> One bill opposed by the App Association is the Open App Markets Act, which aimed to help app developers use alternative in-app payment systems and avoid Apple's standard cuts of 15 to 30 percent.
The cut is a platform fee, and collecting it via the in-app payment system is mechanism, not policy.
The core issue is Apple's rate: although it is usually comparable to rates on other game platforms (eShop, Google Play, Steam...), (some) game and app developers want it reduced so that they receive a higher percentage of an app's retail price.
The largely unfounded expectation that some developers seem to have is that changing IAP payment methods will cause Apple's platform fee to drop to zero, rather than causing Apple to simply collect it by other means.
Edit: for some reason people are responding to me with complaints about Apple's policies and downvoting me because they don't like Apple's platform fees. I'm trying to shed some light on what is actually going on: a dispute over platform fee rates. This is something that much of the media coverage doesn't seem to be getting right.
The "core problem" isn't Apple's rate - they're free to charge whatever they want. The real issue is that the App Store has no competition, so Apple could charge 90% and developers would have no choice but to abide or abandon the platform.
The evidence on the Android side doesn't seem to support this line of reasoning. There are multiple app stores on Android (including Amazon's), and sideloading is permitted, yet there is still a dispute over the platform fee rate that Google is charging for Google Play.
At the end of the day, it's a dispute over money, and specifically the platform commission rate: developers want a bigger cut of the retail app price on Google Play.
While Android is more open than iOS in that alternative app sources are allowed, it's still far from a level playing field. The Play Store has special privileges that third-party ones don't, such as being able to automatically update apps, rather than forcing the user to hit "install" for each individual app to be updated.
Your reasoning is faulty. There is no Android platform fee for app developers. In fact, alternative Android stores pay no fees at all. The Play Store has fees, and there's a dispute about them, but that doesn't make it analogous to the situation on iOS, which really has an iOS platform fee because it's impossible to install native code on the device you ostensibly own without Apple's ongoing permission.
... with a $700+ Mac purchased from Apple, and usually a $99/yr subscription purchased from Apple, plus a network connection to Apple's servers to obtain code signing permission, which must be periodically refreshed or your code will stop running, to ensure you are never independent of Apple's ongoing approval.
I'm pretty sure you can sideload without an Apple developer account($99) but you need to reinstall the app every 7 days and you can only have 3 installed at once. The processing on refreshing the install and swapping between more than 3 apps can be automated by using desktop software like AltStore.
Ha, was that a stealth edit? Fine, I’ll yield. You can have this win.
But really side loading is not as difficult as you’re making it out to be. The biggest hurdle for most is access to Mac, but renting a cloud instance an option too.
It's not about difficulty, like the number of mouse clicks or something. It's about who has ultimate control over your device. And with control comes the ability to extract rent.
Then you would agree it’s fair to rephrase your original post as
“It’s quite possible to install native code on the device you ostensibly own unless you want ultimate device control”?
Your phrasing doesn't make sense. Whether you "want" ultimate device control or not is irrelevant because you can't have it. The relevant thing is that Apple retains ultimate control, you never have it, and Apple uses that control to extract rent. My original phrasing is correct and doesn't need to be changed.
BTW I forgot to mention that the "Chromium for iOS" that you linked to is not a "non-Safari browser". It is the same Safari-wrapper version of Chromium that you can already get from the App Store. The "popular belief" is correct. There is currently no port of any alternative browser engine for iOS. Why would anyone bother to maintain an iOS port for software that can't be practically distributed?
No the popular belief is not correct. Perhaps the link the wrong, but you can mmap W^X and roll your own JIT, which is the only syscall preventing non-safari browsers.
> Why would anyone bother to maintain an iOS port for software that can't be practically distributed?
There is very little difference between a Mac and iOS app these days, and could be practically none at all if engineered correctly.
LOL you think it would be easy to just recompile Blink/V8 for iOS and get a browser you could actually use day-to-day? How many web browsers have you worked on? I have done several years of work on both Chromium and WebKit and I'm here to tell you that an iOS port of Blink and V8 good enough to actually use as a replacement for WebKit on iOS is going to require a huge coordinated effort of a large number of engineers, with a large ongoing maintenance cost afterward. It would probably require a ton of private APIs other than mmap W^X, too.
You're not going to be able to do it in your spare time. You probably wouldn't even be able to get a crippled and buggy version to build at all by yourself. Google's not going to invest in it for no reason while Apple expressly prohibits distribution. The only way there will ever be an alternative browser engine ported to iOS is if the EU actually follows through with forcing Apple to allow alternative browser engines on their App Store and/or alternative app stores, and Apple subsequently loses all of their inevitable appeals in court. Only then would Google (or Mozilla) be able to justify the investment.
... except even just in that page there's at least one important feature listed as not supported on iOS (pointer compression) and I'm willing to bet that there are many other issues you'd need to fix before you could call a fully functional V8 iOS JIT port "done". And V8 is only one of dozens of components in the whole browser engine. You are vastly underestimating the complexity of these projects.
Are you sure my first link I originally posted wasn’t a full rendering engine? I know I had read it was included a few years ago. Looks like a custom renderer to me:
I am absolutely certain. Chromium on iOS wraps WebKit and adds some features mentioned in the comments in that file, such as translation. But it's still just a wrapper and the rendering engine is still WebKit, not Blink. If you don't believe me, here is the implementation of CWVWebView where it creates the underlying WKWebView: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ios...
>Please refer to the Apple documentation on how to get a code signing identity and certificates. You can check that you have a code signing identity correctly installed by running the following command.
It has a secure chain of trust in the sense that the machine is secured against user control. Face, meet boot.
The arguments on Android are sometimes even simpler to make (which I appreciate might not be intuitive at all), as there is a space where there SHOULD be competition and clearly CAN BE competition and yet there are arguments being made that Google is going out of their way to stifle this competition regardless, by such techniques as limiting the functionality of third-party markets (a big one was preventing them from supporting automatic upgrades), or their included anti-virus software flagging alternative markets (which reminds me that I haven't caught up on the Epic lawsuit against Google recently, and really really should).
You'll find me ranting about making a non-system permission for automatic updates on Android for years on this forum. Now it's there, and I credit Epic.
But like Windows having IE/Edge installed by default (& being sued for it), Google Play is the default store for Android, & 95% of public doesn't know otherwise.
To be fair (pedantic? devil's advocate?) Samsung ships all their phones with the Samsung store as well. I suspect there's a few other bit names that do similar. A great many Android users have alternative stores, some some probably use them without knowing the difference as well.
To be honest, I doubt many of them care, given all they want is apps from a trusted source, and most people probably trust Samsung if they are buying Samsung phones with specialized Android builds made by Samsung, if they even know the difference.
My comment doesn't detract from that demand. What I'm pointing out is that Apple will suffer from this at a much larger scale, therefore it makes sense that they will fight tooth-and-nail to stop it.
The 'platform fee' shpiel is a distraction from the real problem: iOS must allow alternative storefronts if it wants to survive long-term antitrust scrutiny. There is no other logical outcome.
That may indeed be true. However, the core dispute over
App Store fees will likely remain, irrespective of additional app stores or sideloading, just as it has on Google Play.
Solving the single app store antitrust issue doesn't solve the platform fee dispute.
it does, because those who don't want to pay the platform fee would move off to the other store-front (and not use any services provided by the apple appstore).
Amazon threw billions at creating an alternate storefront for Android devices. If they cannot achieve it, then who could? Maybe Samsung, and then it's a triopoly where which store still depends on who sells your phone.
This is the opposite of my recollection. I thought Samsung just started bundling their own app store, and was referencing that it may yet succeed. Maybe this is attempt 2?
Amazon tried selling phones with their own app store built in, but Fire Phones never took off for whatever reason.
Your point of view here will depend somewhat on your level of success.
In the current model, the barrier to entry is pretty low. $99 gets you xcode, plus you need done hardware.
Once you've made something you need to reach a market. A good market place (like a regular super market) brings together suppliers and customers. That market has costs.
One model for costs is to charge each app the same amount. Say, for example $5000 per app submission. Lots of successful suppliers would like this model because it raises the bar for completion, and means they pay less money.
Another model is free-to-enter, but takes a cut of the sales. Successful products end up paying much much more than stuff no-one wants.
Overall I think I prefer the second model. Wildly successful apps, and developers, are basically funding an equal-access marketplace.
Now, of course there are winners and losers. From published numbers its clear most apps make 0,for some definition of 0. Every developer thinks their app is special, but most are, well, not.
Good marketing helps, buzz in the tech-press, visibility on forums, shows and events, and do on. Some do nothing, waiting for their big apple-lottery break of being "promoted in the app-store".
Developers risen in a world of cost-free-everything believe that they are the sole value-add in the path from hardware to consumer. Apple should provide this appstore connection to the developer free of charge. Of course developers think this, and they're welcome to think this, but it doesn't mean Apple has to do it this way.
Developers have choices. They can choose to develop for Android instead. They can choose to use the Google store, or a different store, or make their own store.
If you develop for iOS you know the rules. If you see value in that market (and you like the low barrier to entry) then go for it. If you make money then pay your 30%. If you don't (and the odds are you wont) then delight in the money you saved by there not being an entrance fee.
But don't sign up for the competition, win the game, _then_ complain the prize money is too low.
You may like Apple, you may not. But its your choice to join their game, or not. There's no bait-and-switch here, the rules are clear and well understood. You either accept their position of strength, their ability to crush you on a whim, their ability to arbtitarily create winners and losers, their ability to earn royalties on your code (on their platform) or you don't.
> In the current model, the barrier to entry is pretty low. $99 gets you xcode, plus you need done hardware.
Hundreds of dollars in apple hardware and software compared to zero dollars for MSVC community, zero dollars for android developer studio, zero dollars for linux toolchain or whatever.
>Once you've made something you need to reach a market. A good market place (like a regular super market) brings together suppliers and customers. That market has costs.
The cost of hosting the app store is essentially the cost of hosting a web service that lets you download and buy programs. The developers could easily host their own app store as a web page if iOS just facilitated running programs downloaded from the internet or loaded externally. Apple has built themselves a dam upstream and is charging everyone downstream for water-rights-as-a-service.
>One model for costs is to charge each app the same amount. Say, for example $5000 per app submission. Lots of successful suppliers would like this model because it raises the bar for completion, and means they pay less money.
>Another model is free-to-enter, but takes a cut of the sales. Successful products end up paying much much more than stuff no-one wants.
The only fair model here is the one where 100% of apple's income comes from hardware sales alone. That is the only situation where you don't set up the user to be exploited by erecting these walls around what they can and cannot run on their own hardware.
> If you develop for iOS you know the rules.
They know the rules, and they know the rules are bullshit. What do you want them to do, throw their hands in the air and say "welp, them's the rules, I guess we can should never try to use our leverage or negotiate better rules cause that's just how it is I guess."
> Hundreds of dollars in apple hardware and software compared to zero dollars for MSVC community, zero dollars for android developer studio, zero dollars for linux toolchain or whatever
Apple’s software is free, and you need more than zero dollars for the hardware to run Android Developer Studio.
Also, on both platforms you may need a few (or more than a few) phones and tablets for testing (you may be able to test on a simulator, but that doesn’t guarantee things work on the real hardware, doesn’t give you a good idea about performance, and certainly is not a good option for apps that use on-board sensors such as accelerometers)
In the end, I think the difference in cost is between the cost of a PC and that of a Mac, so ballpark $500 in both cases, the phones to test on may cost more.
>The only fair model here is the one where 100% of apple's income comes from hardware sales alone. That is the only situation where you don't set up the user to be exploited by erecting these walls around what they can and cannot run on their own hardware.
And that is what we call the slippery slope.
Apple has created a successful product,
therefore developers want to make money from it,
therefore apple cannot charge a fee for access,
therefore apple cannot charge for developer tools,
therefore apple cannot charge for hardware (lest it makes the developers market smaller than it could be if phones were free)
>>What do you want them to do, throw their hands in the air and say "welp, them's the rules, I guess we can should never try to use our leverage or negotiate better rules cause that's just how it is I guess."
They can choose not to play. If Apple is not offering any value for their 30% then simply don't publish on IOS.
If all the developers stop developing for IOS then the rules would change.
Of course small developers have no power because individually they have no power, and they are not willing to pool that power collectively (ie unionize).
They're trying to get the govt to act as a collective bargainer on their behalf. Which is likely to fail,because Apple is better at govt than they are.
So yeah, I expect them to say "I can make more money elsewhere, so I'm leaving ios - the fact they don't suggests apple is adding plenty of value worthy of their 30%
But from what I hear of it Android is a mess, rife with malware, and a blatant rip-off of the success of iPhone and iOS. The sideloading support while convenient also opens up opportunities for abusive apps like spyware that unethical people use to track their household members without permission. I would not hold any of that up as a model.
Have you actually used it? Android with free software stores like F-Droid is pretty comfy. It's community-curated, so none of the garbage asset-flips that Apple loves to greenlight makes it onto the platform. It's also entirely transparent with regards to who gets removed, and doesn't allow you to use harmful proprietary software that infringes your personal liberty as a user. There are no ads when you search for things, and malware is removed when the community spots it, rather than when Apple decides to remove it.
Remind me of how Apple is doing a better job here, again?
The platform fee for the IBM PC is zero. The platform fee for notorious quasi-monopolist Microsoft Windows is still zero. That is the standard to which all other platforms should be held.
There is talk about the cost of designing and manufacturing the phone, which is irrelevant, especially in a world where users frequently buy new phones every two years. That cost should be borne by the purchaser of the phone.
Now, the ongoing costs of running payment systems and app stores are more significant, and I think it's reasonable to argue that they cannot be zero, but we should have a go at determining them in the market.
> The platform fee for notorious quasi-monopolist Microsoft Windows is still zero.
While true, paid-for apps from the MS store - the option that should be recommended to laypeople, instead of the dodgy websites that have download button styled ads - charge a registration fee [0] and Microsoft takes a cut of 5 - 30% [1]
The Windows app store is .. extremely poorly used. I couldn't find any stats with a brief search, but it's not popular with either users or developers. And of course the existence of a free disintermediated alternative helps this.
Game console systems are insanely closed and locked down platforms. I consider anything console manufacturers do to be an antipattern, so the fact that their fees are comparable to Apple's only shows that Apple needs to loosen the purse strings a little.
> I consider anything console manufacturers do to be an antipattern
Perhaps. On the other hand, Nintendo is a beloved company and the Switch is an incredibly successful system with fantastic games. So the walled garden seems to have worked out reasonably well.
I'm not sure why you're responding to my parent comment though, as it was descriptive and not prescriptive.
Apple is not the exclusive source of podcasts or ebooks on iOS or otherwise; they provide an optional store. Especially for podcasts their store is a new, optional feature and it is perfectly possible to offer your own store and your own authenticated podcasts and integrate them into Apples podcasts app. You can also offer them in Apples store and have them deal with payments and distribution and accept that they charge a 30% commission. They don’t even require exclusivity, you can both offer your own store and Apples store at the same time, whichever your customers find more convenient.
I think you're misunderstanding the GP. They're talking about services provided entirely by other people, e.g. buying ebooks from Amazon. In that light, here are the responses to your bullets:
- the hardware I already paid for
- this should be included in the price of the hardware (and certainly is in the case of Apple)
- I don't use the Books app, I use the Amazon Kindle app
- I never listened to a podcast on my iPod
- I don't use the Podcasts app, I use the Spotify app
So in the case of Amazon/Spotify, what value is Apple delivering beyond paying for download bandwidth in order for me to download the app (which is like, $0.000001 of bw costs)?
You can choose between two royalty options for each of your eBooks: the 35% royalty option and the 70% royalty option.
-If you select the 35% royalty option, your royalty will be 35% of your list price without VAT for each unit sold.
-If you select the 70% royalty option, your royalty will be 70% of your list price without VAT, less delivery costs (average delivery costs are $0.06 per unit sold, and vary by file size), for each eligible book sold to customers in the 70% territories, and 35% of the list price without VAT for each unit sold to customers residing outside the 70% territories.
Alt reason why "Apple continues to support old hardware":
If some people found out that they NEED to get a new phone every 2 years that costs $1,000, then they might look to another cell phone manufacturer.
Even granting that not everyone uses every app, Apple made and continues to maintain, improve, update, and support the thriving ecosystem (including many free apps) in which Amazon and Spotify can find the best audience.
Including, with help from fees charged to developers and the 30% revenue cut, funding development of all the tools and platforms that make it all possible.
Amazon and Spotify (and their customers) would not do as well without this ecosystem and its tools, devices, and platforms.
I think the value of the ecosystem including all the aspects mentioned is huge. Device sales alone would not ever come close to paying for it all, if you want devices to be in reach of normal people and you don’t want to build your business off of intrusive personalized advertising.
This. If 'the algorithm' decides not to promote your app, you should have to option to pay less. Unfortunately, there has yet to be good business incentives for a change like this. Hence it feels very much like a winner take all market.
Isn’t this part of the problem? I enjoy when things are able to change in life based on effort, or choice, not the ease of sedation or being pacified from convenience.
They did. They hosted the files that people downloaded when they purchased the ebook or podcast and they created the mechanism by which people can find it, rate it, and pay for it.
I feel an unintended fallout of an eventual mandate to allow 3rd party stores on iOS would be Apple charging a license for the frameworks and tooling they provide. Something like, "Want to use CoreML? Well, each API call will cost you. Or would you rather take our 30% flat rate?"
I’m sure there would be piles of APIs supplied by other manufacturers that devs wold flock to. That doesn’t mean that they’d be any good. Part of what Apple did is make its software very performant for the hardware. They want the experience to be good for the user, and the Dev might not care that their app chews through the battery. I doubt that apple try to split their dev base like this.
I am just being pedantic, but 30% is the opposite of what a flat rate is.
CoreML being a phone feature, then restricting it behind a paywall sounds like something customers would sue apple for. CoreML is already bundled in the price you pay when you purchase an iPhone. It will only work as a cloud service.
As I understand it, 30% pays for all of the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode, as well as everything involved with running the store, and they take their cut when you post on their store and sell stuff. If a law comes by and says Sorry Apple, you need to provide a way for other stores to exist in your ecosystem, well, something is going to have to pay for the development of these frameworks they provide.
>then restricting it behind a paywall sounds like something customers would sue apple for
Slightly difference scenario here but I feel it's similar. In my last job my company bought a system from Oracle that did a bunch of number crunching for processing images to be printed. As I understood it, Oracle charged for utilizing more cores, even though it was an on premise system and everything was already in the box ready to go.
If Apple, or anyone, makes hardware and wants to charge a license to use said hardware, isn't that legal?
This sounds like BMW charging a license for their heated seats. The hardware is already there and ready to go, but is behind a paywall.
> As I understand it, 30% pays for all of the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode, as well as everything involved with running the store, and they take their cut when you post on their store and sell stuff.
Xcode is free, though. Apple 'takes their cut' when you pay $99/year to be a registered Apple developer. If that's not enough, then maybe they need to review the checkbook again. Whatever the case is, Apple made a mistake by attaching the success of their software platform to the success of their App Store. The future of the internet was never going to be proprietary, they should have known that back when Microsoft was sued over IE. It's not illegal, but they're certainly teeing themselves up for the most radical antitrust scrutiny witnessed to-date.
It's just a dick move. Consumer advocacy groups should have fixed this by now, but Apple's legendary PR and reality distortion field has fended off most attacks so far.
Except it isn't. Neither Unreal Engine nor Apple's developer frameworks (shipped alongside Xcode) are public domain or copyleft. They're both proprietary code available under a license that permits certain usages, disallows certain usages, is royalty free under some conditions, and requires payment under other conditions.
> Apple 'takes their cut' when
That's not for you to decide. Epic can decide when to take money from developers who use Unreal Engine, and how much they're entitled to. It's equally Apple's decision which payment represents compensation for the developer's use of their intellectual property, and how much they're entitled to.
I'm not confusing them. The fact that they are not libre is precisely the point I was making. They are both proprietary intellectual property and encumber the person using them with financial obligations under some conditions.
> Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".
No, they are not. They're free as in "free beer when consumed on our premises, max five per customer, and if you sell our free beer to someone else we'll take some of that revenue thank you very much".
The comment you were replying to wasn't talking about free as in speech. They were talking about free as in beer. And the whole thread talks about money and cost. Not their source code availability.
"Free as in beer" only concerns itself with the price of the distributed software.
Edit:
In Epic's case the tools remain free as in beer. There's no additional cost to using them.
Epic applies a fee to what you produce with them, and even then:
> A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.
If you were to distribute your product for free (as you want), you wouldn't pay Epic a single cent.
Yes, I know what Epic's business model is. As with many software libraries, it's free as in “first sign this contract, do some stuff with our stuff, then later we shall decide how much you owe us”.
If you want to lump that in with free as in beer because Epic isn't taking money from people who haven't made something particularly profitable, okay, but I don’t think many people would agree with you.
(It's also free-as-in-you're-part-of-their-marketing-strategy. Widespread "free" use of Unreal Engine helps build developer experience with Unreal Engine, increasing the availability of relevant skills in the job market, and making its use more attractive when it comes time to start a big, highly profitable project.)
You keep piling more and more unrelated things onto a very simple concept. "Free as in beer" literally talks just about the cost of distributed software. That's it.
Your attempt to somehow conflate it with someone's business models are laughable at best. All software comes with strings attached. And the biggest one is: even people who distribute software for free still have a business to run and mouths to feed.
I see where you're confused. You might well have a valid point if the discussion was about the Xcode IDE or whatever developer tools are supplied alongside Unreal Engine. That's not what the discussion was relating to. Per the great great great great great great great grandparent's post, the discussion was referring to "...the frameworks Apple develops that is available to you when you fire up Xcode..."https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905694
Or its parent, the one which initially defined the scope of the discussion, which was "...Apple charging a license for the frameworks and tooling they provide..."https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905555
Not about the Xcode IDE itself which I agree is free-as-in-beer. (Though others might disagree — an argument could be made that it was paid for the purchase of a relevant Apple hardware product; the fact that it wasn't pre-installed being a mere technicality.)
I don't want to use xcode either, their tooling is terrible and the only reason I use it is because of Apple intentionally obfuscating their build and release process.
That's strange people think as it's providing some kind of "value" which needs to be paid, in reality it's the opposite, it's a problematic byproduct of the monopoly which I would get rid of given the choice.
Just compile with command line tools and use any editor you want. The xcodebuild command line tool, which is distinct from Xcode lest there’s any confusion, is pretty well documented.
Under the hood it uses clang, which was developed with Apple support and which I guess has some value…
> which was developed with Apple support and which I guess has some value…
Clang was a community project, same as LLVM. Apple came along and threw money at it because of FOMO (very similar to CUPS) and eventually a XNU toolchain followed. Apple didn't really provide any value beyond support that already existed for FOSS operating systems.
Many walled gardens, growing different plants, landscaped in different styles, with different admission fees, but ultimately conforming to basic principles and paying their dues to the Apple botanical society.
That is true. I wonder what the payment structure is for Apple Authorized Service Providers or Apple Authorized Resellers. The economics definitely change when it comes to software. Consider a hypothetical iOS version of F-Droid: if such a third party store doesn't charge developers to host their apps, what kind of dues do they owe upstream? Apple would still claim that F-iOS is benefiting from the app distribution APIs and security features they're providing, not to mention updates to iOS itself.
> if such a third party store doesn't charge developers to host their apps, what kind of dues do they owe upstream?
In an ideal world? Nothing. Apple builds these APIs because they want people to use them, not because they expect a return on their investment. We established that precedent when Google litigated Oracle so many years back.
Of course, Apple will claim they need whatever they can get. Their lack of candid conversation with the community is exactly why we need to respond by taking away their taxman hat.
The cut is a platform fee, and collecting it via the in-app payment system is mechanism, not policy.
The core issue is Apple's rate: although it is usually comparable to rates on other game platforms (eShop, Google Play, Steam...), (some) game and app developers want it reduced so that they receive a higher percentage of an app's retail price.
The largely unfounded expectation that some developers seem to have is that changing IAP payment methods will cause Apple's platform fee to drop to zero, rather than causing Apple to simply collect it by other means.
Edit: for some reason people are responding to me with complaints about Apple's policies and downvoting me because they don't like Apple's platform fees. I'm trying to shed some light on what is actually going on: a dispute over platform fee rates. This is something that much of the media coverage doesn't seem to be getting right.