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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

App Store revenue was a significant source of income for Apple. Money that paid for development of iPhone and iOS. I don’t know what sort of idiotic thinking it takes to imagine that they won’t need to find another way to recapture that money. It will probably come in the form of higher costs for development licenses, or hardware. For example, absolutely nothing stops them from charging you for using the SDK. No one said it had to be free.

Everyone screaming about how happy they are about this seem to be ignoring the fact that Apple is not a charity

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Apple is doing fine. They have crazy profit margins on everything, but especially on hardware upgrades. They're one of the most cash hoarding tech giants and that's still after the stock buybacks. It's fine, they're not going to suddenly run out.

Also this is an article about Kindle adding an option which wasn't there before. Apple wasn't getting the money either way.

“Paid for the development”

This comes off as incredibly bought-in to Apple PR, and if you’re not on their payroll, I don’t understand why you’re carrying water for them so aggressively.

First of all, the incredibly high margin hardware more than “pays for” the development of all the parts that make that hardware useful including iOS. We all know this.

Apple makes a tremendous amount of profit, both gross and net. This will dent their top line and their bottom line a bit. It will not make the iPhone a money-losing platform. “Not making as much pure profit as your near-monopoly status might theoretically allow you to if there were no antitrust laws” does not imply “that money will have to be made up somewhere.” They may end up being only “wildly, amazingly profitable” instead of “wildly, absurdly, amazingly profitable.” They don’t “have to” make up any particular amount of money.

Whether that upsets their shareholders including their mega billionaire CEO, is just the breaks. It is quite fitting for a group of people who enjoyed all those amazing profits from Apple’s monopolistic behavior so far — money that I might point out, isn’t even being required to be paid back.

You're ignoring the fact that desire doesn't magically translate into money. If the decision holds, and Apple loses this easy pot of gold, they won't be able to replace all of it just because they want to, so it will still be a net win for developers/consumers.

it was an unlawful source of income that they should have never had

they're lucky they're not being made to pay it all back, plus interest

> Money that paid for development of iPhone and iOS.

iOS has gotten progressively worse every year since 2012. It may not be the worst idea to turn off the tap.

How is it worse? It’s better now for me than years ago.

Off the top of my head:

- Substantially poorer performance

- Keyboard is less accurate

- YouTube videos can’t be played on the lock screen without some tricks

- Apple Maps (it is basically at parity now, however).

- Translate feature doesn’t have a copy button

- The storage bug

- No option for manual cache clearing

- SMB protocol doesn’t work with Windows and doesn’t display error messages

- File transfers are substantially more complicated than they used to be because they want you to pay for iCloud (the workaround here is installing VLC which gives you a drag-and-drop folder you can use through iTunes)

- Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)

I haven’t used the most recent versions of iOS so I don’t know if some of these have been addressed.

> - YouTube videos can’t be played on the lock screen without some tricks

Waiwaiwait. Hold the phone.

That’s GOOGLE’s decision, not Apple’s. This whole thread is a circle jerk about how Apple doesn’t let developers do what they want. It’s a general purpose computer and all that. This is an example of what happens when Apple doesn’t prevent developers from doing something anti-consumer.

We can ignore that one, then, but my understanding was that the functionality has been disabled twice; first by Apple, and later by YouTube. I could be wrong, though, it's been almost 15 years.

FWIW iOS users could write a workaround if they were allowed to sideload, like Android users did: https://newpipe.net/

> - Translate feature doesn’t have a copy button

Sure it does. It’s labeled “Copy Translation”. It’s the first button under the translation for un-editable text.

> - Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)

Apps that aren’t working in the background shut down effectively as soon as they lose focus. Don’t let the list of screenshots fool you – those aren’t running. Don’t waste your time swiping them away.

> Sure it does.

I’m talking about the Translate app, not the in-line translator. If your text exceeded a certain length in the Translate app you couldn’t even select it. They might have fixed it in subsequent versions, but I wouldn’t know.

It’s had a copy button forever. It’s allows you to scroll, select, copy.

> - Translate feature doesn’t have a copy button

Just selected text. Pressed translate. It says “copy translation”…

Opened up image. Translated text. Pressed copy translation.

> Keyboard is less accurate

I actually find androids default keyboard less accurate when typing or using the predictive text. I use the swipe to text all the time on iPhone.

> - Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)

lol no

> - No option for manual cache clearing

Never needed to clear cache?

It sounds like you just don’t like apple to be honest. Finding things to nitpick. I have a pixel phone and iPhone so I can do testing and while I have no issues with the pixel. I much prefer iOS. It just works, feels more consistent, and the phone is faster than the pixel despite it being a iPhone 13. It’s still as fast as when I bought it, while the pixel just feels slow compared to when I bought it a year ago, and it’s mainly used for testing…

> lol no

This is obnoxious and you’re wrong about it.

> It sounds like you just don’t like apple to be honest.

Astute, I don’t.

> It just works

It doesn’t.

> This is obnoxious and you’re wrong about it.

It appears you don’t understand how iOS apps work. Have you ever tried building one?

No, I haven’t. I haven’t tried building a car before, either, I still know that I want it to have a cupholder.

Lol that’s funny knowing in this analogy you want the cup holder in the boot because you don’t know what a cup holder is just that you know you want one.

I know I don’t want to have to close down the apps manually.

Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.

Pointing out you’re wrong because you don’t understand how iOS apps works is against the rules? Ok.

The billions of dollars in cash beg to disagree with you. I don't think they are hurting for money.

Nor am I. But if my boss cuts my salary I’ll still fight back.

Apple platforms are already kind of notorious for having the highest price sticker to develop/publish apps for.

The development of the iPhone and iOS is payed-for in the exact same way it is on MacOS. With the outrageous hardware margins Apple commands, profiting hundreds of dollars off each unit sold.

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