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Comment by ENGNR | Hacker News Reader

Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.

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Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).

Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.

Most and mostly.

But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.

The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.

Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.

The point is that the OP is not free to do so.

>Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.

Not necessarily, once other channels are available developers could choose to force their clients down that road.

If they have sufficient market power to force consumers to do anything, they should also be subject to antitrust.

You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.

As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.

The Linux package repositories take a 30% cut of zero. If the software wasn't free, it would be entirely reasonable for them to demand a cut

On Android there's a repository called F-Droid which offers free software. Apple won't let anyone create a FOSS repo like that for iOS.

I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.

Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.

Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)

It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)

> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard

They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".

Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418828/apple-app-store-c...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...

That was a long time ago. Now,

> “You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/18/interview-apples-schiller-...

The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.

Although I think my go-to instructions at https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ are not being kept up to date?

No, the barrier is to pay above 1m downloads. $99/yr is a o(everything your have to do to publish a safe app online and maintain it safe).

From what I hear, users are tired of installing apps. You can make a website and not face any gatekeepers or restrictions.

What if your app needs to send notifications and/or use bluetooth, for instance ?

From what I hear, most users disable notifications.

You can do like Airbnb and send text messages.

You can do Bluetooth in JavaScript through the Web Bluetooth API.

A little caveat of Web Bluetooth API is that it's like WebUSB and mostly available on Chrome. I don't think Chrome for iOS is using blink yet so you'll probably not have access to this API on iOS.

Both WebUSB and WebBluetooth is still a draft spec, and is doubtful to progress any further with both Mozilla and Webkit objecting to it

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#anti-fingerprinting

Essentially, these are proprietary that are a part of an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by Google Chrome.

> From what I hear, most users disable notifications.

Where’d you hear that? Surely most users don’t change defaults.

There isn’t a default on iOS, you’re prompted for each new app when it requests notification permissions. People have found that users hit no a lot more when the app prompts with no explanation than when it clearly explains what benefit it has to the user.

Then the flood of notifications gets ignored, with practically the same result.

There are web APIs for both.

Not on iOS. There’s no Bluetooth support in safari.

“Web Bluetooth” is a Blink-only API that both Mozilla and Apple rejected on security grounds.

What a weird thing to put in scare quotes.

All modern browsers support notifications:

https://caniuse.com/notifications

Bluetooth is limited to Chrome because Apple and Mozilla were concerned about privacy and security:

https://caniuse.com/web-bluetooth

PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.

If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).

Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

AIUI Apple has deliberately kneecapped PWAs on iOS to stop them competing with their App Store.

Most apps that "need" to send notifications don't, in fact, need to.

Yeah but, what about apps that actually do ?

Web apps offer a subpar experience.

Meanwhile on Hacker News: "Web apps suck. Native apps are so much better. Why can't everything be a native app?"

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