Hacker News Reader

Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

>I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.

I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.

I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.

Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.

View on HN

But even in real life this doesn't hold.

> I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut.

Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.

Regular people understand the idea of "I bought a thing, and now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on", see printers.

Apple is no more entitled to a cut of everything I put on my iPhone anymore than Walmart is entitled to a cut of everything I put on my table simply because they made the table.

> Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.

I don't know if that's inherently correct in people's eyes. For a counterexample, note that video game consoles are very popular, and I don't see any widespread opposition to the idea that e.g. Nintendo is controlling what you can play on a Switch.

I wouldn't be so sure. A major reason people pick PC gaming over consoles is specifically because they have control over what they are allowed to do.

I'm sort of skeptical about that being a major factor, though I'll admit I've not seen any good surveys about it.

(My money is on "I already have this computer for work" being the single biggest factor, with "the graphics can be better on the PC" being #2.)

Anecdotally, the people I know who do console gaming are really fed up with the lack of backwards compatibility; New console comes out, all your old games are now incompatible.

Now PC games often lose backwards compatibility when upgrading OS versions, but patches, compatibility modes, and even VMs are realistic options and ones that people will use.

And they are free to make that choice. Surely consumers who care about this choose Android.

Rights are things that you cannot choose to give up. You explicitly cannot trade them away since the poorest people would be forced to do that in order to afford anything.

I assert that I have rights under the first sale doctrine which let me do whatever I want with the things I own. Apple has no more of a right to dictate what I put on my device than Walmart has a right to dictate when I put on my table simply because they sold it to me.

The failure of the courts to update first sale doctrine to the digital age is the root cause of many ills.

Unfortunately, it's a tricky question, because it's more akin to compelling speech when the content is served by another party at a future time.

If I get a device that uses cloud functionality... is whoever I sell that device to entitled to that functionality?

Well the more important question is are you entitled to that functionality, or can it be taken away on a whim?

But those are more "advanced" questions. We still haven't even established the fact that I should indeed own the thing I purchased (see music or movies or anything). So we have a while to go before we get to questions of transference of services.

The point of the suit is, they should be free to make that choice on their iPhone. No one is going to remove the app store, and if you love sucking from the teat of Apple so much, you can continue to do so in an environment where there are competing app stores

Your point is fine but you have to at least acknowledge the dynamic that users are takers of software and companies have every incentive to take their popular apps off the app store.

It's gonna be the first thing Facebook does, and maybe that's fine but it's going to reduce consumer choice. You won't be able to have the Facebook but with the tracking restrictions anymore because it's bad for their bottom line. I don't really know if there's a good answer for how to strike this balance but it seems drastic that people want it to be illegal to offer a platform where all participants have to play by the platform's rules.

What tracking restrictions do you refer to that are implemented through app-store policies that are not (or cannot) be implemented through OS level restrictions?

The consoles are the most obvious example, but there are other things, too.

Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.

People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.

Plenty of people complain vocally if you don't release your game on Steam, same deal when a musician doesn't release their music on Spotify.

I think a lot of developers will be surprised how many customers actually side with the convenience of the platform over the actual person creating the value.

Steam value to customer is huge - and it's understandable why people just go to Steam and "don't have to think about it" even when you can get the same item elsewhere, perhaps even cheaper.

> both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.

This isn't true. You cannot bypass the stream 30% fee from the consumer side.

Because of practices that stream does, which are arguably anti-competitive, I cannot buy the same exact game, from the game developer's website, and receive a 30% discount.

If such discounts were possible, and it was clearly advertised that I could just get the game for cheaper from a different location, customers would absolutely take that option almost always.

You can bypass the Steam fee as the publisher. Steam's rule is that you can't sell a Steam key for your game somewhere else consistently cheaper than it's sold on Steam. You're free to go wild with pricing, so long as it's on a completely separate distribution platform.

See: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

(At the very least, if they're trying to do a most-favored-nation rule, they're not listing it in their policies and are enforcing it through back-channels.)

In fairness, from everything I've heard the Mac App Store is really not doing well.

While interest in doing so on handhelds has lessened a little due to phones almost always being more capable, wanting to be able to run custom software on consoles is common enough that lots of effort is spent on the cat and mouse game between console hackers and console makers.

Yes, piracy is admittedly very popular. (And maybe 0.02% of said custom software isn't piracy, but...)

You might think that, but at least back during the PSP and PSVita days (when I was into consoles), a large chunk of it was about the homebrew. For a decent chunk of the Vita's existence you only could do homebrew and emulators. Piracy is always just a service problem, with most other pirates being people who weren't going to be customers anyway.

"Being able to do exactly what you want with a thing you paid for" is a very different angle of argument to "knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers"

I was tackling why I don't think that argument holds water with the average person.

"now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on"

With printers this is very tangible to the customer, with the App Store what you're describing here isn't as tangible because nothing on the App Store is actually expensive, it's either free or relatively cheap and it's more a case that the user pays little or nothing, Apple gets a cut for doing close to nothing and the dev gets screwed, printers is more the customer gets screwed.

As an iPhone user, if I wanted a phone with Samsung, Amazon, Epic and Huawei stores, 3 different preinstalled browsers and my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app for a website in Turkey, I'd go with Android. Such an option exists for people who are into that.

But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden. Now some other corporations like Epic, who want to have a cake and eat it too, are going to ruin one of the platform's key selling points.

> my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app

And if your workflow did require an obscure app, who is Apple to decided that you cannot install it on your own phone?

> But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden.

People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you. But time and time again we see that their App Store features outright scams and mountains of knockoff garbage apps.

People buy into the marketing of the walled garden, not the reality of it.

>People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you.

I get the "safety" argument, but it's also about the user experience. What if now Microsoft makes me install Microsoft store to use M365 apps, Amazon makes me install whatever store to use their products, etc? What do I win here as a consumer?

I buy iPhone specifically for what it is. I get that some people don't like walled garden approach, so they have Android at their service. Apple is not a monopoly.

What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?

> Apple is not a monopoly.

The lawsuits is literally about this.

> What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?

Because the thing the company is offering is a behaviour that overall is not one we as a society want (Apple being allowed to dictate what businesses will and will not succeed by either locking them out of 1/2 of the major mobile OS, or by taking a 30% tax from their revenue and then competing against them).

>Apple being allowed to dictate what businesses will and will not succeed by either locking them out of 1/2 of the major mobile OS, or by taking a 30% tax from their revenue and then competing against them

All app stores (and most real-world markets and stores) do that. This is a business model. And as a store owner who invested billions of dollars to build it, and the entire platform and infrastructure around it, you are in your full right to decide the rules on what is allowed there and what is not, and how much to charge. If your rules are unfair or disadvantageous to the competition, sellers and customers simply will not come. But as we can see, App Store is the most successful app marketplace on the planet, both for developers and consumers.

Just as Google is the most successful search engine on the planet for advertisers, website owners and consumers, regardless of the fact that Google can fully dictate what appears in its search results or what advertisers can put in their ads, and how much Google charges for it.

So I don't quite understand what exactly the argument here.

This this different argument than allowing sideloading apps (that one is quite fair, I'll admit).

It is related to side loading. Apple for a long time disallowed side loading (even now it barely counts). So if you wanted to sell anything to iPhone users you had to go through Apple's store and potentially compete with them at a 30% tax disadvantage.

Even with the current side loading changes, which are EU only, they still take a major cut and still dictate who can and cannot run a store.

So I agree with you that the App Store, like other stores have the right to dictate what they do and do not sell. They do not, however, have the right to say that they're the only store allowed, or that any new store must pay them money.

Also, I'd be hesitant of using Google's behaviour, certainly its current behaviour or current market position, as justification for what is okay for others to do.

How can you know that it’s the most successful store in the absence of any competition at all? You don’t have a choice. The App Store app comes preinstalled on iPhones and iPads and you cannot choose any other store, so no wonder it’s successful. The only conclusion that you can draw from that is the iPhone and iPad owners like to buy apps.

I've been a loyal iPhone user since what? the iPhone 3.

The moment Apple is forced to "open up to the competition", all Meta apps are going to magically move to the Meta Store, where they'll likely be able to shove all sorts of tracking garbage down my throat.

Same for Alphabet, same for Samsung, same for Microsoft.

The experience will turn into a hopeless struggle against EULAs and consents, unless one refuses to install any third-party spyware and do the digital equivalent of moving into a forest cabin. The oddball, while everyone else sheepishly complies.

Evenyone loves to hate Apple, everyone forgets that the first commercial music store to sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's. The rest was "squirting" tunes on Zune or inflicting Realmedia on their paying customers.

Nope.

I don't think your points about Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Firstly. If they are doing things we don't want them to do, the solution is regulations, not a monopoly.

So if you're unhappy with their behaviour, that should be made illegal.

Secondly. Apple's protection against tracking comes from the OS level. The OS stops them from accessing my contacts and my GPS location, not apple's 30% tax.

> sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's.

So what. How unencrypted are those audio files now? They've since moved on to FairPlay.

Sure, let’s wait for the regulators to wake up and haggle with the lobbyists while the rest of the world takes a beating.

Ever heard of the expression “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”?

How about we regulate tracking apps etc first then force Apple to change?

This argument leads nowhere since it just as well applies the other way around.

Both are problems, both need solving.

no?

removing/decreasing apples ability to police apps before regulation means you are opening users to hostile apps.

adding regulation and setting standards for apps and data tracking and then removing/limiting apples ability to police apps does not.

these are not the same thing?

Where are all these hostile apps on Android? Even the Facebook example, last I checked it's still on the Google's App Store.

Cause there's plenty of examples of Apple's store filled with spam and outright fraudulent phishing apps. There's a big difference between the image Apple advertises for the App Store and what it's actually like.

Apple users do not understand that. That was the comment's point.

I don't think so. It seemed very strong about "Even if they would know, they still wouldn't care". Which I think is absolutely false. See people constantly complaining about having to buy expensive inkjet cartridges.

But this is why the eu case made more sense? It went after Apple for not allowing side loading of app stores vs this one which seems to be going after what Apple does on its own store?

Arguably phones are becoming less like stores and more like a significant part of life. This is especially true as more and more of modern life demands a smart phone and apps.

And the only options are to take the deal -- modifiable at any time by the platform owner -- or burn down your digital life and start over on the only other practical competitor.

This is a framing issue. I think your comment is a great comment and probably does reflect a popular understanding. A farmer can't just set up shop in a supermarket without first paying and submitting to some vetting by the store owner. The problem here is that Apple doesn't just own the store or the platform for publicity and distribution. They also own the platform on which the software is run. It is analagous to Walmart also owning your house and not allowing you to buy home goods from any store except Walmart. I don't believe an average consumer would find that to be an acceptable business practice.

> I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.

Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?

I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%

And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.

I don’t know where this idea that 30% is an unreasonable monopoly-sustained fee comes from. Stripe’s fee is 2.9% plus 0.30, so it would be way more than 3% on small purchases, which I assume are a lot of App Store transactions. Steams is 30% even though there’s compition (Discord tried to run a store with a 90/10 split and shut it down very quickly). Google Play is the same as Apple’s, and they allow other payment processors (for non-games). On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).

Most App developers aren’t even paying 30%, they’re paying the lower 15%.

> On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).

Amazon seems to inexplicably get away with a lot of anti-competitive behavior. I don't know why.

They do have some competition, and we should be supporting them. See: https://libro.fm

I was actually thinking about that - the number of paid non-game apps on my phone that I actually use? It's zero.

Most apps are free and are things like 2fa, chat apps, kindle, etc.

Would I be sad if the entire App Store shut down? Probably. Would it be enough to move me to Android? Uncertain, probably not.

> Who is arguing it should be free?

I'm not, I'm pointing out for the first 50 years of computing it literally was free.

Why hasn’t Android, with it’s support for alternative app stores and side loading eaten the world anyway?

>> the status quo (30%)

Why is this number so bad? Steam: 30% https://medium.com/@koneteo.stories/how-much-money-does-stea...

>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%

Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.

Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).

Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?

Thanks that is a great question.

The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.

>> So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware)

I can buy android devices that are as good as the iPhone or better in their own way and have all those features (side loading other app stores). Is that not the free market in action?

That would be an interesting way for Apple to side-step the whole question: unlock the bootloaders and make it clear how you could do whatever you wanted with it (except run hacked iOS).

The number of people buying iPhones to run even a slick version of Android would probably be quite small.

> I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal

The App Store was not a business innovation by Apple to set expectations, it's how all cell phone software that preceded it worked. Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.

>> Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that ring tones cost an arm and a leg, that "apps" were awful (I know I designed one)... You had to pay to get your app on a phone even if it was free.

General computing on a mobile device was never mainstream, or even common, before the iPhone. Smartphones are much closer to laptops than pre-smart phones, IMO.

Sure, but that doesn't change the point. The App Store exists as it is because the iPhone was a phone and that's how things were done on phones. Apple didn't create the model, they just continued it.

Computer vs phone definitely changes the point.

The iPhone is a computer, but unlike past computers it introduced a walled-garden App Store.

Also, software on phones before the iPhone was also gate-kept by carriers. Apple was not maintaining the status quo. They were changing it for their benefit.

An iPhone is less like Walmart and more like a computer. We should run whatever we like on our own hardware.

I think Nintendo would disagree.

And with 100M users instead of billions, it also simply doesn't matter what Nintendo thinks.

They would. But they’re wrong.

This is a really bizarre viewpoint.

In my view, my phone is MY DEVICE. It is most definitely not "Google/Apple's platform"!

Google is merely manufacturing my phone, and I intend Google to have no rights or control whatsoever regarding my phone, and merely have the obligation (not right, obligation) to manufacture it correctly and provide open-source software for it that works correctly and properly provides Android interfaces (obviously, I don't use an Apple phone since Apple doesn't offer that, while Google does since they provide devices with unlocked bootloaders that run open-source OSes).

It only runs Android because Google with Android happened to win the adoption lottery and it would run PodunkOS by ACME if PodunkOS by ACME had been the one that managed to gain critical mass.

Again it is absolutely not even remotely close to "Google/Apple's platform", and I have no intention for Google to interfere in my use of it and certainly not interfere in any relations I might have with people providing software for my phone like taking a cut of the transaction or deciding how that software should behave.

Normal people don't think that deeply about it or understand even 10% of the terms you just reeled out.

I'm talking about the normal persons perception of the situation, not what is right in terms of how a technically savvy person would look at the situation.

It's pretty simple: "it's my phone, I do what I want with it, just like my house or car".

Which includes "go to any website and run any app I can download from it, regardless of whether it's illegal or against any rules or against the interests of the phone maker" and "change any aspect of functionality that I don't like (e.g. apps being able to show ads) and that I can find out on the web how to change".

It doesn't include "Google or Apple make rules about what I can do with my phone that I can't override".

Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either.. or any of my 'smarttvs' etc.

Would this mean that anyone must be able to load any software into any platform that runs on software, or are we just picking on apple because they are popular. And got popular while doing all these things.. if people didn't want it they wouldn't have bought into it in the first place.

> are we just picking on apple because they are popula

Well, yes, antitrust law specifically, by design, focusses more on large market players, not small ones (there are some aspects still relevant to any participant, though.)

That's kind of central to the whole problem it is intended to solve.

So you would say that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are not large market players?

Nope, 100M consoles in an internet of several billion where Apple has literal billions of devices in market are not at all the same thing and bringing that up suggests you don't think very hard before you post or you're trying to derail those who do.

I’m sorry that me asking a question is so emotionally upsetting to you that it leads to you attempting to insult me. I’ll try not to ask anymore question about Microsoft the 3.19 trillion dollar company, Sony the 113 billion dollar company, and Nintendo the 10 billion dollar company. I hope my question didn’t hurt these mom and pop businesses. You also made me completely aware of the fact that these aren’t the big three players in the console market which is a pretty fair comparison to this situation. Thanks again for your wonderful contribution.

Which of those has not faced significant antitrust scrutiny?

You could have initially responded with that instead of reasoning that apple is being focused due to being a large player while dismissing other large companies being brought up.

sorry i can sideload my xbox and playstation. Just because they've been dinged for antitrust in other areas (i don't think sony has .. but certainly microsoft in my lifetime)..

> Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either

Homebrew is a thing, and you should be able to use whatever software you want on a device that you paid for. I have no doubt that there are people who own an iphone and wish they could have a different browser, or wish they could use a game streaming app.

They absolutely can. I can compile and install anything i want on my iphone, have to have a dev account is all. Also i think there are still iphone jailbreaks to be had.

I would love all hardware to have an "open option" that disables all security keys, doesn't let you run signed software, whatever, but lets you "hack" the device.

I'm also fine with Nintendo selling games via their store and physically, and taking whatever cut they can bear of it.

(80% of App Store revenue is "games" anyway, so it's a much closer analogy than people might expect. They may end up opening everything except games and only cost them 20% of revenue.)

Meanwhile you can get full advantage of the iPhone ecosystem "for $100/yr" which is nearly free, including App Store distribution, etc. If anything, Apple should be charged with dumping in those cases.

Apple convinced us that only they could keep us safe. Turns out their argument is specious - they can't keep us safe either. They haven't been able to keep malicious apps off of their App Store.

They are probably not monopolies in the legal sense, since there are three of them with comparable market share and they also compete with the PC, which is open. I suspect there would be more pressure to do something about it if those weren't the case.

Apple sells something like 70% of phones in the USA due to network effects that might not be apparent to users in other countries - social shaming for not using iMessage. The European equivalent is WhatsApp, which the EU is forcing to open up.

> are we just picking on apple because they are popular

"Popularity" is a precondition to running afoul of antitrust law, yes..

> or are we just picking on apple because they are popular

I don't use my Playstation or Switch for banking, ordering taxis, my actual job, so there is a bit of a difference.

Although consoles are another good example of how a locked down platform can make an experience hassle free and how that becomes a selling point.

I've Google TV and it allows sideloading. Yes, it should be allowed for all devices.

Most consumers are not even aware of how restrictive iOS is - for the same reason why they aren't aware game consoles do the same thing but way worse. All they know is where to buy compatible software.

If you told them "you have to pay 30% to the person who invented books every time you write something" they'd scream censorship and call for an armed revolution.

Authors often receive much less than that for each book they sell - the best you can get is self-publishing on Kindle or something where you can net 70%: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634560

People generally know this, and they generally don't care.

Anyone can buy a laser printer, print any book, sell it, take 100% profits, and anyone can buy and read it.

But you can't do that with a mobile app because only Android users can use it, while anyone with an iPhone can't use the app unless you submit to Apple's rules.

Walmarts cut is largely based on their costs to stock and sell the item. Appstores costs are not related to the cut they take as they have >80% profit margin.

Is it though? Or is it based on the value the seller gets?

It's both of course, but I think they price based on the value rather than on the cost. (ie: percentage of sales, not per shelfspace)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com