Comment by jodrellblank
4 years ago
You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.
> "That's different. That's very different
Is it? Why is it? You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside. What's the specific difference between that and iOS, other than "Apple's ecosystem and customers are desirable, so I want to use it" and "I don't want to pay for it"?
> You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.
You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS. Except maybe in India where iOS market share is tiny.
> You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside.
It's an appliance. It's marketed as a device to serve one purpose — read books. Amazon isn't making apps for it either, as far as the user is concerned, there's no notion of application software on these things.
By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically.
Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations.
> What's the specific difference between that and iOS
iPhones and iPads are marketed as general-purpose computing devices. They are not appliances by any stretch of imagination. Yet they are crippled because Apple has knowingly and deliberately put in a limitation so they only run code that was signed by Apple. This limits their general-purposefulness. This forces developers who don't want or need the hosting and listing still go through the app store.
Apple devices aren't crippled by it, they're improved by it. By curation and restriction. Users don't buy Apple gear to pay the lowest possible price for software, or to sideload software, users buy Apple to get something that works. The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience, not an overwhelming flood of "fix it yourself" freeware. Users who want that can get it elsewhere, they shouldn't be forced to suffer it on iOS as well. Taking the restrictions away isn't an improvement. They aren't mandatory restrictions until using iOS is mandatory, and it isn't.
This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers, and you complaining that it's anti-competitively hurting your sneaker business and the restaurant should be forced to change. Customers going there are going there knowing the dress code applies to them and others, forcibly blocking that removes part of their reason for going there at all.
> "You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS."
That is the sense, you aren't required to have any semblance of adoption. Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience. You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.
> "Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations."
Now you aren't making sense. Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?
> "By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically."
So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload? Because this is all about anti-competitive, you said? No obviously you aren't doing that, which calls into question your claimed reasons. You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money. Which is fine in its own way, until you try to get some legal mandate for Apple to force me to worse platform so you can avoid paying Apple money for using Apple's platform and reputation.
>"You want access to their customers"
Last time i checked, corporations were not allowed to own people, has that changed?
>"So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload?"
You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons.
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That argument would be fine if we had plenty of mobile OS providers, except we have only two and it's a duopoly with very clear market issues.
If you don't like Bosch, there's hundreds of other manufacturer, if you don't like a restaurant, there's hundreds of other ones you can pick, if you don't like Android and iOS, well, you're screwed.
That's the market analogy, secondly, those monopolies are essential in today's computing world and currently power a great part of the tech industry, easy to see some issues there.
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> The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience
Once you bought a thing, you own it. That's it. It's cool to have a curated app store for those developers who want it. It's uncool for Apple to retain control of devices after they've been sold.
> This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers
You can't make this comparison. You don't get to choose what kind of mobile device other people use. You do get to choose which restaurant you visit.
> Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience.
Apple is successful by building great hardware and mostly good UX. Macs have had no app store for most of their history, and even though presently do have restrictions by default, there's a manual override to allow running unsigned or self-signed code.
> You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.
I'm having issue with there being a gatekeeper AT ALL. I don't give a crap about "their customers" and "their money". I just want to make an app and distribute it straight to my users. That's it. Apple forcibly inserting itself in between me and my users doesn't do any good to either side. Especially if it's a free app and I'm doing my own marketing. It's simply a rent-seeking prude intermediary that creates more problems than it solves.
People buy smartphones because you need one to function in the modern society. They choose either Google or Apple. Neither of these corporations deserves all the credit they feel entitled to.
> Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?
Apple set expectations that you can do pretty much anything on an iOS device.
> You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money.
I don't give a crap about money. I despise intellectual property and proprietary software. I'll never sell a byte.
I'm simply sick and tired of how relentlessly Apple wants to eradicate sex and piracy form the internet, for example. Even if you have a free app, Apple literally dictates you how you should change your ToS to be approved on the app store. Is that acceptable? I don't think so. No one should have this kind of power. If the web was invented today, a web browser would be rejected from the app store for allowing the user to view any content without restrictions.
Meanwhile they approve all sorts of scam apps, like a bunch of wallpapers with a $20/week subscription on it. Because they take a 30% cut on those. This is hypocrisy.
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> Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them.
I would certainly love to be able to do this.
There is no difference.
Just like I can't run third party, unapproved apps on a Tesla, SNES, Gameboy, Samsung TV etc. Or even every website that has a marketplace and supports plugins e.g. Shopify.
Your argument rests on the strange assumption that people who are against IOS restricting apps on the iPhone would for some reason support Amazon's restrictions on Kindle apps.
I can also easily load PDFs and other formats to a Kindle even if I didn’t go through the Amazon store.
And you can load content and view websites on your iPhone as well.
We are talking about apps.
And you can easily load PDFs and music onto an iPhone/iPad without going through the Apple store or iTunes store. So they're even and that's good enough for Kindle therefore it's good enough for iOS, right?
Oh wait, on top, iOS has an app store so you can do more, so that's a win for iOS? And the app store can have free apps on it where Apple take no money, but still review and curate for some minimum standards of quality, which is nice.
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My "argument"[1] rests on the idea that they don't care about restrictions on Kindle apps because there's no valuable market of buyers on the other side, and so it's not about "anti-competitive" as claimed.
The famous and expensive London shop Harrods has a reputation for a wealthy customer base, and it's like saying it's unfair that you have to convince Harrods to stock your products and then they take a cut of all sales for doing so, and that you should be able to sell to their specific wealthy customer base and use their trusted environment for doing so, using the reputation they've developed, without them getting anything in return, and their shop should be an open street market.
[1] in which I ask why it's different, which was no argument at all.