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Comment by ENGNR

5 days ago

Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.

35 comments

ENGNR

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irusensei  5 days ago

Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).

Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.

  • mpweiher  5 days ago

    Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.

    The point is that the OP is not free to do so.

    • tonyedgecombe  5 days ago

      >Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.

      Not necessarily, once other channels are available developers could choose to force their clients down that road.

      1 reply →

  • nottorp  5 days ago

    Most and mostly.

    But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.

  • Silhouette  5 days ago

    The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.

  • thrance  5 days ago

    You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.

    • immibis  5 days ago

      The Linux package repositories take a 30% cut of zero. If the software wasn't free, it would be entirely reasonable for them to demand a cut

      2 replies →

    • charlie-83  5 days ago

      As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.

blitzar  5 days ago

> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard

They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".

Hamuko  5 days ago

The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.

Although I think my go-to instructions at https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ are not being kept up to date?

  • eastbound  5 days ago

    No, the barrier is to pay above 1m downloads. $99/yr is a o(everything your have to do to publish a safe app online and maintain it safe).

intrasight  5 days ago

From what I hear, users are tired of installing apps. You can make a website and not face any gatekeepers or restrictions.

  • popol12  5 days ago

    What if your app needs to send notifications and/or use bluetooth, for instance ?

    • intrasight  5 days ago

      From what I hear, most users disable notifications.

      You can do like Airbnb and send text messages.

      You can do Bluetooth in JavaScript through the Web Bluetooth API.

      5 replies →

    • merek  5 days ago

      PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.

      If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).

      Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.

      1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

      2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

      1 reply →

  • immibis  5 days ago

    Meanwhile on Hacker News: "Web apps suck. Native apps are so much better. Why can't everything be a native app?"