Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.
I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).
At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.
[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.
It's so ironic that Apple was pushing the (open) Web apps in the early days of the iPhone (out of necessity of course).
The counterexample is the iPod, with its advertising slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn.". The first iPod used Firewire and was Mac-only, every edition since then used entirely industry-standard technology, USB and MP3. The value proposition was, as the slogan illustrates, easily taking your CDs and putting the music on the iPod. That too was in pursuit of an excellent user experience.
Later, Jobs fought the entire music industry for the right to buy digital music, not just rent it. And won.
There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case. See this recent example: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/a-fake-app-masquerading-as...
(Yes, it was pulled, but that was _after_ the public noticed and LastPass had to issue a warning)
> I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.
That quarterly growth has to come from somewhere! Line goes up!
Do you have actual evidence for this claim? Because it's pretty widely accepted that the App Store has higher standards and quality, and you just cited a single case.
7 malicious apps (2022) https://lifehacker.com/great-now-the-apple-app-store-has-mal...
18 malicious apps (2019) https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...
Up to 4000 malicious apps (2015) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34338362
All Apple can do is revoke app certificates and pull the app from the store after someone else discovers their malicious nature. That's a very low bar that can be met by nearly every app store in existence and it would be a reasonable security requirement for anyone who's operating an alternative app store on iOS.
The rest of it is just theater as there's no security-focused special sauce that Apple is providing in this area, despite prevailing beliefs. This is further demonstrated by their acceptance of an obvious impersonator like "LassPass".
It's also easy to multiply that tactic by insinuating that this means that it isn't good, or isn't better than the competition. Which is what you're doing here.
You can, though? Just go buy an Android. There are a billion different options there.
Heck, you can also still buy old-school type flip phones at Walmart.
I do agree that losing app licenses is upsetting. But this is no different than the licensing model for many softwares in the desktop market (e.g. per-user and per-install licenses).
People do this every day. Hundreds of them, at least. Every day.
It's 99% the same experience - except for iMessage users your texts become green instead of blue.
On top of that, you can use many other services for texts, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Beyond that, I don't see why it's Apple's problem that Google and/or other carriers can't make a decent texting experience without Apple making theirs less secure or a shittier experience in the process.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
Companies, all else being equal, will choose less regulation over more regulation. If TikTok could release outside of the App Store where no one can inspect what they do, they would only release it there. Users addicted to the app wouldn’t suddenly stop using it but now they would be exposed to whatever TikTok feels like doing. They will choose the path of least resistance, not all the paths. It’s not that hard to understand.
Just 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272
I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.
Because they failed. And not just once!
It's understood that you can install random APKs from anywhere. As a hobbyist developer, I want to be able to set up a GitHub pipeline and then just download my APKs from that without fighting Apple or paying for an Apple developer account.
I'm actually open to buying an iPhone as well, iPhones are much better when it comes to music production, by understand I have to abide by Apple's rules and not be able to install my own software.
With an iPhone 15 you could probably hook up a full blown audio interface and record lyrics as well.