The iPhone is only valuable because of developers. If they all coordinated together, they could get apple to change. Imagine all the apps breaking one day…
Is no value assigned to the truly amazing custom silicon that sips power while efficiently supporting an instruction set that, in turn, supports developers external and internal?
Is no value assigned to the work that goes into evolving with the wireless network standards? Those are internal people, generally with decade+ hardcore engineering backgrounds.
It's because the developers are secondary. Apple is the primary, the key to it all.
One, you would never get the complete boycott that it would require to have an impact—-very few app publishers relying on app profits would risk a profitable app just to prove the point, especially if the publisher is a publicly traded company. You would have to rely on activist super small (single dev or two) app studios for your strikers and, no offense to those smaller studios, those apps generally are not the ones that people will miss beyond a mild irritation.
Two, for every app participating in the boycott, there would be a similar app that didn’t participate that could backfill. The non-participating apps would be well known within a day or two and would start displacing striking apps pretty much immediately.
Of course, this is a hypothetical because the app developers are fragmented while Apple is a single entity. The blog argues that to be fair, Apple should donate 30% of its iPhone revenue to app developers as an iPhone without 3rd party apps is fundamentally crippled. The meta argument is that Apple taking a 30% cut of app revenue is fundamentally unfair.
Apple has set a new precedent with the 30% cut. Operating systems such as windows, macOS and unix that came before iOS never demanded a 30% cut of app revenue installed on the device.
Would you also be supportive of Microsoft and Unix vendors demanding 30% of revenue generated by applications on their operating system - starting 2022?
I disagree that the device is crippled without 3rd party apps. It may not be quite as useful or perhaps fun, but it would still be a far more useful device than a Motorola Razr phone or a Blackberry.
Yes it’s a new premise. Apple provides an app market to 1.65B devices to app developers with little entrance risk to the devs much beyond the elbow grease they spent creating the app. How much more money and effort would a developer have to spend to get their app that level of exposure without the App Store? A lot, and all of it amounting to real dollars at risk with no guarantee of payoff. What’s truly at risk publishing at the App Store? Nothing but a publishers time. Even the 30% you pay to Apple only hits if you are making money. It’s a commission, they marketed and sold the app for you, handled the transaction, distribution, and dropped some cash in your bank account. 30% in my mind is pretty cheap for what you get. Any other business that relied on third parties services to handle the marketing, sales, shipping, and finance transaction of the product would not bat an eye if those costs ran to 30%.
As for Unix and Windows deciding to charge a fee? That wouldn’t bother me a bit if they were marketing, selling, and handling the transaction for my app. Do it.
Then developers started jailbreaking the phones, adding their own apps to them.
The Appstore wasn't obvious for Apple, and it was only after developer backlash that they changed their tune.
So you can say that Apple did everything but the truth is that the success of the iPhone is from the COMBINED effort of Apple, and the work of developers in the community.
This is not “remembering history correctly” at all.
Apple didn’t have an SDK ready, and tried to sell the shit sandwich of Web Apps as a stopgap.
And how exactly do you know that it always was their intent to make an SDK for third party developers?
From https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
"The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash."
At the end of the day, these developers are still competing with each other, and rational actors will break from the coordination to profit off the users for themselves.
Nobody will a join a union just to strike ( a.k.a pull the apps) however making collective to better negotiate with someone with lot of control over your revenue (salary) is not inherently a dumb idea.
App Store developers are sprinkled all over the world, so not too much is consistent between them. Getting enough of these varied people to collectively pause their income, and allow their competitors to flourish, long enough for Apple to even notice/care, is probably much harder. I think it would be even harder to present the applications failure in a way that an average consumer would sympathize with or even understand.
You only need really apps with say 10-50M downloads to join together, most of them know each other and many of them are made by rival companies who have an interest in keeping Apple in check.
Indie developers could of course be invited to join such action, but apart from PR and other aspects they won't move the needle either way with Apple.
Instead of posting anecdotal evidence of mine to the contrary, I ll ask the following. If cartels are unstable in practice, then why do states need competition authorities to punish price fixing, and similar practices?
I 'd say cartel's are unstable in theory but not necessarily in practice.
Even things like commodities have hidden cartels and monopolies. Oil may be a commodity, but the refining facilities are most certainly cartel-owned. Agriculture is seemingly not a cartel, but ADM and Cargill dominate certain aspects of the supply chain and processing.
Instead I would argue that iterative game theory of free market economics would stabilize to a cartel or monopoly. Once one of the open competitors determines an advantage, and/or has substantial access to near-free capital (um, what's the interest rate of the last two decades?), then they can acquire their competitors.
Then they can apply barriers to entry such as regulation and lockin contracts with equipment suppliers and the like. Look at the practices of Intel to lockout AMD. Look at how Microsoft exerted power on PC makers. Once you are big, you can influence the suppliers and distributors to lockout competitors.
As long as size is an intimidator (and it almost always will be except to extreme examples of markets), it will be effective. The only time it helps is when it slows response until an upstart using an entirely different supply chain and technology (like Tesla) gains such a fundamental advantage they can't stamp it out.
I'm sure I'm atypical, but I do wonder how much an app-developer rebellion would really affect folks. I can't imagine my wife or parents switching to Android even if all of the non-Apple apps were to disappear tomorrow.
That seems surprising. Do your wife and parents not use Uber/Lyft/etc.? Do they not use any banking apps? Do they not use any social media apps? Yelp? Food delivery apps? Messaging apps aside from iMessage? Video streaming apps? And that's just from looking at one of my home screens!
Do you really believe they'd be happy with a phone that suddenly couldn't do all that anymore? I very much doubt that.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apples-app-store-ecos...
[2] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/hot-drinks/coffee/world....