Comment by whywhywhywhy
2 years ago
>I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.
I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.
Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.
But even in real life this doesn't hold.
> I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut.
Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.
Regular people understand the idea of "I bought a thing, and now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on", see printers.
Apple is no more entitled to a cut of everything I put on my iPhone anymore than Walmart is entitled to a cut of everything I put on my table simply because they made the table.
> Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.
I don't know if that's inherently correct in people's eyes. For a counterexample, note that video game consoles are very popular, and I don't see any widespread opposition to the idea that e.g. Nintendo is controlling what you can play on a Switch.
I wouldn't be so sure. A major reason people pick PC gaming over consoles is specifically because they have control over what they are allowed to do.
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The consoles are the most obvious example, but there are other things, too.
Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.
People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.
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While interest in doing so on handhelds has lessened a little due to phones almost always being more capable, wanting to be able to run custom software on consoles is common enough that lots of effort is spent on the cat and mouse game between console hackers and console makers.
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"Being able to do exactly what you want with a thing you paid for" is a very different angle of argument to "knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers"
I was tackling why I don't think that argument holds water with the average person.
"now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on"
With printers this is very tangible to the customer, with the App Store what you're describing here isn't as tangible because nothing on the App Store is actually expensive, it's either free or relatively cheap and it's more a case that the user pays little or nothing, Apple gets a cut for doing close to nothing and the dev gets screwed, printers is more the customer gets screwed.
As an iPhone user, if I wanted a phone with Samsung, Amazon, Epic and Huawei stores, 3 different preinstalled browsers and my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app for a website in Turkey, I'd go with Android. Such an option exists for people who are into that.
But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden. Now some other corporations like Epic, who want to have a cake and eat it too, are going to ruin one of the platform's key selling points.
> my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app
And if your workflow did require an obscure app, who is Apple to decided that you cannot install it on your own phone?
> But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden.
People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you. But time and time again we see that their App Store features outright scams and mountains of knockoff garbage apps.
People buy into the marketing of the walled garden, not the reality of it.
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I've been a loyal iPhone user since what? the iPhone 3.
The moment Apple is forced to "open up to the competition", all Meta apps are going to magically move to the Meta Store, where they'll likely be able to shove all sorts of tracking garbage down my throat.
Same for Alphabet, same for Samsung, same for Microsoft.
The experience will turn into a hopeless struggle against EULAs and consents, unless one refuses to install any third-party spyware and do the digital equivalent of moving into a forest cabin. The oddball, while everyone else sheepishly complies.
Evenyone loves to hate Apple, everyone forgets that the first commercial music store to sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's. The rest was "squirting" tunes on Zune or inflicting Realmedia on their paying customers.
Nope.
I don't think your points about Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Firstly. If they are doing things we don't want them to do, the solution is regulations, not a monopoly.
So if you're unhappy with their behaviour, that should be made illegal.
Secondly. Apple's protection against tracking comes from the OS level. The OS stops them from accessing my contacts and my GPS location, not apple's 30% tax.
> sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's.
So what. How unencrypted are those audio files now? They've since moved on to FairPlay.
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Apple users do not understand that. That was the comment's point.
I don't think so. It seemed very strong about "Even if they would know, they still wouldn't care". Which I think is absolutely false. See people constantly complaining about having to buy expensive inkjet cartridges.
But this is why the eu case made more sense? It went after Apple for not allowing side loading of app stores vs this one which seems to be going after what Apple does on its own store?
Arguably phones are becoming less like stores and more like a significant part of life. This is especially true as more and more of modern life demands a smart phone and apps.
And the only options are to take the deal -- modifiable at any time by the platform owner -- or burn down your digital life and start over on the only other practical competitor.
This is a framing issue. I think your comment is a great comment and probably does reflect a popular understanding. A farmer can't just set up shop in a supermarket without first paying and submitting to some vetting by the store owner. The problem here is that Apple doesn't just own the store or the platform for publicity and distribution. They also own the platform on which the software is run. It is analagous to Walmart also owning your house and not allowing you to buy home goods from any store except Walmart. I don't believe an average consumer would find that to be an acceptable business practice.
> I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?
I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.
I don’t know where this idea that 30% is an unreasonable monopoly-sustained fee comes from. Stripe’s fee is 2.9% plus 0.30, so it would be way more than 3% on small purchases, which I assume are a lot of App Store transactions. Steams is 30% even though there’s compition (Discord tried to run a store with a 90/10 split and shut it down very quickly). Google Play is the same as Apple’s, and they allow other payment processors (for non-games). On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).
Most App developers aren’t even paying 30%, they’re paying the lower 15%.
> On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).
Amazon seems to inexplicably get away with a lot of anti-competitive behavior. I don't know why.
They do have some competition, and we should be supporting them. See: https://libro.fm
I was actually thinking about that - the number of paid non-game apps on my phone that I actually use? It's zero.
Most apps are free and are things like 2fa, chat apps, kindle, etc.
Would I be sad if the entire App Store shut down? Probably. Would it be enough to move me to Android? Uncertain, probably not.
> Who is arguing it should be free?
I'm not, I'm pointing out for the first 50 years of computing it literally was free.
Why hasn’t Android, with it’s support for alternative app stores and side loading eaten the world anyway?
>> the status quo (30%)
Why is this number so bad? Steam: 30% https://medium.com/@koneteo.stories/how-much-money-does-stea...
>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?
Thanks that is a great question.
The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.
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> I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal
The App Store was not a business innovation by Apple to set expectations, it's how all cell phone software that preceded it worked. Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.
>> Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that ring tones cost an arm and a leg, that "apps" were awful (I know I designed one)... You had to pay to get your app on a phone even if it was free.
General computing on a mobile device was never mainstream, or even common, before the iPhone. Smartphones are much closer to laptops than pre-smart phones, IMO.
Sure, but that doesn't change the point. The App Store exists as it is because the iPhone was a phone and that's how things were done on phones. Apple didn't create the model, they just continued it.
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An iPhone is less like Walmart and more like a computer. We should run whatever we like on our own hardware.
I think Nintendo would disagree.
And with 100M users instead of billions, it also simply doesn't matter what Nintendo thinks.
They would. But they’re wrong.
This is a really bizarre viewpoint.
In my view, my phone is MY DEVICE. It is most definitely not "Google/Apple's platform"!
Google is merely manufacturing my phone, and I intend Google to have no rights or control whatsoever regarding my phone, and merely have the obligation (not right, obligation) to manufacture it correctly and provide open-source software for it that works correctly and properly provides Android interfaces (obviously, I don't use an Apple phone since Apple doesn't offer that, while Google does since they provide devices with unlocked bootloaders that run open-source OSes).
It only runs Android because Google with Android happened to win the adoption lottery and it would run PodunkOS by ACME if PodunkOS by ACME had been the one that managed to gain critical mass.
Again it is absolutely not even remotely close to "Google/Apple's platform", and I have no intention for Google to interfere in my use of it and certainly not interfere in any relations I might have with people providing software for my phone like taking a cut of the transaction or deciding how that software should behave.
Normal people don't think that deeply about it or understand even 10% of the terms you just reeled out.
I'm talking about the normal persons perception of the situation, not what is right in terms of how a technically savvy person would look at the situation.
It's pretty simple: "it's my phone, I do what I want with it, just like my house or car".
Which includes "go to any website and run any app I can download from it, regardless of whether it's illegal or against any rules or against the interests of the phone maker" and "change any aspect of functionality that I don't like (e.g. apps being able to show ads) and that I can find out on the web how to change".
It doesn't include "Google or Apple make rules about what I can do with my phone that I can't override".
Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either.. or any of my 'smarttvs' etc.
Would this mean that anyone must be able to load any software into any platform that runs on software, or are we just picking on apple because they are popular. And got popular while doing all these things.. if people didn't want it they wouldn't have bought into it in the first place.
> are we just picking on apple because they are popula
Well, yes, antitrust law specifically, by design, focusses more on large market players, not small ones (there are some aspects still relevant to any participant, though.)
That's kind of central to the whole problem it is intended to solve.
So you would say that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are not large market players?
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> Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either
Homebrew is a thing, and you should be able to use whatever software you want on a device that you paid for. I have no doubt that there are people who own an iphone and wish they could have a different browser, or wish they could use a game streaming app.
They absolutely can. I can compile and install anything i want on my iphone, have to have a dev account is all. Also i think there are still iphone jailbreaks to be had.
I would love all hardware to have an "open option" that disables all security keys, doesn't let you run signed software, whatever, but lets you "hack" the device.
I'm also fine with Nintendo selling games via their store and physically, and taking whatever cut they can bear of it.
(80% of App Store revenue is "games" anyway, so it's a much closer analogy than people might expect. They may end up opening everything except games and only cost them 20% of revenue.)
Meanwhile you can get full advantage of the iPhone ecosystem "for $100/yr" which is nearly free, including App Store distribution, etc. If anything, Apple should be charged with dumping in those cases.
Apple convinced us that only they could keep us safe. Turns out their argument is specious - they can't keep us safe either. They haven't been able to keep malicious apps off of their App Store.
They are probably not monopolies in the legal sense, since there are three of them with comparable market share and they also compete with the PC, which is open. I suspect there would be more pressure to do something about it if those weren't the case.
Apple sells something like 70% of phones in the USA due to network effects that might not be apparent to users in other countries - social shaming for not using iMessage. The European equivalent is WhatsApp, which the EU is forcing to open up.
> are we just picking on apple because they are popular
"Popularity" is a precondition to running afoul of antitrust law, yes..
> or are we just picking on apple because they are popular
I don't use my Playstation or Switch for banking, ordering taxis, my actual job, so there is a bit of a difference.
Although consoles are another good example of how a locked down platform can make an experience hassle free and how that becomes a selling point.
I've Google TV and it allows sideloading. Yes, it should be allowed for all devices.
Most consumers are not even aware of how restrictive iOS is - for the same reason why they aren't aware game consoles do the same thing but way worse. All they know is where to buy compatible software.
If you told them "you have to pay 30% to the person who invented books every time you write something" they'd scream censorship and call for an armed revolution.
Authors often receive much less than that for each book they sell - the best you can get is self-publishing on Kindle or something where you can net 70%: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634560
People generally know this, and they generally don't care.
Anyone can buy a laser printer, print any book, sell it, take 100% profits, and anyone can buy and read it.
But you can't do that with a mobile app because only Android users can use it, while anyone with an iPhone can't use the app unless you submit to Apple's rules.
Walmarts cut is largely based on their costs to stock and sell the item. Appstores costs are not related to the cut they take as they have >80% profit margin.
Is it though? Or is it based on the value the seller gets?
It's both of course, but I think they price based on the value rather than on the cost. (ie: percentage of sales, not per shelfspace)