but you pay for the distribution / tools / OS etc is a common sentiment I see here. No, the yearly fee should pay for that, and the user for the OS. And anyways, what if I don't want to, why cant I distribute it myself?
> but you pay for the distribution / tools / OS etc is a common sentiment I see here. No, the yearly fee should pay for that, and the user for the OS. And anyways, what if I don't want to, why cant I distribute it myself?
And if you choose to distribute your apps yourself? Apple still requires you to pay the $100 a year Apple tax, otherwise macOS will treat your app as if it is radioactive[1], leaving users to think that your app is either broken or malicious.
Apple has gone one step further, and now macOS on ARM Macs requires signed binaries, and it will not run unsigned ones[1][2].
> Apple has gone one step further, and now macOS on ARM Macs requires signed binaries, and it will not run unsigned ones.
Apple Silicon Macs will not run unsigned binaries, but the binaries can have any signature, so you can just generate one yourself and add it. There's no need for a developer account, or any other external party. And there are no issues with legacy support either, because ARM Mac binaries didn't exist until now (and the requirement does not apply to Intel apps being run via Rosetta).
This really isn't a big deal.
I was initially worried that mandatory code signing would prevent me from hex editing binaries (which is a thing I do sometimes), but I recently learned that codesign can replace a binary's existing signature. So even that shouldn't be a problem.
> They will not run unsigned binaries, but the binaries can have any signature, so you can just generate one yourself and add it. No need for a developer account, or any other external server or party. And there's no issues with legacy support because ARM Mac binaries didn't exist before now (and the requirement does not apply to Intel apps being run via Rosetta).
Self-signed applications are treated as if they're radioactive by macOS, too.
> This really isn't a big deal.
They've been turning the screws slowly over the last two years. It only takes another turn for them to switch off support for self-signed apps for security reasons. Browsers already do this for self-signed certificates.
It's just not something I'm willing to base my purchasing decisions on, nor the decisions about what desktop platforms I target with my applications.
> Self-signed applications are treated as if they're radioactive by macOS, too.
But not if you turn off Gatekeeper! I can understand how this is annoying if you're creating apps for other people, but in terms of my own personal experience with my computer, the only time I think about Gatekeeper is when I'm talking about it on HN. It gets turned off as part of a bash script I run after installing macOS, at which point it's gone for good.
On my list of annoyances with macOS, Gatekeeper is somewhere below the Library folder being hidden by default. I can't say what Apple will decide to do in the future, but I have a very clear line in the sand, and Apple has absolutely not crossed it.
Gatekeeper-by-default is sensible IMO. I've seen how some people interact with these devices, and how easily malware gets on a computer.
As long as the walled garden can be easily circumvented, advanced users can do what they wish. "Able to learn about Gatekeeper and decide if they should turn it off" is probably an okay heuristic for "can tell a fake Flash installer site apart from a real one" or even "knows that Flash is pretty much abandoned, do everything you can to avoid it".
That said, it absolutely changes the incentive structures, and Apple is also doing it for profit. Will they cross the line in the future, with this goal? I expect they will conclude losing the advanced users would be a net loss.
> As long as the walled garden can be easily circumvented, advanced users can do what they wish. "Able to learn about Gatekeeper and decide if they should turn it off" is probably an okay heuristic for "can tell a fake Flash installer site apart from a real one" or even "knows that Flash is pretty much abandoned, do everything you can to avoid it".
That's exactly how I see it! And this mentality continues throughout the chain, too—if you want to actually install unsigned kernel extensions, or inject code into other processes, you need to boot into recovery mode to disable SIP. This is still not at all onerous if you know what you're doing (and, like Gatekeeper, you only need to do it once), but it's definitely a next-level test for next-level privileges.
IMO, the way Apple designed this process is brilliant! And that's why I'm not personally concerned by the boiling water argument, at least not yet—whatever Apple's incentives, the current setup strikes me as the best way to handle things.
All of that said, where I am starting to get annoyed is with the root snapshot stuff in Big Sur. Having to reboot every time I want to edit a system file is a clear progression from "trivial speed bump" into "consistent pain-in-the-ass" territory. If you want to talk about Apple locking down the Mac, I'd start there!
Can't you still go through the song and dance of disabling SIP and authenticated root and then editing the root snapshot? It's incredibly annoying but should still work, right?
Generally things don’t like it very much when I lie to them about what OS they’re running on; I try to set the version just before opening Xcode and fix it then right after I’m done submitting the app so my computer isn’t confused. More than once that has been long enough for Software Update to get confused and offer me a new build :P
The problem is that it makes it clear that the market for third-party software is completely at Apple's pleasure.
If Apple chooses not to issue me a Developer ID, they have effectively removed 95%+ of my market.
If this is because I distributed malware, that's reasonable. But there are a lot of other reasons why Apple might choose to revoke a Developer ID. (Think pressure from the state, for one.)
I also feel like in the spirit of the OP: it’s like telling customers that they can drive without a seatbelt and it will save them time getting in/out of the car.
Most will look at you like you’ve got three heads, and (I suspect) the majority will simply walk away without purchasing.
Your just assuming it’s a pot and want to persuade me to jump into the freezing river instead. But Apple may have no intention to completely lock down the Mac. It may well be just a hot tub, and right now it’s quite comfortable. If it gets too hot, I’ll just get out.
I understand the analogy. You are asserting that it's a pot, but that's just an opinion. Anyway the analogy just doesn't work. Why can't I get out of the Apple ecosystem if it gets too hot, what's stopping me?
"The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive.
The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.
The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly."
In the case of Apple, at some point when they do something you really dislike you might be too invested into the ecosystem and it will be easier to just accept it instead of leaving.
But if you were not on their ecosystem already and were thinking of switching to Apple you would just think "Yeah, I really dislike that new move, I'm not buying into it".
I believe to get the behavior you need a brainless frog - they are shockingly functional due to how much behavior is in bodily reflexes. In that context the brainless frog sort of fits as a metaphor of "cargo culted" or tradition fixed behavior or single strategy. An approach well adapted enough to the expected environment that no thinking is required but is doomed as soon as it has to deal with change.
sorry to be pedantic, but if you believe wikipedia, it is true (just you probably cant reproduce it on your kitchen stove)
--
The New Psychology (1897): "a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at a rate of 0.002°C per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2½ hours without having moved."
> But Apple may have no intention to completely lock down the Mac.
They've been very gradually locking it down for years and show no signs of stopping. Plus they have an obvious financial motivation to lock it down. To give them the benefit of the doubt here is naive to say the least.
There isn't really any - it's just a smaller change than banning unsigned apps completely. Their strategy for forcing people to use the app store is to very gradually make it more and more inconvenient not to. This is one of those gradual changes.
Imagine the next ones:
1. You have to enable an option in settings to allow running self-signed apps.
2. You have to disable SIP to allow running self-signed apps.
3. Apps can only be self-signed via Apple's website.
The second link seems like a massive problem for developers - but the tweet in that link has been deleted. What's actually happening?
If that were true, I couldn't just write some C, Rust, or Go code on my mac, compile it myself, and run the executable file because it's not signed?
There's got to be a way (developer mode?) to disable this, right?
Edit: Found some more info - only binaries that are compiled to run natively on ARM are affected (for now). Still seems like this will introduce some major inconvenience for developers/power-users.
But at some point you'll _only_ be able to run ARM binaries. Rosetta2 will go away. Like how Rosetta went away for non-ARM Mac's, and now they can only run x86 binaries.
I seriously can't overstate how easy it is to sign a binary. You don't need an Apple Developer account, or an internet connection, or anything other than macOS and a working development environment. Just go into the Terminal and type:
> codesign -f -s - [path to binary]
Unless something has changed on Apple Silicon, that's it, you're done, the binary has a signature. It does not have a trusted signature, but you don't need one. I think it was just simpler to write the OS assuming all executables would have a signature.
Do you know whether this applies to everything which executes? If my build scripts create a build script and run it I guess that will be ok, but if my build scripts build a specialised parser (say, from C source) I need to add a step after linking to code sign the generated parser binary before using it? Is that about right?
Have they announced that it’s temporary or is this an assumption? Obviously it goes away eventually, but going away in year 3 of a transition is a different beast than going away in year 10.
My personal thought - there's a hell of a lot more software written for x86 Mac than there ever was for PowerPC Macs. It would make sense to provide the transational layer for a longer amount of time.
That said, Apple has never been shy about aggressive transitions.
Yeah I have the same thought. On the other hand, SaaS and Electron were not really things back then. It's possible that if enough heavy workloads go into the cloud and basic ones just turn into wrapped web apps the actual underlying instruction set becomes irrelevant much faster.
The first link is very interesting. The author talks about the alert in terms of a dark pattern, but the notification directly lies to the user stating "cannot be opened." In fact, the app can be opened by simply command-clicking and selecting open. However Apple lies to users in an effort to prevent them from using these applications. Sounds like a possible tortuous interference claim, or possibly fraud. Surely this "warning" serves to prevent users from using apps where Apple doesn't get a cut, and cases them to use apps that Apple does profit from.
Seems like only binaries compiles to run natively on ARM will require signatures. Still seems like its going to introduce some inconvenience for developers/power-users.
Don't self-signed apps expire after a week? You'd need to distribute a new build every week for people to continue to use your app. That's not a major hassle if you're just using your own code, but if you want to distribute something to other people it quickly becomes very problematic.
I agree - for commercial development its a trivial step. But it's yet another barrier to entry for students and people that just want to hack on their own computer at will.
It's also a potentially dangerous first step towards forcing new versions of MacOS to only run code from verified developers - those that pay Apple. Again, trivial for commericial development, but a major issue for non-commercial use.
I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc.
The danger of saying 'the developer membership should account for that' is that they will actually run the numbers and come back with MUCH higher yearly fees that simply push many small devs out.
Bandwidth for app distribution is cheap. Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app.
99.999% of apps don't get any marketing from Apple at all. Apps get lost in the crowd and the poor search that still struggles with obvious keyword spamming and rip-offs. Actual app ads are charged separately.
Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product.
I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut. It's not about recouping Apple's costs, but increasing Apple's profit.
Pretty much nobody prices software or digital services by looking at how much they cost to provide and adding some margin, which is how this implies Apple should be reasoning. The common model is to price on value. Taking a percentage of revenue is a pretty good proxy for that.
And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer. This is a huge part of why native apps even emerged as a major phenomenon on mobile, against the tide of webification that's swept the desktop over the last 20 years.
A percentage works fine, but you need a competitive market for that percentage.
> And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer.
Plenty of companies will charge 5% or less for low-friction high-trust payment processing, and the auto-install is trivial.
Centralization significantly contributes to reducing friction and increasing user trust. Note that even on platforms that do allow competing app stores, market leaders can command similar percentages (e.g. Steam on Windows). This is why.
If Apple opened up the platform, developers wouldn't be paying 5% to Uncle Bob's Discount App Store instead of 30% to Apple, selling just as many units, and pocketing the difference as profit. They'd quickly discover that users preferred to buy from one or two trusted app stores, and that the better move was to pay whatever they had to pay to be present in those stores.
Traditional pricing, including value-based, only works in an actual competitive market where customers have more than two realistic options. In the case of the app market, it's basically cartel pricing where both providers charge the exact same amount.
Is it? I mean almost everyone is at least somewhat familiar with cloud services, SaaS, DBaaS etc. All of those services have established pricing models and it isn't based on X% of what your business charges.
Apple could easily charge $100 for an app to be reviewed the first time and $50 an update to cover review, and the rest is very marginal. What Apple is doing is rent seeking on other people's work, plain and simple... it isn't even based on the profit margin against that work.
Not every application is a game on a console that will see millions in sales to make up for development costs. Consoles only see dozens of games as competition, the Apple store sees thousands. It's not an Apples to Apples comparison (pun intended).
I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut.
This is exactly where most of the cost of operating the app store comes from. I'm not going to comment on how much of Apple's fees go to paying this, but testing software to release standards is expensive.
I remember 20 years ago, just to get started on a PS2 title, you had to pay sony a crazy dev fee just to get your SLUS code (I remember someone telling me it was about USD$50k). Then all of the devkits cost about USD$20k, and then sony still took a big chunk of your sales price.
How exactly would you like Apple to handle free apps, which still need to be tested and vetted? What if there was a $10k dev charge for each round of testing? How many free apps do you think there would be in the app store? Its true - all of the paid apps are subsidizing the free apps in the app store. If Apple didn't squeeze out other payment processors, every paid app would turn free, they'd use Square or something to sell people in-app purchases instead, and then the whole ecosystem would fall apart.
I guess another question we can ask is what are they testing for? Sony was exacting - there were strict rules about stability and content that had to be met. Your title couldn't stall on a waiting screen for longer than a period of time (I remember having to optimize our start-up on one title to meet this requirement). Even the terminology you used had to be correct - there was a list of acceptable names you could use to refer to the console parts like the controller - like you could call it "PlayStation 2 Dualshock Controller" but not "PS2 Dualshock" and stuff like that.
On the one hand, Apple isn't as exacting, but on the other hand presumably they're testing for other things you wouldn't have to worry about on a PS2 like calling dlopen on forbidden dylibs or sending the addressbook contents to a server. I'm sure that a lot of this is automated, but some of it will require a human to interact with.
The PS2 apparently saw 3800 release titles. This is compared to 957,390 games in the Apple Store. That is a lot more to compete against to recoup development costs.
Personally, I'd be okay if Apple charged a nominal fee ($100) to do an initial review to add to the app store, another fee for updates ($50) and say 5-10% of margins on a sliding scale... that would hinder some indie dev, but not be outrageous and cover some of that review cost, while not squeezing everyone out like a cartel.
But you’re still stuck with a collapsing ecosystem. $100 isn’t even close to the cost of testing an app in the App Store. The App Store doesn’t scale - you need humans inspecting the program and using it and they need a bit of time to do that. For decent testing you’ll pay $100/hr and it’ll take a few hours at least. I don’t know how you’d do an all-in customer-protecting test round of an app for less than $2000. Which means no more free apps. Or, you continue to subsidize free apps with income from non-free apps which means taking a cut of things like in-app purchases.
I’m not saying that 30% is the right number - it’s probably way too high (maybe?) - but if you want free apps, you can’t let anyone use their own payment processors because it’s a revenue hole and you literally won’t have any revenue that doesn’t go down it.
Do you really believe that Apple is doing much more than automated testing of applications submitted, especially with the many thousands of "free" apps that apple isn't getting any revenue for?
> Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app.
And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no?
> Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created.
The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
Yes, 100% agree with you. Even the user experience of the App Store seems deliberately crippled - it sometimes won't even show a specific app you search for by name! The idea seems to be force developers to spend even more money with Apple to promote their app on the App store.
That sort of accounting has never worked. Countless internet companies have gone bankrupt because they thought the marginal cost of supporting customers was zero, multiplied that by their customer base and thought that meant their cost base was zero. Turns out that’s not a convincing argument to use to people you owe money to.
A coupe of years after the App Store launched I’m pretty sure one of Apples execs said it cost over a $billion a year to operate. That will only have gone up since then.
App store absolutely does increase your reach. Find me another way to sell software to 175 countries in local currencies with full local tax compliance.
That's nonsense - your app may not get presented on the front page of the app store but it appears in search results, in similar apps and depending on your category can appear in top 100 lists.
I've published apps that got consistent downloads from a little App Store SEO - far more than any internet SEO and marketing did.
> I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product.
I disagree. As a user, Apple has, over the last decade-plus, earned my trust that the software I decide to run on my device won't...
* brick the device
* stay on the device in any manner if I delete it
* access my private data without my consent
* intrude upon the experience of any other app(s) except by way of easily-managed notifications
... etc.
As a developer, the App Store is how you explicitly inherit that inbuilt trust from users. One can't put a price on that, because there's no fungibility in trust. It must be earned.
Apple can, and does, however put a price on sharing that trust, as well as the ongoing infrastructure, tooling, and processes needed to maintain it: a flat cut of revenue.
Data does stay on iOS devices after deletion via keychain, and if the developer so chooses, they can sync your data at all times on their server to make sure it never, ever, goes away.
There is a rich tradition of extracting private information off of mobile devices. It's one reason why free apps are pushed more than equivalent websites all the time (ex: reddit, imgur) , because the dataset for adtech is far more richer. Some databases and system APIs are under a user alerted permission, but that isn't unique to an app store or review, it's an OS implementation detail. Same with sandboxing apps.
You have little access over running a network filter on iOS devices, and apple has had a history of rejecting VPNs that act as so.
You can still have all that you put on your list, but without an app store.
it does, but via restricting others' reach due to the barrier of the app store.
It's like a lottery ticket - if apple decides to feature your app, you will get a lot of business and have a lot of success (provided your app is actually any good).
I can distribute terabytes of my free apps every month without paying a penny to Apple. And all the time getting support, tools, etc from them.
And Apple has thousands of highly paid employees providing all those services to us, it’s misguided to assert its just the cost of bandwidth and servers.
The $100 is a screaming deal for us iOS developers.
Apple does increase your reach, the vast majority of customers would have no idea where to look for an app if they even had the desire to find one outside of those the big social sites create.
We don't know Apple's investment in the app store, from maintaining it to enhancing it. To blow it off as marginal is disingenuous at best.
I take no issue with app developers creating and selling an app off the app store. I don't think Apple should be able to interfere with that. I do believe they have the right to restrict another app distributed within the app store from being able to sell apps itself. That would be like Steam allowing Epic to install from its app to sell additional games/apps through the Epic store.
It’s funny how, as someone who builds cloud services, I thought your statement was going in the opposite direction until the end. $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting that is more than adequate to run most indie app downloads for a year.
The counterpoint to my claim which you stated is that the App Store also provides reach and marketing, which are quite pricey. I agree that they are expensive services, but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?
It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
> but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?
>It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
The entire Software stack are included in the iPhone purchase price, and as of 2018 they are included in Apple's Services revenue on a per unit cost including but not limited to OS, Siri and Maps.
The software stack argument makes sense in consoles where they are selling at cost or barely break even from a BOM / Hardware perspective. But Apple is making industry leading profit margin on all front. So Apple is double dipping, as Apple like to call it in the case against Qualcomm.
The software stack argument would be fine if there was an alternative. There isn’t. For one reason or another apple says everyone needs to use their stack. When people buy apple devices they’re buying that simplicity and security that comes from apple controlling the whole software stack. If they want that “feature” they can do that but then to charge developers for it when they can’t use an alternative I find ridiculous.
I find the marketing argument silly. All apps pay the fees (well paid apps). Not all apps are promoted (almost by definition). You’re not paying for marketing. You could stretch to argue you’re paying for a slim chance to be promoted, sure. I think that’s a weak argument however given there’s millions of apps and only a couple featured at any time.
And android does have alternative stores. Amazon, F-Droid and even directly side-loading applications. Not everyone takes advantage and most sales go through the Google Play Store, but it still happens. Apple offers none of that.
AFAIK, Google also doesn't charge for dev-tools or access to dev options. I admit, however, it's been several years since I've done any app development for either, and then it was mostly a wrapper around a browser control with some custom integration for use with NFC.
> It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
What if I don't want to use their "software stack"? Frankly, as developer, I'd rather spend my time developing than learning Apple specific ecosystem. Heck, React Native and Flutter do me just fine. Develop once and run everywhere.
In the end what does that $99/year license get me? A fancy certificate to publish on their only app store?
Because Apple requires them to. If I wanted to ship a PWA in a Firefox-based shell using no iOS-specific APIs other than required (rasterize using OpenGL ES + Skia, Mozilla's JS interpreter, etc) they wouldn't let me because I'm required to use their browser and JS runtime, among other things. And they've deprecated OpenGL, so now you have to use their custom graphics API too.
I pay more for iPhones partially because the ecosystem is not yet fully crapped up with C++ programs with bad UIs, and I think Apple would argue this point too. You’re fully allowed to draw your UI with Metal though, and MoltenVK supports iOS. Many iOS games use almost no platform UI components.
Sure, but the argument becomes circular, doesn't it? They deserve X% because you use their APIs, and they force you to use their APIs. Congratulations? If it's so expensive to develop/maintain those APIs that they can't afford to part with them for less than 30%+cost of hardware, maybe they shouldn't require you to use them?
React Native and Flutter are lowest common denominator frameworks that make for lousy apps. My experience was so bad that I no longer even respond to recruiters for companies using React Native.
Apple should charge non-native apps a large premium to be on the store. They degrade every users experience.
> It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
You paid for that already when you bought the Mac that's mandatory for developing on iOS.
People pay for the simplicity and (arguable) security of apple devices that comes with a tightly controlled software stack. They buy the device with the expectation that 3rd party software will be made for it that they can use. Apple then says you need my software stack to develop that 3rd party software.
> they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using.
Without giving developers a choice to use a different software stack this doesn't mean much. You first have to buy an expensive Mac in order to use the free iOS development tools.
They run stories every single day including about indie developers.
About the $100 - yeah getting some droplets is not a cost. Maintaining them. Scaling them. Writing say, a sync solution, or even data storage solution, THAT is the cost and goes well beyond $100 of course.
I feel like the $100 is just supposed to be a token amount to provide a speed bump for tire-kickers, spammers, etc.
If they were serious about it as a revenue stream, it would make sense to go with something more like the UE4 model, where it's free up until the point where you're a big fish, and then a more aggressive fixed fee kicks in.
I'm not sure that most of us have issue with the $100 cost of entry... even if it were $100 for each app for store submission and a lesser fee for updates to offset the review costs even. The issue comes down to if you spend even a modest amount of time/money on development of something to jump into a vast sea of competition, where someone searching for the name of your app specifically cannot find you and to add insult to injury takes 30% if your gross before you're even able to recoup costs and there's no way to work around their distribution or payment models.
Take Netflix for example, which doesn't run on Apple's distribution network... Should Apple have to pay for part of the deployment of all the assets and feeds? They don't... the margins are already thin and Apple frankly doesn't deserve 30% of that recurring revenue.
I think I agree with you, but it's interesting because you're actually making two points which are kind of the opposite of each other— on the one hand arguing that it's hard to pay the 30% before costs are recouped, but then also arguing that it's unfair to pay the 30% in perpetuity long after Apple's fixed costs (review, etc) have been recouped.
I think if anything this kind of thing makes the case for explicitly having multiple tracks— maybe an enterprise one where you pay a 5-7 figure fixed annual fee (for support, timely review, policing of the store for phishing/knockoff apps that target your own, ensuring a direct hit for explicit searches) and then either a single-digit percentage of revenue or for free "portal" apps, some other way that Apple is compensated for user engagement. And then a totally separate indie track where all the revenue is yours up to X, after which some kind of sliding scale kicks in.
In reality, there are almost certainly enterprise deals going on behind the scenes (or at least mostly behind the scenes, cough Epic) and the details of those are almost certainly very proprietary, due to how the negotiations would occur. But having at least one option for which the details are public would be nice.
The purpose is gatekeeping, and setting a minimum basis of quality. If the annual fee was $0/year developers would be worse off due to the flood of low-quality applications.
This is exactly what happened on Steam when the platform was opened to anything for a $100 submission fee - quality tanked and revenues even for established Indie developer have declined significantly.
I was doing some back of the napkin math earlier today to figure out just how much bandwidth Fortnite on the App Store has done over it's lifetime.
Assuming 116 million ios users with a 2.5 to 5gb depending on the device. That's 580 petabytes just for the initial download, not to mention updates probably push it into the low single digit exabytes range.
~445k in s3 costs according to aws calc, using a naive "there is 1 object in the bucket, it's been fetched 116 million times, and that used 580PB of fetch bandwidth."
>I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc.
Then the carrot the fee unlocks in terms of access to these services should speak for itself, without the stick of having no other choice.
Are we assuming that after more than 10 years of App Store, Apple didn't run the numbers and/or is taking a bad deal ignoring its bottomline for some reason?
Because Apple decided that only software they approve of can be used on machines they sell unless the user explicitly allows software Apple hasn't accepted (via ctrl-click). On iOS, Apple decided that users can't allow untrusted software at all. Users still end up paying $400-$1400 for phones that run this software, so the 'free market' has decided that users want a software model like this (otherwise Android would be an even bigger player in the US than it is now).
People still paid $1400 for PCs in 1999, nothing stopped US govt from suing Microsoft for bundling IE - let alone not allowing users to run "unapproved" software.
In US phone market, they do and this isn't just about monopoly per-say but what it means to "own" a computing device if you can only run manufacturer approved applications on it.
I can buy something else. In fact I did. The problem is that if you are making a product which will be consumed from a phone you have to support iPhone users and do everything Apple wants you to do.
To solidify this point, the majority of phones in the US run on iOS. iOS has 52.4% of the mobile operating system market on phones[1].
If you're selling an app, it's even more important to support iOS users because the App Store is responsible for three times as much revenue as the Play Store[2].
Yeah, 52% means that Android is nearly matched marketshare wise. The mobile situation is nothing like Windows’s share when Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations: the desktop market share of windows is still like 70%, 20 years ago it was like 97%.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
You quoted selectively. It goes on:
> Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages.
In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power
It is clear that A) Apple is not a monopoly and B) the market is very competitive
But Appoogle together clearly form a duopoly that does have monopoly power over the market. And they both charge 30% to App devs for the privilege of selling Apps on their respective platforms: coincidence or price collusion? Well it certainly looks like collusion from where I'm sitting.
(Yes, yes: Apple has just cut the rate for small devs. The big sellers still have to pay 30% though.)
Not sure if you're trolling, but that's not a rational option for most.
I've described elsewhere in thread why switching is not an option for me; Apple has slowly trapped me in their ecosystem of Apple TV, Apple Watch, Macbook, Homepod, my BMW which will only talk to an iOS device, iMessage, HomeKit
They don't provide any external APIs to interact with these products so other platforms/systems could make such a switch less painful.
I feel your pain: Apple slowly lured you into spending thousands of dollars on high-quality products which work smoothly together, and then they went and changed the EULA on you and now you can't install non-App Store software on it!
Only that didn't happen, of course: the rules have always been the rules, you just don't like them.
Which is fine, actually, complain all you want. But the victim act is hilarious. "My luxury car will only talk to an iPhone! I should sue!"
I personally switched to Apple products because they more or less Just Worked and they prevented me from fiddling with them: the big issue with Android phones for me was that, since I would always root and mod them, they’d always fail at inopportune times: by making this sort of tinkering not an option, Apple phones are just more reliable for me (and, sure, this is partly my fault but, from my perspective, the locked-down status of iDevices is a feature that lets me treat them like appliances)
from a European point of view, the market belongs to the people, not Apple and thus they must play by the rules the State set, for and on the behalf of the people.
And quite literally a choice for a browser, because Apple mandates that all browsers on the App Store use Safari on the backend, which means that Chrome and Firefox are just skins over Safari on iOS.
This would not be huge, because iOS devices don't stop getting updates for 6-8 years, by which time it is very unlikely that third parties would bother making a special browser app just for that unprofitable 0.1% slice of the market.
But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
It’s not like the user doesn’t know what they are buying. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have strong competitors. It’s not like the app developers are like, “Oh, 30%?! I didn’t know!”
People want the product that Apple is making. They buy it knowingly and willingly in droves.
Look at the M1, the culmination of decades of hard R&D, beating Intel at their own game.
You want to tell this company — which is absolutely killing it and creating absolutely tremendous value for consumers the world over — you want to tell them how their own device should work?!
Explain to me why the free market has not spoken, and spoken clearly in favor of the products that Apple has brought to market for their customers. Why in the world should the US Government say that what this truly amazing company should do in their own code and product roadmap.
Honestly, it’s a travesty in the making. What Apple has accomplished — coming back from the brink — is one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism.
Why, why in the world should the US Government — a true paragon of incompetence — dictate terms on how they should run their lawful, competitive business.
>> But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
No. Its MY phone from the moment I bought it. If I want to change some aspect of how it works that's up to me.
The phone doesn’t magically just work the way you want it to, and the functionality you personally desire doesn’t come without trade-offs and consequences to Apple, to other developers, or to other users.
You’re saying that because you bought a single iPhone that Apple now essentially reports to you. That YOU get to decide how Apple spends millions of dollars in its R&D, and that you get to decide how their software should function.
What makes you their master just because you freely chose to buy a single unit of a device from them? A device that, by the way, has sold billions of units.
It would actually require a massive investment by Apple to actually support all of those things as tested, enabled, documented, secured, stable, and fully supported (by the help-desk) features of their product.
This is a little harder to deal with because often its not obvious what repair issues you will have in the future or what will stuff up and be difficult to replace. The restrictions on ios are obvious and you would notice them within your 2 week return period.
>But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
Maybe? But then they're not selling it, they're leasing it, and they need to say that.
Doesn't really matter: if you are making a phone app or service (especially one that has any sort of network effect), you need to support both ecosystem which means you must submit to Apple's ukases.
That player also has a history of tracking, fingerprinting and privacy violations that not everyone is comfortable with, especially relating to a device that has as much control over you as a smartphone.
it is not like these 2 products were identical except for sideloading.
They don't have the same hardware, Apple has an unlimited ad budget, if you want to chat with somebody using iMessages, you are pretty much limited to iOS, you can't transfer app purchases between platforms, etc
If you go into subscription settings on iOS devices, they show a "try out apple music" ad -- you think this position is available to Spotify/others? They don't pay 30% on top of sales to boot.
Same thing with Google, they cross promote their own new properties everywhere in Gmail (left pane) and Google.com but no one else has access to those locations, they can destroy thousands of small business through this practice.
Honestly it is almost funny how Google has been mostly unable to successfully launch new products while they have the capacity to promote them to virtually all of the global north.
In particular with Play Music .. not going to complain, I don't think that this market needs another FAANG product but wow, failing to promote that service is one epic blunder.
Exactly! And it's a bad kind of duopoly. It's not like I'm customer and I only have two choices. Here, I only two choices and I pretty much to use them both since if I drop one I loose a lot of potential customers.
Just because the people are generally happy with 2 options? If enough people cared about extra app stores, someone would create an alternative as there would be money to make.
and they did, Cydia was a thing when people could jailbreak iPhones. And I definitely remember some of my less tech savvy friends using non-Apple-approved tweaks back in 3GS/4/4S days.
Sorry, I don't use a mac -- could you clarify about ctrl-click to accept? Can you bypass the approved developer check box in system preferences with a right click on the `.app` folder?
Effectively - if you don't have "only app store" selected in gatekeeper, you can bypass the 'unidentified developer' option as well as the message when an app isn't notarized.
However please note that they publish the whole development toolsuite needed for free without obligation. This was not the standard behavior of commercials OS in the 1990's. (not sure who pulled this first)
So the 100$ annual fee is more like a contribution to be recognized as a professional developer with extended support and services. Heck if you work in a team you don't even need one account per developer.
This somehow guarantees that each account is linked to an identifiable real world entity and that bad actors won't massively create fake account for free to muddy the water around illicit activities.
So by imposing a relatively modest fee they improve both traceability and avoid spamming behavior. This sound like a sensible design.
PS: I'm amazed by how on the same thread people can complain that the 1 million $ threshold for rebate is cruelly low AND that a 100$ entry fee is an unbearable tax. Internet trolling at it's finest!
That's not my point. The point is there is no technical reason for requiring a Mac for, say, iOS development. I get that they don't want to straight-up port XCode to Windows or Linux, but nowadays you could run it as a cloud service. The price of admission for something like that would certainly be less than keeping up with Mac hardware. They don't do it because it runs counter to their business model.
The yearly fee is NOT to pay for any costs; the fee is a tactic to keep low-effort spammy app developers out, and therefore to reduce the load on the review team. The $99 fee does not cover the costs and expenses that Apple does and has done for you as an app developer. Dropping it would not affect their revenue directly, but it would open up the floodgates of random app submissions.
One could argue that the Mac hardware itself that you need to develop iOS apps is a similar barrier to entry though.
99$ could be a fees to show "true effort" for some developers in the world, while for others it could a monthly salary.
Also how can an app that has 500M downloads cost more to review than an app that has 500 downloads (considering both are paid apps and Apple charges 30% per download)?
It doesn't matter what the theoretical intent of the fee is. (Which would be impossible to prove either way.) They make a billion dollars from those fees.
The "yearly fee" could pay for it, it'd just be several billion per year. Their existing business model is the one that's best for Apple, users, and small developers.
So the developer of a free app used by 100 people should pay the same fee for app store distribution as the developer of a $10 app used by 50m people all over the world?
It's not just Apple, I think the fight shouldn't be about just fee but allowing 3rd party stores and applications that don't have an approval stamp from Apple.
Imagine, if your Tesla refused to move if you didn't use Tesla approved tires which cost 30% more because Tesla charges the tire manufacturer 30% for approving them?
> Imagine, if your Tesla refused to move if you didn't use Tesla approved tires which cost 30% more because Tesla charges the tire manufacturer 30% for approving them?
Fine by me. Their business what they charge and how their product is designed, not mine.
Not for iOS realistically speaking. You have to switch to Android, your only other choice, and suddenly all your other Apple devices don't really work that well.
Yes realistically speaking. Of course if you switch to a competitor things aren’t going to integrate as well. Perhaps you can immerse yourself in that ecosystem.
My argument is for interoperability and better 3rd party access to APIs within the OS.
My argument is not that Android doesn't function as well, I quite liked it infact but all my other apple devices basically lost half their functionality without an iPhone and Apple won't give access to 3rd party developers or itself make those apps for Android.
Apple won't even let 3rd party apps integrate with the system like their own do - which is why I wanted to shift away from an iPhone in the first place. Not because I hate or like Android, but because I can replace whatever parts of Google I don't like
It's actually a completely justified intrusion into the market.
To answer questions posed by others since I'm apparently posting too fast:
The reasons governments should intervene are well-elaborated in the blog post under discussion.
Governments worldwide already have plenty of control over what terms corporations can sell their wares to people on. For example, in Europe you must offer at least two years of warranty.
Corporations are government-granted legal fictions, so a government is free to impose whatever constraints it wants on corporations. In return, corporations get plenty of benefits like the ability to declare bankruptcy and not have it hit the pocketbooks of its executives. I would be fine with a regime where if a corporation doesn't abide by the rules, its executives become personally liable for debts, for example.
It's the truth. Unilateral control is the reality, and I'm interested in exploring how to harness it to improve the lot of humanity.
For example, I think Stripe should be able to compete with Apple to be a payment provider on Apple's platform.
As I said, I would be a fine with a world where if Tim Cook doesn't want to play by the government's rules, he is jointly and severally liable for Apple's debts. There are real benefits that come with being a corporation. There need to be responbilities to society as well.
I realize that the federal government /can/ do things, it's whether they/it /should/ do them.
"I want them to" and "It's been done before" don't fly. These are contracts between willing participants, none of which have been broken. The federal government would be overstepping proper bounds to interfere.
> Unilateral control is the reality
Yes. Which is why we should minimize the regulation coming out at the federal level.
> There need to be responbilities to society as well.
They owe you nothing. They provide a product, you either buy it or you don't.
You can distribute an iOS app yourself. Give the user the source code. Then then give them instructions on how to build the app with xCode and deploy it to their iOS device.
You can use the App Store effectively for free, just do what Amazon Kindle or Netflix does and have a separate website, without linking to it from the app.
This is completely about the kind of splurge in app purchases that are terrible for consumers.
First, Epic is hardly a no name developer. But secondly a great deal of apps work like this both big and small. The limitation is you can’t make purchases though an app by say asking for credit card numbers or put purchase links to your website from the app.
There are well known and detailed App Store rules about this stuff, if you want details just look it up. For example all those 2 factor authentication app fits this model where it’s meaningless to download the app without a subscription.
Yeah because regular no-name developers like Epic can't read the damn rules. It's quite simple. If you don't want to get booted off the app store then follow the rules. The rules are very easy to follow.
If you offer a multi platform "content" app on iOS then users should always have the option to create a subscription account directly on their iOS device. It's perfectly fine to create an account on a different platform and use it in the iOS app but this should neither be required, nor be directly advertised in the app.
Seriously, don't make random stuff up. Amazon and Netflix don't receive preferential treatment. If you want to make your own streaming app on iOS you can do that today as long as you follow the rules.
Sigh. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to. You should go write an app for something else.
You can’t distribute it yourself for precisely the same reason you can’t distribute a game to PS5 yourself, or for reasons you could never distribute apps to blackberry or some other device.
As for the yearly fee covering costs, sure, you have a point. But remember, Apple could arbitrarily increase prices on that fee instead. Apple could charge directly for the tools. They could just tack on the 15% or 30% for the annual developer license for apps that some money-making m, non-free angel to them. We’d end up in the same argument.
An app is not just a bunch of bits strung together. An app needs to have a commitment of support behind it.
Part of “supporting” an app is using only the languages, compilers, apis, payment processors and distribution systems authorized by the manufacturer.
And please don’t bring up PC software. PC app marketplace is a shitshow. Platforms like steam have made it more reliable recently. But they’re still not tightly integrated into the OS as they ought to be.
If you really want users to control the entirety of the digital device then Linux & it’s partners are truly a worthwhile competitor. The fact that Apple’s device marketshare is larger just implies that the a significant chunk of human society (not skewed towards engineers or people in tech) agrees with Apple’s policy.
