very little change in demand of their product, it has monopoly power.
When deciding if a company is a monopoly, the first thing to do is 'market definition' - defining the relevant market. Is the whole mobile phone market? Can companies realistically compete if they produce only Android apps? It is in any way practical to assume that people carry two phones? Obliviously not.
Apple lowered its fees to 15% but that can't be the end of the story, right ?
That's what I hint at with "basic economic theory". Evil Corp X wants maximal returns and there is a price point at which they get maximal returns. They can't just raise prices infinitely, because nobody will buy the service. If a middleman takes a cut then that optimal price point moves. Explaining it as the cut being shifted onto the consumer is too simplistic of a model. A part of the cut is shifted onto the consumer and the rest is lost by Evil Corp B, to maximise their total revenue.
although wholeheartedly I agree with your sentiment, that's where our opinions diverge... none of the parties mentioned in the original issue are 'wanting to do good' in my opinion, even thoug it _is_, as you say, understandable that they do what they do.
Yes, for the immediate issue at hand they just want to make money right, but they might be seeing their greater mission as extremely good, for example in providing the best handheld computing platform to the world or whatever it might be and that makes it all OK. To which level that is delusional thinking I'll let you decide for yourself, but I have a lot of first hand experience of how the mind operates in top level C-suits. They almost have to fool themselves to be able to operate and at their core believe without a shred of a doubt in what they do. Whether this comes from starting each morning with Tony Robbins affirmations I do not know.
But if you ascribe the degree of evilness to the action rather than the actor, then you absolutely should care because it's anti-competitive and poisons the general health of the market.
So if you buy the slippery slope argument (which you don't have to), then if there are objections you want to make about that dominant-institution-in-progress, now is probably a good time to think about what they're doing and what you wish would change.
Because Evil Corp B and Evil Corp C will pass the 30% commission on the consumer.
This is not theoretical. In 2018 Netflix would've paid Apple around 256m [0] and Netflix also had a fair number of price raises in the past few years. Obviously the app store commission was not the only factor in these price raises, but it's clearly a factor the tune of about 250 million per year.
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/netflix-stops-paying-the-a...
I guess not everyone would look at it this way, but from a big picture standpoint it all adds up to the bottom line.
To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.
Users might be ok with some extra fee for conveniences like trust and the ability to easily unsubscribe. Let the user pick and let Apple compete for those sales.
It’s completely reasonable that side loaded applications should not be entitled to use regulated payment services.
Edit: Even Android will not entitle side loaded apps for Google payment processing. Android and iOS are literally identical in this regard.
To ask you the inverse question, in what way is any of this "nearly identical" to Android sideloading which allows indefinite sideloading via any delivery method, including installation of 3rd party stores, with no more than a click on an approval prompt from the user?
It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
Anything that can run LLVM can side load.
When you personally limit sideloading to be "I compile the app and manage a personal security chain to keep it active" it may seem wild, that's not what the vast majority of Android sideloading/3rd party stores is though. Xcode, beyond requiring installation, requires a macOS install to run it on. There are other ways to compile iOS apps, each even less accessible to users or distribution by companies. And again: the obvious statement that the vast majority of revenue generating apps on the App Store are not open source.
Even amongst the Android tech nerds 3rd party stores like F-Droid are popular because users don't want to compile their open source apps constantly... and there are even less requirements around compiling Android apps than iOS apps!
> It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Not true, sideloading apps on Android means loading them from a different source not disconnecting them from Google services or the Android ecosystem as a whole. It of course allows for that if it's what you're after but it's not limited in such a scope.
> Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
On Android sideloading is being able to pick which app sources you trust, even if that means "not Google". That could mean "I compiled it myself on an air gapped computer" to you, "I loaded it from a 3rd party store" to another, and "I downloaded it from the developers site" to a third. Which you personally choose is irrelevant as each user gets to pick their allowed sources so it can fit any user's need.
I've never heard of this being possible.
You can install any app you compiled with your own key and it lasts for 7 days before requiring it to be recompiled.
This seven day lie/conspiracy/flat-earth is disappointing.
A far bigger limitation for me is the three-app provisioning limit. There isn't any way to work around it[1], and if you do want to do serious sideloading you almost certainly will need to upgrade to a paid developer account.
[0] Specifically iOS only allows app provisioning over USB or Wi-Fi, not locally. Locally installed software cannot actually communicate with the remote debugging daemon. You can work around this with network extensions, but you don't get to use them in dev-signed apps unless you have a paid dev account that's been approved by Apple to use them.
For the record, that isn't to make sideloading harder; that's because Facebook went and shipped a spyware VPN with their enterprise cert.
[1] Personal experience time: Even when jailbroken, and with AltDaemon and Immortal installed, AltStore still bumps up against the three-app limit.
But that everything they charge money for, they _must_ allow alternatives to exist. If they want to charge a large fee for getting on the App Store, they must allow alternative app stores. The problem is not that they charge money, but that they use their massive user lock in to force people to pay for these services to exist in the market.
And yes you do have choices. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers out there. Can I install Ford UI on my Tesla? Do you think those companies won’t make you use their own payment processing once apps become prolific in car UIs? Can I hail Uber with the Lyft app? Why are they locking me in to only using Lyft on the Lyft app? Can I buy PlayStation games on Xbox?
If you’re against all of it fine, but let’s not pretend Apple is doing anything out of the ordinary here.
And even so, many of these “issues” are not problems on Android right? You can use 3rd-party app stores and so forth right?
I’d also suggest.. why does the scale issue matter? I prefer that Apple enforces Apple Pay. I prefer that Apple enforced Sign In with Apple. That’s why I buy an iPhone. If those things bothered me I’d buy something else.
I switch between Windows, Linux, and macOS with regularity and while there are platform-specific services, the mobile platform is considerably more walled off. Mobile storage stagnated for years while the apps and any captured media became larger, really pressuring you to use their cloud services in a way I've never had with a desktop. I can store data on a NAS and access it pretty easily with any of the desktop platforms. I'm not sure how someone is supposed to be able to be able to migrate off iCloud when moving to Android without involving a non-mobile computer. It doesn't appear to be anywhere as easy as copying files from one SSD to another or using AirDrop/SMB/NFS.
The iMessage thing is another layer to this. You may not want to call that lock-in, but there have been extensive threads about this topic recently [0][1]. The Epic lawsuit surfaced some emails that strongly suggest Apple views iMessage as a way to lock customers in [2].
Regardless, the original point is switching platforms isn't going to happen without a fair bit of cost and likely some social upheaval. Switching platforms is technically an option, but it's not a realistic one for many. I don't think it follows that if someone has stuck with the same platform for several years that they tacitly agree with all the policy decisions made by that platform.
[0] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889492 [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29851317 [2] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753014
What's illegal is anti-competitive use of monopoly market position.
Some textbook rulings will apply, since Apple exces admit that if they do no constrain downstream, no one will use their 30% markup product. So consumers could be better off by definition
although Apple will argue that they will charge more to downstream producers directly, but this is also difficult to argue (they can do this anyway and extract rents from consumers and producers at the same time).
If you have a monopolistic platform market on which you also produce, it seems rather hard not to get sued
It’s exactly the same dynamic as in net neutrality.
The different here is that Nintendo is not a 3 trillion dollar company, that owns 50% of a massively important market in the US.
Yes, anti-competitive practices are allowed if you aren't a huge company.
Literally it is the law, that if you become a big enough company, and have enough market power, then certain actions become illegal, that were not illegal if you weren't as powerful of a company.
> that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.
It actually literally does mean that they are entitled to that.
For the same reason that 3rd party web browsers, were entitled access to windows users (and before you say it, yes I am aware that windows had a larger control of the market than apple, and it is not literally the same in every single exact way, but the same principle still applies, just in a smaller amount)
This is why we talk about Tesla direct sales all the time. Because we are moving car sales to the apple model.
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if a customer already purchased a ford car, and then tried to fix the car with a 3rd party repair person.
There are literal laws about this, for cars, that require ford to provide manuals, to 3rd parties, and require ford to sell replacement parts for 3rd parties to repair cars from.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...
For example I have no problem if a third party store forced one payment option only, but only allowing one store and one payment option is just milking your market position/rent seeking.
See that’s _exactly_ the problem I have. I don’t want to use your shitty payments system that’s likely less secure than anything Apple is doing. Allowing a single payment source that’s not Apple would directly harm consumers from a security and privacy perspective.
I do not use Apple at all. Somehow I am not feeling "harmed".
I might reconsider my attitude when / if I can have phone as a generic computing device where I can download and install whatever I need without much hassles and where I can distribute my applications without needing to sacrifice a virgin first.
Apple's attitude of "we know better than you" is the really shitty thing here.
Can you imagine being a student and being told you have to install this app from a third party store?
That’s just a terrible model for user safety and security.
But I think we should be able to agree that demanding 30% of nearly everything and completely banning any sort of alternatives is extremely overbearing and ends up taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people struggling to get by.
I also kind of like the idea that something like that happens, except games all caps must use Apple‘s system and pay the 30%. That’s not as fair, but might be workable.
If I had my way over all of this? Do you know what I really want?
No consumable in-app purchases. Period. Outlawed.
One of my favorite things about the early iPhone was the incredible games that you could get. Now there’s almost none of them, the developers of practically abandoned the platform. The only ways to make money are ads and consumable in app purchases which are just complete scams. Like $1000 buckets of Smurfberries.
That’ll never happen. But I wish it would, because it would bring back the great games.
On that note, I hope FedNOW works well enough to become an alternate PoS payment method[0].
0: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
We also have the insurance component: Say some famous musician and a few influencers decide to launch a new music festival, get a lot of money paid to their festival-making company, and then, due to mismanagement, fail to have a working music festival. Most of the people that paid with credit cards will ask for refunds, and will get them, even if the festival company goes bankrupt. Some of those people managing transactions hold the bag, and end up losing millions in refunds. There's also a wide gamut of fraudulent operations that will try to extract money from the system, either by posing as merchants, or as customers. Some of that fraud is also eaten by the companies that handle the transaction.
So while fees could go down in a world with little fraud (and they do, as companies that are large enough, and have sufficient controls, end up negotiating serious discounts), it makes sense for fees to have a flat base and a percentage base, even if the entire system between you and your customer was just attempting to break even. The right percent though, barring the most fraudulent of environments, has nothing to do with a 30% cut.
And the banks that issue the cards are the ones that pay points/get interest, not Visa. Visa simply processes the transactions. If you noticed, your "Visa" card has a bank issuer, like the Capital One Quicksilver card (which uses Visa network)
The cost of running a transaction network has nothing to do with credit card points, insurance, chargebacks. Those are all handled by other parties.
What you are basically trying to do is visiting a vip club (user-value wise) and then making it open to every crap dj out there, because otherwise it's "unfair". Why don't you just go to a regular one then? It is the same as this vip would turn into in a heartbeat. And where should other members who liked it go after that?
- SDK / iOS updates
- Bandwidth to upload the compiled app to their phone
- Support from Apple
- Hosting / security of aforementioned
- etc. etc.
Who pays for all of the infrastructure of the App Store and the Apple SDK then?
Granted the SDKs would probably be much less comprehensive if there were no 3rd party apps but Apple advertises how their hardware can be used incl. by 3rd party apps and providing the libraries to access that hardware is expected by users (even if they don't think about this, most people expect Snapchat to access the camera).
Bandwidth/Hosting is covered under the $100/yr but if it wasn't, they could easily charge devs for tiers of downloads. Most of the support I'd bet is on the consumer side which wouldn't apply if there were other payment processors.
It's also tricky to change the status quo since at this point a huge chunk of their revenue is the AppStore, and any serious change in the 30% will impact that greatly, upsetting investors. Once you take the step forward, it's very hard to take a step back.
From that angle, it’s easily worth a 30 % fee. Not because it costs that much to run it, but because it creates that value.
Edit: To clarify further, I'm not saying "the status quo is fine", I would be in favor of legislation that would force Apple and Google to allow alternative app stores as first class citizens, but in the world we live in, I don't think trying to extract profit out of the platform you built is that crazy, this is what every big corp does.
You could almost argue that it's worth 30% for the initial discovery in their app store (meh), but I just don't get how anyone could think it's fair for Apple to take 30% of a subscription, when developers don't have a choice but to use the platform.
What I mean is that this is not something exceptional, literally every single billion dollar tech corp operates this way, the only way you accumulate insane amounts of profit is by cynically examining every possible angle to extract more revenue from the business.
"Competitive capitalism" is the one which is generally best for consumers, as businesses must compete, which drives down their margins (thus passing savings to consumers).
"Free market capitalism" is effectively hands off. Monopolies can form, and without any regulation it can become quite bad for consumers. Typically monopolies rarely form, but obviously in areas like utilities it happens quite naturally.
Most people strive for competitive capitalism, when used colloquially, IMO. In the general case they are one in the same, but owning whole platforms that are broadly used is new territory, where it bleeds into anti-consumer impact IMO
I daresay a lot of people here owe their careers to the actual (and aspirational, especially considering the site sponsor) gatekeepers collecting rent, too.
Sort of, it would be just business if developers were allowed to release and install apps from somewhere else other than the App Store, and if there were allowed to use any type of payment system they wanted to, or even the mere fact if there were allowed to tell users to go somewhere else besides Apples IAP system to make a payment. It's monopolistic and anti-capitalist if you compound all the facts together.
Is that valuable enough to charge 30%? I don’t know but it’s certainly not outside what seems reasonable by orders of magnitude to me.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that they are a monopoly and should be forced to allow alternate app stores or payment processors but it’s not what they are charging that puts me over the line.
Most likely the non-Apple route would be cheaper to the consumer and get 90% of the traffic for that reason alone. If that's the reality, does that not imply that Apple's practices harm most consumers? Seems self evident to me that they do.
Besides, there really should be some common spec/mechanism to manage subscriptions from any vendor.
Then a one time purchase app just makes a lifetime subscription for the same price and cuts the fee from 30% to 10%.
Well then I have good news for you: Apple forbids you that option.
Why would Apple agree to having its intellectual property being used for free? As long as you have an app on the App Store taking payments, Apple is still entitled to take a commission out of that regardless even if IAP is optional.
Even after the Epic v Apple court case, Apple unfortunately still wins. Don't like it?, Maybe use PWAs or failing that build an alternative. Good luck.
What’s really interesting to me is that moves like this are the embodiment of the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News for years. For a long time it felt like every HN thread about pricing or salary negotiation was full of people insisting that you needed to “charge more” in every conceivable situation.
If you made a thing that was producing a lot of money for your clients, you needed to “charge more”! If your customers weren’t complaining and leaving, you needed to “charge more”!
Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move, HN reaches for the pitchforks.
It’s interesting to see how clear-cut this dichotomy is depending on who the reader thinks is being charged more.
"Tech Immigration" is largely H1B immigration is prefectly valid to be opposed to H1B while being pro immigration.
H1B is a predatory program designed to lower wages and put immigrants in a terrible stop when in comes to the immigration status, i.e the employer holds not only their income, but their ability to remain in the nation in the palm of their hands. This created a toxic and coercive relationship with the employer.
At the same time a correction to this program, and a correction to the low skilled workers is simply allowing more open immigration, if you want to come here to work you should be able to.
The alternative is a sane program that is detached from your employer’s whims and provides you some stability and control. As of this writing, that program in the US is called a green card. But don’t get me started on how hard that is get.
I want to be clear no where did I say anything about "open borders", I said "more open immigration"
I do believe in some controls on immigration, security controls as an example. However I also believe it should be vastly easier than it is today, order of magnitude more open than it is today.
With that in mind, consider also that 'and according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or cofounded 55% of the United States' billion-dollar companies.' [1] It's not a zero-sum game, and stapling would-be founders to companies they would rather not work at for decades (H-1B for Indian born folks) hoping to get the freedom to found the next unicorn is quite a waste of time, talent and their risk-on years.
As an aside, it's interesting that folks want high wages, high disposable income, low inequality, low prices and low inflation all at the same time. I strongly suspect that these are fundamentally incompatible goals. Feels like, at most, a pick-two kind of thing.
[1] https://hbr.org/2021/08/research-why-immigrants-are-more-lik...
I may have done the same! Parent and gp are scrubbing any nuance and leaving cartoon version of arguments, then fighting that strawman. Not all immigration is the same, IMO, sameness is a requisite for arguing the only "rational" positions can either be pro-immigration (all of it) or anti-immigration, which is absurd and reductive.
This is not about Apple charging more - it's about Apple charging for something they did not add any value to. This is closer to Oracle's billing tactics, that rightfully get pilloried on HN, the only difference is I'm yet to encounter anyone on HN defend Oracle's billing practices.
It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services. To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
I do agree with you that most people will see their lives improved when compared to the country they immigrated from. However, the abuse does exist.
The complaint isn't that H1B should go away. It that it needs reform.
Facts, Reality, 1000's of people that have exploited by the system and talk about their experiences publicly just like your fellow commenter that seems to have had a different experience than you.
>>Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.
2 things can be true at the same time as well, it could very well be a boon for the person, but it could also artificially stunt their growth due to the restrictions placed on them by the program, I am not sure how anyone could honestly argue that is better for the immigrant to be locked into their employer, and for the employer to have the power to deportation over their employee.. Or honestly argue that would not be abused by less than ethical employers of which there many.
You may have found a good one, I can assure you not everyone does
>>It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services.
That seems to be a huge leap based on an assumption that does not track with reality. I am unclear as to what would prevent highly educated people from immigrating to the US with more open immigration, but how H1B does not?
>>To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
Does not serve my interests at all really. I am not impacted by immigration one way or the other.
I am sure a large part of it has to do with the fact that until certain points in the process, you cannot change your employer without restarting the process, so a lot of people just stay without making a fuss about it.
Edit. Regardless, as it stands, the current H1B is indeed a broken system ripe for exploitation.
Of course there is abuse. Even systemic abuse. This goes both ways though. For instance, Indian applicants can wait for over a decade for green card, we're talking completely americanized, fluent and self sufficient people, often with high positions at companies. People who did everything right, by any standard. Are these people abused? Perhaps, but if so, it's because the US government refuses to acknowledge them as permanent residents, which they clearly are for all practical purposes.
Alternatives and improvements to H1B is important, but suspiciously few in this community were interested in such a discussion at the time. Imo, parent comment is spot on that this is one of the hackernews dissonances.
I have the opposite view and don't believe they are diametrically opposed. I see many legitimate reasons to cap unskilled immigration while seeing virtually no good reasons to cap skilled.
You'll need to ask patio11 for comment. He might have had some disciples regurgitating it, but he's ultimately responsible for this viewpoint. (Not saying I entirely disagree...)
And here's a comment with more; it has definitely been a theme:
Imagine a web developer gets hired to build a landing page for a product. Yes please, charge twice as much for your work, sure. But say they tried to charge an ongoing 30% of all future revenue for that product. Do you think HN would be behind that?
Actually many people do just fine without Apple.
However if many players decide to get out from Apple ecosystem, it'll be Apple that'll change stance here.
That makes it unlike either a one-time or a flat maintenance fee.
Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.
Apple views the iPhone as a sovereign territory, not just some generic compute resource. They can delete accounts, block access to the CPU, and charge whatever taxes they want. It's their land. In their minds, you're blessed to have the opportunity to be on their platform. Your users are strictly on loan from Apple, and you're going to pay for access to their customers. Your app better behave.
The market evolved into the shape that it did because Apple had a great product, a fun evolution of iPod, and a simple and compelling UI. Microsoft missed the shot, Android took time to get its act together.
None of this was a bad deal for developers at the time, but now there's no way to avoid it. We're now living in a sort of North Korea. Entrenched, with no way out. Over half of your potential customers don't have other devices and you can't reach them any other way than going through Apple.
It sucks for small companies in tech having to carve out ever smaller pieces of the pie. Year by year the market shrinks because the giants take it, tax it, and ration it out. If we'd have known then what we know now, we would have bought up every first generation iPhone and buried them all in a ditch.
iPhone is compute, but they'll be damned if you do anything that threatens their dear platform and profits.
We should push for our legislators to require open installs without an App Store. Customers already pay for the device. They shouldn't have to pay additional taxes for us trying to develop for them, trying to survive in this already hostile market.
That wasn’t always true of phones (pre-iPhone smartphones), PDAs, games consoles, workstations, or some mainframes. Platform owners requiring license fees for on developers on their platform, using their dev tools, was not invented by Apple.
Since you’re talking about web, if you want to be on Shopify’s or Salesforce’s marketplace, you need to share revenue too.
But you are right, HN used to be about the little David entrepreneur. Since ~2012 it's all about "fuck making a startup and go work for The Man"
It’s a different thing entirely when you’re the sole gatekeeper between hundreds of millions of customers and anyone wanting to sell them apps and digital services.
It might not qualify as monopoly in the legal sense, but you’re still being a bully, abusing a position of power in the market.
"Charge your customer more for your work" is VERY meaningfully different from "Charge someone else's customer more for someone else's work, because you own the storefront for someone else's business".
Sure, building the storefront is hard and high leverage. But figuring out the moral answer to "who reaps the rewards" is an entirely different journey.
Apple in that regard is holding them hostage.
Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.
As of September of 2021 in the US[1], both Apple and Google's mobile app payment policies have converged[2] as Google mandates that all app developers use their payment platform and only their payment platform, along with mandating a 15% to 30% cut of all app payments. I believe Google's policy matches Apple's when it comes to this example.
[1] https://fossbytes.com/google-mandates-android-apps-to-pay-30...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
> Android has always allowed people to get apps from multiple app stores. In fact, most Android devices ship with at least two app stores preinstalled, and consumers are able to install additional app stores. Each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features. This openness means that even if a developer and Google do not agree on business terms the developer can still distribute on the Android platform. This is why Fortnite, for example, is available directly from Epic's store or from other app stores including Samsung's Galaxy App store.
The implication is that apps can choose to only publish in stores with more favorable IAP terms, not that each store is somehow eligible to a fixed percentage of the $120/yr fee for a costco membership that may or may not have originated within the app store's ecosystem. Otherwise, at a cut of 30% per store, an app would owe platforms 120% of subscription revenue to be on merely 4 stores, regardless of how the customer converted.
When you raise your prices on your own work, there’s usually an implied alternative like not hiring you. We know there’s no such thing when it comes to iOS.
Creating and providing access to a lucrative market is valuable. What's the moral imperative for allowing others to provide access to the market you created or reduce your fees, both of which would reduce your profits for the benefit of everyone else who is trying to increase their profits?
I think it's disputable. It would seem to be adding about the same amount of value that the Windows store does for Windows users. How much is that?
It is simple not at all comparable in quality to the app store on iOS.
Apple, much like the solo developer, is looking out for its best interests and what will help it continue to grow.
There is a difference between a pricey product and a high taxes.
This sort of cognitive dissonance is pretty par for the course for communities like this.
- If you are to build a product with similar quality to Xiaomi's, it has to be priced higher than Xiaom's, because unless your production/sales volume is on par with Xiaomi, your production cost is very likely higher than Xiaomi's. Customers will prefer Xiaomi's product because it is cheaper.
- If you cut down production cost by bringing down quality, you might be able to price the product in Xiaomi's price range. But customers will still prefer Xiaomi because it has better quality for the same price range.
1: https://www.gizmochina.com/2019/11/28/xiaomi-ceo-says-that-g...
Here I fixed your quote.
Including in everything is the $750M bonus Tim Cook received[1]. We've seen that exec comp is inversely correlated with performance[2] and buy backs only cause greater equity packages to be issued (doesn't reduce the dilution)
[1]: https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_apple-ceo-brings-home-750-mill...
[2]: https://archive.fo/uSTWs - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/business/stock-buybacks-t...
[3]: https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...
And distributing a mountainous pile of cash to shareholders. In FY2021 alone, Apple repurchased $85.5 billion dollars worth of shares and spent $14.5 billion dollars on dividend issuance. That's 1/10th of a trillion dollars per year in distributions. [1]
Buffet alone collected almost $1B in dividends since taking his position. [2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/03/apples-3-trillion-market-cap...
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
I'm okay with them enforcing app store policy guidelines etc. I think what they're doing here though is just a racket.
They may have deluded themselves about this (seems that way from their comments about it), but I think most people outside of Apple see it for what it is. You can make a good argument about app store rules being in the interest of customers and chosen by customers. You can't really make a good argument for the profit grab they're doing here, it's just abuse.
Edit: for example, after I downweighted the current subthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29914127 became the top subthread. Talk about from one extreme to the other...
Safari has dragged it's feet for supporting common web app features and fixing bugs. To this day there are no push notifications on web.