Apple vs. the "Free Market" | Hacker News Reader

Apple vs. the "Free Market"

pluralistic.net

114 pointsjrepinc158 comments

What's the conceptual difference between Apple charging 30% for Patreon subcribers vs. charging 30% for purchases on Temu or the Amazon app? This distinction seems completely arbitrary to me. I suspect the only reason it exists is that adding a 30% Apple surcharge to every Amazon purchase would cause too much outrage.

Disclaimer:

I've never used Temu or the Amazon app, but I'm assuming they don't apply a 30% surcharge on physical goods on iOS.

App Store policy (written or otherwise? It's hard to say.) only levies the 30% on digital goods delivered in the app. Uber, for example, doesn't pay 30% of rider fees to Apple.

Patreon is in this weird gray area because you kinda-sorta are getting digital goods delivered via the Patreon app, depending on how you look at it. And obviously if there's a way that Apple can squint and say it falls under their purview, they will...

> What's the conceptual difference between Apple charging 30% for Patreon subcribers vs. charging 30% for purchases on Temu or the Amazon app?

I can name more than 1 competitor to Amazon.

Of course, but I don't use shopping apps so I don't know who does or does not have an app. Temu just comes to mind because of their dismal reputation and obnoxious marketing.

I don't think you get it because you wouldn't have asked the question in the first place if you did.

If there is actual competition in a market, the surplus generated by economic transactions is more fairly distributed by the participants in the transaction. When there is competition, businesses also need to compete and improve their products to drive efficiencies (for better margins) and to make the product more attractive to buyers.

Because Apple is in a monopoly position, the only way to sell to Apple device users is via their app store. If you want to sell on their App store you need to give apple 30% of revenue. To be clear, Apple does not provide 30% of the value here. This 30% is pure rent seeking, once the app is installed Apple provides 0 value.

If you really wanted to equate Apple and Amazon, it would be like Amazon taking 30% of the initial transaction then forcing all revenue generated from products sold on Amazon to give 30% of revenue in perpetuity to them.

At no point was I equating Apple and Amazon. I was asking why Apple doesn't collect 30% from Amazon (which Amazon would naturally pass on to consumers) when people buy goods from Amazon's iOS app.

My entire point is that this distinction seems increasingly arbitrary on Apple's part and is perhaps driven by the expected outrage if they tried to pull the same stunt with retailers like Amazon or Temu.

> driven by the expected outrage if they tried to pull the same stunt with retailers

which is pretty good evidence that society should pass a law to disallow apple from doing it (rather than let them pick and choose to charge a subset small enough to bypass public outrage, but still rake in an undeserved tax on apple device users)!

Depending upon how you look at it, there is more than one competitor to Apple. It kinda sucks that most of the competition to iOS runs one operating system, yet that one operating system is supported by multiple hardware vendors and multiple online storefronts.

Yet there is also another competitor to Apple on iOS devices. It is called the web. Patreon in no way owes money to Apple if the end user fires up a web browser on their phone and makes their contribution through the website. Argue all that you want about convenience, and you're probably right on that front, but it is a way to circumvent Apple to have more of your contribution delivered to the intended recipient.

In the end, the decision of iOS users to support Apple's practices are at issue here. Sometimes you just have to say no using whatever means are at your disposal.

Digital goods and tips are required to use IAPs and pay the fee. Patreon is either one or the other, or maybe a mix of both. I suspect this has been published more than they anticipated, and they’ll have to allow tips to use external payment systems.

Playing the devil's advocate here, I believe the rational to take 30% cut for only digital goods is that, usually digital goods have zero marginal cost. To 'manufacture' an additional digital asset, the company doesn't need to spend anything extra.

This assumption starts breaking as internet becomes more ubiquitous and for anything really outside gaming coins. Example, for every additional Spotify subscriber, Spotify needs to pay music producers as well. The economics is now very close to physical goods being sold in Temu or Amazon.

This doesn't work for Patreon, which often isn't merely about "digital assets": while some people on Patreon might be using it to merely sell access to some digital portfolio, many (I'd even say "most") use it as a form of VIP club system, with direct access to the artist, custom work products, physical swag that you receive in the mail, shoutouts during live shows... Patreon isn't a system that inherently scales with anything close to zero marginal cost, at least for most of the tiers of most of the artists I've seen on the platform.

While the blog post stresses the 30% fee, I read the Patreon post that it was responding to. I am subscribed to a couple infrequent but high-quality creators on Patreon who charge by deliverable instead of as a monthly subscription that won't make sense since months may go by without a deliverable. This will make monetization via Patreon unviable for them.

So it sounds like someone should make a Patreon page that renders a video of someone ordering what you want on Amazon, that will help Apple get a 30% markup on Amazon purchases.

It seems like Apple needs to be split up into separate Services, Devices, and Marketplace companies.

Absolutely, so does Google and Microsoft. How do we make this happen?

Stop electing corrupt dinosaurs to public office.

Separate the Operating Systems too for good measure.

providing an OS with your computer is pretty much a thing since operating systems (or supervisory programs) have been a thing.

like the business model predates the personal computer by at least 25 years or so.

"Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue"

Does Apple have access to Patreon creators' gross revenue? I thought they only charged commissions on payments through IAP, which I assumed is only a minority of their overall gross.

People really need to read the article before commenting. He explains why there is no choice and why this affects everyone not just Apple users.

I agree with some opinions and the sentiment of this article, but in some parts the author, perhaps unintentionally, makes false or misleading claims to simply provoke outrage and demonize Apple. For example:

> Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple.

This is inaccurate, as not all Patreon subscribers use iOS devices to support creators.

General computing devices like smartphones should allow users to install whatever they want without any cost or restrictions.

Ok, but then I’ll need another kind of locked-down device provided by a company with enough power to force other strong companies to not be dicks, to do all my actually-important-in-normal-life computer stuff.

This isn't a problem on Linux because instead of force you have a small group of maintainers who the users are able to outsource the decision making to.

There are other ways to do this which work much much better and don't constrain the user's freedom.

Fine and dandy until half the software I want and/or need to run requires a root kit or otherwise dangerous access and the alternative is “don’t get to do that thing” where “that thing” may include stuff like communicating with clients or a job interview or whatever.

Short of legislation (please! Please just outlaw shitty behavior like this!) you need a platform too big to ignore that prohibits the worst behavior, or you’re gonna be forced to choose between two kinds of loss constantly.

Problem is, this "need" for big platforms is entirely a matter of faith. It's like your "need" for supernatural bed-time stories that explain human suffering and make you feel cozy; they're just tall tales. You're taking this practice entirely on their word, your "proof" that this system works is a backwards understanding of determinism. The only realistic, grounded worldview is to conclude that we don't need fairytales, and that we repeat them as an axiomatic comfort and not a truth.

Similar problem pervades with Apple. They have no written obligation to protect you, they've been caught lying about security at the request of larger entities than them. They have no technical obligation to provide a secure experience; no GrapheneOS equivalent exists for iPhone, and Apple sues researchers that attempt to dissect the production build of iOS. They cooperate with governmental bodies worldwide and cannot fend-off state-sponsored attacks even when thousands of personnel are targeted. Default programs like iMessage, Facetime and iCloud Mail are all vulnerable to zero-click exploits. The App Store regularly approves trojan horse variety malware masquerading as brands people trust. Apple's platform security is a veritable trainwreck.

If you liken Apple's approach as the diametric opposite of Open Source security, then they are the perfect example of why this mindset fails. There are no half-measures with security, when someone locks your room without giving you the key it's not for your protection. Lord only knows people will argue that the cell door makes them feel safer though. Tall tales, and all that.

The need comes from a set of pragmatic concerns, current reality, and the way human systems behave.

What’s the concrete proposal here? There ain’t much in the Debian repos, for example, that’s useful to me for anything but tinkering, as far as things that make my everyday life better and easier. I’d have to bring in closed-source software and engage with a bunch of megacorps to make an open-ecosystem device do anything I care to do beyond playing with it. How is that an improvement? What do I tell my wife to do with all this? My dad? “Here, I put an open-source os on your phone, it’ll get worse battery life, much of the automation you use daily is now not available, a bunch of platform features you use are gone, most of the apps you like aren’t here, and things like notifications are probably flakier than you’re used to. Just use the web browser for everything important”?

Apple sucks. Sure, we agree. So what? The alternative is—unilaterally—largely disengaging with the benefits of computing technology in day-to-day life and waiting for the government to fix the whole shitty industry.

The appeal of Apple is I get a partial solution to the problem of every damn “legitimate” company trying to spy on me and open up back doors to my system, that I can recommend to other people in my life, and since this solution is basically the exact opposite of “become a tech hermit” people will actually do it and be glad they did it. Me included, because I don’t want to become a tech hermit (unless everyone else is also going to, in which case, yes please, very much yes).

> I’d have to bring in closed-source software and engage with a bunch of megacorps to make an open-ecosystem device do anything I care to do beyond playing with it. How is that an improvement?

Benefit of choice? Currently you rely on iCloud, I assume. iCloud is about as "trust me, bro" as you can get in the cloud storage industry; blatantly backdoored, expensive beyond understanding, and integrated too deeply to replace entirely. On other platforms you're not forced down just one avenue of convenience, you get to exercise your choice as a consumer between different solutions, or even roll your own. The express advantage is that you are enabled to not be helpless when a corporation makes mindbogglingly dumb decisions on your behalf as a user.

It's not trite or pedantic to point out your hypocrisy here. Supporting a company you think "sucks" is a terrible example to set for the rest of your social circle. I used to be that way about Google - might as well use their products since everything else is borderline garbage, right? But it isn't right, and supporting their business is actively making the world a worse place. You're welcome to suffer through whichever corporate woodchipper you think is less painful, but I can tell you firsthand the only thing I miss from MacOS and Windows are the built-in ads. If the dark patterns get any darker, I doubt most users will want to keep using their preinstalled OSes in the first place.

With regards to your wife/dad/family/whoever, "so what" indeed. If I replaced my dad's Android phone with LineageOS I legitimately don't think he would ever know as long as his YouTube app worked. Is it really that hard to imagine the people that suffer through Windows 11 slogging through Debian and Fedora instead? It's not a problem for Steam Deck owners, and for the average Google Sheets-bound employee it's probably an even easier switch. How am I expected to commiserate with people that, by your insinuation, don't care?

> Problem is, this "need" for big platforms is entirely a matter of faith. It's like your "need" for supernatural bed-time stories that explain human suffering and make you feel cozy; they're just tall tales. You're taking this practice entirely on their word, your "proof" that this system works is a backwards understanding of determinism. The only realistic, grounded worldview is to conclude that we don't need fairytales, and that we repeat them as an axiomatic comfort and not a truth.

Oh, so, how is it going with getting hdmi 2.1 support upstreamed into the kernel tree these days?

the “fairy tale” seems real and the needs seem genuine. You are being rude and dismissive and reductive.

> Oh, so, how is it going with getting hdmi 2.1 support upstreamed into the kernel tree these days?

About as lousy as getting Vulkan upstreamed into MacOS, for much the same reason. Corporate interests and licensing feuds regularly supersede what the community would prefer, or even is capable of making for themselves. Big platforms will gladly reject a free solution if it means they lose out on licensing costs; just look at iOS and the way Apple rejects common-sense standardization so they can eke-out the last vestiges of cash from their victims.

If HDMI® Licensing Administrator, Inc. let AMD provide a free interface to their IP, how could they strongarm Apple and Microsoft into paying for a license to their kingdom? Is this colloquial "big platform" protecting consumer interests now?

That's a good distinction. It doesn't bother me that I can't run arbitrary code on my Xbox, it does a specific function well and I don't need or expect more from it. But with a phone or computer it would never be acceptable to need permission to run given code or be forced to go through a platform middleman.

Well, other people feel the same way about their phones.

The line you are drawing is arbitrary and personal and other people can choose to draw it in different places. Maybe a phone is something they want to just work, let them do their banking apps in a secure ecosystem, while they would love to plug in a mouse+KB and do some spreadsheets or run Linux on their Xbox.

Try to maintain some level of theory of mind here.

There are options for that, Users don't choose them. You can sideload apps very easily on Android, it's 1 toggle in the settings to activate the ability and then you can install apps from F-Droid or anywhere else you want

I don't see the issue here as much as I would like to dunk on the company. All those vendors on Apple's platform can take their wares elsewhere or if they feel so aggrieved they can start a class action motion.

RTFA

I did.

> Apple's pristine execution of stage one of enshittification – luring in users, then locking those users in – mean that businesses can't survive without reaching Apple customers

Sensational nonsense.

Tell me how

This article reads like an uneducated rant in so, so many ways. Apple rolling over its sleep and squashing Patreon isn't 'enshittification', it's just textbook monopoly abuse. And if you want to rail about the nuance of Apple's business practices you can at least not typo the name of two of their flagship products ("Iphone and Ipad").

> The fact that it's a felony to get your Iphone apps from anyone except Apple means that whatever policies Apple makes for the app store have the force of law.

The EC and US DOJ would like a word, please.

> you can at least not typo the name of two of their flagship products ("Iphone and Ipad")

Why not? Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

> Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

He should go the whole hog in this radical stance of civil disobedience and just spell the names entirely wrong!

It can certainly be obnoxious (I remember everyone calling Microsoft, M$ in the early 2000s), but if the goal is communicating an idea to an audience spelling it iPhone vs IPhone vs iphone vs Iphone doesn't make a difference.

What I don't get is advocating for radical civil obedience to a company's preferred trademark names.

Heh... I hereby submit:

¥phone , ¥pad

Calling any of this "radical" is rather dramatic and framing it as "obedience" misses the point.

If someone says "My name is spelled e. e. cummings" then writing it "E. E. Cummings" is weird. It feels either uninformed or a deliberate, though tiny, mark of disrespect.

It would also be weird to spell the Motorola "Razr" phone's name as "Razor" as that's not the spelling Motorola gave it.

It isn't about "obeying" the poet nor the corporation but rather following social norms to spell things as the named person (or the namer of the item) prefers it to be spelled. And if you don't follow this convention then... oh well, most people will probably forget about it seconds after they notice it as they have other things to think about.

I remember many years ago representatives of Photoshop® visiting forums to tell us that we must always add the registered trademark symbol whenever we mention Photoshop® - sorry, Adobe Photoshop® - and that we mustn't use the verb "photoshopped" but must instead say "digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop® software". And we told them to fuck off. But as you say it all depends on social norms and conventions ... which are not homogenous, so these things are always being tacitly fought over.

just as a side note, cummings spelt his name in uppercase

https://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps.htm

> Why not? Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

Aren't they proper nouns?

If so, then Ipad and Iphone (or perhaps IPad and IPhone) are more grammatically correct: https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/proper-noun-capitali...

Not if the name of the products are iPhone® and iPad®.

* https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

There's a fellow who did a bunch of stuff with computers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

You would not write "Von Neumann architecture", but rather "von Neumann architecture":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/von_Neumann_architecture

Cites:

* https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/02/do-i-capitalize-t...

* https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/when-to-capitalize-words... § 5

If the word is at the beginning of a sentence it may be capitalized, but mid-sentence it should follow its proper name:

> Rawashdeh says that before generative AI, eBay had billions of signals about what consumers bought and sold, and the feedback that they’d share with eBay about their experience on the site. […]

> EBay is agnostic about who it will work with for generative AI. It partners with Microsoft for GitHub and buys AI data center infrastructure from Nvidia, for example. […]

* https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-uses-generative-ai-em...

excuse me? it's called HIG (Human Interface Guidelines)

> Apple rolling over its sleep and squashing Patreon isn't 'enshittification', it's just textbook monopoly abuse.

Isn't it both? Enshittification is a form of monopoly abuse in my mind.

Also note that you're arguing against the person who coined the term "enshittification".

Enshittification does not require a monopoly; merely captive consumers. You can enshittify cereal boxes, even though you don't have a monopoly.

True. I guess it's more accurate to say that enshittification is not mutually exclusive from monopolisation. But if anything becomes easier with a monopoly.

This is the guy who invented the word enshittification. He, of all people, is using it correctly.

> Tumblr still remains heavily moderated and heavily censored. Why? Because Apple kept kicking Tumblr out of the App Store on the basis that it contained sexual material, and without Apple users, Tumblr was dead in the water

> Apple claims this is merely a matter of "editorial standards," no different from a bookstore deciding not to shelve pornography. The difference is that in this case, Apple can block you from patronizing another bookstore, by forcing you to forfeit the $1,000 you spent on your device and potentially many thousands more in media and data and other switching costs.

The question at the heart of this issue is simple; do we own our devices, or not?

When I pay $1,400 for a computer, do I own it? If yes, then why does Apple get to decide what I get to watch or not?

And why does Apple prevent me from deciding what speech I get to engage with my device or not?

The app store is, at its heart, an enabler of totalitarianism. The first link of the chain is forged from the freedom to own your computer for marginal profits, but the rest are forged from your human rights.

Do you want Hong Kong to be a democracy? Too bad. Apple removed the application protestors were using to protect themselves from a totalitarian police state, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...

Oh are you gay or queer? Too bad. Apple removes apps made for and by LGBTQ+ people in 78% of countries. Everything from niche forums to dating apps. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2021-06-14-apple-is-e...

Do we own our devices, or do we not?

Aren’t you free to load any OS you like?

Not trying to justify anticompetitive behavior from Apple here, but tired to see people saying ‘do you own it?’ when they really mean ‘does the manufacturer help installing third parties apps on its default OS’.

> Aren’t you free to load any OS you like?

Not while the bootloader is locked.

The thing is, there aren't many hardware examples which allow installing an arbitrary OS, esp. if one has specific hardware requirements.

I prefer machines with a Wacom EMR stylus, and it's simply not possible to find a device which:

- supports the same Wacom EMR technology as my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and Kindle Scribe

- has a high-resolution display

- decent battery life

- tablet form-factor

I currently compromised on a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (because I simply couldn't find a direct replacement for my Samsung Galaxy Book 12), but the only OS option there is Windows 11 --- I've been considering a Raspberry Pi 5 and Wacom One 13 2nd Gen w/ Touch or Movink 13, but the display is only 1920x1080 and arranging for a battery is rather hackish...

I used to use a Surface Pro 3 on Linux just fine, I really don't think the hardware requirements are an issue. And circumstantially, Linux has upstream Wacom device drivers that still supports hardware from 2003 (at least my CTE 430).

Surface Pro 3 is NTrig, not Wacom EMR.

I'd be glad of a guide to installing Linux on a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360.

Not on an iPhone. I'd probably buy one today if that were allowed.

Apple does not control which websites you visit. Your ownership argument could also be leveled against game consoles, which do not even have web browsers these days. Phones are certainly more important, but the idea that manufacturers must not be able to curate what runs on their platforms strikes me as overreach. Put a tax on it, maybe.

Nobody is saying anything about what they offer on their stores, people are complaining about when they wanna not use their stores and want to install something else that would be entirely possible but is artifically limited, to force the user to use their stores. That is overreach from the manufacturers.

And yes, IMO it should also apply to consoles. But those aren't marketed and used as general purpose computing devices.

While the examples are all valid, the restrictions don't apply on mobile Safari. Why do corporations and devs continue to accept a share cropper role by paying Apple to host native apps?

FirefoxOS had the right idea, make the browser the principal gateway for applications. It was a decade ahead of its time, but the mobile web is now at a level where native apps aren't needed for the most part.

> Why do corporations and devs continue to accept a share cropper role by paying Apple to host native apps?

Push notifications.

That's it, and presumably why Apple waited 8 years[1] before allowing them on iOS PWAs.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/push-notifications-on-the-...

I remember companies pushing their own listening apps so they could collect more of your behavior than from podcast apps. Patreon will not pay the fee if they pull all payments from their app. It can be a player/browser app with all the instrumentation they want.

Oh hey, that's kinda like how Apple designed a proprietary undocumented Push Notification system so they can harvest your personal information as a secret accessory to the NSA and international surveillance organizations: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

Skinner: "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the third-parties that are wrong."

I can understand engagement/spam-hungry apps like Uber nd Facebook needing notifications for business reasons. For all other apps, notifications are either a lot less important, or can be sent via email.

Even Apple had the right idea in the beginning…

Way better tracking. Getting ad/trakcing blockers for apps is a lot harder than on the browser.

Also an app can observe things while in the background (with a cat and mouse game on how much vendors allow)

And for broaden the tracking they can still open the browser from the app transferring some unique id, thus tying browser cookies to the app user.

This PR campaign from Patreon is meant to inform patrons that their own website offers lower rates than through the Patreon App, if the creator so chooses.

If Patreon doesn't see the value in distributing through the App Store, it's smart to get as much exposure as possible on the way out the door.

You do not. This has been established for quite some time. You’re not forced to purchase Apple. If you like Apple, you know you’re getting the ecosystem that comes with it. Honestly the App Store is already garbage with the heavy amount of moderation it has. I can’t imagine what a cesspool it would be without that oversight.

Admittedly, I’m a fan of this approach. I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple products. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for people.

It’d be the mid 2010s google play store

>I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple products. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for people.

Because Apple is so aggressive about lock-in that it excludes reasonable interaction between people with Apple and people without. The texting situation with pictures and videos is the most glaring example. You are not forced to purchase Apple products, except that you are.

Pictures text just fine to non-Apple users. Videos don’t go through, but that’s because of a limitation of the text protocol (and Apple is finally providing support for the extended text format that allows videos to be sent via text)¹. Claiming that iMessage should be opened up is kind of like saying that you should be forced to allow people to park their cars on your front lawn. iMessage is a non-zero-cost service that Apple provides to add value to their products. You might as well insist that Apple allow people to install iOS on a non-Apple phone.

⸻

1. I will criticize Apple for bad UI design in that if you text a video to a non-iMessage user, it silently fails rather than alerting the sender that the video can’t be sent.

Why do we have interoperable email but not interoperable text? Actually we do now, thanks to regulatory action forcing Apple.

Pictures going through MMS are horribly low-res though. Luckily IOS finally supports RCS now.

This! I’m still suprised people behave like owning an iPhone is some kind of government mandate. Unhappy? Choose differently! Don’t like Apple, buy a pear. It’s like listening to offroaders complaining their Mercedes Maybach gets stuck in the mud.

Wouldn’t App Store competition allow someone to build a better, more strictly moderated App Store? I think Apple knows that and it’s part of the reason they forbid competition.

The issue is there’s no choice. There’s Apple, Google, Samsung and there is utter trash. You just can not buy a good phone that you can fully own. You can’t even buy a mediocre phone you fully own.

So now we’re going to regulate how “good” phones have to be? That’s silly. There are 100s of different phones across at least 5 different major manufacturers.

The argument of no choice is not based in reality.

I think you’re onto something. We do regulate cars, for example. Why not phones? Especially since it’s virtually impossible to live without a phone now.

> You’re not forced to purchase Apple.

Smartphones are necessary to interact with the modern world. This level of importance opens them to regulation. Just because Android is an alternative doesn't change this. My town has two hospitals. The existence of some sort of choice doesn't mean hospitals should be able to be unregulated.

"Don't blame me I voted for kodos!"

> Honestly the App Store is already garbage with the heavy amount of moderation it has.

Sounds like you would be open to a more strictly moderated alternative!

I did not argue against Apple being regulated. But the “how” and “to what extent” are very important details.

You want to force them to allow 3rd party app stores? That’s fine. But theirs should still be the default. Regulate how hard it is to swap them out if that bothers you, but their defaults are the best choice for most technically-inept users.

I’m open to alternate app stores. But I also think Apple is fine the way it is. It’s a premium brand with opinionated design and if you don’t like that, there are more than 100 alternative phones spread across at LEAST 5 major phone manufacturers.

> You do not [own your device]. You’re not forced to purchase Apple.

Holy oxymoron, Sherlock. You "purchase" something you don't own !? That's called a grift, you're getting grifted.

"X" is 99% either nazi stuff or porn. Unfiltered hardcore porn.

How come that's still in the appstore then?

>The app store is, at its heart, an enabler of totalitarianism. The first link of the chain is forged from the freedom to own your computer for marginal profits, but the rest are forged from your human rights.

1. Practically speaking, those restrictions are trivially bypassed by changing the region on your apple account, or using an alt account for app store. Yes, this presents a hurdle, but given that any serious totalitarian regime would probably also be implementing network-level blocks for such services and you'd need VPNs to bypass those, I don't think this materially changes availability of those apps.

2. Apple is doing those things because they have to comply with local laws. Would you rather have multinationals flout local laws? Or only when it suits your politics? What makes one country's laws more legitimate than another? Some of the hate speech/defamation laws in European countries are arguably pretty draconian as well. Should Apple, being an American company, push American notions of free speech to European countries?

> do we own our devices, or not?

Ownership is a bundle of rights that takes colloquial meaning based on context [1]. (Owning a cat, ornament, painting, apartment and freehold plot are functionally distinct.)

The words this discussion demands are possession and control, the machine codes of ownership. You possess your device on purchase. You do not control it. Even if you controlled the OS, the carriers wouldn’t let you control the chipset connecting to their network.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership

Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.

I wouldn’t say all of the privacy changes or even the majority of them are to ensure lock-in, but they have certainly been using their privacy stance as a pretext for lock-in.

If Apple cared about privacy ssh would be well supported OOTB and you'd be able to build your apps from the source.

There's no way to do this, even if you pay all the fees push notifications won't work unless you publish to the app store and that will get rejected for being a duplicate.

Like all corporations, Apple only cares about making a profit. Their business model let them implement much stronger privacy guarantees than their competitors, and this differentiation has been a profitable avenue for them. But ultimately if there’s any lock-down they can get away with (i.e. without affecting their profits either directly or via fines and legislation) they’ll try it, and privacy/security misfeatures are a great way to couch these regressions without appearing directly hostile.

That being said, I don’t think Apple’s privacy stance is all hot air, they publish plenty of white papers on their infrastructure. I mostly think they’re greedy and don’t mind harming the user and developer experience to ensure they get their cut from every transaction that occurs inside their ecosystem.

Which is a great pitch to use Apple devices. The software community seems to hate it but I have a theory that one of the reasons Apple commands such a premium is because regular users don't actually like the software people all that much.

Apple protecting user privacy for selfish reasons is a wonderful thing. It means they are going to keep doing it for as long as they can manage until the legislators step in.

I would hate to see a world where this sentiment is widespread when others are trying to fight for the right to repair and other causes and Apple is doing nothing but lobbying against them.

> Apple protecting user privacy

It's amazing how successful they are at virtue signaling about privacy while selling your traffic to Google, the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism, for tens of billions of dollars. Laundering the reputation through the slightest bit of indirection is all it takes.

Don't forget Apple's super-safe ultra-private AI collaboration with security mastermind (and former interim Reddit CEO) Sam Altman. When your data enters OpenAI's servers, it's trusted with the same cryptographic geniuses that brought you Worldcoin.

Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing.

Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy-respecting AI services and on-device AI as a first class citizen, which is different from any other company. All other AI products are designed for maximum privacy invasion.

Google, Microsoft, and the entire mobile app ecosystem are all actively hostile to user privacy and seek to undermine it as a primary mission and policy.

Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.

iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.

The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.

I'm like you and my primary device is my laptop.

That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.

These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.

I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around.

The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.

This is the thing that a lot of software minded folk don’t get. And I’m one of them

This isn't a problem on Linux because there's a careful community oriented path for users who may not understand what they're doing without cutting things off from knowledgeable users.

In fact OSX let everyone just download and run binaries and even that didn't have this problem. That's not a hypothetical situation, literally everyone used computers that way until recently.

There's a long tail of people who will manage to blow their devices up regardless but maybe they shouldn't be using computers unaided. It's very frustrating to make literally everyone else's lives harder just for them.

> If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.

That's extremely hyperbolic. Not every Android phone got infested immediately with malware, despite shipping out of the box with the ability to sideload apps. I don't think the platform would have survived if that were the case.

> The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war.

That's quite a bleak outlook. One seemingly founded in fear without any faith in free software and the communities around it.

Sure, a person needs to learn some caution in installing and running software, but there aren't monsters around every single corner. There are communities that do a lot of work, without expectation of compensation, to provide safe, trustworthy software.

The internet is _not_ a dark forest. It is a place with people of many stripes and intentions. Some are dangerous, but shooting first and asking questions later is _not_ the way to navigate this wondrous thing humanity has built.

I’m a programmer by trade who grew up on DOS and early Macintosh computers and ran Gentoo on my main machine for a bunch of years. I’ve done sysadmin work and Internet system architecture and blah blah blah.

The reality of my actual behavior these days is that my primary device is an iPhone. All the stuff I do that actually matters in my personal life (not work) takes place there.

“Real” computers are worse at or totally incapable of doing a lot of what it does for me (I don’t want to use a laptop for turn-by-turn directions or to hail an Uber or whatever, to call out just a couple examples) and its lack of “real” computing capabilities are somewhere between irrelevant-to and beneficial-for what I need it to do and how I need it to operate.

I use Windows and Linux for play but nothing that matters happens there. If every computing device I own except my phone stopped working, I would have no actual need whatsoever to replace them, and nothing bad or even inconvenient would happen. (Exception for my work MacBook, but I don’t own that)

> IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.

You're of course free to define things as you wish personally (and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with yout), but it should be noted that we start getting into the realm of:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy.

Given how many services are off-device I'm not sure how accurate that is.

If I'm running a Framework laptop with Linux, I can have very little privacy if I'm using Metabook and Gmail for socializing.

Well... yes, one does have to make good decisions and be intentional about using private software even on open platforms. But at least with open platforms, one has the choice to do so without a corporation being able to unilaterally wipe something away from that platform, or impose terms on that software due to market capture.

Sure. And maybe where we end up is the iPhone hardware is open to install other OSes on.

If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers?

> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users…

This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money.

Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives.

To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play.

Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.

> If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers?

Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue.

Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization. That's just revenue from one company and that's just to be the default search engine.

When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable.

Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details.

The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.

> When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable

This is your personal definition that suits your argument. I'm not going to get into a debate about semantics.

This phrase has been around since at least 2010 and has been popularized over the years by many big names in tech and media circles ranging from Tim O'Reilly and Bruce Schneier to Jake Tapper among many many others. In most cases, that coverage was just highlighting discussions already happening across various social spaces. And the concept behind this sentiment can be traced to earlier TV advertising days. Not my personal definition. [0][1][2][3][4][5] (there are dozens, if not hundreds more).

I've never heard anyone use it to describe Apple's approach to ads or search agreements until this comment thread. I'm not excited about debating semantics, but there's a lot of conceptual weight attached to the phrase that can't be ignored here.

- [0]: https://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/facebook-youre-not-the-...

- [1]: https://x.com/timoreilly/status/22823381903

- [2]: https://x.com/jaketapper/status/976473447374221313

- [3]: https://bryanalexander.org/digital-literacy/you-are-the-prod...

- [4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/ello-...

- [5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvZYwaQlJsg (1973)

> Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization.

Huh? Apple's market capitalization is $3.44 trillion as of today, and the unit of market cap is not dollars per year, so you're conflating categories here.

If you mean yearly revenue, $20 billion is 5% of Apple's 2023 revenue. Compare that to Meta, where ad revenue is like, 98% of their ~$135 billion revenue in 2023. These are different categories of companies, no matter how you slice it. You're fighting the wrong enemy here.

> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.

The issue anytime this thread comes up are binary statements like the above. There's a lot more nuance here where privacy changes are likely both. When ATT came out it was good for the user, but also poked FB in the eye which I'm sure Apple enjoyed.

> Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple

Stopped reading after the first sentence as this just isn't true. First of all this only affects users who subscribe via the iOS/iPadOS app. Secondly Patreon creators have the option to have the prices for those Apps adjusted so that they receive the same amount of money and Apples fees are just added on top of it.

With blank statements like this that just aren't true and seem to only exist to enrage the reader I don't think the rest of the text will be any better and from just skimming it very quickly it just launches into a rant about Apples business practices without much structure and without any context to the claim in the beginning.

I thought, (although the rules might have changed), that Apple explicitly forbids having different prices between your website and the app, and will kick you out of the store if it finds you doing this?

According to this article Spotify was charging 30% more on iOS all the way back until 2016 with multiple other prominent examples still existing today, so I don't think that this is true or at least hasn't been true since at least 8 years: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/07/08/heres-why-...

Apple exists within the same free market as it’ customers and competitors.

The high customer satisfaction is the lock-in. High customer satisfaction can easily explain the success. The idea that lock-in breeds high customer satisfaction needs to be proven to me.

Considering Microsoft’s dominance was cheered on by the Microsoft ecosystem and derided in customer satisfaction is noteworthy to me.

Apple has high customer satisfaction and a vocal group that consider the happy customers lemmings. These vocalists believe if Apple got out of the way they could show the happy customers what good really is.

If you're right, what's stopping Apple from providing the same service while also granting fair access to third-parties?

If Apple's main product differentiation is customer satisfaction, then in-theory they won't suffer as much from exposure to competition. As we've seen with the App Store on MacOS and AppleTV though, Apple cannot rely on just their premium profile to push a service. If they don't force people through the App Store a-la iOS, they can't get developers to reliably use it.

Why should Apple do work that isn't part of their business?

I think all that is needed is for customers to have the option to see "what good really is"

The app ecosystem is the lock-in, and creates a very high bar to entry for other players outside the Apple-Google duopoly.

Note that Google has created a dependency on proprietary Google Play Services, and owns the Play Store, so even leveraging AOSP is not sufficient to overcome the barrier to entry.

There are two established players. Apple can charge whatever they want, and Google can copy their strategy, because they know users have nowhere else to go (the number of people who will permanently switch to independent degoogled phones is too small to affect the duopolists' business)

Customer satisfaction is high and there are other platforms with lower bars.

The high bar is the product differentiation that Apple is using.

The phones do lots of things, and a lot of them well, so overall satisfaction doesn't mean that App Store pricing is satisfactory, nor fair.

Apple forbids developers from itemizing pricing and telling users how much Apple takes, interfering with informed consumer choice.

The cut is well known on HN, but I'm not sure that most users are fully aware that they're overpaying 10x on transaction fees, and the major consequences that it's a cut of revenue and not profit — the developer takes all the risk, and needs to cover all the development costs from their part, and can be even in the red, while Apple has a guaranteed profit with a guaranteed margin from every sale. Apple can be easily making more profit than the developers themselves.

We all know what Apple's take is. People complain about it all the time. The perforative terms you use to describe customers you can't seem to attain are related.

If you describe your desired customer as a cult than you may hold them in too much disdain to achieve a quality product.

Demonizing Apple does not improve product quality in anyway.

If Patreon doesn’t like Apple’s rules, they should just take their app off the App Store.

All these companies moaning about Apple yet aren’t doing the one thing they have the power to do which is just leave.

If they refuse to leave, then they’re admitting that Apple’s platform is providing value to them and they should pay what Apple wants. I support creators on Patreon, what exactly is wrong with just doing everything via their website? The mobile web is a thing, what more do they need for their glorified payments processing platform?

Counterpoint, monopolization is not a good thing, and as long as Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores, we can talk about how the value they provide is artificially gatekeeping the devices of over a billion people from running the software they would like. There's not only business in this equation, and historically attacking tech monopolies through legislative power has been more effective than suggestion that businesses exclude themselves from business to make a statement.

But they’re not stopping me from supporting creators. I can go to Patreon.com on my iPhone right now and subscribe to any creator without Apple’s fees. If they took their app off the App Store tomorrow I will continue to be able to have all of the functionality because they have a functioning mobile website that allows me to do everything I want to do. The web is a perfectly suitable alternative here and it’s working, so why exactly do they need to be on a store with rules they don’t agree with?

>If they took their app off the App Store tomorrow I will continue to be able to have all of the functionality because they have a functioning mobile website that allows me to do everything I want to do. The web is a perfectly suitable alternative here and it’s working, so why exactly do they need to be on a store with rules they don’t agree with?

Because majority of the people expect that app exists for everything and because Patreon.com is not just a website, it is a complex web app. And a complex web app usually works better on smartphones when it is in the form of native mobile app than just a website in the internet browser.

I think PWAs are the viable future. Native apps are too much problematic when it comes to developing and managing them; taking in consideration you need to wrestle with two monopolistic behemoths like Apple and Google on top of all the technical complexity behind like I said developing and managing them.

> because Patreon.com is not just a website, it is a complex web app

I don’t agree with this as someone who uses Patreon relatively frequently. It’s actually quite a simple website, and the main thing I care about is the ability to manage my subscriptions, which I can do on the mobile website today.

Maybe there’s an argument for the creator posts being a bit more complex, but nothing a non PWA shouldn’t be able to handle well.

Also with Patreon specifically, the creators tend to tell users how to support them, so it’s trivial to include “make sure to visit the website, it works on mobile too!” When they call out.

There are now alternative app stores in europe.

Why only Europe?

Because regulation is forcing this.

"If Netscape doesn’t like Microsoft’s bundled IE with Windows, they should just take their app off the Windows OS.

All these companies moaning about Microsoft yet aren’t doing the one thing they have the power to do which is just leave.

If they refuse to leave, then they’re admitting that Microsoft’s platform is providing value to them and they should pay what Microsoft wants."

The irony is striking: Microsoft (Windows/IE) is often criticized for being a monopoly, while Apple, a behemoth with a trillion-dollar valuation and unlimited resources, is paradoxically seen as a humble, independent studio despite its questionable business practices on HN.

Again: you can literally go on Patreon.com on your iPhone right now and subscribe to any creator you want without paying Apple’s fees. The mobile web is literally a suitable alternative and competitor right now, but for some reason people on HN have given up on this concept and think every website needs an app. Patreon should just leave the App Store and invest in their already great multi platform website with no gatekeeping of distribution.

I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall.

No, you just don’t have an argument. Patreon has a perfectly working mobile application called Patreon.com that doesn’t have any gatekeepers. It’s fully mobile, responsive, and allows me to do everything I want to do right now.

If the article they wrote had said “We’re leaving the App Store because we don’t agree with Apple’s fees” then people who want to support creators will continue to use their excellent mobile site.

Apple’s App Store is NOT the only distribution platform that exists for iPhones, so please stop pretending that it is. The web is a thing.

>Again: you can literally go on Patreon.com on your iPhone right now and subscribe to any creator you want without paying Apple’s fees.

I'm glad that walled gardens like Apple and their App Store teach people how valuable is the Open Web.

Same here: the default option is not to put your website on the App Store, I’m sorry but it isn’t. It’s 2024 and there have been so many advancements in web technology, I’m tired of people arguing that the web isn’t even an option for the vast majority of websites out there.

I get that some apps need the computing power and unique APIs that you can only get via building a native app, but Patreon should not be an app. And the crazy thing is they already have a great website that works really well on mobile. What do you need the App Store for?! Just leave Apple to their practices that you disagree with and focus on yourself, making the best possible product for your users that is distributed via the open web.

Patreon is a web site. It shouldn't even have an app.

Thank you! And not just any website, a good mobile website, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com