It's completely scummy. You can buy Apple's iCloud storage upgrade from within the OS, and now you can't even LINK to a place where you could link to a place where if you click the right link you could buy Dropbox storage.
I wrote about it in a recent blog post:
As for the payment question, simply in terms of UX and as a consumer, I want only one payment provider and account on the device. I hate pulling my credit card out and remembering my password for the nth account.
Consumers are happy with the platform. Look at the sales numbers and earnings reports. Obviously companies like Dropbox see the value in the platform too -- I just wish they'd take the time to understand why it has that value, and why Apple has huge profits and very happy users.
In the long run the open market always wins.
If Apple wasn't forcing the larger industry to learn how to turn a profit by putting users first, the market would simply saturate the app store with whatever existent concepts are popular today.
Remember, prior to iOS, the Mac OS X market was both cry user friendly and very insular. Now, iOS has gone mainstream, but Apple's user-friendly focus hasn't (yet?).
Of course, your open market does still exist -- users can choose Android, which thrives on the notion of 'user choice'.
Of course, your open market does still exist --
users can choose Android, which thrives on the
notion of 'user choice'.
When I decided to buy a smartphone, I wanted one that allowed me to block calls and SMS messages completely, without leaving traces in the calls/sms logs. I wanted this because somehow my number ended up on a lot of spam lists and a smartphone should be smart about these things, right? If my email address is protected by spam filters, it should be a no-brainer for my smartphone to do the same for calls and SMS.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that such apps are banned from the iTunes App Store and that the only way to get such functionality on iOS was for me to root it and install software through Cydia. And why should I as a consumer go through so many hoops to use such software, when the company (that receives my money in the process) is actively hostile to my use case, a use case which is in no way immoral or unjustified.
When it comes to Android, building an app that blocks calls and SMS messages is still hard, as the APIs you have to rely on are private and keep changing, so the results are unpredictable. But upon a search on Google Play, I did find one that works well, installed with a single click. And I didn't have to root my phone.
Now that's what openness gets you - user experience is important, but it's all for nothing if the apps allowed don't solve your real problems.
The App Store is not an open market, nor is it intended to be an open market.
I've never seen an open market in the wild, much less it "always winning".
You mean an open market like the "$1 trillion bailout not to collapse the whole economy" open market? Or an open market like "we enforce strict copyright laws to artificially limit each copyrighted product to one maker and it's pricing at his whims"? Or an open market with patents, for the same purpose? Or an open market with frequent cartels, to everything from dairy products to RAM? Last, but not least, an open market where a country with a military advantage has several army units deployed and several wars to secure resources and keep their prices down?
What application market is it that is open and always wins?
The same hold true for application markets. In any market where money are involved and parties with interests of their own can get a stronghold on the rules, the results are the same.
>I didn't know Google was using their market to bail people out and wage a secret resource war.
Well, pushing their own apps to users with "picks" and front-page promotion is akin to a bailout. They can restrict apps that compete with their core businesses in a snap, they can change the rules of the game anytime, etc. They use it to do whatever offers them a competitive advantage.
Apple's marketplace is an even better example, as it is more closed. Google cannot close the Android marketplace at the same level, because they cannot do all the stuff Apple pulls and still attract developers away from more lucrative iOS at the same time (developers are the "scarce resource" here).
Btw: "ideological rant" implies that something I said re: "free markets" does not hold true and I say it because of my ideology. Can you point to it? Else it's not "ideological", it's mere empirical observation.
I can. You didn't say (as in "state") anything. You asked a rapid fire succession of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are one of the best indicators of ideology (as in "zealotry").
There's no reason to hijack a fairly specific discussion with a much broader ideological rant. This sort of thing has been happening on HN lately and it bothers me. It takes a potentially interesting conversation and turns it into an ideology measuring contest.
I understand that the theory of free markets in general might be applicable here, but the point is the way the GP is framing the debate it can't be resolved without much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The free market left to itself would fix most of it's own problems (I say most because I think some regulation is necessary and good). But it requires patience to let the market work.
The free market left to itself will eventually converge into a monopoly.
No, all the things that I mention are instances of actual markets. Were is this free market? If it's possible, why it hasn't been seen anywhere on earth?
>The free market left to itself would fix most of it's own problems
I mean, to reason about what the free market will do IF it exists has no value.
The free market, even if it was imposed by some power for one second, would have to be forcibly sustained by human agents --namely corporations, consumers, workers and the government. Nothing tells us that it would, in fact history teaches us otherwise.
One might as well say: "If everybody always was pro peace and love, and never did anything bad, we would have world peace and love".
Of course, but the whole point is in how to achieve that. So, to say "the free market would fix most of it's own problems" has zero value, if the #1 problem is how to create and sustain a free market itself.
We perhaps disagree about the motivations behind the clauses, but without inside knowledge I suppose we'll never know for certain.
The piece that perhaps I didn't express clearly enough: there are cases where developers -- even the good ones, who care deeply about doing the right thing for their users -- are boxed in and, no matter how much they would like to play by Apple's rules, are unable to for one reason or another. The result is often worse for users.
It's the unintended consequences of the "Kindle Clauses" that I find so interesting; that was what motivated my original blog post.
The fact is that Apple is the one that requires apps to open the browser in the first place. It's rule upon rules upon rules. I'm an iOS user and I'm not happy with this aspect of platform, if that means anything.
(Emphasis mine) Sounds like it might be time to find a new business plan, then.
I would be surprised to find many software products where the gross profit margin would be less than 50%.
Software and service prices seem mostly arbitrary to me anyway.
How else Aperture went from $300 to $100, Lightroom the same, BBEdit shed 70% of it's price in one day, etc etc... Same, why was iWork a $99 package and now it's 3 components are $10 each on the Mac App Store?
Services are more deeply and negatively affected by price changes than software, though. A price change that seems insignificant to you can drive many users away. Look at the fiasco with Netflix last year; they changed their prices by about $6 and subsequently lost about a million subscribers within a few months. Some users see price increases as an indication of a service's instability in the marketplace (and therefore a cue to jump-ship). Most users have lower tolerance thresholds for price differences when comparing services than they do when comparing one-time purchases (like software).
Regardless, now would be a really bad time for Dropbox to increase their pricing. Many Mac & iPhone users are watching iCloud closely and realizing that it could make Dropbox redundant for them. A price increase, even one as small as a ~$30 a year change for their 50+ plan (corollary to your $3 a month change), could push enough users away from the service that Dropbox is better off sticking to its guns.
If your competitors can offer lower prices and still give away 70%, then you're not competitive enough.
create a subsidiary.
dropbox.com, charges $x for 5GB
idropbox.com, a dropbox company, optionally in the caymans, charges $(1.3 * x) for 5GB and has an app.
They've rigged the game.
No, I know of that rule. Just jack the price everywhere --if the iPhone is an important market to you, that 30% is a factor you have to take into account in your overall pricing strategy.
The same holds true for all of your competitors, after all. Either they give up the iOS market, or they have to do the same. So it's not like someone has an advantage over you.
( And, I'd say, if it IS an important market to you, well, you don't get to both have all those customers with their credit cards at the ready in a system someone else built out of thin air AND complain that you have to give him a cut).
> 11.3 Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the application will be rejected
In app purchases are simply a wildly inadequate solution for many apps and services, and Apple forcing everyone to use them is absurd and helps nobody.
[1] 1 - (1/1.3) is the additional percentage that must be added to a price maintain constant revenue.[2]
[2] To be pedantic, Apple also handles payment card processing, which is ~3%. So the difference is really 1-(1.03/1.30) = 20.8%
Yes. If the choice is between UX and cost, I'll almost always pay more.
Not everyone will, but the people that don't are less profitable customers, as Apple is demonstrating.
"Way to far" is an interesting characterization. Apple has rules about their playground, they like their rules, they make Apple very profitable.
So the question becomes can Google leverage this liability to increase the penetration or market share of Android tablets? Once these tactics hurt Apple in the market they will change. Until then, well its their town and you either have to play by their rules or not play at all.
Unfortunately, Google is probably not capable of exploiting these mini-resentments and I don't think anybody else is either.
I'd love to hear more about that.
This is my reasoning on why I think there is an opportunity there:
Lets say (patent issues not withstanding), you created an exact clone of the iPad and iOS and sold it at the same price but without the 30% 'apple tax' on purchases. It seems reasonable to assume that if that were the only differentiating feature you would get more developers (they get to keep more of the money) and so it would get more apps, and the platform would outsell Apple's iPad with its constraints.
Now granted that is a hell of a hypothetical, but if you can accept the claim that given two otherwise identical products, but one with more developer friendly policies, would allow the developer friendly one to be more successful, then we can talk about at what point the 'value' represented by that can overcome the fact that the product is not an iPad. Does that make sense?
The Android tablet ecosystem is currently horrible. Between the device diversity, the user experience diversity, and the release diversity, and the app experience diversity it is a wild and woolly place which has not been able to compete well with iPad. Contrast that to the Kindle Fire which started with Android, locked down a lot of stuff that Google doesn't, and that has gained more traction than any other Android based tablet.
To me, that shows a market for a non-iPad but with Apple like quality control and predictability. Depending on Amazon's success, Google might just wake up and fix their world (and of course they might not, it would not be the first time a large organization just didn't 'get' it)
But you also claim that nobody can exploit these resentments, and certainly Amazon is going to try and seem to have some modest success in that regard. Love to hear the counter point of view.
Based on the examples I have witnessed, I simply do not have any hope in the existence of an open platform with Apple-esque quality and eco-system (the assumption being viable eco-system automatically implies major market share).
Sorry if I spoke in circles!
One of the areas that hasn't been explored a whole lot in the product space is 'moderated open' which is how I think of the Linux Kernel. You can change it all you want, get the source, etc, but if you want to get into the kernel that everyone else sees you have to go through Linus. He keeps the quality pretty high by doing that. It was similar to FreeBSD as 'open source' but 'moderated commits.'
Now in the tablet space I have yet to see someone to take that path. There do not seem to be too many successes for business people to draw on for inspiration. That being said, as an example the Kindle Fire has sold a lot of units. And it is a completely legit argument that Amazon 'makes it up in book sales' (which is their business model) much like the iPod can be subsidized by iTunes purchases.
And I am sympathetic to mladenkovacevic's comment about a wild and free ecosystem can be more useful/desirable than a locked down one. But I also recognize that there are lots of folks who are interested in the product, not deeply technical, and chafe under Apple's restrictions on developers.
If anyone could 'afford' to make a run at this, Google could. And perhaps they will with a 'Google Experience' tablet that has been rumored.
I understand your lack of hope given the things you have seen so far. Back in the before times of personal computers when they had lights and switches on the front, the introduction of the IBM PC for the 'suits' was a huge pain. And really successful brands at the time got pushed aside. Google pushed aside Alta Vista, Sun pushed aside DEC, Compaq/Dell pushed aside the IBM PC, and Android phones at least have put a huge crimp in Apple's style.
Interesting to see how this evolves.
Apple has that covered. You cannot make your services cheaper on other platforms. You have to charge atleast what you charge iOS users for the same service. This is to prevent the success of alternative app stores that will take only 20% or 5% cut. The new ecosystem won't take off because the existing developers cannot afford to completely drop the App Store to jump to a new platform.
Surely in a world where the network effect rules and the stakes (the global marketplace) are so high, we shouldn't allow networks to entrench themselves too easily? Else we'd just have a behemoth in each sector, probably the same few companies even.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that it protects Apple from having their users find out that 30% of what they're paying gets nowhere near the person they think is getting all the money.
I do not believe keeping the price equal to other helps the consumer, it's simply Apple keeping developers from charging the 30% straight to the consumer. I believe it would be interesting if they let this restriction slide. Perhaps the advantage of simple purchasing makes up for an increase in price. Convenience is also worth something, as supermarkets have found out.
What? It's specifically set up to protect Apple's cut of 30% and to prevent other app stores from charging less.
Lets say you price a service at $14/mo. Apple takes 30% so you price it at $20/mo. Apple takes $6/mo. Windows 8 ap store takes zero if you roll your own in app mechanism, but you can't charge Windows 8 users only $14/mo. You have to charge them $20/mo if you want to stay in the iOS App store.
How is Windows 8 users being forced to pay $20/mo instead of receiving a benefit from their platform competing, protect Apple customers?
Apple is trying to protect their own users from being ripped off by Apple? That's some _really_ twisted logic there.
That rule is in place to safeguard their 30% cut. I don't see how the user benefits from having to pay 30% extra instead of getting a 30% discount on the same supplier's website instead of paying Apple the tax.
That cost goes directly to Apple. It protects Apple, not their consumers. Their consumers see no benefit from 30% of their cost, whether larger or smaller than the alternatives.
What "Apple tax"? Haven't you noticed that competitors have struggled to offer the same prices for their tablets for example? The iPad/iPhone is one of the cheapest products on their market segment.
Just consider that when everybody expected the iPad to be like $999 or $799 on introduction, it came out at $499 -- and the mostly useless copies (now forgotten) that appeared of it, where in the range of $700.
Apple has their margin's with huge economies of scale and huge massive pre-orders of RAM, solid state storage and screen panels.
Personally, the idea of hardware-accelerated HTML5/JS apps makes my heart sing, so I'm really hoping it takes off with consumers. Maybe it'll be the best texting phone ever and every teenager in the world will swap. A dude can dream...
They would be cutting their own nose off to spite their face.
You have to write a short letter saying why you once used <product> or refused to purchase <product> because of <reason>.
Didn't IBM lose the case where they said you can only run IBM software on IBM 360s?
IANAL but it sure would be nice for someone that is to speak up on why many of these old cases don't apply.
Is it that it is legal, Apple just doesn't have to feature it in their store? Phone companies were forced to allow 3rd party phones on their network. So where/are mobile companies as far as I know. Car companies are require to honor car warranties even if you change out the car stereo AFAIK.
Is there some reason similar rules don't apply to Apple (and Nintendo, and Sony, and Microsoft)?
It should be.
If this doesn't feel like anticompetitive behaviour, I don't know what does. They are using their rather large position in the smartphone/tablet market to enter another market (in this case storage) and snuff out the competition. And there are other examples.
Be careful what you wish for. If antitrust laws can be applied even when there is no monopoly, indeed, not even a majority market share, you are basically giving the government a green light to do a WHOLE lot of bad things.
Now it's kind of funny to see some of the same people make the argument in comments here that Apple has no significant marketshare or dominance of anything.
Why is this a distinction?
Apple has a monopoly on the "market" (portion) that pays for apps. That's not as clean a definition of market as you would want. The defining characteristics of this market are also (arguably) inconveniently dependent on the offending practices. IE iphone user pay because it is easy, because there is a single payment provider, because users don't have to worry about a cheaper option some roundabout way, etc. etc.
Then there is the problem that any platform, regardless of overall marketshare is something like a little local monopoly. Our definitions of monopoly don't really work here but platforms can still exhibit a lot of what anti-monopoly rules are trying to prevent.
Apple are being abusive, few would deny this. Few have. Why are you?
A market segment just is a market according to the dictionary definitions. And legally, a lot of EU competition law concerns exactly how one individuates such markets/market segments.
Can you draw out what you're claiming more?
The fact remains semantically and legally that you a monopoly of the segment or niche of a market is not possible. A company can be abusive (which is what you mean when you say monopoly - something which in and of itself isn't illegal), but unless they control the significant majority of the whole the it is legally not an issue. Morally is different debate.
Well, I don't know what you mean by 'cogent', as that's generally taken to be a property of arguments and not statements (there may be loser notions, but as I say you'd need to spell out what one you intended). However, the statement that 'Apple have a monopoly over Apple products' is a true statement, which is all that matters to establish the semantic point. It might be trivial, but it's trivially true.
If I might try a helpful suggestion, it seems to me your confusion is arising because you're thinking something like 'if x is a market segment, then x isn't a market'. But of course that doesn't follow, as one can individuate markets at different levels (more or less fine grained).
Then there's a legal point about whether one opens oneself to legal action for dominance when operating in certain ways over market segments - I think it's also true you can be. But I'm not that advanced in my legal training, so don't take a strong position on that.
Further, there are normative and moral issues about what should be the law, and what one should do in these cases - but discussing those would take a long time...
The issue here is one of sensationalism. As a community, we a far too quick to jump to the "$corp is evil!" conclusion without looking for a reason, however ridiculous it may seem. We, as a community, are too cynical for own good.
> "Apple makes 80% of the money in the cell phone market, Apple is the only one making any money"
Making the majority of the profits is not a monopoly in the Microsoft Windows sense, which I assume is what we're talking about here. iOS does not have that in the handset market (esp. if you include Symbian!), and the tablet market is very young.
I wouldn't invest in app development ever, precisely due to these sorts of issues.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%E2%80%A6
It's a poignant message and reminder that this is not the first time this has happened. It's especially important because the OP mentions Apple having "gone too far," as if everything they were doing before was acceptable.
As for your belief that this response is merely a quip from an recent migrant from Reddit, might I point out that your comment is, at the very least, far, far worse. I'm confident, however, they you merely don't care, and are at best a troll.
At least you realize it's your mistake. After all, what is written can only mean one thing, and one thing only.
Maybe one day you'll learn about context, and history, and how that poem was not about the Nazi purges, but rather people not speaking up about them until it was too late. That you would equate that poem to the purges implies you miss the meaning, the point.
> and a hiccup encountered while installing an iPhone app.
But it's not. Again, you miss the point. People are saying this crosses some line. But that line was crossed years ago by Apple. People defended their actions then, while others decried it, and this exact point (and poem) was raised at the time. People dismissed the warning. They said things like this would never happen.
Now they are complaining about Apple crossing a line.
Finally, I want to introduce to you a literary concept called hyperbole. It is an exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally. So, while you want the poem I pasted to be about the holocaust, it isn't.