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I have been writing software professionally for 15 years and I have never written a single line of code for an Apple device, and I never would. Contributing to the Apple ecosystem is a choice, no one is forced to do it. Any developer who contributes to the Apple ecosystem is taking an active part in the situation.

Unfortunately for mobile games iOS tends to be where the majority of the money is.

I don’t think it’s just games. iOS users in general are more willing to pay for software than Android users and Android users are more willing to pay than web users.

This was my experience doing consulting/contracting for most of the 2010s. Clients would want both iOS and Android, and we’d release with full feature parity. In every instance the iOS apps brought in 2x-5x the revenue, even when our Android apps had more active users.

I’ve always wondered why that is. I’ve had both Android and iOS phones and I’ve spent far, far more on iOS apps. I don’t think I’ve ever paid for a web app. There’s something about the platforms themselves then encourage or discourage spending.

Where are all the good iOS games? I don’t know if I’d be able to name more than a handful[0]. How many people are making -- and similarly monetizing: upfront cost sans micro-transactions -- things like Mindustry?

0: Mindustry https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindustry/id1385258906 and two more which are available with an Apple Arcade subscription, maybe also for individual purchase: Dandara https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dandara-trials-of-fear/id15761... and Fantasian https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fantasian/id1517339045.

Over the past few years, the highest grossing games are freemium pay to win games, like Star Trek Fleet Comman. While they're available on both android and iOS, the fact that iOS users tend to me more affluent means that the revenue tends to come from in-app purchases on iOS more than android.

This was shared on HN a couple months back, I found some nice games there: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

Not just games, iOS App Store revenue is far higher in pretty much all categories vs Android.

> Contributing to the Apple ecosystem is a choice, no one is forced to do it.

This is such a disingenuous argument that ignores the huge pile of incentives at play. Here is an equally disingenuous argument: anyone who sells or gives away any software to anyone in the US is taking an active part in the US military industrial complex.

> anyone in the US is taking an active part in the US military industrial complex.

Its annoying how this isn't that far off. Even big consumer facing companies will end up working for or supplying intelligence to the MIC.

I think this is because Apple is a hardware company, that uses software to attract consumers. While Microsoft is a software company, that uses hardware to attract consumers.

Apple is a vertically integrated company. They offer you (in theory) everything you need for computing

Except cloud services for business, which are increasingly vital. And without AI, also a big deal now.

If you are a consumer or for example a creative pro. If you are a big enterprise, not so much.

Re-read that. Microsoft uses hardware to attract customers?

I don't know the GP's intention, but I'm guessing it's that MS's actual products are all software (Windows, Office, etc) and the allure is that they can be sold on/come packaged with relatively cheap and available computing. Compare to Apple, where they primarily sell hardware, and use software (whether their own or 3rd party) to make that hardware desirable, especially at high price points.

Everyone universally loved the zoon and the windows phone.

You dropped this: /s

Yeah I don't agree with that assertion either. Microsoft will produce hardware to show the art of the possible with their software. It largely comes out of a situation where the PC/device manufacturers were doing a sh* job of it.

Hardware manufacturers that aren't Microsoft have little reason to take speculative risks that might prove that there's a market for a new configuration of commodity hardware to sell Microsoft’s latest non-commodity software; it's all potential downside with very little potential upside.

That's an old saying. It's not so clear-cut now.

A better way to describe their differences is that Apple started as an end-user company (and became a services company while at it) where hardware was a means to an end. The products they sell are based around an experience rather than just a bag of components/parts, as those are just the means to an end. It's why their design envelope is the way it is, and why the kept vertically integrating more and more over the decades. In a way, that's where the IWM and SWIM came in so long ago, not because they had to, but because it delivered a better solution to that specific experience than anyone else. (granted, back then using a computer had a very different meaning than it does today but the reasoning still applies)

Microsoft on the other hand is a typical SKU-mover, their business relies on selling 'parts' of someone else's workflow, but later on realised the only way to have a consistent experience is to also start making the hardware. Later on, they tacked on services, but because they kept the "spray the market with SKUs" business strategy it mostly just became 'more', rather than better integrated products for people. It's still "move as much stuff", even if it's not well-integrated. Heck, sometimes it is less-integrated because it enables moving more stuff.

At the end of the day, most large tech multinationals end up manufacturing a lot of stuff over the various layers (hardware, software, firmware, entire devices, individual components etc), but that no longer describes what the company actually "is". (just like it doesn't really describe much to group them together as "commercial money makers", it isn't very specific or useful)

> In a way, that's where the IWM and SWIM came in so long ago

I’m going to assume based on minimal context you are meaning the 40 year old floppy controllers?

Since these acronyms are fairly obtuse / not well known…

IWM - integrated woz machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Woz_Machine

SWIM - replacement for IWM which supported the SuperDrive

> Microsoft on the other hand is a typical SKU-mover

As far as I can tell there is nothing typical about Microsoft. The sophisticated, deeply-root long game they’ve executed extremely well puts them in a very different place. As a contrast to Apple, the differences are striking - not because of the difference between “bing” and “bling”.

This. The Microsoft long term business execution is amazing despite their resources involved in zillions of failed projects and acquisitions, and some horrible apps (e.g. Teams). It doesn't matter they are a success anyway. Other companies would be buried much before that. Always recommend the book Hard Drive (just in a yesterday's thread) [1]. I need to not forget to add now "Idea Man" [2] by Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder. It shows that the young Bill Gates was already a Titan.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243044

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...

Their "throw as many SKUs at the market and see what sticks" model is very typical. That is not uniquely Microsoft and is very common in broad supply enterprises.

The only thing that is unique about microsoft is being in the right place at the right time, making the right B2B licensing deals and entrenching for decades because of it. Operating systems, window managers, filesystems, graphics, SDKs, IDEs, it's all been done before (and after) at equal, better and worse quality levels.

Their broad catalog is somewhat unique in having more SKUs that don't work well together (or at all) vs. ones that do, but the same applies to IBM and Google for example. And the things that do work well together tend to be based on technologies that have little to do with the company itself (like WebDAV and Kerberos), and that's not unique to Microsoft either.

The sophistication is in their business and SKU broadness, not in making proper end-to-end vertically integrated user experiences that make people happy. (well, they have started to get there in the gaming market I suppose)

If you have an example where that is not the case, and there was a product choice that merited their offering, I would love to hear about it.

Apple doesn't make developers do anything. Developers write apps for their platform because it is the one where consumers want to spend their money. They do this by being mean to developers, or, rather, not allowing developers to be mean to customers. It's the same way that apple leans hard on their suppliers but at the end of the day it has led to creating a healthy and wealthy ecosystem that those developers and suppliers still seem to contribute apps to.

> not allowing developers to be mean to customers.

apple has a history of denying apps for monopolistic reasons & collusion price fixing : https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple#Restriction...

> t's the same way that apple leans hard on their suppliers but at the end of the day it has led to creating a healthy and wealthy ecosystem

yes, like using child labour and working environments that require suicide nets: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple#Student_and...

Not protecting Foxconn, but I suggest you to compare their work conditions with other Chinese companies, where the competing mobile devices are manufactured. Problem is China and its borderline slavery labor conditions.

Thankfully, Apple started moving out to India and Vietnam.

This feels like a different situation than the article author. My impression is that they were concentrating on services where mobile is just one point of access, but make sense in any scenario. Stuff like social networks, dating apps, reddit, stackoverflow, etc. Services that don't depend on the mobile experience whatsoever, unlike, say, Uber, that requires location tracking, or mobile games, which are often designed to be played on the go.

If a business doesn't depend on the mobile experience, then they are still able to offer their services without offering a native app. People on mobile can still access the service through a mobile browser--perhaps not the ideal experience on mobile, but it is still an option. And I think that is the author's point: If there isn't a necessity or dependency on the mobile platform, don't build for it.

What sort of mobile gaming related things have you seen Apple push back on?

> This author seems confused about something that he, himself explains... they have created such a walled garden cult w/ users that developers are forced to produce ...

In the presence of a cultish relationship, I think a persistent sense of puzzlement is reasonable.

Your description is basically aggregation theory in practice.