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Comment by cosmotic | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Counter offer: the tooling is ultimately for their benefit. They need the apps to make their platform what it is.

They ultimately need money, not apps or platforms, so this is exactly how they achieve that ultimate benefit, no top-level logic will just justify free here

>no top-level logic will just justify free here

Not true. The technical term for "ultimately need money" is discounted future cash flow. It is impossible to know for sure what price you have to charge for any particular item at any given time in order to optimise for this metric.

Realistically, the answer depends on the state of competition between platforms. We all know what that state is.

> It is impossible to know

so it is true, you can't provide any top-level logic to justify 0, you need some facts

If "top level logic" is supposed to mean "analytic statements" then you are right. The optimal price cannot be derived analytically.

As this is such a pointlessly contrived interpretation of the term "logic" in this context, I chose to use a different one: Is there a set of empirical circumstances under which an optimisation algorithm could conclude that the optimal price is zero? The answer to that is clearly yes.

Top level logic is supposed to mean the logic the comment I'm responding to uses to justify free. You know, "in this context". And I'm not talking about "optimal", just a single price of 0

Now, what exactly is the point of you insisting on your wrong interpretation?

I mean by that logic, no top level logic will justify a cut of all revenue.

They want to be feudal lords, requiring us to pay a tithing for the privilege of selling something to customers.

you're right, no top level logic would help you settle on any specific price, hence you need to engage with actual reality instead of simply noticing one party that benefits while ignoring the other that also "ultimately benefits" and "needs the platform to run apps on".

You, of course, want to be their feudal lord and get access to all their customers by right while also requiring them to pay a tithing of their hardware sales to you since you advance "their ultimate benefit" (they wouldn't sell any hardware without software)

> You, of course, want to be their feudal lord and get access to all their customers by right

If someone buys an iPhone, Apple does not have the right to interpose themselves between that person and what they want to do with the iphone they bought. They have no right to a cut of the sales any more than the power company that provided the electrons to charge the battery.

What I want is for Apple to get out of the way.

> while also requiring them to pay a tithing of their hardware sales to you since you advance

What I want them to do, for a start, is to the same thing on ios that they already do on macos. I can already write a piece of software an sell it without forking 30% over to Apple.

The current situation where they feel entitled to a cut of every software sale that happens on ios, and veto power over it, is a wet dream that even Microsoft in the 90s wouldn't have thought they'd get away with.

Yeah that doesn't quite work. I agree that the cost of tooling has gone to nearly zero in most cases, but not giving it away will limit the people willing to even try to develop code for your platform.

Microsoft charged ~$1000 a seat for Visual Studio and at the same time they had an effective monopoly eventually leading to United States v. Microsoft Corp.

But for things like Apple notarization, you don't get the choice of not using the tooling. Besides, that transition already happened with the popularization of Free/Open software, somewhere in the early 2000s.

The problem with this argument is that the tools for proprietary platforms are inferior to the cross-platform ones in many cases. VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio. GCC and Clang are better than MSVC. We don't need platform lock-in to subsidize good tools because the best tools are unencumbered.

I'd happily build iOS apps without XCode or any of Apple's frameworks to save the 30% fee. Heck, I'd do it even if I still had to pay the 30%, I hate being forced to use XCode.

I don’t use Xcode, I develop in vim. You can run the deploy/signing step on the cli without launching Xcode.

> VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio

That’s just your opinion though isn’t it

That's just an opinion. Not only his. It's shared by many.

"This is my opinion. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My opinion is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

Without me, my opinion is useless. Without my opinion, I am useless."

One off few hundred or few thousands is nothing in comparison to 30% tax.

That said, I don't know about Mac, but you can build apps using free tools - maybe in not as convenient way, but certainly you can.

I remember, because I was someone who couldn't afford Visual Studio licence and had to make do with GNU tools.

The greed of these companies put me off from developing anything.

In the early 90s, you could expect to pay anywhere from $200–1000 for a good C/C++ compiler. Now it’s free. The 30% tax, as many people have already pointed out, is only if you want to sell through the store. Back in the 90s, if you were selling software, downloading off the net wasn’t really a thing yet and you could easily expect to end up giving up 40–60% of the retail sales price and out of what was left you were paying for manufacturing of product so you’d maybe get 20–40% of the retail sales price.

Which leaves the certificate thing and while it’s an annoyance, it’s also nice as a software user to know that a program I’m running is the program it claims to be without much friction on my part, and the cost can’t be that prohibitive since I don’t remember the last time I ended up with an unsigned binary on my Mac, even for free software like TeX and friends or Aquamacs.

It’s free because of free software, not because of platforms that used to sell these tools.

> and the cost can’t be that prohibitive since I don’t remember the last time I ended up with an unsigned binary on my Mac, even for free software like TeX and friends or Aquamacs.

Ok, so your app tastes aren't that varied then (or maybe it's the memory), plenty of devs of various little utilities don't bother paying

It's 15% for almost all developers, not 30%.

A distinction without a difference

It's a 50% difference.

It’s a 100% difference (;

ICT departments in many large companies often force dev teams to use certain tools, because it's what's on their list of 'approved tools for devs'. Getting new tools on this list is often stonewalled for usually office-politics reasons.

Sometimes devs are locked into the tools they use. This situation is shit, but not uncommon.

On which platform? On Apple's there cost is part of the premium you pay for the device. Cheapest Mac is $599. Cheapest windows machine is $199? $99. So arguably some of tbat $400-500 is for the extra software. Or would compare against Linux where you could also get a machine for $25

You don't have to buy a brand new Mac.

Older M1 devices which are still very fast are available for much cheaper.

"Much cheaper" is still very relative. I got a second hand 8GB M1 MBP last year for $900, as is the standard price in my region. The cheapest M2 Air brand new retails for ~$1200. Meanwhile I've just ordered a new non-mac machine with up to 5GHz boost and 32GB RAM for a whopping... $1000, including extended warranty and delivery fee.

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