Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s App Store charges much more than that for a service that includes only very basic hosting of an application package.

View on HN

That is also egregious, but Apple and Google are getting away with it because they have a duopoly over mobile phone app stores. Not so with video hosting.

Isn't it so though? What viable alternatives exist?

Definitely educate me, but: what is Vimeo doing for a B2B solution that Youtube can't provide? You can provide unlisted videos (and that is something a few pareon users have done).

It's odd because Vimeo was most known to me for hosting art portfolios, so seeing it denounce it's "indie" status is bewildering. I assume the advantage comes from providing uncompressed videos with extremely high bitrate. Which is an admittedly extremely niche market.

an alternative is Amazon Video Direct where content providers receive 50% of net revenue. seems like a worse deal than Apple & Google.

https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G202037410&...

I have never understood how pointing out another unethical policy justifies the first unethical policy

It seems we as a society have lost the axiom of "2 wrongs do not make a right" as it is not just this area were I see people attempting to justify their wrongs based on the wrongs of others...

> includes only very basic hosting of an application package

Only basic hosting if you ignore all of the other services. You might consider the App Store's revenue share high but don't pretend the App Store is just a dumb file host.

What else do they do besides provide a payments gateway ( that they force you to use)? As seen with Android, you don't need to use the official app store to use the official SDKs and platform APIs.

Developing 3rd party frameworks is a meaningful expense. AOSP means Google made a business decision to incur that expense and sign away rights to it, but Apple hasn't.

And that is a bad thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com