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Comment by zeta0134 | Hacker News Reader

This would have been a completely unattainable amount of money as a high school student. In college, that money was better spent on school supplies and food, and spending cash was short. After college it took me the better part of a decade to get to the point where $100/year felt like something I could feasibly consider spending and not risk missing rent in January.

$100/year is a lot of money to people in a wide variety of life situations. Being unable to afford this does not make them any less of a programmer.

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I bought Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ versions for Windows 3.1 as high-school student.

Each of them were between 150 and 200 euros on today's money.

High school student allowance in early 1990's Portugal after decades of dictatorship wasn't that great either.

Was it a subscription service, though? That doesn't seem like a terrible deal if you get a perpetual license - meanwhile forking over $99/year for some basic functionality wrapped in Service Credit seems like a racket to me.

No it wasn't, nor are Apple devices given for free to students.

Anyone that can afford Apple hardware as an high school student surely can afford the dev subscription.

Anyone that can afford a Lexus can also pay for a heated seat subscription. Does that make it right for them to sell it?

Yes, a company has the right to do whatever they want with their products.

It is up for the customers to validate their business decisions.

Customers can only validate it if they have a choice. How does an iPhone developer validate or invalidate Apple's behavior? They're basically a hostage on Apple's platform, and the only thing keeping them there is the fact that they get paid. Apple shouldn't have the negotiating power they wield, and regulators are taking action to stop them from abusing it.

By becoming a developer of something else.

You don't have that choice if you're building a service that relies on having a mobile app. You are required to have presence on iOS if you want any semblance of success.

It might be news for you, many countries in the world have a very superficial presence of iOS devices, and not every company is a multinational.

Second, Web also exists.

Third, this whole thread is about macOS.

You are the one who tried to introduce an extremely general argument, which I guess you are no longer interested in defending?

> Yes, a company has the right to do whatever they want with their products. > It is up for the customers to validate their business decisions.

So, to verify: you do agree that your argument at least does not apply to the iPhone?

I wasn't the one moving the goalpost into iOS app store.

Still the point stands.

I'm the one who pushed the discussion onto the tangentially-related Apple mobile platform, guilty as charged.

Do you want to defend Apple's absolute control over the iPhone in front of God, Saurik and everyone, or admit that the world's richest company operates out of greed sometimes?

Greed? No. Profit motivated. Of course. They are a business. Businesses generally exist to make a profit. The more profit they make, the stronger and more resilient they become. Apple, having been very close to bankruptcy a couple of times means that they have a strong motivation to make a profit. Nothing is without reason, whether or not you like the reason. I guess corporate greed is a thing, but then so are the very real costs of operating services. Ranting about a business being successful or being the wealthiest just smacks of petty anti-capitalist jealousy. I get it, Apple were supposed to fail and they didn’t.

Are Apple’s fees worth 15%[1] of the vendors revenue? Possibly not, though as a provider, they are entitled to make a profit.

[1] Yes, yes; 30% if the vendor make > $1,000,000. Let get real, the significant majority of the app that you are arguing about are likely to be grossing less than that. And of course 15% of $0 is $0, so the argument is completely moot for freely distributed apps.

> Possibly not, though as a provider, they are entitled to make a profit.

The big thing people seem to disagree with is Apple forcing themselves to be a provider (and thereby forcing their entitlement to a profit). Apple is certainly entitled to compensation when people use their service, but no computer should force it's services on the user. Regulators seem to really hate that bit, and it will be interesting to see how Apple responds to the Digital Markets act.

That doesn't make them an iPhone developer anymore, does it?

Which is the whole point of how customers make the difference regarding platform business decisions.

UWP died because the large pool of Windows developers didn't want to buy into it.

UWP died because there were better ways to make Windows apps.

Which Windows developers as Microsoft customers decided to keep using.

App developers are not the "customer" of these curated store platforms any more than cereal manufacturers are the "customer" of a grocery store.

If you try to take your business elsewhere, you have no market, because no one else is able to create a store which targets the same market. This is entirely unlike a grocery store, because if Safeway is unreasonable you can launch an entire store just for your own products and people can shop at both.

However, with these curated store platforms, a user can only use the App Store. They can get a different phone--at ridiculous expense, as there are numerous anticompetitive lock-in mechanisms with respect to licenses that prevent this: I would, for example, lose access to all of the music and books and apps I've ever bought--but then they aren't able to use the App Store anymore.

The problem is that virtually all sane people only carry around a single phone. This is not true of grocery stores or frankly any other form of store unless you map the analogy to geographic regions, where people have to move to a new house in a different community--at great difficulty and expense--to get to another grocery store. Even if you only have a monopoly over one "small" region, that's still a monopoly.

This is not really the case for mass market consumer goods (like the cereal example in your post). Safeway and Kroger are a duopoly not far off of Apple’s app store monopoly and if you don’t like their terms, there aren’t exactly alternative viable channels for your cereal.

I get what you're saying, but I think the fact that convenience stores are anything but a monopoly just further illustrates how disparate Apple's authority is here. The power Apple wields is like if there was one cereal store, and if you didn't like the selection they had then you "just find another breakfast food". It doesn't, and shouldn't have to be a binary choice.

And the customer has the right to hack their car to activate their already installed heated seats on their own terms because they own the damn thing.

Depends on the laws of the country.

Who says the HS student is buying the hardware themselves? It could have been a gift, a hand-me-down, a school computer, etc. As a HS student I was poor as shit, no allowance and lived in a rural area where getting a part-time job would require a car and all the expense with that.

Yeah and selling apps on Apple hardware will surely be top priority in such cases.

They didn't say they wanted to sell the app, just sign and distribute it. Maybe they want to put their FOSS project on the App Store, but can't until they get a "real job" first.

No need for the app store for that.

Plus I have known many offshore colleagues from African and Asian countries that managed to be successful in selling software, despite the conditions they were raised in.

So painting the Apple story as gate keeping is playing it short, there are many ways to skin a rabbit.

You'll need the App Store if you want it on iPhone, which means you need to pay the subscription.

I'm not going to sit around all day and play pity-party with you about impoverished developers. I've known my fair share too, and I might even be one depending on your definition of poor living conditions. The point is simple: Apple stops people from doing arbitrary stuff for no reason. Perhaps you don't care; I'm not arguing that. Maybe it doesn't stop people from getting rich; obviously, money is still made. Regardless, everyone knows their deal stinks like shit - the cat's out of the bag. Apple bought themselves a couple months with the 15% punch-line, but the laughing stops next year.

This isn't controversial or high-concept stuff. You should be able to freely install stuff on your iPhone even if you don't personally intend to. It seems like by-and-large, the democratic world agrees.

And me thinking this whole thread was about Mac apps for macOS.

If only the App Store were that simple.

The whole point of the post was exactly not using it, so it doesn't matter how simple or complex it happens to be.

Alright.

Yet you can afford to buy a Mac?

Looking around in the average small city in the US today, McDonalds is paying $15-$20 an hour.

McDonalds pays you in compensation for actual physical labor. You pay Apple to flip an arbitrary bit on your iCloud account that enables features that should be enabled by-default on devices you bought and paid-for.

Bit of a difference there, perhaps something worth being upset about.

That has nothing to do with the fact that $100 is affordable to the average college student working at a fast food company.

But even if I buy your argument, are you saying that selling software also has no value since once you write it, the marginal cost of delivering software is basically $0

Distributing software has zero cost. Apple can bundle services with it (vuln scanning, CI/CD, cloud resources, etc.) but copying data is inherently a free process. You may object to that all you wish, but the entirety of the internet stands as evidence that software distribution is normalized and free.

The problem was never that Apple wanted to offer cloud resources or scan for known exploits. Go wild, Microsoft does that too and it works great for them. People are only mad when Apple conflates completely arbitrary capabilities with their $99 dev service fee. I should not need a recurring subscription to install an App from Github. We're not in 2005 anymore, we're done selling feature phones.

So once software is made, delivering it to the customer is just “delivering data”. Do you think that all software should be free and people shouldn’t charge for software?

All software is free. I have 4 versions of MacOS archived on my disk right now, and you can get your own copies on the internet archive. Want to pirate Mac software? Go get it, nobody will stop you. The only price that everyone pays on the internet, is free.

Every platform that respects the freedom and authority of it's users seems to agree that all software is free. As Apple is an American company, it would make me very happy to see them agree with those values.

Are you a software developer? How does your company make money?

Selling support.

Distributing software is inherently not a zero cost process and it suggests an amount of ignorance in the space to say that it is.

I’ve been paying the $100/yr to sell my iPhone apps since I was 15. It’s really not very much money, even to a high school kid.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone dig in so passionately that the fee is unreasonable. Most people just pay it and keep building.

The fee isn't unreasonable. The things they block off is. Until Apple lets me install an IPA file as easily as something from the App Store, I will mercilessly mock them for extorting the very developers that make them rich. The closing noose is why I left MacOS, and the reason why I could never daily-drive iOS. It's dumb, and anti-consumer.

I'll happily answer any further questions, but I'm afraid my opinion isn't as interesting as you think it is.

What does any of this have to do with Mac development? Anyone can already install anything on the Mac even if it is unsigned by right clicking.

I'm replying to the parent, who was talking about selling and distributing iPhone apps. Moreover, this discussion started with me highlighting which things should be in the subscription (CI/CD time, VPSes, direct support) versus things that shouldn't be in it (freely managing arbitrary software). Conflating the iPhone's capabilities with the developer program is Apple's fault, not mine.

Most people aren't "mad" about this -- and in this case, GP is complaining that they simply don't want to, not that they can't afford it or anything. There are also fee waivers available for registered non-profits, those in education etc. -- so it's not as binary as you're making out.

You also don't need any subscription to install any macOS app, but without it being signed by a developer, you have to -- le gasp -- control-click or right-click, and accept the warning that the developer is unverified. Hardly a massive tax on end users.

How do you know they weren't gifted it, or bought it used, or that it's some older hardware revision?

Wanting to work on software for macOS doesn't automatically mean you own a $3000 MacBook Pro...

And have you seen the prices of even used ARM Macs that by definition aren’t more than two years old?

Did GP claim to be on Apple Silicon? No? Stop assuming.

That aside, if GP did run an Apple Silicon machine, there's also the market to buy used, and buy lower-spec models like the base-spec Mac Mini or MacBook Air.

Once again, these aren't $3000 machines, and you don't know whether the machine they use was gifted, loaned, used, a work machine, etc. -- although the decided choice by their own admission, and their profile, suggests cost wasn't a factor for them.

Do you have a point, or are you just looking to argue? The response was in your incredulous "Yet you can afford to buy a Mac?" accusation to GP -- which is loaded with baseless assumptions. I reasonably pointed out any ways someone could own a Mac without significant or any cost to themselves. Nobody said anything about it being the most modern or powerful machine, all GP said was that they want to create FOSS apps for Mac, and didn't agree with paying the $99/yr Developer program fee for signing apps as an "authorised developer."

Then don’t pay the $99 fee and tell the users they have to right click to run it.

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