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Comment by quickco | Hacker News Reader

> If you sell a general-purpose computing device and market it as one, you should relinquish any control of it once it's sold.

The freedoms we have, and the freedom that should be protected is market choice to buy or not buy any consumer product.

If you don’t like Apple, don’t buy its products and purchase a device from a large number of competitors. It is really that simple.

There is no rule that consumers have a right to do anything. You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows. You aren’t guaranteed that your coffee machine can run Python.

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> You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows.

This is a complete red herring and a very sly one at that.

Sure, MS have no obligation to make it so that Safari can run on Windows.

However, Microsoft also cannot stop Apple from building a version of Safari that runs on Windows. Or iTunes on Windows. And when Apple built iTunes on Windows MS had no right to force them to fork over 30% of every song they sold within iTunes to MS. MS had no right to force Mozilla to build Firefox around the IE6 engine, or Chrome around IE6.

It’s very likely Apple, Google, or Mozilla would not have existed if governments (specifically the EU) hadn’t stopped Microsoft from pushing it’s options as the default, never mind blocking alternatives altogether.

Yep. Microsoft also hasn’t banned Steam from windows, forcing everyone to buy games from their own official windows App Store where they take a juicy cut of all sales.

Microsoft also doesn’t charge a ransom fee for 3rd party applications to use the hardware features of my computer, that I’ve already paid for. Apple does this with the NFC chip in iPhones - public transit companies the world over need to pay Apple money to use the nfc chip present in iPhones to pay for transit.

You seem to have high opinions about what others don’t have the right to do with software they invest their own money into. Here’s an idea, let’s drop the coercion and let free men make free choices.

> choices

What choices might those be? The only other mobile operating system that people develop for is Android. How is a duopoly choice?

But as an app developer, I have no choice, Apple will act like they own my relationship with my users despite having done absolutely nothing for it.

Nothing? They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world, and handles nearly frictionless payment. And they have created a marketplace where users feel safe downloading your app. As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.

> They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world

It's nice that they provide that service for those developers that want it. It's not nice that I don't have a choice to distribute my own app however I see fit.

See, I want to build an app, and people want to install it, but Apple is standing between us, dictating how we must and must not interact.

> As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.

Then you're free to not enable sideloading when it eventually inevitably materializes, and miss out on apps that aren't available on the app store. This decision is still yours to make. We've had this on Android and macOS since forever.

So you’re advocating freedom for you and coercion for others. You’re free to buy an Android, no one’s forcing you to do anything. Free not to buy Apple. But you won’t extend that to others, forcing them to bow to your demands or lose their freedom to conduct trade.

Where did you see coercion? MacOS offers both options. You and I both know how popular the Mac app store is among both users and developers. I'm sure there are people who use a Mac and would not install anything from outside of the app store out of principle. It's their right to do so.

MacOS offers others because Apple wants to. They could lock it down, they’re free to. But they would lose customers. But they’re free and you’re free.

They also write and maintain the primary frameworks by which one creates software on their devices, a set of tools that help developers create apps far better than any competing mobile operating system. These frameworks are available for all developers to use for free!

I propose Apple start charging some pennies for every million UIView calls.

What is the price of devices for then? It's a sane expectation that when you buy a device with a preinstalled OS, you pay for both the hardware and the R&D costs for the OS.

Apple sets prices and there’s no reason they need to charge customers for the R&D costs of supporting public APIs. In fact, if they charged developers per call, maybe customers could pay less. It used to be pretty standard to charge for better application development frameworks. Heck, people used to pay for compilers!

I remember how Microsoft wanted non-insignificant amounts of money for its official SDKs and Visual Studio (and I always pirated them).

But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.

Companies set prices however they want, not based on "need". They don't need excuses.

True or false, then: does Apple really need the European market to access the first world as a userbase?

I’m not sure what you mean by that question. If you’re trying to imply that usage based pricing for their APIs is banned by the EU, it’s not.

What I'm saying is that Apple can fuck around and find out. 2 years ago there weren't protections for arbitrary digital market gatekeeping, now there is. If Apple wants European market access, being the vanguard for the World's Dumbest pricing model is a bad start.

Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.

Being the vanguard? Usage based pricing is not new, and framework makers have charged developers for access for a long time.

Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs. Apple has spent the last three releases trying to slowly fix privacy issues with API as basic as copy and paste.

The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!

> Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims.

Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".

Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.

There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.

I have bought an iPhone and not your app. You have no relationship with me without me choosing iOS. That’s it. I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store. Respect that decision. Don’t make me go outside the ecosystem I have chosen so you can make you 30%. I say that as a developer who gets charged the 30% as I respect the fact the user decided to use that specific platform for whatever reason they have.

Mine as a consumer is that Apple doesn’t have dark patters when I want to cancel my subscription with your app. When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…

> I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store

Then you're not my user. And I'm not talking about anything involving money anyway.

> When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…

It's the government's job to enforce consumer rights, not Apple's. I'm sorry that consumer protection in the US is so terrible. Where I'm from, "credit card on file" is just not a thing and most of everything is prepaid. If a service really insists on charging you against your will, you can block your card and get a new one but I've yet to hear about this actually happening to someone.

There was a time when people would give up their job if they truly believed in what they preached. But you like your work (or money) enough to not make a choice to change

I would be very surprised if someone could demonstrate that the reason Apple’s platform is more valuable to developers than Android doesn’t have quite a bit to do with things Apple has done, and continues to do.

> There is no rule that consumers have a right to do anything.

But there is, in the EU. That's what this whole thread is about. Like it or leave it, our market, our rules.

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