Probably the argument is that they (1) host the software in the cloud which costs them money, and (2) they review software for e.g. security issues which costs them money.
> The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”.
It does cost them money, but I can't wrap my mind on why that's not subsidized by the rest of the Apple machine.
Didn't customers pay a premium for Apple hardware because of the unified ecosystem and superior security to begin with? And developers also pay a premium to be on the App Store ($99+30%) because it costs them money to create the infrastructure and ensure safety?
I'm pretty ignorant on the whole situation, but it does sound nice to be Apple. Raking in hundreds of billions while charging premiums on both sides, convincing them it's for their own good. Meanwhile, customers and developers descend into a feedback loop of even heavier dependence on Apple: the more customers there are, the more devs have a financial necessity to publish apps on the platform, the more value the platform has, the more customers they get.
People are quick to point out Apple is the one providing for developers, who should be honored to be able to get on the App Store for a 30% cut. But, really, how many users would Apple have without those apps? They do deserve their cut, but at some point it went from a symbiotic relationship to "oil the Apple machine." The economies of scale simply work in their favor here.
> Didn't customers pay a premium for Apple hardware because of the unified ecosystem and superior security to begin with
Not defending Apple, but offering forever-services for one-time fees is a great way to go out of business. I would not expect the App Store to be subsidized by hardware sales.
Also, assuming you accept the premise in the first place, it makes sense to charge the developer, who is the one generating work for reviewers.
Not completely, but maybe enough to lower the insane fees?
For instance, why not charge for the services used and a low payment processing fee? If developers bring associated costs, they should pay for it. It just seems 30% is overshooting quite a bit. They want to treat developers like regular customers with regular margins, when they are more like partners bringing them nearly free revenue.
I guess I'm too ignorant to understand how building, maintaining and securing the App Store is 10x more expensive than doing the same for something like Mastercard.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The developer program has a yearly fee. Phones, even in the rare case that they are used for their full lifespan, still need to be replaced as they slowly die/become obselete - in practice every 2-5 years.
Apple recently suggested to Australian authorities that Apple can't possibly have a monopoly on app distribution since they have no restrictions against PWAs which "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". [1]
As someone currently building an app-like website – https://wormhole.app – let me tell you that Apple's neglect and underinvestment in the web platform definitely precludes websites or "PWAs" from having the "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". Safari suffers from the twin effects of (1) limitations that Apple has intentionally put in place and (2) intentional under-staffing of the Safari team. Here's how it's affected us:
- Apple recently broke our website by adding support for a new API `blob.stream()` in Safari 14.1 (which we correctly feature-detected) but when you call the function you get a null pointer exception which crashes the renderer process [2]. Worse, the bugs was fixed on `master` several months before Safari was released but it wasn't included in the release.
- IndexedDB has been full of bugs for years and shows very slow signs of improvement. We have no other storage options on Safari, so we're stuck using their buggy implementation.
- Safari limits websites to using 1GB of temporary space after which the app must prompt the user for an additional allocation, each 200MB at a time. So if the app needs 5GB of space (for example, a video editing application, or in our case a P2P-enabled file sending app), then the user will need to click "okay" on twenty prompts for 200MB more space each to make the app work. Needless to say, this is totally ridiculous and definitely not an API that Apple would ever find acceptable to ship for native iOS apps.
- If we choose to use in-memory storage then Safari warns the user that our website is using lots of RAM. So that's not a real option.
- We can't offer streaming download + decryption from our servers because Safari's ServiceWorker implementation doesn't allow intercepting HTTP requests for file downloads.
- Missing many APIs that would actually let websites truly compete with native apps. Just a few that we use:
* Web Share Target API (https://web.dev/web-share-target)
* File System Access API (https://web.dev/file-system-access)
- I could go on...
It's hard to see Apple's decisions here as anything but outright hostile to the web and designed to push developers into making native apps.
These complaints have a very similar vibe to the complaints about IE6 back in the day. Companies coyly pretending to support interoperability while actually breaking it as much as possible is getting really, really old.
Then people should start explaining how free they are from regional dealerships.
Apple 30% cut is for developer access to the Apple cultivated and exclusive selection of customers.
They built the platform, infrastructure, distribution channel and trust of the users, creating a market where there was none.
One can argue that a 30% margin may be too fat, but considering other industry margin and that Apple consolidates in that margin logistic, distributionship and dealership I haven't yet seen a convincing case comparing it fairly to other industries
But still, exclusive distribution rights are neither unheard of nor have scores of people up in arms about them restriction people from of choice, so why is Apple singled out and targeted?
Missing the point they the only way to install apps on an IPhone is the app store. If you had choice to freely download apps from the internet, this would not be a monopoly abuse issue. Then sure charge on the app store whatever you want, allow competing so stores that also offer reviewed software.
I think what you are saying is probably correct, but remember what happened to MS and IE. IE was never forced, and other options weren't blocked. The issue was bundling and inability to uninstall due to tight coupling. Both of those would apply to iOS though the details and current political landscape would probably give them a pass.
I don't think so. I'd say the mobile market is quite different. Look at Android and the Google Play Store which also has similar pricing stipulations. There are players offering separate app sources/stores (Amazon or Epic appstores for example), but I certainly wouldn't consider virtually every big player or even a large portion opting out.
Do you know that Epic failed with their Android Epic Store because no one was sideloading it from their website and quickly went to the Goole Play Store and started paying 30% fee because users use unified solutions not geek ones.
Which is exactly why Apple users specifically do not want third-party app distribution at all.
This isn't just blind fanboyism, either: PC gamers absolutely loathe Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, because they want their entire collection of software to live on Steam. Yes, a decade and change ago everyone hated Steam, but now it's the established way of doing things. The more developer-friendly, competitive option is to have 15 different launchers, one for each publisher, with their own payment systems, terms of service, and so on.
You can see this in the reactions Apple users have to the Epic lawsuit, versus their reaction to stories of Apple demanding their cut from developers that don't have it to give. They're way more sympathetic to companies that aren't trying to split their app libraries in half.
(EDIT: I should probably clarify that I, myself, don't think alternative iOS app stores would actually take off without major cross-subsidies from powerful industry players. Google Play has a stranglehold in markets where it's available, even though Android has no technical lock-out like iOS. EGS on Android is a joke and I would never install it. On the other, OTHER hand, though... Android in China, where Google Play is banned, is basically PC digital downloads, pre-Steam.)
This is you really liking the mall experience where stores are paying twice as much rent to be in the mall and trying to make it illegal for shops to do business outside the mall to maximize your shopping experience. You and the mall are both in love with the idea.
If you want to shop in the mall vote with your wallet if there isn't enough demand to convince merchants to situate themselves there then deal with it.
Laws forcing merchants and customers into the mall ought to be themselves illegal.
Many apps are free so that argument doesn’t hold up. Also 30% of subscription revenue from services they don’t run just because it was purchased through an app is further proof that the fee is just rent seeking.
I anticipate that in the Epic lawsuit, the judge will definitely rule against the anti-steering policies of Apple though she'll probably not touch the app store, margins and payment processing pieces. There are many many Apps where buying content in iOS apps is pricier than buying on the web on the same publisher. This definitely raises consumer prices and causes consumer harm which is the key criteria of American anti-trust practice. This would be very very unlikely to be overturned on Appeal especially if the judge is careful to limit her ruling to just this and will result in numerous class action lawsuits.
The one I personally experience is sheet music where I'm very careful to never buy in-app which are always priced 20-25% higher.
It's basically a myth that apples reviewers are reviewing for security issues. I've worked in the iOS ecosystem since the beginning, undergone hundreds of reviews, and the reviewers are there primarily, almost exclusively, to endure apple gets it's 30% fee. There are automated security tools, to be sure, but apple the costs of hosting and automated tests are basically 0%.
If they charged $5-20 per release, that I would be fine with, and not only cover costs but would generate profit.
The standard argument that a 30% is ok for video games but not ok for the App Store is that games are special and different. I don’t find it convincing. I think a better argument is that a 30% cut is wrong full stop, but going after phone app stores is a higher enforcement priority because the stakes are higher. An increasing portion of commerce is digital, and increasing portion is happening on phones. Apple will try to expand the coverage of the 30% cut until someone makes them stop. The only way they can keep growing as a 2 trillion dollar company is to take an increasing cut of the world’s economic activity.
The argument with videogame consoles was that console makers were actually loosing money on each console sold, and would make up for it by taking a larger cut on each game sold.
This is of course very different from apple business model.
As well as the cost of running first-party QA processes, namely that “Nintendo Seal of Quality” that was instigated to prevent a repeat of the 1980s video game crash, precipitated by a slew of awful shovelware games for the Atari 2600 in particular).
Apple does have their app-review thing - but they said it’s paid-for by the $99 fee, so the 30% cut with all the other Kafkaesque restrictions is not a tenable position.
Anyway - my company stopped publishing to the iOS App Store over a year ago and switched to PWAs and no-regrets here at all.
Microsoft and Sony take 30% of game revenue. A piece of software is sold and they take a cut. They also take a cut of in app purchases of game expansions and game items.
Apple, on the other hand, wants to take a cut of every non-physical item purchase on their platform regardless of what it is. They also don't want any non-physical item purchases to occur off their platform. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Apple's platform is a gateway to all kinds of businesses selling all kinds of goods, both physical and digital, with a range of business models.
Apple could even take a cut of physical item purchases if they wanted; they just decided they don't want to (for obvious reasons).
I agree it's similar but it's also not exactly the same.
I don't think I see the difference in what you are describing Sony does vs Apple does. What's the non-physical items sold on PlayStation that Sony doesn't take a cut for?
That's not what I mean. Take this example: Fanhouse is an app that sells a digital products created by end users and pays those creators for the content that end users subscribe to.
In terms of business relationship and product something like this can't exist on gaming platforms. Game platforms are strictly for publishers to sell their own gaming content.
iOS is a gateway to businesses selling both physical and digital wares of all types. By their good graces, they don't force physical items through their payment processor but they do for digital goods regardless of what that good is (with a few notable exceptions).
The only point I seem to see from you throughout this post is that you can use physical disks on playstation/xbox, but even that is dependent on having a playstation/xbox with a disk drive. Additionally, Sony/Microsoft still receive a cut from those sales.
The point is there is still an alternative. It's not quite the same as they act as publishers and distribution partners in gaming vs mobile devices. There should absolutely be more access to stores there too though, with Steam and Epic on Xbox or Playstation.
Do physical disks come with "you cant sell me at less" restrictions like Apple enforces? With "you can't use any payment store other than apple"?
The number of restrictions on top of Apples cut is what makes the difference. The mafia wishes they could enforce the same restrictions. Apple makes them look reasonable.
There is indeed alternative ways to get software on Apple mobile devices. Why is this such a common belief?
Edit: your point seems to be revolving around the access to physical disks for playstation/xbox, which is 1. Limited to devices that have a disk drive, 2. Limited to software that would similarly be sold on the sony/xbox stores, and 3. Still gives sony/microsoft a cut of the sale.
Edit 2: No, I'm not talking about webapps. You can sideload apps with a free developer account, similar to xbox.
Edit 3: Right, well I guess I'm being "purposely ignorant" and am actually talking about web apps. This was fun HN, lovely discussion.
Edit 4: It does indeed only require a free developer account, and you can strip and resign apps without needing to compile from source.
It's a common belief because it's true. We're clearly talking about consumer-level access to install and run native software, not pedantic technical workarounds.
> Edit 2: No, I'm not talking about webapps. You can sideload apps with a free developer account, similar to xbox.
This is disingenuous. Not only do you need a paid developer account, you are limited by the number apps you can sideload, you need to compile them yourself and sign them with your key, and they must be resigned and installed every 7 days. You also need to do all of that from a Mac.
Your original comment was about side loading apps on iPhone ON a thread about iPhone apps. I don't see what consoles have to do with this. You are being ignorant of the fact that the vast majority of iPhone users CANNOT and WILL NOT side load apps using a developer account.
Edit: Can't reply further, but the way of doing this is much the same as installing unsigned apps on an xbox. Using a (free) developer account you can sideload things quite easy using something like https://github.com/ios-control/ios-deploy
Edit: So the only way to do it besides jailbreaking is for literally everyone who wants to do it to pay Apple an extra $100 on top of what they already paid for their iDevice. (Sharing will get your certificate revoked.)
The "alternative way" is to install web apps... which is tied to webkit... which is a neutered browser technology that's purposely hamstrung as to not interfere with the app store.
Using the web apps as a defense only shows that you won't admit to the massive problems with it - from bluetooth restrictions to lack of hardware level driver support.
That isn't a realistic option... it's a deflection from the subpar user experience Apple supports to enforce their mafia level protection racket.
Tell this to the judge which stated this to Epic lawyers lmao. Don’t forget that Tencent who’s behind Epic takes 50% fee in its Android store in China and Tim Sweeney bans everyone in Twitter who reminds about this fact.
Anyway, the EU is coming for them:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
> The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”.