> iPadOS App Store: 23 million
Asserting that the iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store - and totally isn't in scope for the regulations - is certainly a bold strategy.
I wonder why iTunes and Apple TV+ aren't included, and why Podcasts is only counting paid subscribers. Is there some obvious reason why these kinds of services would be out of scope?
I've gotten more than a few apps approved on tv, watch, Mac, iOS, iPad. They are distinctly different. As much as Apple is helping us leverage 'one code base to rule them all' there are so many gotchas and detail required to make great experiences on each.
Snapchat built with some platform-independent UI toolkit would have felt kind of wrong, and the speed at which I've seen teenagers use it (this was years ago) shows that they would have been frustrated with anything that is slow-ish. I assume similar trends dominate for TikTok and Instagram today.
So unless you're attracting a very hip, fast-moving, perhaps even young-person's market, you probably just want an app that basically works and is available to folks on whichever phone they use. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin / .NET MAUI will all get you there.
iOS, Android, mobile web, Windows and Linux? Flutter or Expo.
Android tablets are pretty bad. Google dropped the ball, although they seem to be coming back.
iPads could be fantastic devices to program in, but they are quite crippled by limitations.
Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.
The iPad, on the other hand was the original "this is what we want". The iPad was the first thing that Apple was trying to make.
> Work on the iPad itself actually traces back to 2004, when designer Jonathan Ive and others crafted a new tablet prototype. The product was originally supposed to ship before the iPhone, but the company came to decide the latter was more important, premiering it in 2007 using similar technologies.
( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-o... )
So from the very beginning with the iDevice, the idea of different form factors and sizes was part of how it was written rather than as a phone that grew bigger.
The other part of it is that android has been poorly designed for the tablet interface. For an OEM to try to make a tablet out of android they would have to invest significant software development resources into what would amount to be a fork of android (compare Amazon Fire tablets). While they likely have some software developers, they probably don't have enough to maintain that amount of development on android (and always being behind with Google preferring phones).
... and even if they were close to parity with Android (and the challenge that would imply at trying to keep their devices up to date - with the largest investment customers would expect them to last longer) you would still have difficulties with the developers for Android aren't making things that fit well in the tablet form factor (Amazon was trying to bribe/incentivize developers to write for its form factor - https://readwrite.com/amazon-give-developers-rewards-build-f... ).
All that means that unless Google wants to do it and you're willing to go head to head with Amazon its probably not that good of an investment of time, reputation, and resources.
If that’s the case why hasn’t Omni or Panic written these apps already?
The 30% cut Apple takes is indeed large. But any new store will likely attract only a small fraction of all App Store customers.
Can you help me understand this better?
AFAICT, this restriction (and the one where no app but Safari can use use the Webkit JavaScriptCore JIT) is in place, because the alternative — allowing arbitrarily-badly-coded apps to do "dynamic native code injection" — would be a near-infinite wellspring of jailbreak exploit vectors.
But, insofar as Apple's own semi-manual QA process is required to preventing the publication of apps that include this kind of "dynamic native code injection", a third-party App Store would presumably not inherently have this same restriction (although individual third-party App Stores might.)
You are basically stating the opposite while completely ignoring the actual complexity of such an hypothetical merge for codebases that forked 15 years ago. They share a kernel and some API, but on the UI side recent cross platform framework are more like a proof of concept than a production ready thing.
[1] not actually hilarious
Them pulling ill-suited features over to macOS, like the Control Center[0] and toggles, also give me pause.
[0] Which lives in the menubar, lacks any keyboard accessibility, and introduced bizarre new interface behaviors, e.g. multi-step dropdowns where you click inside the dropdown to navigate back. Ugh.
Most of the same people that fear the convergence also ask for "iPadOS" and "iOS" to be more like the Mac (add mouse support, multitask like the Mac, and so on).
So what they do fear is the mythical "dumbing down" of Mac, as in the outcry when Logic got a different skin, and everybody losts their minds as if it's now "just Garageband Pro" (meanwhile it has never been more powerful). Same for FCP (where a few features were lost due to the rewrite, not for any dumbing down).
Not sure why you see it as an irrational fear. What timeline are they actually working under / how are they prioritizing that convergence? I don’t know but it’s clear it will happen. I’m sure there’s a lot of unification going on of background services (radio stacks, security hardening, etc) in addition to more visible UI pieces.
And the store is called just "App Store" on every platform.
Claiming that I somehow used 3 different stores to buy a single app is an accounting trick, nothing else.
It does not run on watchOS without extra work, correctly?
I think their position is kinda defensible here. Yeah maybe with iPad/iOS not so much, but for the other devices, definitely
I think there should be a hard rule, that if companies try to sell something as the same to consumers, they immediately loose if they try to argue they are separate things when it comes to regulations.
> "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2"
But that's not what's happening here
Is an iPad app the same thing as an iPhone app? Or a watch app?
If an iPhone app took minimal work to work on the iPad, then I'd say it's the same thing, sure
As a customer, I go to the store page on one of my devices, it says the app is compatible with my device x, y and z. I click the "Buy" button once. Then I get the app on all my devices. I get a receipt that shows I purchased one item.
But what Apple is saying is that I somehow used 3 independent stores?
And yes, if you click buy once and get 3 different apps, then I'd say it's the same store
> Nonetheless, Apple intends, on an entirely voluntary basis, to align each of the existing versions of the App Store (including those that do not currently meet the VLOP designation threshold) with the existing DSA requirements for VLOPs because the goals of the DSA align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal content.
the whole idea that applications written in software shouldn't handle screensize differences (and dynamic changes) intelligently is just so broken. I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach like "who let these people in? is the door wide open out there?"
i mean, to each their own, that's just me, but that's how I feel software should be written, and while we're at it, give the user some input/options at runtime.
But almost always the experience for iPad users is terrible.
Which is why Apple's initial approach of forcing developers to build distinct iPad apps was the right one and a large reason why its tablets dominated the market versus Android competitors.
are you saying the tools aren't there for developers to create equally pleasing (mutatis mutandis) apps, or simply that the developers aren't able to create equally pleasing (mutatis mutandis) apps? Or that designers can't grok the mapping between their equally pleasing ideas and the tools available?
The “mutationes” that must be made reach deep into the functionality of an app, not just UI-level stuff. The whole purpose of the app should probably change. It’s therefore a big and challenging job to make an app scale seamlessly from one device to another. That’s irreducible complexity. The tools available will always be at best “necessary but not sufficient”.
That developers have the tools and can or cannot use the tools is secondary to that, imo.
You need to optimise for the particulars of each device.
Our UI for the iPad was a completely separate one. The core code was shared via various internal libraries, but the UI was entirely different. Adding a feature to iPhone required one entirely separate set of code compared to the iPad app. The app was a universal binary though and one app ran on both device types.
This was, at the time, an absolute requirement. There was no way to scale the app from iPad to iPhone in such a way that it would give a great experience on both iPhone and iPad. It just wasn't possible to give an excellent app.
I've long since left and the app does seem to be written in SwiftUI now and seems to be one shared codebase. But I wouldn't say it's as good as it was previously.
I prefer it when my iPhone and iPad apps have separate bespoke UIs that take full advantage of the different sizes and shapes.
yes, what you are pointing out is the challenge. solve it, don't slough it onto the user.
However, the same app can appear on different sized screens with different skins, it doesn't have to be a different app.
* the developer for papers please's blog about the mobile port is indicative of the work that goes into supporting other screen sizes. Asking developers to have infinite time and motivation is just not realistic. also note that it took a few years for the mobile port to be released.
Even Apple themselves couldn't expend the effort to make an iPad version of their vaunted new Classical music app: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/03/apple-music-classical...
Probably because they don't exceed the 45MM MAU threshold.
> Online platforms with 45 million or more average monthly active recipients
That won't work on court.
How do you know? If there was no chance of it working, you would think Apple's lawyers would have said so.
They can view the stores as they want, but they know that per law they aren't distinct online platforms, as long their Userbase, AppleIDs, AppleID Backend, Hosting Services, Databases, iCloud Services, Apps, Games and In-App Purchases are cross-wired and shared between all Apple devices/stores. The DSA sees it as one(1) united Online Platform and would not care for Apple's Store breakdown.
This is just the typical Apple FUD: Without prejudice to further consideration of the legal characterisation, Apple views each version of the App Store as a distinct online platform under the DSA, and only the iOS App Store may qualify as a VLOP. Nonetheless, Apple intends, on an entirely voluntary basis, to align each of the existing versions of the App Store (including those that do not currently meet the VLOP designation threshold) with the existing DSA requirements for VLOPs because the goals of the DSA align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal content.
Thanks for including that prominently enough it made it easy to skip the comment without reading.
But users don't have to use the same login for each store.
How is it then a "different store"?
The issue you’re describing is just the lack of investment in adding multi-pane views to android apps.
But a developer can sell separate iPad versions of an app. Most don’t anymore.
The Apple TV App Store is listed.
Also, podcasts and ebooks are not apps, but they listed their ebook store and podcast subscriptions platform in this disclosure. Why not the music store, the TV series and movie subscription service?
Perhaps they’ll release those other numbers in a different document.
I can’t say why Apple appears to be doing things this way. I was only pointing out why Apple may not have included them here.
> ‘online platform’ means a provider of hosting service which, at the request of a recipient of the service, stores and disseminates to the public information."
For some content, particularly music, video, and some ebooks, Apple is the merchant of record. They are not acting as a platform for that content but as a traditional retailer. Compare this with the App Store, where Apple instead acts as a platform, intermediating the dissemination of information between non-Apple content providers and the public.
A service like Amazon would have this distinction as well. Some interactions are direct retail transactions between an Amazon entity and the public. At the same time, its Amazon Marketplace service provides a platform for non-Amazon sellers to disseminate information to the public.