Paying for updates has been the standard software model for ages, and with good reason. It still takes money to update and add new features. It still takes time. To some extent new users can pay for this, but then developers have to severely limit the time spent on updates in order to nod spend too much, or they risk not even making a profit on the first version.
That is why most "big" software packages these days are either subscription based, or pay-per-update. We've all come to expect apps to get free updates, but it's not a sustainable business model.
And Apple taking 30% of that... for what? Payment processing is a 4% thing. It’s in the app developers interest to make it not have errors. It’s just for access to the market. That is the only value Apple truly brings, outside of the brand and a privacy commitment
People get hung up on apple having a 30% entrance fee, but that didn't come out of nowhere.
I work in the video games industry and access to steam or other first parties (Sony/Microsoft) is 30%, no negotiations.
You could argue that first parties such as sony/microsoft have subtle costs involved such as printing of disks, but that's paid for before market by the publisher.
The thing you pay for is: content distribution (in the case of digital downloads such as steam), 'signing' and access to market.
The amount of value steam provides on top of payment processing and distribution is immense. Valve basically single handedly created Linux gaming. Their client is so many years ahead of everything else with the forums, workshop, broadcast streaming, streaming to your tv, gamepad support and gamepad virtualisation as well as a mountain of developer side APIs for things like inviting friends to games.
Apples 30% would seem a lot more fair if it was possible to side load and install alternative app stores
In comparison apples offering is little more than "we have a huge captive audience on a proprietary system. Pay us or miss out on half of the market"
Apple meanwhile created the entire OS and all of the developer APIs that your apps rely on, including things like Metal that games rely on. And Apple gives this all away for free.
That should be included in device cost. It is unacceptable that they prevent users who paid for the device from installing programs outside of apples walled garden
If we find Apple extracting rent from apps unacceptable, we look no further than a mirror for the cause. We the public don’t want to pay full freight for hardware.
Microsoft used to boast that they made more money from Apple systems than Apple did. Google does that to Android device makers today.
If platform makers don’t extract rent, or compete with the developers they court, they will look for other sources of revenue to stay profitable. I would be aghast if Apple hardware came loaded with the kind of Junkware I recall from the years I bought Windows hardware.
Are you arguing Apple needs to juice their hardware profit margins? Because my understanding is they're very healthy and the envy of the computing and mobile phone industries.
The neglect of the mac app store feels of a piece with their utter neglect of the mac platform. They seem to be treating it as a runout.
$99/year is for developer support and publishing. You can use Xcode for free and even install your app on your personal device without paying a cent. What's more, I was actually talking about the OS and frameworks which are given away for free to all Apple users.
> Valve basically single handedly created Linux gaming.
Valve's influence has been immensely positive for Linux gaming but saying they created it is ridiculous. I was playing on Linux just fine before Steam was ported. Valve's contributions very much stand on top of the efforts of those that came before them.
People don’t sell their labor to employers at a “fair” price, they sell at whatever the can get. Same concept for any other transaction, sellers will sell for the highest price buyers will pay.
Apple created THE smartphone. Every phone is an iPhone - Apple proved it and everyone else copied it. And Apple springboarded off their first-mover advantage into a platform that users really like, and keep coming back to.
We were already using Symbian, Psion and PocketPC based phones.
The first phone with hardware support for OpenGL ES was the Nokia N95 released in September 2006, one year before iPhone, with Asphalt as their show game.
Sure, you could go back to 1996 and say the Nokia Communicator was the first smartphone.
I think what he meant by "Apple created THE smartphone" is that Apple created the first mass-market smartphone which was desired by regular consumers (rather than niche buyers).
Docomo phones were(are?) a Japan-only irrelevance.
Granted - Symbian was a thing back then, but can you buy a Symbian phone today? Consumers voted with their money, and they wanted iPhones, not Nokias.
Fast forward to 2019, Nokia is nothing more than a trademark - making generic Android phones on one hand, and cashing in on nostalgia with their feature phones on the other hand.
Why are you pretending you don’t understand what he’s trying to say. Those aren’t phones most people have heard of, and when they did exist, living without them was easy.
Growing up everyone had a Nokia phone. The Nokia 6600 specifically (which had a multitasking, internet enabled OS with IMO the best J2ME implementation and also allowed you to install arbitrary native programs either from a PC or download them from the Internet) was a very popular device.
To anyone who used this phone, smartphones were already a thing long before iPhone was introduced. Of course iPhone changed things a lot, though IMO many were for the worse (for example i really liked using the tiny joystick on my 6600 for playing games).
All those things were cool about it, but those phones were going to remain business-y devices for a loooong time if someone hadn't come along and replaced resistive touch and add a decent UI.
You're moving the goalposts massively. No one is claiming that the first gen iPhone outsold anything or anyone. More importantly, that data is for 2006, the N95, of which you claim everyone and their dog knew about, didn't become available until march 2007. Your claim that the N95 was massively popular is also wide of the mark. Nokia had around 30 SKU's available to buy at the time, with the N95 being one of the very top end devices. All your link shows is that Nokia had the lions share of revenue and market share. Well, yeah. No one with half a brain would argue that.
TL;DR: Look at how Nokia's revenue collaspsed post September 2007. Look at how Android and Nokia's decision to go all in on Windows Mobile accelerated it. Then tell me that the iOS fanbase is trying to rewrite history...
You are the one making those claims as otherwise it weakens the iOS über all assertion.
N95 was just one example of the millions of Symbian, J2ME and PocketPC/WindowsCE smartphones being shipped before iOS became reality.
Nokia's revenue only collapsed due to the way Elop drove the company to the ground as means to get the bonus on his contract. As the Finn press later discovered.
> You are the one making those claims as otherwise it weakens the iOS über all assertion.
Nonsense.
> N95 was just one example of the millions of Symbian, J2ME and PocketPC/WindowsCE smartphones being shipped before iOS became reality.
And none of them are around now. More to the point, all but a handful could be considered 'smart'. We could debate what smart is, but ultimately it's moot. Pre 2007, 'smart' devices were by and large business oriented, post September 2007, they started to become the norm; first with iOS, closely followed by Android. These facts are incontrovertible.
The point you are trying to make is utterly wrong. The original assertion was that Apple 'invented' the smartphone is equally wrong. However, Apple did play a significant role in defining what a smartphone is, Nokia and Symbian not so much. The proof? Where are they now?
> Nokia's revenue only collapsed due to the way Elop drove the company to the ground as means to get the bonus on his contract. As the Finn press later discovered.
Elop merely dealt the final blow. Nokia's sales declined post 2008 when they peaked with a global share of ~40%. Elop Joined late 2010...
When iPhone arrived in Europe it was disappointment for people who used smartphones. It had few things going for it (better web browser than default IE Mobile on PDAs, better screen than many), and long list of "works worse".
Starting with the basic things that everyone who invested in smartphones at the time wanted, i.e. email, going through hilariously high cost (the reason behind it known only to insiders - Apple was in full rent-seeking mode, and required a portion of your phone bill as payment for being able to use iPhone. Not joking, that's why there were special iPhone-only tarriffs), it lacked physical keyboard, copy&paste, and a bunch of other things. iPhone 2G was also slower at running iOS 1.0 "applications" than higher end Nokia symbian phones (that used the same webkit core in browser).
Symbian devices were well known, and were more commonly considered "smartphones", as "palmphones" generally only got interest from people who really needed the power (a bit of chicken&egg issue).
What is this weird narrative that pre-iPhone smartphones didn't exist in the US, and somehow only Europe and Asia had these "advanced" devices? We had smartphones too. All the negatives you mentioned (no physical keyboard, copy & paste, etc.) were brought up by lots of people when the iPhone was first released. Ultimately it didn't matter, and the iPhone was a breakout hit and every single smartphone on sale today is based on its core design.
Man, everybody had blackberrys in the US. It was a huge success. Apple took a risk decision of having a purely touch-based smartphone, and the bet paid awesomely. But by any other aspects, the blackberry was a more useful and powerful device for professionals than the IPhone.
That's the one time cost for purchase outside of contract... For N95. Not for iPhone, at least not for normal people.
The reality in 2008 is that Apple forbid selling iPhone without contract, with contract requiring special extra Apple tax (we already had "unlimited data" for years by then). So you were paying whatever the telco asked you for the phone, then paid extra to Apple as long as you used the "iPhone tariff" (and you couldn't get it otherwise other than ebay).
Since at least in Poland majority bought the phone as part of the contract, the prices were wildly different. I can't find N95, but business oriented E51 cost me under $70. Without significant impact on monthly fees on the contract. And without paying Apple tax on my phone bill.
BTW, regarding visual voicemail... Little known thing about iOS 1-2 is that the network stack was broken and it wasn't capable of redirecting to voicemail like every other phone. Required special buggy software to get any voicemail for people running iPhones, and at least at Era GSM (present day T-Mobile Poland) it took 3 months from providing iPhone on sales and any voicemail working?
The cost of a phone bundled with a contract bears no relation to the real-world cost. Depending on your monthly payment and length of contract, you could pay $100 or $500 for the same phone.
In some markets, iPhones were bundled with a contract because networks had bidding wars for exclusivity.
From the PoV of someone buying a phone, in that specific time and location, cost of phone without contract was rarely ever known. And the iPhone wasn't sold outside of network with attached plan anyway.
From the PoV of someone working at the network and having the luck to talk with some pretty high up there people... the exclusivity was only for order in which networks got the phone. As in, present-day T-Mobile Poland made a bid to be the first network to have it - but it didn't have any kind of long exclusivity and was soon followed by Orange and Plus (the other two "main" networks). All networks had special iPhone "plans" and the phone wasn't available outside of them, and the only technical difference was that said plans ultimately got the very buggy Visual Voicemail server attached and probably triggered workarounds for call handling bugs.
The Apple tax on the phone bill itself, and making it unavailable outside of contract, were all on Apple. (I think for some time using one outside of approved contract even required jailbreaking, but I can't be sure).
This is an infuriating topic to read about because everybody seems to be varying levels of uninformed.
I worked at Nokia's R&D facility in Ruoholahti briefly in 2011, so I got inducted into the inner sanctum of history regarding the phones.
Symbian was designed for very anemic hardware, there were very tight constraints it's a marvel that the thing ran on what it did. The iPhones first CPU was at least an order of magnitude (and then double it again) more powerful than what Symbian was designed on.
the iPhone, famously did not meet any of the internal tests at Nokia, no drop test, battery life tests nor usability tests for blind people passed at all.
Basically from all avenues it looked dead on arrival.
However, it was obviously _not_ dead on arrival, and so Nokia started looking at things from a "UX first" perspective, the engineering culture was still around though, so, not a major "product" team or graphics design team to be found on the floors of the R&D facility.
But they started this effort _after_ the iPhone had launched, and these projects take a long time.
That's what Maemo was. And it was later merged with Intels efforts and named MeeGo. And everyone who used that system seemed to really enjoy it.
It was, indeed, killed in its crib by Elop. Although to be truly fair, the iPhone and Android were very incumbent at that point.
Symbian was considered obsolete or deprecated internally, not for lack of very intelligent design, but because people seemed to care for things other than that Nokia had believed people cared for.
Yeah, I had Nokia N9. Best phone I ever used. Only wish it had a replaceable battery. Elop killed it before it arrived by announcing the move to windows. That was one of the key event for Nokia in particular and the smartphone industry in general.
Imagine if Nokia had continued investing in a linux phone, android wouldn't be what it is today.
I had an N70. It was slow, slow, slow. I had a 5800. It was as slow as the N70 and the resistive screen made me want to cry. I never had the original iPhone but I guess it wasn't as bad.
I could make a phone call and browse the interest on my gen1 iPhone. I used ATT as my network. Verizon had the limitation you described, but not all carriers.
Copy and paste didn’t work, but it didn’t work on any phone at the time. A few attempted it (eg, win mobile, blackberry) but it really sucked.
The camera was quite good and the ability to finally save and share photos and video was revolutionary at the time. I always thought it was funny how much it sucked at the time to try to store and send photos from my BlackJack or Blackberry.
Copy and paste on Android worked well before iOS, both in ability and timing. I remember being confused my wife couldn't copy and paste with her iPhone when I had a password manager. Copy and paste on iOS took way, way too long. It's interesting how you're claiming you were doing things that didn't exist for the device.
hardware from that era would be slow. If you used an iphone 3 right now it'll be slow guaranteed. Also the first iphones were shiny toys, underpowered and featureless compared to Nseries and Win mobile. If they were that good, Microsoft would have responded immediately.
They were very slow. The important thing is they didn't feel sluggish, at all.
It took Android phones many many years to even approach feeling as responsive and smooth and indicative of whether input has actually registered as the original iPhone, just scrolling through stuff and navigating around the OS.
Tech at the time didn't even try on that front.
Featureless yes, but it could do enough to almost right away replace my iPod, Palm, and Nokia. One device instead of three was just too good to pass up.
That is not true at all. The iPhone had “amazing” features for the time- a real browser, visual voicemail, photo management, music integration, three way calling, contact integration. Almost all were incremental but really made the functions more useful.
And no apps apart from the built-ins. No copy and paste. Just like a feature phone. Apart from the browser and music courtesy ipod, other smart phones had the remaining features and far more robust. They may not have had fancy UI, but they were more powerful at the time.
Even the camera megapixel craze was being led by nokia. You're conflating the current dominance of the iphone for the past. At the time, the best thing about it was the finger only touch screen operation. To the best of my memory, others still needed to fall back to a stylus. Finger usage was a whackamole operation with Nseries and blackerry I used then
The first iPhone lacked many features, but it was the best phone at the time for usability. It had massive hype in the press that was probably overblown. But its features were head and shoulders above others at the time.
The simple act of making a call was so much easier and efficient, even though it lacked cut and paste.
Comparing it to feature phones is really curious because they were completely different markets. I don’t think it’s very useful in describing the iPhone’s success to point out individuals features that were also available in various existing phones.
Your claim that steam/sony/microsoft all charge 30% no negotiations is dated if not completely inaccurate. It might have been that way the last time you were involved in negotiations (if ever) but it's questionable whether that's still true - we know for a fact Valve offers a lower cut to big studios now. There's basically no guarantee that it's not possible to negotiate anymore, and I would be shocked if the Playstation or XBox business wings were unwilling to negotiate a cut down in order to land a big, million-selling title.
Is your claim that the iOS store cut is 30% because Steam was 30%? Kind of an odd argument given that the iOS store was heavily focused on "apps" initially, and still sort of is, even if games ended up being a big moneymaker.
The 30% is now coming out of a different sort of product than it did at store launch, too. Lots and lots of F2P stuff with in-app purchases, subscriptions, etc. Even if 30% was justified for single-purchase apps, does it make sense to continue giving them an ongoing 30% of all revenue when IAPs and subscriptions are literally not using any Apple infrastructure if they're things like 'unlocking premium features in the app you already have' or 'getting premium support'?
> Your claim that steam/sony/microsoft all charge 30% no negotiations is dated if not completely inaccurate
I get the general impression that you're either in a much better bargaining position than I am, or you're not in the industry.
I still make AAA games, the latest of which came out this year[0] I can tell you concretely that we pay 30% of every purchase to the first party.
(except on PC, because we sell on uPlay and the Epic store, which has lower fees -- one of steams conditions is that you cant offer the game cheaper elsewhere, so we could never apply discounts on uplay)
> we know for a fact Valve offers a lower cut to big studios now
Valve has been openly hostile to my publisher for many years, perhaps this is the problem? Frequently unlisting our games.[1] We as a publisher do not officially respond to these things because they have better customer relations and a higher sentiment than we do, we would lose a PR battle, so we accept it and move on. This happens in negotiations too.
> I would be shocked if the Playstation or XBox business wings were unwilling to negotiate a cut down in order to land a big, million-selling title
They have almost all the power in those negotiations. The only bargaining power we have is if we have a very strongly rated title that we threaten to make exclusive. But in those cases we would lose more from _not_ selling on the platform than we would make back in the first-party cut. So it's lose-lose.
30% applies to in-game consumables too, anything processed by them as a payment provider.
Perhaps your games on Steam would be better received if they didn't force the buyer to also install a crapware like Uplay on top of Steam and forcing to create another user account to play a game the buyer has just paid for (perhaps it has changed, I haven't bought an Ubi game in years).
Regarding a second account; I'm afraid there's very little that can be done on that front, there was account linking added some time ago that meant you didn't need to maintain or continually log-in to uplay, you just create a linked account and forget about it- no second password needed I believe.
So at least for usability it should not be any different than normal.
If you have other specific complaints about uPlay then I'd be happy to hear them and feed them back to the team, since we're actually located in the same studio.
Unfortunately uPlay does drive a significant amount of business value, handling things like entitlements so that each game doesn't have to re-implement them and allowing us to handle things like distribution of "other" types of clients, like development versions of the games for review, or debug enabled versions of games for debugging. It also allows for A/B testing of various features.
As recently as 2017 there was consensus among ubisoft upper management that the perception of uPlay was bad, so more focus has been put on the user aspects, so in theory it should be much better now than it was, because before it was very business focused.
But, as everything, people are happy to help if they can, nobody wants to make an awful system.
Unless the problem is that you have to have a second launcher? that's usually peoples primary complaint. (and in those cases uPlay tries to hide itself and stay out of the way)
Well, I can assure you that seeing a game requires uPlay means I'm probably not going to buy it, and I'm not alone in that. Of course, I haven't even wanted to play an Ubisoft game since... I honestly can't remember, so I guess I'm not the target audience anyway.
> Unless the problem is that you have to have a second launcher?
That's a big part of it. I have enough crapware that insists on constantly running on my PC (a lot of it direct from MS these days, sigh).
PS: Oh yeah, and it wants me to sign up for an account too. Hooray! I don't have enough of accounts spread all over the goddamned place already.
So, again, the largest complaint is that we have our own launcher.
Given what I mentioned from the parent (Valve arbitrarily pulling down all our games), how do you think I can convince the business to make ourselves more vulnerable to such behaviour?
Well I think not many people have a problem with Ubisoft having their own store, but why require a launcher? (e.g. that the launcher runs in the background or that I have to start it at all when I start a game)
The functionality should be optional and the parts you need could be a library which integrate within the game.
I don't have enough information to know what "arbitrarily" means here. From what I can tell, Valve is pretty damned reluctant to remove things from the store, which makes me really curious why they would "arbitrarily" remove such popular AAA titles.
Regardless, I can tell you that things like uPlay are hugely annoying and whatever excuses your company has for why it exists don't really change that.
Frankly I don't even like having to use the Steam launcher, but seeing as they pretty much single handedly built the market they are now the defacto standard in I've reluctantly accepted it. Ubisoft's wares simply do not appeal to me enough to overcome my distaste in the same way.
> the largest complaint is that we have our own launcher.
That sits above Steam's launcher, so I launch the game via Steam, then Uplays pop up (slowly, then updates), I dig up my contact details from an old post-it, then the game launch! I think it makes sense for Ubisoft to have their launcher, but in the case of games sold through Steam, its mandatory use detract from the game. And on Steam, games that have been pulled from the store are still in the game library of buyers, so it's not an argument.
I don't have any recent criticism of Uplay, I'm pretty sure I haven't launched an Ubisoft game with Uplay since maybe 2017 (more or less) (played all the 3d PoP though).
I commend you for offering to receive feedback.
I also understand that Uplay is a good business idea.
The issue was being _forced_ to use it in addition to Steam and having to create an account, since apparently at the time (2015?) the account linking didn't exist. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to have to launch two launcher just to play a game (perhaps it has changed since last time though).
Just another data point: I also will not buy any game which uses uPlay, I spent too many hours trying to make the damn thing even work which I intended to spend playing games. (Not compatible with Steam Link either, in my experience.)
I won’t lose sleep over f2p apps that profit by getting whales to spend money on in app consumables. I hope Apple Arcade cuts even more into those types of apps.
As far as subscriptions, the answer is simple - don’t allow subscriptions through the App Store. Netflix, Spotify, Linux Academy, AT&T Now, Sling, etc force you to pay for subscriptions outside of the App Store. You can subscribe to Hulu in the App Store but not Hulu Live.
As far as the 30%, all of the rumors are that none of the big players like Netflix (before they stopped allowing in app subscriptions), Hulu, or HBO ever paid more than 15%.
> IAPs and subscriptions are literally not using any Apple infrastructure if they're things like 'unlocking premium features in the app you already have' or 'getting premium support’?
They’re using Apple’s account, pricing, payment, and licensing infrastructure
You have to remember what these store are replacing.
In case of Sony/Nintendo you pay togt access to their closed hw and ecosystem (for much less than 30% by the way). In case of apple you pay to be included in a catalogue but you can also sell directly to customers.
One added value of steam I like is that games that uses Steam Network to find servers are still working long after for other games master servers are gone
Sony and Microsoft sell the consoles at a loss in order to create a huge installed base to sell games for. They make money selling games, but definitely they are bringing way more to the table than apple, that not only don't sell their devices at a loss, but has the highest margins on the hardware business.
30% is high but it’s not just payment processing, it’s payment fraud insulation, download bandwidth, and marketplace amplification (people finding your app without knowing they’re looking for your app).
Apple also drops subscription costs from the second year on to 15% which is coming back to reality. I personally find the subscription model way more sustainable & less user hostile than the paid versioning upgrade model, the grand majority of the industry is also in agreement there. So there’s a lot of bad smells from this developer that they just want to run a shoddy business and not that there’s a big problem with Apple.
this never happens, if you JUST upload your app to the store and think it will take off coz it has good features then good luck.
In reality you have to upload and then pay some app advertisement agency to feed your app to the multiple tech blogs to inorganically promote it.
App store is full of inorganically promoted trash nowadays
I'm not saying apple takes you from 0 to millions of downloads, I'm saying that the marketplace does find you new customers. I buy/subscribe to lots of stuff that I find through the editor callouts or through organic search and Apple has a probably wildly inflated number for how much they drive downloads, but its definitely higher than 0%.
What would be "organic promotion" in your mind? You're right that you can't just throw something out there and expect it to get popular. Either you've gotta pimp it out to tech blogs and forums in the hopes that people notice it or you pay someone else to handle it.
Considering Microsoft cut their percentage take to 5% on the Microsoft Store [1], it shows that Apple is really charging 30% just because developers keep letting them get away with it.
You can claim the MS Store is an outlier because "nobody uses it" (maybe? got numbers? it's obviously not #1, though) but other stores offer lower cuts as well. Epic made a big deal out of their lower cut (~12%) compared to the other stores and developers seem to be paying attention.
The Epic store doesn't need to make money, they have Fortnite for that. A barebones store missing features that even the worst online marketplaces have, is just their attempt to become the new "monopoly" if they can get enough of steam's customer base. Once the platform matures and they stop throwing money at devs and giving away free games, we'll see what changes they make, if any.
Mostly because they're throwing buckets of money at the developers for exclusive deals, not because it's a better product offering in any way, or has a better audience.
If the software I want is on it then I use it, while Mac App Store is an inferior experience to a downloaded app + update framework like Sparkle I've found Microsoft Store far superior to software updaters and installers that usually ship on Windows and it works much faster and smoother than the Mac App Store which is very janky.
Ah, 30% of the ~3 billion Tinder or any successful business is worth it for "band width"? Yeah, no. Not sure how this even became a norm for people to look so blindly. It's absolutely insane to even think about.. we're almost talking about 1 3rd of the entire business value for hosting!?
How would you sell access to the iOS market? If you're just saying 'they have full control so they can set the price', well yeah, but that doesn't automatically make it reasonable to give up most of your control and hand out 30% of your revenue in order to pick up additional customers. It seems like today in 2019 more people are deciding the customers aren't as profitable as they look.
I’m saying they have full control of something buyers want, so they can charge 30%. If their revenue starts going down due to their customers deciding 30% isn’t worth it, then the seller (Apple) will have to consider dropping their price if they want to continue selling.
That is a good point, is creating a new app feasible within the app store? It seems if there are enough new features added, then it would become a new app which would be chargeable as a new purchase (with a discount code for users of the existing app). Presumably, such a milestone release would only happen every 2 - 3 year so there is time to think of an appropriate addition to the title ("Pro," "Premium", "Plus", etc) or very occasionally launch a new product.
> Presumably, such a milestone release would only happen every 2 - 3 year so there is time to think of an appropriate addition to the title ("Pro," "Premium", "Plus", etc) or very occasionally launch a new product.
Worked well enough before every app became a security hole waiting to happen. I'd be happy with paid updates if the trade-off was you stay off the network. No cloud sync, no analytics, just standard local APIs. I mean, software companies used to turn a profit without data mining our souls to Satan.
That is why most "big" software packages these days are either subscription based, or pay-per-update. We've all come to expect apps to get free updates, but it's not a sustainable business model.