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Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

Well, I am just glad that Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 store apps don't have this stupid restriction if you don't use their payment systems.

Walled garden and 30% forced cut of app sales is one thing, but a forced 30% cut of every in-app sale is like erecting a toll booth on all apps. Gruber's explanation of "Apple does it because it can, and the people complaining are just jealous that Apple can and they cannot" doesn't really fly.

This is one of the reasons that Apple is dragging its feet on making HTML5 web apps work on par with native apps, despite Jobs' anti-Flash memo two and a half years ago.

Edit: Sigh, looks like this submission is sinking on the HN front page due to people flagging it for it being anti-Apple. Be classy, HN.

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"Well, I am just glad that Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 store apps don't have this stupid restriction if you don't use their payment systems."

The Android Developer TOS says that any other in-app payment system isn't legal, and grounds for your app being removed from the app store.

I haven't studied it, but I suspect Microsoft's ToS will say something similar too.

Edit: Android's DDA section 3.3 and 4.5 disallow using other payment processors. http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.h...

Doesn't the Kindle Android app allow you to buy ebooks and subscriptions?

Also,while Microsoft does support in-app purchases in their store, they don't restrict other payment methods like Apple does. From Microsoft's Store guidelines:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/maki...

Using your own billing system

Your app and service may already depend on a particular transaction provider or benefit from ties to other lines of business. Your customers want the trust and efficiency of a familiar, trusted transaction experience. You can use your own transaction provider within your app to provide the experience your customers expect.

If you are not using the Windows Store as your transaction provider, you will want to make sure that your app meets all of the certification requirements such as: Identifying the transaction provider to the user during purchase confirmation Prompt the user for authentication before processing the transaction Your payment processor must meet the current PCI Data Security Standard

Google's Play Store ecosystem disallows you to use any other provider but the Android in-app billing via ToS. Likewise, Kindle disallows you from using any other in-app payment mechanism besides their custom in-app SDK. FYI, Kindle apps need approval, unlike apps in the Google Play store. So this is no different (in fact worse, because you now have to maintain two code bases and accounting systems).

Good to know about Microsoft - thanks.

Edit: Ah, the Kindle app for Android. I misunderstood. It's possible that Google might deem those violations (see links to the relevant section I posted in parent). Their DOJ mess with eBooks might prevent them from taking such measures though.

I was referring to the Kindle app for Android phones and tablets, not to the apps on Kindle hardware.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_k...

Um, Google doesn't have a DoJ mess with eBooks, Apple does.

The Google Books lawsuit is primarily a dispute with authors and publishers about fair use. The DoJ's involvement in that is tangential (and AFAIK was limited to commenting on and investigating the proposed and now rejected settlement).

When encountering that acronym, I often suspect that an "s" has gone astray.

Do you have a link to or a quote of that section of the TOS? I just looked through it and couldn't find anything like that.

http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.h...

Sections 3.3 and 4.5

The language isn't as restrictive as you're suggesting. Here's the quote from section 3.3: "All fees received by Developers for Products distributed via the Market must be processed by the Market's Payment Processor. "

The key distinction is that this doesn't apply to products not distributed by the Market, like eBooks and mp3 hosted and sold externally (see: Amazon, B&N, Kobo, ...). Hell, you can even buy physical goods via the Amazon Mobile app (and others I'm sure).

Two things:

- Reading the Android ToS, it sounds far less restrictive. 3.3 says that if your apps has a "upgrade to full version" option, it has to be their payments. 4.5 says you can't sell alternative markets. Neither is anywhere as broad as Apple's "anything you sell must be charged as an in-app purchase", which applies to things like Dropbox subscriptions, etc.

- On Android, you can always just distribute your app online to be sideloaded if you don't like the Market. Or distribute in an alternative market like Amazon or GetJar. On iOS, Apple's store is the only way to get on the device.

> Gruber's explanation of "Apple does it because it can, and the people complaining are just jealous that Apple can and they cannot" doesn't really fly.

Well, Gruber's job is to come up with rebuttals to any criticisms of Apple, no matter how lame they may be. Otherwise, he wouldn't continue to get fed insider information from his Apple sources.

As someone who's spent the better part of the last two years building a framework for mobile applications (jQuery Mobile) with the primary purpose of supporting as many platforms as possible I can tell you that mobile safari is hands down the best mobile browser out there today.

You could make the case that Apple's patent threats around the touch event spec are holding things back (not having a standard here is making a nightmare out of handling both click and touch events) or that turning off Nitro for the UIWebView control are a detriment to HTML "apps" but ultimately Android's browser is actually the biggest hindrance to HTML as a competitor.

I'm not an Apple fan (I don't buy their products for other reasons) but mobile safari blows every other mobile browser out of the water in terms of having sane implementations of HTML5 features and performance (css or otherwise).

I'd certainly agree that Mobile Safari is superior to the stock Gingerbread browser (and even the stock ICS browser, to a lesser extent). That being said, are you asserting that Mobile Safari is "hands down" better than other members of the current generation of mobile browsers (Chrome for Android, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile, etc.)? To me, that seems like a much, much harder case to make.

First and most importantly lets highlight an exceptionally important issue that well equipped web developers _always_ seem to forget: 2.X was 84% of Android market share as recently as a month ago. ICS and Jellybean are tiny by comparison.

Leaving that aside, Android's stock browser and Chrome still has serious issues with CSS based transformations and animations on non-trivial pages which mobile safari has handled with aplomb for the last 2 _major_ versions. This is not ICS, I'm talking about Jelly Bean. Even the newest flagship devices from HTC, the One X, can barely handle complex content animations. Again, toy examples have worked for a very long time but anything exceeding the compositing engines tile size just falls over completely.

Unrelated to animations, here's a bug that I logged myself against 4.0:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27959&...

Wherein a full width position fixed element fails to reflow on orientation change.

https://github.com/scottjehl/Device-Bugs/issues

If you look at the issues we've recorded over time you'll see there are plenty of iOS issues there too, but the degree of pain caused by them is vanishingly small when weighed against those we've dealt with from Android.

> First and most importantly lets highlight an exceptionally important issue that well equipped web developers _always_ seem to forget: 2.X was 84% of Android market share as recently as a month ago. ICS and Jellybean are tiny by comparison.

Fair point, but... the overwhelming majority of those users (2.2+) can use the latest Firefox, nearly all of them (1.6+) can use the latest Opera and most (2.3+) will be able to use the latest Dolphin when it comes out of beta. All of these browsers are leaps and bounds ahead the stock Android browser for 2.X and Android lets users change the default browser nearly seamlessly.

Now, granted, none of these browsers is considered important today because they have little to no mobile penetration, but then, mobile web developers could influence that, if they chose to.

So in theory Android browser feature support could be mostly ok, but in practice it isn't and won't be for the foreseeable future?

Some number of years ago you could have said exactly the same about Windows XP.

This is one of the reasons that Apple is dragging its feet on making HTML5 web apps work on par with native apps, despite Jobs' anti-Flash memo two and a half years ago.

Is it? I instead suspect it's because making HTML 5 web apps work on par with native apps would require Apple to build out dozens (if not hundreds) of new, platform-specific extensions and APIs that would bring the web stack on par with Cocoa Touch. It's going to be some time before we see HTML 5 web apps that are truly on par with native apps.

And before citing WebOS, note that they added dozens of new, platform-specific extensions and APIs to make apps running on their stack as feature rich and responsive as apps on other platforms. I don't consider WebOS apps to be "web apps", as they only work on their platform.

I also note that Apple has one of the best mobile web stacks out there. I'd say they're only bested by Chrome for Android, and not by much. That's not a sign of a company that's dragging their feet on HTML5 support.

I was very excited about Apple for about a decade now, but this walled garden is really getting to me. I doubt I'll be buying any new Apple hardware in the future, and I'll pivot to developing for the web instead of making apps as soon as I can.

Oh, how you will miss that walled garden then :)

So Gruber is some kind of paid blogger for Apple? His stuff always ends up on the front page of HN. What's up with that?

The church of Apple likes reading nice things about itself.

There's lots of people religiously invested in Apple here on HN, which seems to have Apple (and it's share-price) as the better part of their identity.

It's a bit awkward for sure.

Would HN actually affect the price of AAPL though?

Why would they care about HN if HN readers are not all Apple worshippers?

The postings by Gruber that make it to the HN front page are not nearly that one-sided.

The html5 assertion is bunk: there are things that can not even be expressed in html5/js which are ubiquitous in native apps. An example is true honest to god no bs no excuses no hand waving thread spawn. As in truly concurrent threads, as comcurrent as the os allows, not some interstitial vm allows, not js worker threads. The j2se JVM gets that right but Ruby and Python do not, but there are no shortages of excuses as to why.

Well, 99.99% of the millions of people queuing up for iPhone 5 don't know about stuff like this and some don't care even if they do.

If the Kindle app lacks the ability to buy books, they will blame Amazon the for lack of that feature and not even linking to the Amazon.com page to buy. This is losing battle regardless of a few HN'ers switching to alternate platforms because of this.

Same as with the patent case against Android, Apple has much more to gain that lose by pissing off some developers. In fact, much of their fan base was cheering on Apple against Samsung and Gruber has ~220K Twitter followers, so I felt that the lawsuits may have the effect to actually legitimizing patents among the sizable segment of Apple aficionados. Like Microsoft in the 90s, Apple has turned into this juggernaut that no power grab can really affect their market sales.

Yes, I definitely worry that of the many negative impacts of Apple's patent lawsuits that the worst might be creating a popular constituency that has begun to believe in the legitimacy of our deeply broken patent system.

It literally sickens me.

Re: Apple pissing off some developers:

I have been bashing Apple for all of this on my blog (I have some regular readers) and I have carefully explained the "Apple problem" to 15+ people in non-Internet space.

It is OK with me if most people don't get the problems that Apple's new butt asshole behavior is causing. Personally, I will spread the message as I am able, and move on. (As I have previously mentioned here, I wrote the simple Chess program distributed with the early Apple II and I had fairly good luck with an app I wrote for the Mac in 1984 - but that is history for me now.)

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