Developers revolt over Apple's new app store rules

I wish the cut was more like 50%, to benefit my stocks, while I'm using exclusively FOSS and pay nothing.

These devices are so shiny and great status symbol. I recommend everyone should be in Apple ecosystem and develop applications for it.

This is not true at all. Netflix customers are Netflix customers, not Apple; the same goes for Amazon Kindle, Spotify, etc. Netflix literally cannot include a link to netflix.com in their app, otherwise Apple would pull the app from the store.

The smaller the app, the more those users are Apple's customers. But obviously we don't want a world where we penalise small developers more than large ones, so that's not a solution either.

But if you sell something for a 10% markup, having to give that + 20% to apple is bad. And now people ask "why do I have to pay more for your service on apple vs android". And now you're in a fun PR battle.

In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved. Not to mention dev costs. In cases of say music, there's licensing you pay. If you order food, you are already working in the margins.

This makes competition vs big boys even harder. How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.

The list goes on.

The point is, it isn't just a grin and move on problem :(

I’d like to see Apple unbundle their take such that the maximum cut is 30% for devs who use all of the iCloud, dev, payment, and store for their apps. It’s debatable, but I think this is reasonable for this type of dev.

The problem is when I have an existing SaaS business with all that infrastructure already built—I don’t need all of Apple’s infra, so why should I have to pay for it? I’d have no problem paying Apple a % for listing and distributing through their App Store and processing payments.

Unfortunately Apple is being very short sighted about this and consequently are being forced to unbundle by the EU and it’s likely other countries will follow. That puts us in a situation where regulators are making these decisions instead of Apple, which is why I think we’re going to be in for some very janky user experiences that Apple will try to pin on regulators.

What would happen if this had been the standard applied to Windows?

> If the arguments were "these restrictions are so burdensome I can't be in the app store!", that's a different conversation. But they tend to be "I can access such an irresistible amount of customers via apple, I just wish I could take those benefits à la carte.

For some developers, they are. The ones that are complaining about it are the ones still trying to be in the app store despite the burden.

- I was working on an app for both healthcare professionals (paying customers) and their patients (the app was free for them). At the same time we could not have sign up for the doctors - Apple would like 30% of the subscription fee for the honor of hosting the client and its updates on their servers, but also Apple insisted vehemently that everybody should be able to sign up for the service, even if we insisted that we needed to check on their credentials (i.e. if they had a degree in medicine). We had to explain this multiple times to app review people as they kept on coming back to the same points. On the patient side, we were able to add payments to the doctors as luckily an exception had just been granted for use cases like that - up until then, Apple would have required 30% of the doctor's payment as well. We were still VERY on our toes, because the whole process felt like Apple at any time could change the rules and put us in the situation of paying a lot of money, drastically change our business model, or just shut down/lose tons of customer. While this might be technically legal, is not exactly a great business partnership.

- These rules have giant exceptions for big companies who pay a lot less or are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as smaller app makers. This feels incredibly unfair.

But I think it’s also fair to note that there are app developers to whom these arguments do not apply. For example I was a Spotify customer long before I installed the Spotify app on my phone, and I don’t mind them having my credit card details.

EDIT: For clarity.

More like Apple's hostages if Apple gets to dictate who does and does not have access to them.

To me, theres two issues:

1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.

2) taxes, is you want to line apples 30% up with those, are just part of business. No, you cant write off the 30%, but if you want to keep adding 250million new phones to your potential customer base every year.... wtf, pay up and be happy? To be fair, taxes arent the same - taxes take money out of an economic system usually based on economic activity to make currency actually worth something. But they kind of are the same in that they keep the infrastructure that lets you reach customers going.

I guess we can move to the windows model and place the burden on the customers, pay your $99/yr for updates or whatever, but then youd have ... like no one buy the phone.

Apples stance is - if you generate economic activity on the phone, you should have to pay to upkeep the roads that keep the phone working. I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.

This is just such a radically different way thinking about platforms than the way that I think about them. It's like saying that I owe Facebook for the privilege of talking to my college friends because "they're not my friends, they're Facebook's users and I've been given access to them."

It's hard for me to debate something like this because it's just so fundamentally incompatible with my basic axioms about how interactions work online. The idea that platforms own their users is just not how I see the world.

> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.

If every single developer jumped ship off of iOS, iOS would stop existing. We only have to look at Windows Phone to understand what the difference is between a platform with developer support and a platform without developer support.

The reality is that Apple and developers have a mutually beneficial relationship and they are more like partners than customers. If Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, etc all stopped working on iOS, iOS users would jump to Android. Heck, look at the most recent Vision Pro launch, in which I saw users complaining that Apple even gave iPad developers the choice at all of whether or not their apps would be supported on the new device. The users want the apps.

So this is something that users care about, and users pay Apple handsomely for the privilege of accessing developers on iOS. That doesn't mean developers should pay literally nothing, but this is a relationship. The argument that developers are just customers always strikes me as vaguely Comcast-y -- saying that Net Neutrality is unfair and that websites are leeches if they don't pay for network access. No, your customers are there because of us. Customers are paying for access to a service that allows them to access the stuff that they actually care about -- apps, movies, books, the ability to talk to their friends, the ability to transact online, the ability to browse websites. And this gets back to the disagreement on axioms above, but to treat those customers primarily as if they're just resources to be locked down and resold for even more profit -- I just don't think it's a healthy place for a platform to be in.

> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air

Funnily enough, iOS launched without an app store entirely on the promise of using web apps for all of its functionality. We weren't using the term PWA back then, but it's notable how different iOS's approach to application development is today than what it was when iOS launched. And notable for Apple's continued direction as the company appears to be actively reducing PWA functionality in Europe in response to increased browser access.

What we have on the web is effectively what Apple hates -- a completely Open, device-agnostic ecosystem of apps that is much more difficult for any one company to lock down or extract rent from. But Apple didn't always hate that principle, when iOS originally launched they were all for it; and in fact Apple looked at the web as a key strategy in differentiating their devices -- by offering developers a way to target their devices without development kits, exhaustive agreements, or commissions.

Over time that became less valuable to Apple, and it became increasingly important for Apple to distinguish between web capabilities and native capabilities.

Is that change fair, are they entitled to do it? I don't know, but it's not the direction I want the computing industry to go. How we deal with Apple's increasingly hostile approach to Open Standards, user freedoms, and market competition is an open question, but it seems clear to me that we should be trying to deal with it at the point where Apple is threatening to go backwards on web standards in response to regulation that opens them up to browser and ecosystem competition.

Unless I am misreading somehow, this is an unusual position. Software developers don't sell their software to Apple. They sell to the end users. Unless an intermediary rebrands the software and takes ownership of customer acquisition and support, software users are the customers of the software developers.

What? Of course they can. That someone will then just leave the market, or maybe change their product more. But there is absolutely no reason why they can't.

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1743421673871929723

This looks like a very interesting argument. When you retain full control on access to a specifically defined set of customers (or relevant market), we call it monopoly. You should never have such a single powerful entity in a properly regulated, successful free market.

First: the most vocal developers really do not care about Apple's "ecosystem invented out of thin air". They just need to be where their customers are, wherever their customers are. The Spotify's, the Google's, the Netflix's, etc. The users who leverage the iPhone to access their Spotify subscription are Spotify customers, not only Apple customers. My relationship with Spotify pre-dates my relationship with Apple. I signed up for Paramount Plus due to a Superbowl Ad, not due to some contorted funnel which Apple, believing themselves to be the center of the universe, have inserted themselves into.

If I could download these applications directly from the suppliers: I would. And, in fact, I do so, on Windows, on Linux, and even on Apple's own MacOS.

The cognitive dissonance I can't reconcile among advocates for Apple's side is: simultaneously saying "Apple built this ecosystem, they deserve to tax it however they will" and "If you don't like it just go to Android". Ignoring the obvious problem that a duopoly is only marginally better than a monopoly: one of these has to be a weird argument, right? Either the ecosystems are not so-fungible as to be interchangeable for the purposes of marketplace competition; or, what Apple created isn't unique, it is fungible, and they shouldn't get as much credit as they have.

I trend toward the latter; I don't believe what Apple has created is all that special. I think their App Review does vanishingly little to improve the functional security of their end-users. Their software technology is almost universally crappy, especially when speaking on anything developers have to interface with. The next few years will prove even their hardware to be un-special, if it isn't already. They've built what they've built on the shoulders of giants. AT&T built a nationwide fiber network "out of thin air". Verizon built a nationwide 5G UWB network "out of thin air". TSMC builds state-of-the-art chips "out of thin air". The open source community built FreeBSD "out of thin air". Slack and Spotify built their application experiences "out of thin air". If even one of these entities didn't exist, or made the decision to stop dealing with Apple's unique ecosystem, Apple would face an existential risk. If Slack wasn't on the iPhone: I wouldn't buy an iPhone. If iPhones did not work with Verizon: I would not buy an iPhone. The list goes on.

Just think on that for a second: should AT&T have the right to say "our fiber backbone won't carry traffic generated by iPhone endpoint devices"? "Ultimately Apple is gaining unfairly access to our customers". "They represent a security threat to our customers". That would be insane! If its even possible, it would literally overnight destroy Apple as a company. So then it becomes, where do you draw the line? Why is it "obviously not ok" for AT&T to do that to Apple, but "eh its complicated" for Apple to do that to Epic Games?

Your argument is that this is an Ayn Randian situation where Apple put in the work to win over these customers, and now devs want a free lunch. I get that. My argument is: Apple would not exist today without the giants shoulders they stand on, Spotify (as an example) is a material reason why they're so successful, to whatever degree, and their insolence in admitting this isn't just morally wrong; its psychotically egotistical. This is, generally, the argument against all Ayn Randian philosophy; its not new ground, this is why Ayn Rand isn't really respected as an philosopher, and why her arguments also don't work in Apple's case.

Windows users aren’t viewed as Microsoft’s customers from the point of view of third party software. Same with MacOS. Apple has pushed this paradigm in iOS because it’s ludicrously profitable.

Controlling the evolution of a ubiquitous computing platform gives a company a huge amount of power. Add to that the power to control any commercial transaction performed on that platform is simply too much concentration of power.

This is problematic argument, that imo we should not accept in _any_ commercial context.

* Are people browsing the web on an iPhone Apple's customers, and therefore 30% of web sales should be collected too?

* If you use Comcast to access the internet, are you Comcast's customer? They're giving the retailer access to your traffic, so they should take a cut of every online purchase?

* Should your headphones take a cut of all music streaming revenue, and refuse to play non-compliant music?

* Should your TV take a cut from every video stream provider they allow to show video to their customers?

There is significant value to society in general-purpose devices & services, where the user pays for something concrete, and can then use it with any 3rd party provider in any way they like.

That principle has been a key driver of digital innovation for decades, and allowing it to disappear would be a Very Bad Thing.

Insane take imo. I'm baffled how people can write this out with a straight face.

Just one counter example to the relationship you described: In Europe, if my app does not deliver as advertised, it is the customer that can sue me. Directly. They don't sue Apple because my app is in their app store, they obviously sue me, because I am the service provider.

> Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.

Watch us and learn.

Apart from that, I think this is blowing things out of proportion: Apple hasn't offered any calculation at how they arrive at the 0.50c installation fee, but I'm sure were going to get some insight once the first lawsuits at the CJEU roll in.

I have the exact opposite point of view, they are my customers and Apple is simply a middleware which is blocking access to them.

They only get their cut through very questionable and borderline illegal practices as seen in the EU.

Maybe if they had to actually justify their cut in a real market, they would improve the sad state of their dev tools, that could start to somehow justify the cuts.

Notice that they forbid any display of the Apple tax anywhere, that could be a marketing issue if Apple customers start to understand what's going on.

This makes no sense. If you were right there would be no android phones sold in europe because the conditions are so bad for the manufacturer. That, however, doesn't seem to match with reality at all.

Absolutely not.

Let me give you a hypothetical example - I pay for Jetbrain Ultimate. I use it in the MacBook for work. If OSX was as closed as iOS, I would magically turn into Apple's customer?

They are just the OS I am using (not even my own choice).

Apple would offer an app store in some form even if they were statutorily prevented from making any revenue from it because if they turned off the ability to install apps people would abandon iPhones in droves.

Yes, that's called "unbundling", and it's the bread and butter of antitrust regulation: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

It's not an exact match to Apple's situation, though; that's why there was a need for the DMA in the first place.

> [...] I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market. I'm not sure we're there on this one, but the patience can't be infinite.

What is Apple going to do? Stop selling iPhones in the EU, the third largest economy in the world? That would only make sense if iPhones and iPads indeed were loss leaders for the App Store.

Apple is a corporation, and corporations don't throw irrational tantrums. They do sometimes try to hold their customers hostage, but that type of behavior has a mixed track record at best.

The DMA (seemingly) didn't target root of the problem, so Apple was able to easily just sidestep the legislation by saying "okay, you can use alternative app stores now, but the app stores and all software on them still has to be reviewed and approved by us, and we're going to continue to impose conditions (including payment) on that approval". If they had been completely stripped of the ability to exclude software from my device, then they wouldn't have the leverage to impose these new rules in the first place.

You can enshrine a company's right to define its market or the price for its products, hold those rights sacrosact and still punish apple.

The issue at the core is not a company's right to X. Instead, it is: Has this company thru dominance of their market have achieved a monopolistic power ? If so, that's the avenue you take to undo their abuse. If the abuse cannot be rectified by market actors or new entrants, they you slap the anticompetitive monopoly with restrictions of what they can or cannot do.

EDIT: I personally think that there should be straightforward threshold criteria to be defined as a monopoly automatically, such as (numbers made up) exceeding:

- 0.1% of revenue in aggregate political donations, or

- 0.5% of profits in aggregate political donations, or

- Annual Revenue > US per capita x 100,000, or

- Annual profits > US per capita x 10,000

- Etc.

For me, the central contradiction of this kind of rights-based argument is this--the stronger you make property rights, the more justified actions like Apples seems to be, because, after all, they are the ones who really own the phone.

I really don't think a property rights argument has any suasion here at all.

Can you run your own software on your television, car, smart fridge, etc?

The default expectation seems to be no, you can't.

Instead of a hardware compatibility list, it's a software compatibility list and every entry must be Apple-approved.

How did they ever pull this off. No one ever questioned it.

For decades, I have wanted option to remove the Apple OS and use non-Apple operating system. Seemed like no one else ever wanted to do that. People have been content to multi-boot, leaving the Apple OS installed.

I’m also a developer that is very happy and who’s sick and tired of corporate devs acting like they speak for me, followed by outlets who echo everything they say like it’s gospel.

On one hand it seems like Apple is trying to take a US style approach, but on the other they must have European lawyers on staff explaining how that won’t work.

One might conclude that it’s a calculated risk, or a stalling tactic to extract a few more years of revenue from the current model while waiting for things to play out in the courts.

If you disagree, educate me.

Yes, because we can have a functional, productive society based on a legal system where the foundational principal is, “We’ll write laws so vague that we can just say they mean whatever we want them to mean after people and companies try to follow them”.

Tim Cook met personally with EU regulators before their changes were introduced.

I doubt they would knowingly introduce something that would result in a punitive fine.

Why do you have to change it? As a user if you don't like walled gardens or restrictions just buy another phone? why do you insist on shitting up my walled garden just go use android!

But Spotify has 30% market share, Apple Music 15%. And it's because for example Apple has lossless audio, Dolby Atmos etc. Not because of any unfair competition.

By the amount of bitching on this issue, it really sounds like developers need Apple not the other way around. If this was really about user freedom and shit like that developers would just boycott the platform and move to android. This is just about money and developers wanting to have their cake (distribute their app in a high trust environment) and eat it too (put whatever stupid shit they want in their app with no checks or controls)

The new Browser Engine Kit that allows alternative browsers to be installed is really a very deep integration. It's not just swapping out the browser and engine that users open as an app, it's swapping out all system integrations – webviews embedded in apps (in certain types of use), and importantly, PWAs pinned to the home screen. The APIs have a fairly sizeable surface area, and PWAs themselves have many features that require system support to implement.

My assumption would be that full PWA support will return, but that it was a significant amount of extra work that Apple decided to skip for the first implementation. I'm not sure if that was the right call, but they were under quite a deadline with the DMA coming in.

I suppose a small bit of light (for me, not the community at-large) is that all of my targeted market is in the US. But I also acknowledge is they get away with that in the EU, the US will be next. Le sigh. This is why the Web is the best platform.

This statement can be reworded as "the companies that are big enough to be monopolies are monopolies".

Not all companies are monopolies just by their size. Microsoft is the biggest company in the world (not Apple), and it's not a monopoly in everything it sells. It may be a monopoly in some areas, because of its tactics, but the same goes for Apple: if they open up the app store, like the EU wants them to, they'll no longer be a monopoly, even though they'll be exactly the same size.

I think you would have a hard time establishing that 202x Apple is worse for independent developers than "Big Blue" IBM, let alone three orders of magnitude worse.

> Based on our analysis of major fraud malware families that exploit these sensitive runtime permissions, we found that over 95 per cent of installations came from internet-sideloading sources

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/google-android-dev...

...the app store that requires AP devs to pay Apple 30%. That's... convenient.

There is nothing wrong with using a package manager to guarantee the source of your software. That's what every major Linux distro has been doing since forever!

The problem is that Apple gets to play dictator with their package manager, and vainly call any alternative (that doesn't pay them and cater to their politics) "a virus".

So what percentage of humanity do they have to gatekeep before you will be willing to consider them a problem?

Apple is anticompetitive, and that's what matters. Arguing that it's technically not a "monopoly" and therefore A-OK is ridiculous.

1. "Apple" is a lot of things, and depending on how you define it (eg. internal app market, API provider, browser developer, etc.) they are absolutely a monopoly. It's not appropriate to say Apple isn't a monopoly because they do have monopoly power, pertinent to multiple markets.

2. Apple is owed nothing if they abuse monopoly power. Bell had "all the right in the world" to charge customers for rewiring their telephone, but it was also foundational in the case to break them up later. All the most famous American monopolies were also in denial up to the bitter end. Microsoft got away lucky, not also getting broken-up.

I understand the corporate actors pushing for this out of self interest, but all of the bystanders cheering this on annoy me. You already have android, linux phones, etc. etc. Can't you just leave us alone in our walled garden and stick with android or linux or whatever?

That is a form of malicious compliance that the websites do in order to make you angry at the regulators rather than at them.