Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app stores under new EU law
theverge.com
theverge.com
At its core, this is a discussion about rent seeking. Apple and Google lust after their 30% cut, which is outrageous and would not be long tolerated in any other business arrangement. They keep the gravy train going because of gatekeeping.
“I want to root/mod my device” and “right to repair” are interesting but orthogonal arguments. Those arguments are about “what does it mean to own a thing”.
I am glad the EU is doing this but I despair that Apple and Google will still avoid this in the US.
Personally, I’m mostly happy with the App Store except their bans based on political POV (disguised as content violations).
I’m much more unhappy with the content stores on mobile devices; I want to set Amazon as my book store and buy within the Kindle app.
Ed s/list/lust/g stupid autocorrect
I think 30% has been ridiculously high although I don’t know what a fairer margin is. For what it’s worth Apple has managed to maintain a 30% profit margin (not just sales) on the hardware they sell which is unheard of in the consumer electronics industry (everyone else is struggling to just barely make money in phones and mostly losing while others are taking a much more modest cut in other categories). Partly it’s branding. Partly it’s savvy business practices. Partly it’s immoral business practices.
> When setting your wholesale price, first multiply your cost of goods by two. This will ensure your wholesale profit margin is at least 50%. Profit margin is the gross profit a retailer earns when an item is sold. Apparel retail brands typically aim for a 30% to 50% wholesale profit margin, while direct-to-consumer retailers aim for a profit margin of 55% to 65%. (A margin is sometimes also referred to as “markup percentage.”)
So 50% is about normal for retail goods. Yes yes. They have physical merchandise they need to manage. Apple has engineers they need to pay to do their virtual distribution. Maybe 30% is excessive. Certainly that they're the only store and hold a monopoly on the things they allow people to do on their platform is probably fueling that margin to be higher than it should. However, if we look at Steam[2] and other console manufacturers, we see similar 30% markups. Maybe everyone is just copying Apple's lead here as "customers will swallow this". Or maybe Apple figured out a good virtual store distribution model and this is the markup needed for a sustainable thriving business.
[1] https://www.shopify.com/retail/product-pricing-for-wholesale... [2] https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...
1) the majority of apps don’t pay apple a cent because they make their money off selling user information
2) of those that remain most likely aren’t reaching the income point where it stops being 15%
3) 30% matches the payments of every other store, except those stores that don’t pay for any of the platform development. It’s super easy to charge next to nothing when you don’t have to pay actual engineers to make actual products.
* Google, who makes money by harvesting information from every android user; or
* Samsung, etc who don't pay the cost of developing a platform
* Steam, GoG, etc who literally only operate a store front, yet still take 30% cuts. They don't even have significant proportion of free games - and the games that they do have are frequently > $50 so their per-sale absolute revenue is insane.
* The various console platforms, because somehow consoles are magically different from everyone else
* Microsoft (ignoring consoles) who charges for their OS, and despite that seems hell bent on putting ads into the OS
Also basically all Apple’s direct competitors both in the PC and smartphone businesses operate on paltry margins in comparison to Apple. They usually sell a mix of low/high margin products though, e.g. most premium Dell or Lenovo laptops are priced at similar levels to Macbooks (of course their real price might significantly lower due to infinitely better customizability and reparability options). And almost none of them have significant additional revenue streams (not to a degree comparable to Apple). Yet they are still in business.
Apple would be able not to only to survive but to still thrive if they significantly cut their margins and the app store tax. Of course it would not be fair or sensible to expect any company to leave free money on the table. This is why we get ads in Windows, seem like most users dont’t really mind them too much (to be fair I’m not sure I have actually seen one, maybe it’s a windows edition and/or country thing.
Every app in Apple’s App Stores makes them a minimum of 99USD/year, the cost of an Apple Developer account.
Obviously the comparison is slightly Apples to oranges, as physical retailers have massive overheads/COGS that Apple don’t incur for the App Store.
Many developers don't want to have apple be their gatekeeper for apps. They should be able to have alternatives. Apple's rent seeking behaviour is to take platform development in the cost of the device and again to distribute apps without any alternative.
I will accept the argument that apple’s gatekeeping is ridiculous, a lot of that is the bizarre prudishness of the US, but saying that apple should not be compensated at a rate that is generally below the market - the majority of apps on the AppStore are freemium from which apple makes nothing, the remainder are mostly only paying a 15% commission. This is vs 30% or so on game consoles, 30% on steam, etc.
On the other hand, if Apple's model allows them to better compete with others and create a superior product that people want ... well then, it's ridiculous to mandate they should do business a different way.
their business business model allows them to compete because they're rent seeking by grazing off developers and apps that dont want or need their app store, payment processor, etc.
Wow who knew rent seeking was massively profitable, huge surprise!
Isn't that because Apple doesn't allow for third party repos/stores/etc?
If that changes after all (I'm personally hoping it does), then it would make sense that the new alternative store(s) would have their own overheads (development, running costs, etc) and would have their own fees.
That seems sensible, yeah?
Sure. And who cares? That has nothing at all to do with the App Store fees. :)
It also made a distinction between apps acquired from the Play Store and apps you loaded yourself from outside of it.
But I assume even those will benefit if Apple has to compete with alternative sources of services. Myself I feel the Apple app store is somewhat inadequate and clumsy to use both for consumers and suppliers. Me and some others around me have this view that it could be done better. Especially the process of publishing your work. It remains a bumpy ride as there is no incentive for them to spend on improving it, people have no other choice than doing it the way Apple dictates, no alternatives. Even as consumer navigating the store it feels pretty much directed into a particular direction others want us to go.
Hopefully those not thinking about using alternative choices will benefit too from the opening up of the infrastructure.
Which is exactly what Apple doesn't want, because of (a) Fortnite / alt payment options (b) Facebook / privacy restrictions bypass, i.e. the loss of revenue and the loss of credibility as a (sort of) privacy-oriented platform.
So I am sure they will fight to at least make it an OR.
Also it could lead to a much better ecosystem of open-source apps like there is with F-Droid on Android. It'll take some time to develop but I really love many F-Droid apps over their commercial alternatives. Apps are so much more efficient if they just do what they need to do and don't bother with all the spying and ads.
It could also finally enable other browsers on iOS for real!
I am not sure about this. Who would buy an iphone with the intention to sideload apps if it does not let them install all the apps that the iphone is famous for at the same time? Microsoft allowed users to still use IE (and Office and everything else) after they have been forced to offer other browsers.
I envision a scenario, where you buy a new iphone and selecting/configuring appstores is part of the setup process and can be changed later. As many as you want, just like you would add repos in a package manager.
We would not allow our shopping bags to limit our possible sources of groceries to one specific supermarket chain.
Media computers could be subject to the same side loading regulations since compromise should only impact non-critical functions.
People were making a lot of noise about Sony retroactively removing functionality not too long ago.
But even if we accept the bogus argument that a console (a behemoth CPU with 100s of watts of power available) is not a general purpose system, that's not relevant:
Why should a company have to go through Sony or Microsoft's stores to buy games for their console? What makes consoles somehow different from phones? - I would put money on the primary apps people buy from the App Store being games?
Claiming the Sony/MS make a loss on console sales isn't relevant either - firstly because they're charging ~30% on games with an average sale price in the region of $60 they make up that "loss" very quickly, secondly neither company expends significant (any?) resources developing features for their consoles once they've been sold (vs. Apple that is still providing major updates and functionality to devices 5 years after they stopped being sold)
A PS5 today could easily run whatever desktop OS.
However, I think consoles have always been "consume media" devices in peoples minds. Maybe with steam deck (assuming it can get any level of popularity that xbox/ps have) we might see attitudes shift towards them.
A lot of these lawmakers are unaware of the exact internals of these devices. Phones can do everything realistically. Manage your bank accounts, pay your taxes, find jobs, make calls, consume media. Heck they can do more than your average laptop/computer - and this is self-evident for lawmakers. The same can not (yet) be said for consoles.
Anyway, I do hope we take more of these steps in the future. At the very least it reduces ewaste.
I’d also hope that the store are required to enforce the same security protections as the main App Store.
I don’t want buying an app to now come with the risk of uncancellable subscriptions, gross invasion of privacy, malware, etc
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...
Also, people forget that iOS itself has many security protections built into the platform itself that go beyond App Store review.
Side loading will likely still require a business agreement with Apple and “App Review” to get a cert that allows your app to run.
However it is indeed possible that Apple would weasel such a requirement through the loopholes, yes.
At some point Apple might see itself being split apart because of its constant and well documented abuse of it's status in the market.
This view of Apple as a pure-platform company does not comport with reality
There is no weaseling, it is very simple: the commission covers the licensing. The alternative is saying that apple must develop software, give it away for free, then let random stores make a profit selling software that they contributed nothing to.
It is exactly equivalent to the EU saying that a company should be free to use GPL software however they like, including selling at a profit, without providing the sources.
Cross-subsidization is obscuring the true cost of a good and not permitting consumer choice, many people don't want UI revamps and feature rewrites bundled with basic security updates, with the cost hidden in the fees charged to App Store developers and never disclosed to the customer.
Google can give away android because Android is stalkerware that feeds their ad revenue.
I hope at the very least apple can mandate that the additional app stores enforce the same privacy and safety rules, or would the EU consider that allowing people to not be spied on be to much of an infringement of the rights of business?
And yeah, it isn't perfect, but actively making it less secure isn't going make it better
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30280457
Such a move is basically mutually assured destruction- they would be taking their critical app off the official Apple App Store, and in doing so inviting huge customer backlash. Besides the negative press, at least a fraction of users will not migrate over- both HN power users technical and ideological enough to reject entering a user data harvesting shady app store, and the less technically adept users who can’t figure out how to enable such a store. Not to mention, everyone who is sick and tired of having to manage yet another user account forced upon them by a tech giant. It’s guaranteed that not 100% of existing users would transition, and even if it’s not a huge amount, it would be upsetting the apple cart and damaging the brand.
There’s more considerations beyond that I mentioned previously- the difficulties of these companies now having to create their own parallel iOS app ecosystems- again, ask Facebook how their own platform’s app community is faring these days, let alone every smartphone app market that isn’t iOS or Android.
And it’s debatable that these tech giants can even successfully create a sufficiently compelling alternate app market from a product or business perspective. It feels like all of the giants are at a point where they’re engaged in side projects- cloud gaming, Clubhouse clones, Snapchat stories clones, Libra- that don’t really have staying power, as far as new products go. Creating a parasitic clone iOS App Store would yet be another boondoggle, and committing to it, as I mention, is MAD- Apple loses their apps, and these companies are forever tied to having to maintain and work on their 3rd party app stores. In fact, one can easily imagine a Meta pulling back and resubmitting Facebook, Instagram, etc. back to the official App Store after initially removing them. And it’s incredibly easy to imagine Google resigning an iOS Play Store to the Google Graveyard before you can say Stadia.
Smartphone software has been around a decade now. I don’t think it’s so easy to woo users over with your own carbon copy that offers nothing. Not to mention, perhaps these companies might invite regulator antitrust attention as well if they keep truly “critical apps” away from the official App Store. There’s a lot of possible implications.
I think the prospect of tech giant data-harvesting third party iOS app stores is a fascinating prospect that hasn’t been examined in detail. Too often it’s used as a bogeyman, “Facebook will take away their app and track you!” against sideloading. The reality is probably more complex that that, and I would argue that opening iOS to alternate app marketplaces and sideloading might actually increase business opportunities and vectors of positive innovation for Apple. But that’s the subject of another comment.
Also, I’m uncertain if many of these companies really have that many iOS game exclusives to incentivize this sort of lock in- Epic being a major exception. But most other publishers don’t exactly have big iOS libraries. Most of their apps are more like incidental tie-in material accompanying their actual PC and console titles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30280457
One should note that Meta could create their own Android third party store right now, like Amazon has (pretty much only to support their Kindle Fire devices), yet they haven't had any interest in doing so. One could claim that's because Android users don't pay as much for apps as iOS users do, but that's still a lot of users worldwide, and a lot of data that could be tracked. Yet they don't bother to.
So they really don't have a need to do this.
Apple can still make it difficult for them though. They can just remove the forbidden APIs and sandbox apps better. If they do this they don't even have to bother to review as thoroughly anymore.
The big benefit is that Apple no longer gets to decide what type of apps are allowed and what aren't.
Access to your photos, contacts, device identifiers, etc are all gated on sandbox entitlements, and if you remove the App Store review process then you remove the gate the prevents an app from saying "give me read/write access to the whole file system", "give me read/write access to the photos on the device", etc
The OS cannot decide when it should or should not trust the entitlements, because the whole point is that an app has some modicum of trust.
That can be changed of course. They can make it work just like on Android where the user has to give permission for things like filesystem access.
The point of the law is to bring more control away from Apple and to the user.
2) Because apple doesn't want to compete
(I have only dabbled in Android apps, my impression of the Apple situation is very much that, an impression.)