Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like the idea of having N different app stores no matter how bad the one App Store is. Just having one App Store and no silly monetization rules would be great.

I download the Netflix app for $0 and my business with Netflix is done directly with them after that. And Netflix can pay Apple some reasonable fee for hosting and reviewing the apps themselves. Apple have already lost the AppStore they just haven’t realized it yet. They should try to rescue the 1 good store before the app market is fractured with side markets. Eventually it’ll affect the perception of their hardware and that’s a worse place for Apple than just losing the entire app tax.

View on HN

I really like the user experience of the app store as it is. I love that I can cancel any app subscription from 1 place. I understand some of the problems of the app store from the developer side and hope those change, but I like how it is as a user.

I do wish progressive web apps were improved a bit.

I see the "app subscription in 1 place" point a lot, but what stops you from only ever enforcing that rule by yourself, as you're already doing now ?

I assume that means you currently don't subscribe to anything Amazon provides, nor Netflix, nor game services, nor newsletters, nor coffee subscriptions etc.

A few more subscription mechanisms appearing in the world would not make a difference, do they ? I anything you'd have more option to choose which basket you put all your eggs in.

> I assume that means you currently don't subscribe to anything Amazon provides, nor Netflix, nor game services, nor newsletters, nor coffee subscriptions etc.

I subscribe to all of these through apple and that means I can cancel them in the settings app on my phone instantly.

To my knowledge Amazon doesn't allow Apple Pay, nor do I see stuff like kindle unlimited subscriptions in the Amazon app. How do you do that ?

Same for Nintendo Online, please give me some pointers.

If you subscribe to a service from your phone, it does show up there. My MLB subscription is also usable from my computer, but because I bought it on my phone it’s manageable there.

Presumably if they decided to move that app to a 3rd party store exclusively, that goes away

If they’re like me, they subscribe to those through the various apps from the app store, such that Apple is the processor for them. It means paying more typically, but it’s worth it for me to have as many of my subs as possible in one place, easy to cancel and easy to resubscribe.

Yes it's so hard to cancel Netflix on the Website, and resubscribing is even harder. Lol

I chose examples that I basically don't see in the App Store. I have a NIntendo Online subscription and an Amazon unlimited subscription, and don't expect it will ever be integrated.

Fair enough, I have neither, so it’s been great for me.

If you've ever tried to cancel Amazon Prime through amazon.com, you'll understand the value that Apple provides through its App Store subscriptions.

I take that you are American?

It is super easy to cancel Amazon Prime in the EU (I did it in Portugal).

No it's not. They still let you jump through a bunch of hoops and try to trick you. Have you ever cancelled something on the app store? It's really just a cancel button.

Ahh, I see.

Maybe we should expand it then? Make a rule that all subscription services shall to use Apple's iStore – it is after all the simplest possible way.

I have not cancelled anything on the Apple store, no. I have not yet had the burden of owning an iPhone, but I have cancelled a lot of things elsewhere. And the only situations where it has been anxiety provoking has been for US companies.

That's true! In Germany there's the law that you need to be able to cancel a subscription the same way you created it. So if I click a button, you can't ask me to call you. But it's circumvented, and you're right, internationally it's so much worse. And they call it "customer retention" lol

What's wrong with cancelling Amazon Prime? I did it recently and it took less than a minute. I even had the option to cancel immediately and have them refund my money, even though my yearly subscription was still running for half a year, which AFAIK is not possible for App Store subscriptions. I'm in EU so might be different to US.

The EU have it way better, like one or two clicks and it's done.

I sincerely feel sorry for you and how fucked up it is to cancel subscriptions in places with weaker customer protection.

What is even better is that I can use prepaid Visa cards to subscribe to things via Apple Pay in the App Store for the very same apps that will not allow me to do it on their website

Nothing is preventing you from using the same app store in the future

That means Apple can compete on merits, not through a monopoly.

If they truly have a stellar experience, people would want to pay a premium for that even, and choose this option.

What need is there, for you, that requires Apple to then hold on to their monopoly?

I'm not sure! If I have the same cancel-any-subscription-from-ios-settings experience without the app store, then I would love that! I'd love it if I could cancel other things like spotify/netflix from that same ios settings screen.

So you also think that on Windows PCs, you should only be able to install programs from the Windows Store?

a bit of a silly comment. a PC is not a phone. a phone is something very personal, something you can lose very easily (and a lot of people do), something that you use all the time outside your home (on the street, on the bus, etc). a PC isn't that.

A phone is, in fact, a computer

I think it would be a much better UX for 90% of users. But it would require the store to exist from the start so it contains all/most of the content. That never happened on windows.

You could totally have one app store to rule them all (front end \neq repos).

Also, this whole "fractured with side markets" sounds massively overblown. On the android side other app stores are allowed. Yet, almost nobody goes out of their way to add any app store that was not preinstalled. And those preinstalled at most include one by the phone manufacturer, i.e. apple in this case.

And now thanks to Apple's malicious compliance is going to be even worse for everyone

The EU is luckily different from the US in terms of following the spirit of laws rather than using technical loopholes. Hopefully any attempt to be in malicious compliance should result in the same penalty as noncompliance.

The new alternative business terms basically set that up. The "reasonable fee" is €0.50/install plus 10% of recurring revenue for customers acquired through via the Apple App Store.

The reasonable fee if you ask me would be only to cover their own cost. So the same fee for Spotify and Netflix as for my own combined Todo/flappy bird clone app.

N should just be 0. Why have an app store middle man at all? You could just download your Netflix app from Netflix's website. Problem solved.

When you look up a program on Google search, you pretty much always get the right result. When you search for something on an app store, you get a bunch of spam mixed in. It's a worse experience.

> When you look up a program on Google search, you pretty much always get the right result

This is dangerously untrue for many categories of app. Google plays a game of whack-a-mole trying to stop the worst malware but it’s far from perfect and once you’re in more dubious categories like adware they pretty don’t bother.

That’s the problem here: it’d be nice to be able to install Netflix from Netflix.com but making it that easy means that millions of people will get something with bundled adware, spyware, etc. because they didn’t realize what they were installing - or because it wasn’t installed by them but their controlling spouse, kid who likes games, etc. The long-term answer for this will involve better OS sandboxes but as we’ve seen that’s a tough thing to get right and will inevitably limit what people can do or be abused (e.g. taking away direct access to other applications means attackers now try to convince people to enable assistive features).

Now, maybe that freedom is worth the risk. Personally I think it is but I also know that statistically the rate of people I know/support getting their credit cards stolen, being used in a botnet, or having their PC become unusable dropped to zero when those people switched to iOS or ChromeOS so I certainly can’t say there isn’t a solid argument that the general public cannot use general purpose computers safely.

> The long-term answer for this will involve better OS sandboxes

Well, this is exactly it. iOS should have redundant security policies that don't take fallible App Store reviews for granted anyways. Apple didn't really account for this, presumably to hedge the validity of a single App Store. Now they're acting like the victim when they gave up proactive solutions to chase more money. I can't empathize with that logic, even if they drag users into the regulatory bear trap with them.

Apple has every opportunity to make things right. Sideloading works fine on Android (or, Mac); getting it "right" is eminently an implementation problem. It would be incredibly sad for Apple to fight down this legislation through bad faith compliance and self-sabotage. Not unexpected or poor entertainment, but very sad and unnecessary.

As the original comment states, there's not magic sandbox solution. It's a hard problem. The average user should be able to grant or deny capabilities. For things like location it's easy but when you think about the botnet case, things get tricky. What ip ranges do you allow?

There's no way to fix the problem natively, either. Apple's "solution" to this issue is checking every app personally, which is a fallible and expensive approach. Apple will pretend they're taking the high road, but it doesn't take a genius to surmise they only care about that process because it's expensive.

No matter how you slice it, this is already a problem and literally no one blames Apple for it. It's not Apple's job to blacklist phone numbers that contain scam callers, it's not Apple's job to protect Safari users from content that harms them. The EU is very unlikely to approve any scheme where Apple is still a gatekeeping party.

> Well, this is exactly it. iOS should have redundant security policies that don't take fallible App Store reviews for granted anyways. Apple didn't really account for this, presumably to hedge the validity of a single App Store.

If your second sentence was accurate, Apple wouldn’t be leading the industry on app security as they have been. The mistake is seeing these as incompatible rather than complementary goals: the layers of protection on the device ate never going to be perfect so having a single point of review and, more importantly, revocation means that they have a chance to catch exploits first and to deter them with knowledge of what can be done in response. The notarization framework they describe seems like a compromise in that regard, being especially useful for linking binaries to a legal identity.

> Sideloading works fine on Android (or, Mac); getting it "right" is eminently an implementation problem.

Again, this depends on whether your definition of “right” includes as much malware or spyware. That’s a spectrum, and there is not an absolute right answer. Apple appears to be shifting to a model where multiple stores are allowed but there’s still some accountability for stores which don’t control malware, which seems like a better place to me than where we’re at now.

> If your second sentence was accurate, Apple wouldn’t be leading the industry on app security as they have been.

If Apple was actually leading the industry on App Security then they wouldn't be using the App Store as a security defense. They know that people are afraid of Pegasus-style malware and they want people to think it comes only from third-parties. In reality, Apple devices are already attacked from a variety of endpoints, many of which are first-party. Some of them are zero-click. Blaming malware and scamming on sideloading is an obvious stretch; both of those things exist on iPhone even without the DMA.

> The mistake is seeing these as incompatible rather than complementary goals

I do see them as complimentary; that's why I'm outraged that only one half of the goal is considered. Apple actively neglects security on their device to reinforce the validity of a centralized App Store. That is an objectively deteriorated experience for users, and when stuff like the Digital Market Act comes around it's a blatant ploy to buy Apple time.

I'm not denying the merits of your discussion, I'm proving that other platforms (including Apple-made ones) already get this right, so regulators have no reason to go let Apple off easy here. The status-quo can be better, and I guarantee you that this policy will be revised within the year. There is simply no excuse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com