Hacker News Reader

> these apps are contributing to its bottom line

Are they, though? If you don't have the $99 for a dev account, you don't have a marketing budget either, so your app won't make money, so Apple doesn't care.

I think the best argument to be made for catering to hobbyists is to attract new developers to the platform, but I doubt Apple cares about that any more. Apple wants developers who care about making money. Developers who care about making money will come to Apple because of how much Apple users spend on apps.

> $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden

It’s a token amount, just enough to prevent spammers from creating thousands of accounts. It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year. Go check what Microsoft charges for a Visual Studio license per seat, per year.

$99 doesn’t even buy you 1 hour of a developer’s time. Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.

> It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year.

This seems reasonable when you look from the point of view of a corporation. But hobbyists are single individuals, not corporations. So this basically makes development a privilege for corporations or for people in the first world for whom $99 is nothing.

there are education discount programs for students etc..

Visual Studio Community Edition is free and quite capable for the individual hobby developer, same with VSC. Compared to developing for iPhone, which requires me to still have macOS (and legally Mac hardware) at my disposal somewhere to even get the app built completely, right? That would be the proper comparison between their approach to enabling developers on the tooling side, not the App Store fee. What’s the barrier to entry for the Windows App Store? I think it’s like $25 bucks and $99 for an org, or something very similar.

Obviously the glaring difference is that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all. The day that becomes a serious barrier is definitely a line too far in the history of computing. But Apple has always been a very closed off ecosystem - going back to the nineties they were never very friendly to developers or third party hardware. To me this is just Apple doing Apple - their phone, IMO, is still miles ahead of anything else, though.

> few hobbies are as cheap as this

Quite true.

> that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all

It's unfortunately not that simple anymore on Windows either with the SmartScreen popup getting in the way and the "Run anyway" button hard to find (not as bad as on macOS but still...).

Your executable needs a big enough "reputation score" for SmartScreen to remain silent, even when properly code-signed (unless it's signed with an expensive EV-certificiate apparently).

For a lot of people, including hobbyist programmers, $99 is actually quite a lot of money.

> Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.

Let me guess, you’re from a 1st world country and probably make 6 figures a year (pre tax), likely working in FAANG?

As a guy in a 3rd world country, $99 is a hell lot of money. Your comment comes across as quite tone deaf. If you grew up middle-upper class and relatively sheltered that’s not necessarily your fault, but trust me in many parts of the world $99 is worth much more converted.

They "went wrong" to the tune of being a 2.4-trillion dollar company. If that's what going wrong looks like, I'd love to know what going right looks like. $100/yr may be too much for you, but there seems to be plenty of crap in their app store so it could be argued that it should be higher.

> $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden

I think that what you buy with your 99$ is the privilege of asking for the privilege of publishing (which is not given at all).

For publishing to the the Play Store, it's a one time US$25 fee.

>> The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the company is worth so much money and these apps are contributing to its bottom line.

No, they are not. We are talking about hobby apps and maybe free ones. Those don't contribute to their bottom line.

We might say they contribute to the platform. For hobbyist they make it viable. But for paying customers maybe they add a lot of low value junk to the store. If a developer doesn't feel their app is worth a few dollars, maybe it's not worth having on there at all.

This is the same disingenuous argument. The $99/year isn't preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore, and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play store a dumpster fire of garbage apps. [1]

The AppStore is currently filled with low-value junk published by people paying $99/year (1.8 million apps out there, of which most outside of the top X lists are terrible). Will hobby apps really decrease the average quality? I highly doubt it.

[1] I'll admit that this appeared to be the trend early on, but in the long term both platforms have converged to something similar.

Exactly, the real reason that people don't want to realize is that the $99 is not to keep garbage out of the store, it is to take the $99 per year from each developer in the world.

>The $99/year isn't preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore

It's not "preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore", but it does prevent "a whola lot more of junk from showing up on the AppStore"

>and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play stor a dumpster fire of garbage apps

You'd be surprised. Google Play store is notoriously more insecure and loaded with junk, with estimates that close to 90% of mobile spy/malware are on Android rather than iOS.

"According to the whitepaper, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones for less than 1%" (Panda Security)

"Over 98% of mobile banking attacks target Android devices"

> I don't know where Apple went wrong

They didn't go wrong. They are making money - the most important thing.

That they hurt developers that got them there in the first place? Who cares.

Then even few years ago I heard: "If you don't like that platform, create your own!" I wonder where that crowd is now.

> That they hurt developers that got them there in the first place? Who cares.

I mean this fee has been there since forever no? Early on not even the iOS updates were free. You can argue about the merits of the fee but don't frame it as some recent change that disparages early adopters.