When Microsoft helped me get Krita in the Windows Store I hadn't much expectations. Now the Windows Store and Steam (fifty/fifty) bring in enough to pay me and six other people to work on Krita almost full-time. It has saved me from having to find a day job that would have driven me round the bend for sure.
That said, it sucks that I cannot tell people they can also download Krita from krita.org. There's always the fear that some day, the Windows Store will be closed, or Krita will be kicked out or whatever.
Publishing in an app store means you're a sharecropper, with all that entails.
>It's that I, a user, cannot choose to sideload an app
That's only half the equation. I run android, but have no google account. I have always used a combination of aptoide, f-droid and manually downloaded apk's for my apps.
When all the covid apps were released and governments were encouraging people to download them, do you think they put the APK on a government website for people to download?
Nope, just links to the app store. Of course, most of those apps relied on google play services API's for a bunch of stuff, so it's not like they would have worked anyway.
It's not enough to merely allow sideloading. If the expectation isn't that mobile devices are a diverse ecosystem and that it's not good enough for developers to pick one store and bugger the rest, you've achieved very little. Most people could not be bothered going through what I do to keep my phone clean.
I've not yet found that to be the case, although I fear that one day it will.
I generally find that all you need to do is tell people their solution is not acceptable. All the banks in Iceland are trying really hard to convince people that phone based 2FA is the only option. However, I went to my bank and informed them that I don't take my phone with me when I travel overseas and I require another option. They tried a few other variations of "but you could use your phone this way", but once they realized I wasn't joking when I said "I often just don't have a phone with me, find me something else" it turns out that the physical 2FA tokens totally still work, they just don't like telling people.
Generally speaking, the people providing these things have a boss who expects them to make sure things run smoothly. They'll try to force you to use the app if that's the easiest path, but as soon as they realise that trying to force you to use the app will be much more painful for them than just giving you another option, they'll find another option.
This also happens in credit card merchant contracts (from what I've read) and it seems like the kind of thing that I prefer governments regulate (rather than try to disrupt all app stores altogether).
I just want to know that my license to use an app purchased in 1 store means that the license follows me (or my account or my estate, etc), not limited to that one app store. If I buy a game on Steam, and later move to a PS and later move to XBox, I don't want the loss of value associated with losing all copies of my legally purchased/licensed content (or worse, if my account is closed/banned on one platform).
This is also what is destroying any potential value to electronic health records (although doctors seem to hate transcribing their notes, so the value may be limited anyway).
You can say there are options in a credit card enabled business . What You cannot do is make cash transfer cheaper by offering to reducing the price by the cut you pay the provider.
It is not a lock-in at all, and it also not strictly enforced or enforceable even , plenty of times I have given cash when a vendor offered me a 2 % discount on a large purchase where the extra hassle was worth it .
> it also not strictly enforced or enforceable even
Your assertion seems to be that just because you got away with it that it's "not enforceable". I would argue that just because it's a clause in a merchant contract (a very important contract for a small business), it's a significant threat.
I meant enforceable legally depending on the jurisdiction not practically.
The comparison is not the same at all, No merchant gateway is blocking cash transactions just forbid different pricing.
This is miles away from what Apple can do. A payment g/w can only at best stop payment processing as it happened wikileaks or more recently with SciHub.
Apple can kick you off the market effectively by blocking access to app store . Either the app store should be treated like a utility given its monopolistic nature or not be allowed to push their second service (payment g/w, lots of competition) because they have control over first one App store (no competition), in another era this would be classic anti-trust .
Recently friend of mine told me he bought Krita through the Windows app store - I was confused because I thought it was free. Thanks for the clarification.
BTW big fan of this app and I have to admit that I'm relieved that it has some sort of a steady revenue stream. That sum next to the Donate button doesn't look like it could sustain any large scale development.
> That said, it sucks that I cannot tell people they can also download Krita from krita.org.
As in, you've signed an NDA literally forbidding you from mentioning as such? Or you're simply not allowed to put the URL anywhere in the Windows Store description?
I mean in practice you can also list links to your site on the Apple App Store but you aren’t allowed to mention a cheaper price or another purchasing option.
I'd imagine it's more that Microsoft takes a smaller cut if they come to the store via krita.org versus finding it through the store itself, so they don't want to give that up.
Krita on Windows' store costs (I think) around 10 dollars. Directly from Krita's site, 0 dollars. Windows has a similar policy as Apple that the app creators cannot tell the users on the store page to go somewhere else to get it cheaper/free.
The commenter above was making a slightly different point. Some digital stores take a large cut if the user finds the app organically while browsing their Store, vs if they came to the store page from a link on the owner's site.
The former means Windows helped the user find the app, whereas the latter means the author did and Microsoft is just providing a way for the user to download the app.
Which stores? Does the Microsoft store work this way? When you respond to a specific and pointed question with theoretical knowledge of how things "could work," it just starts to muddy the waters.
But what if the user literally just enters the apps name in the search. In this case the app store only played the negligible role of an trivial looking indeed. Is it really reasonable to then thanks a larger cut?
Edit: but then the cut for extremely driven aquisation is 5% which compared to some other stores is really low. So I really shouldn't complain ;)
That was implied ever since Microsoft decided to make Windows 10 free or at a very low cost to a majority of users. And, why not, as long as their fee is not outrageous for application developers and they don't restrict the users' ability to install software from other sources.
Most people either upgraded for free to a new version (the same operation was paid before), or get Windows through a subsidized OEM version. Subsidized is pretty clear: you pay less, in exchange for something else.
> varying price is something I would expect from airlines, not from respectable business.
Why should we expect a software company to be more ethical, for varying definitions of ethical, than an airline company?
Free upgrade from paid product to paid product. Still paying yet product.
I question wisdom of the original term. What if "shut up and take money" is not enough? If so was it on purpose or by accident? First time in my life I think of conspiracy theories.
My take on catchy phrases:
- You are a product for for-profit
- You are a product if don't fight for your freedoms
Download link is prominent(in top header) on krita.org ?? Do you mean you are not allowed to add link from Windows Store description. Which seems reasonable, i.e. equivalent of using Amazon to promote company site (alternate/competing store).
Would you feel similarly about AirBnB hosts leaving their contact information in the physical location so you could arrange bookings outside the platform? Just curious because I can see the value platforms provide in discovery and "bringing the customers to you" but once you have proved your worth to the customer, it's not clear to me why a platform-middleman is still needed.
It feels a bit like a dark pattern though if you consider a user that find it first through the store. I would like to know the percentage of users that consciously paid for it knowing they could also download it for free vs those users that paid for it because they didn't know better.
I wasn't aware of Krita before, checked it out after I read comments here. I now have a much deeper appreciation of animation artists. One scene is so much work! [1] And kudos to you for making your tool available for free.
I don't think that don't matters that much atm. Most will google for paint programm or directly for krita after they heard about from somewhere (youtube tuts for example) and land on the project homepage. After which they mostly will remember to look for the homepage next time they install it again.
It’s definitely not all that it entails, but point taken. Anyways, I prefer the open web instinctively, but it would be interesting to see data on the average age of software on the internet alongside where that software is hosted.
For a full view of not just what an executive says, but Microsoft's actions here:
The Windows app store gives a 95/5 cut to developers, as long as the download happened from an external link to the page. If the discovery happened via an app store search or marketing within the app store, that cut changes to 85/15 [1]
I would also like to find some revenue split data for the Xbox store, though I imagine that's far more nuanced, with many different contracts for different third parties. If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30?
Thank you for saying "app store" instead of "App Store". If you dictate this sentence on an iPhone it comes out as "The windows App Store".
In other words, the people that work for Apple are so petty that they won't capitalize the word "windows" even if it was preceded by the word "Microsoft" but they always capitalize the words "App Store" because they insist that they have a trademark on this very generic term even though they really don't [0].
According to them, the generic phrase for app store is "online store" [1], which is hilarious because nobody ever says that.
Yeah sure. I suppose you’d also say that it’s simply incompetence that Apple refuses to open Google Maps, the most widely used map app, when I click on a link to somebody’s address in my contacts app. Oh and it just so happens that I can’t replace the Contacts app either.
Yup, iOS I believe learns your typings over time and chooses what you use the most. So if you talk about Windows a lot and capitalize it, it will start suggesting it, but if you talk about your house windows more, it'll lowercase it.
What was the earliest prior art resembling the Apple App Store? (Eg curation, 3rd party publishing with royalty cuts, one-click install.)
Was it Steam? Which first launched in 2003?
Did Apple debut objectively novel behavior that made the App Store a thing? Perhaps the install flow, or maybe the developer submission flow? (Which was admittedly awful for a number of years)
App Store was obvious as Linux user. In Windows and Symbian users has to search for installer. Out of commercial looks like Valve was first. I've never seen Windows Marketplace. Nokia took so long to make obvious thing - you have to review and sign application by Nokia (Symbian 9.1, 2005 [0]), but host by yourself.
Valve Steam - announced on March 22, 2002, released for beta testing the same day. [1]
Windows Marketplace - announced on July 12, 2004, launched on October 12, 2004 [2].
Nokia Ovi - announced on 29 August 2007, public beta on 28 August 2008 [3].
"an application development platform created by Qualcomm, originally for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones, featuring third-party applications such as mobile games. It is offered in some feature phones (mostly with the similar specifications of a mid to high-end mobile phones) but not in smartphones. Developed in 1999, as a platform for wireless applications on CDMA-based mobile phones, it debuted in September 2001."
Wow, I completely forgot about this one. I remember this on my flip phone. While a nice bit of nostalgia, IIRC the fees and royalties were very high and the administration to get something submitted was not in the same ballpark of the earliest Apple App Store.
Symbian had mandatory signature checks and Nokia Signed/Symbian Signed program for privileged APIs, i-mode phones had “carrier official sites” program and Java app players to use with...
That said, the idea of iOS and App Store that you don’t ever sideload, browse from PC or web browser, or handle .ipa directly, as an integrated whole, do feel novel to me.
Something similar but for music existed in pre-Vivendi MP3.com (whose founder later started Lindows which had an app store for Linux PCs in 2002), and a real world analog might be something like a consignment store.
Remember though that until BUILD 2018, the revenue split on the Windows Store (even though it had long been a failure at that point) was 70/30. At BUILD 2018, they changed it to the 85/15 and 95/5 as a last-ditch effort, although it took until December 2018/January 2019 to finally roll out that change.
Chances are pretty good since the Xbox Games Store remains at 30%. And 5% is very, very low even for low-cut stores: apparently Itch is whatever the dev chooses, Epic is 12, Humble Store is 15% + 10% to charity or as store credit and Steam is 30 sliding down to 20 (above 50m sales). Short of individual agreements I think everything else is 30% flat.
I believe it is a lot more complicated than that. Non-game Apps on the Xbox see the same splits as on Windows (the 85/15 and 95/5 based on "marketing"). The 70/30 is offered to game developers that want to do only the bare minimum Xbox integration possible to get on the platform, almost every other scale and publisher agreement is presumably covered under NDA of one sort or another. Some rumors are that the sliding scale is today competitive to Steam's (and better than Sony's, maybe? Sony's seems even more NDA encumbered), with a lot of complicated other factors such as Xbox Play Anywhere titles and allowing Xbox Game Pass rotations are rumored to get substantial cut discounts based on the shifting whims of Microsoft's marketing teams.
The Windows app store also isn't very popular. I'd attribute that less to a sense of fairness and more to a way to drive adoption.
Microsoft has deployed all sorts of carrots and sticks to try to drive more adoption. In the early Windows 10 days, you could secure $500k-$2.5M in services investment even for internal apps at a not so huge scale.
It seems every thread there is a comment on console. They are not the same.
Console is a loss leader, or sold at cost. No one on planet Earth could make an exact replica of Playstation 5 or Xbox 5 for discount. And that is excluding all the IP, R&D and Software / OS Development involved. The 30% is where they make the money. And personally that is a fair share.
Microsoft also make their profits via selling OS to OEM and Business. The current App Store model are there to help distribution of Software. And the 5% are essentially zero considering you will have to paid ~3% for credit processing any way. i.e Linking to the App Store frees you the burden and duty of hosting yourself for free.
Edit: And if you dont mind share why you downvote.
I'm also not sure that the "but consoles are closed" argument would be a slam dunk anyway, even if they were exactly the same, because I would absolutely support either requiring Microsoft to open up the XBox or allowing game developers to bypass Microsoft's controls.
It's not clear to me why loss-leading consoles are a good thing for consumers. It just means that:
A) games will be more expensive, because Microsoft needs to make more money on them, and
B) a smaller number of games will be made, because the barrier of entry to profitability on any single game will be increased by forcing developers to subsidize Microsoft's costs.
Microsoft is still going to make the same amount of money regardless. They'll either charge upfront, or that cost will be passed on to consumers in the form of more expensive, less experimental games.
So, I dunno. People who make the comparison between Apple and XBox should maybe be careful what they wish for, because I'm more than happy to go after XBox, Playstation, and Switch with the exact same criticisms. I am skeptical that there are many indie game developers who are happy that they need to jump through hoops to get development consoles, or sign NDAs just to target a platform.
The game development communities are exactly the opposite of HN culture, there no one cares about FOSS ideals and stuff, it is all about IP and getting their ideas into the gamer's hands no matter how.
In fact, nowadays I see as a mistake having spent so much time around FOSS during the university back in the 90's, which caused a bit of schizophrenic considerations when going across communities.
The subsidized console increases the total user base by lowering the up front price hurdle. So you’re comparing a world with a small TAM, expensive consoles, cheaper games, vs a world with a large a TAM, artificially cheap consoles, and more expensive games.
I think both game devs and console makers prefer the big-TAM world.
Not loss leaders. Maybe close to "cost" but not loss leaders.
The reason is the length of the lifecycle. Say you spend $100M developing a video game console. That seems outrageous. You ship 100 000 units to stores for the early adopters, and some goof says $100M/ 100 000 = $1000 per console just for the R&D costs. These must be a loss leader!
But by the end of the cycle you've sold over 100 million units, so the R&D cost was under $1 per unit. You also get to do relentless cost engineering. When you spot a way to reduce the BOM by 4¢ on a product you're going to sell another hundred million of, that is Four million dollars you just added to the company's profits. Moore's law is on your side over that period of time too.
I was going to say something similar to you, but then I read https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/econo... and found that consoles are loss leaders. With the plan of making it up in subscriptions, licensing, and games produced by the manufacturer.
In other words it is a "sell the razors at a loss and make it up on razor blades" strategy.
> In 2006, at the time of PS3’s launch, each console was sold at a loss of around US $240 per console
That would be a loss leader if the plan was you sell those launch consoles and then exit or move on to a new product having lost $240 per console.
But that was never the plan, the plan was you sell millions more consoles over many years and so overall they're profitable.
It's not razors and razor blades, Gillette sent me a free razor when I was a teenager because that's a razors and razor blades model. Sony doesn't give away consoles because they make money selling the console. They didn't make money on the first few million, which doesn't matter because they sold over a hundred million after that.
The reason they don't do razors and razor blades is because the attachment rate is much lower than most owners imagine unlike for razor blades. It's typically going to be 5-6 games per console. PS4 actually hit 8 games per console but that's a fantastically successful machine nearing the end of its life.
So, if you're losing $240 per console but you hope you can shift six games per console that is $40 per game you need to recoup to break even.
If you go out to a third party developer and you say "We want $40 per sale" they are going to laugh in your face. This isn't Apple strong-arming independent developers, the big games publishers (most obviously Take Two and Activision) absolutely are powerful enough to walk away from such a deal knowing that their competitors will do the same and then the console is dead.
I disagree. It doesn’t matter if the company makes money on the device or not. A device with a walled off App Store, be it a PS4, Xbox, Switch, or an iPhone, operates in the exact same murky legal waters. MS better be careful, or they could wind up breaking their own console’s ability to limit access to their store. Why shouldn’t Steam or Epic be allowed to sell games to an Xbox customer?
So you are suggesting console maker to sell at a loss while others come in and paid nothing for using their platform? Even EPIC have no problem with the console business model.
No, I think they're suggesting that console makers need to open up their app stores and that may result in them no longer being able to sell at a loss.
> Selling at a loss is also called "dumping" and Is generally considered as a illegal anticompetitive practice
No, this is wrong. Dumping is selling at a loss unsustainably in the short term to drive out competitors. If you do it sustainably, it basically can't be dumping.
Thousands of business have loss leaders, from supermarkets to rasers. Video game consoles are not an exception.
You then end up with no body buying the console. It would cost $999, and everyone would have problem justify that price tag. And the total market would shrink, which means for Game developers their Games would also have to be priced higher in order to make a return of investment. Normally that wouldn't work because pricing it higher also means less people are willing to buy, so the solution would be to lower the cost of making games. And less ridiculously expensive AAA titles.
Apple sure sells a lot of iPhones at around the $1000 price point, and they’re not selling those at a loss. I don’t see any reason to think that the laws of the physics are such that it’s simply impossible to sell a gaming console the same way that, you know, almost every product in the world is sold: for more money than it costs to make.
Very few people pay $1000 up front. Carriers have subsidies and 0% payment plans over 24 months. Apple also offers 24 month payment plans. The console market is much smaller than phone market. 100 million consoles being sold over the entire lifetime over 8 years is considered successful. Apple sells that many phones in two quarters.
There is also a history of consoles not selling well when the price becomes too steep from the Neo Geo for $699 to the XBox that was bundled with the Kinect.
People buying $1000 phones are on the upscale range, who would likely be in the PC gaming category if they gamed. Consoles are priced for the mid budget consumer who likely own $600 phones. On top of that, the price-tag of the phone is an amalgamation of several devices into one. The smartphone is so valuable people are willing to pay cost+margins on it and it STILL fully saturates society. The console unfortunately is not that.
Sure, but then the argument is nothing more than “because our product isn’t good enough to just sell it like every other normal product in the world, we have to sell it at a loss and then extract as much value as we can from developers by exerting total control over software distribution.”
Are you just arguing because you can't stand the idea of a world where everything isn't black and white? If the system as it has settled were so much of a problem for the developers, they would not have time and time again put their weight behind the companies pricing their consoles low.
Prices are all ephemeral anyway. How many of those "normal products" are only able to be sold for more than they are made for because we value the labor of the person making it less than we would the same labor from the person buying it?
> If the system as it has settled were so much of a problem for the developers, they would not have time and time again put their weight behind the companies pricing their consoles low.
To loop back around to the iPhone, pretty much every indie developer I know thinks that mobile phone games are priced too low, but nobody can change it because the expectation has been set that a mobile game can't be $30-60. It's just the way the market has evolved.
So markets are complicated. Sometimes they move in smart directions, sometimes multiple factors conflate together and they move in unsustainable directions. The fact that developers still write games for consoles doesn't necessarily mean that developers like the system they're a part of, or that they don't want it to be any better. It just means the expected value of signing those NDAs, using expensive locked down hardware, and paying revenue portions to the console maker still currently work out to be positive.
Games sell like hot-cakes on the Switch right now. Nintendo would honestly need to do some pretty horrible stuff to make a Switch release of almost any semi-popular game not worthwhile economically. But that doesn't mean developers love everything Nintendo does.
So be careful of reading too much into what developers do. We're Capitalists just like everyone else. If the market demands F2P micro-transactions, NDAs, DRM, or region-specific pricing, ultimately most of us will do what the market demands. Revenue splits are no exception.
That being said, I would argue the market for games publishing hasn't settled, and that it's really not shifting towards increasing revenue splits or developer costs. The original process for getting games on the XBox was way harder and way more expensive than it is today. The reason consoles have generally started to shift towards more open terms is because developers eventually got fed up with paying money to release bugfixes, and started shifting focus to consoles that made releasing software easier.
We're seeing the same trends with Steam and the Epic store. 30% was reasonable, until Epic started offering much better terms. Now Valve is starting to move towards 20%. Devs will work with any system that makes them money, but obviously they would prefer to take bigger cuts of each sale. People don't really appreciate that -- if Steam didn't have such a massive market share right now, no developer would rationally choose to release on Steam instead of Epic Store. We all want lower revenue splits.
Which was mostly my point, nothing is just as simple as "Sell things for more than they cost to make." Markets are weird, more so when you have non-tangible components like software and IP involved.
I'm not advocating for any model over any other, just acknowledgment that there exists a complex co-dependent relationship between the console owners and the developers.
>You then end up with no body buying the console. It would cost $999,
If people are bad at gathering enough money at once then there are options like pay 999 now or pay 1099 over 2 years period. This is not in the interest of the consumer so it will not happen without regulation.
Consoles are usually not sold at a loss. Maybe for the first year after launch, but they quickly get costs lowered to the point that they're profitable.
One interesting thing about the Wii/PS3/XB360 generation was that Wii was sold at a profit. Knowing that, it was pretty funny to see Sony/MS fanboys lambast the Wii's low attach rates as an impending failure when the model was totally different. Sony would need a customer to buy multiple games to turn a profit on a PS3, Nintendo could sell someone a Wii and Mario Kart and not have them buy anything else, and that'd likely be a happy and profitable customer.
We should note that the Windows app store is a massive failure, so Microsoft's actions as an also-ran are going to be "benevolent" and "open" because they have nothing to lose. Browse through the derelict mess that is the app store to understand just how miserable their state is. The overwhelming bulk of sales in the Windows app store are Microsoft's own products.
Recall when Microsoft was lagging far behind the other cool instant messenger kids, and was loudly crying for open interoperability and cooperation. Once MSN Messenger had a foothold, it slammed shut and their noble goals dissolved. Microsoft is certainly not alone in this self-serving morality -- it is a logical position -- but they do have a lot of examples in their corporate history.
Apparently the Microsoft employees are out in force today. It's also interesting how making an observation like this -- that the Windows app store is a failure -- leads people to pigeonhole. As I sit here on my Lenova 720 in Windows 10 Pro cross compiling an app between Windows and Linux in the WSL...hurrrRRRRrrr)
Even earlier than MSN Messenger was the RTF document format, promoted by Microsoft as an interoperability format to allow them to co-exist with Microsoft Word in a market dominated by WordPerfect, WordStar, etc.
And of course Microsoft dropped RTF like a hot potato when they managed to use their new Microsoft Windows platform to leverage into a huge market advantage for Microsoft Word. Other vendors were obviously initially reluctant to spend enormous resources to port their software to Windows, a competitor’s platform, but Microsoft could spend hugely on developent of Microsoft Word for Windows, making it very impressive graphically, and when the Windows platform was successful, all other word processing software vendors were left behind, forced to play catch-up. I also remember hearing that Microsoft were using secret Windows APIs to get nice things like toolbar icons in color, not available to non-Microsoft companies.
It's interesting RTF is discontinued when it is still the default format on the included word processor in Windows. I checked WordPad on Windows 10 and it still saves to RTF by default, though it supports docx and odt as well.
Unless they changed something the last couple of years, WordPad is just a wrapper around the Windows rich edit common control[1], which as its name implies, is based around RTF[2].
Microsoft is famously backwards-compatible, and support for RTF is still present in those programs which originally had it, like Write, the included word processor in Windows since Windows 1 (replaced in Windows 95 with WordPad, which retains its features). But is RTF usable for its original purpose – interoperability? Can you open a reasonably complex Word document and save it as RTF, and then open it in LibreOffice? Can you save an RTF document from LibreOffice and open it in Microsoft Word without loss? Is Microsoft working to maintain RTF interoperability in order to promote cross-program document compatibility? No. To quote Wikipedia, “Microsoft has discontinued enhancements to the RTF specification. New features in Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.”¹
Upvoted for the attitude (of course MS's calls are entirely self-serving) but it's hard to know how much of a "failure" the Windows Store is - I tend to use it and recommend it as a safer-than-average port of call for the less skilled.
I would be willing to bet a non-zero amount of money that, much like the average Hacker News reader would woefully under-estimate how much .Net code is out there being written today, so to would we woefully underestimate how much usage the Microsoft Store gets.
I opened the Microsoft Store and had a look at the top 50 items in "most popular". It includes items with such mainstream appeal as the Windows Terminal, Ubuntu 20.04 and the VMWare client.
The most popular app is Roblox. It has 164 reviews. The second most popular app is Spotify. It has 57 reviews. On Android, it has 19 million reviews. Their Android TV app even has 200. The item with the most reviews is Minecraft, with 1000 reviews. On Android it has 3.5 million.
The Microsoft store also lets you install free apps with out logging in (if you keep clicking out from the login prompts) so it's probably also harder to get reviews.
While I agree that the windows store is used more than some people might think, it is used nowhere near as much as the Play or App Store are, and is nowhere near as import for Windows as the others are for their respective platforms.
Of course it is! For the vast majority of users, the Play or App Store is the only possible way to install software.
Of course the difficulty and headaches involved with windows package management are pretty asinine, they at least are an accessible and non-gated platform for both the developer and user, which can't be said for Android and iOS/MacOS.
Which is partly Microsoft's fault because Enterprises should have easily embraced the Microsoft Store for Business (emphasis on the "for Business" as a part of the name following one of Microsoft's more confusing name patterns; it's a separate more customizable "store front" than the "not for Business" consumer store): it's a lot nicer UX than System Center's "just ported from Silverlight" Vista-era ugliness, has more features than System Center (including easier license management for applications sold on the non-Business store), and better install technology. In one of Microsoft's many "forgot to build a bridge" problems with the Store, they forgot to provide easy upgrades from System Center, especially for the then (too many) companies still supporting Windows 7 side-by-side Windows 10 installs up until the security support deadline.
It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.
I imagine the Windows Store gets billions in revenue, but much like Microsoft's claims about the great success of their cloud offering (where they hilariously count Office 365 as cloud revenue to compare against AWS and GCC) the overwhelming bulk will be people upgrading to paid Office accounts.
The .NET bit is an irrelevant strawman. We aren't talking about that, and it has zero relevance.
i wouldn't call it a failure i actually bought a couple of apps and I don't usually buy apps (in the past 5-6 years I think i bought another 3 on play store). its just that windows app delivery is traditionally done via application's website so it never took off especially cause at first it only catered for UWP stuff.
I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis of Microsoft's motivation. However, it does nothing to change my support of it. The 30% Apple takes for its App Store seem a bit much for a middle man.
Oh, how the tables have turned! I still remember Microsoft's chokehold on the entire industry in the 1990s, their "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy, and nearly total monopoly.
Fuck Microsoft. I recently updated Windows and had to go through an unskippable ad for Edge. After the ad, I had to go through an unskippable setup process for Edge, even though I don't use it. After I got through that, I had to tell Edge not to make itself the default browser, unpin it from my start menu, where it was added by Windows, then remove it from desktop, where it was added by Windows. I'm a paying customer, and they're plastering their shit all over my computer, just like they did in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Don't be a fool and think Microsoft has changed because they give away VSCode and have added features to Github. This isn't a goodwill measure, it's a lock in measure. They're quietly trying to lock in engineers into their platform, just like they're trying to keep gamers locked in to their platform.
They're trying to look like the scrappy little guy competing against Apple, but this only after their Windows App store has failed to do anything. They wait until their hand busts before tattling - if the Windows store succeeds, they happily go along with it. If it fails, they talk about how great a tragedy it is for the American consumer.
Exactly, people forget that Valve developed SteamOS after Microsoft's shenanigans, when they tried to lockout 3rd party programs i.e. build it's own "app store"
They have a huge marketshare, but I don't see how they have a monopoly. For example, some of the largest games in the world don't go through Steam (Fortnite, Overwatch, LoL) and the indie scene outside of Steam is popular and successful through DRM free or 3rd party sources such as GoG, Humble, and itch.io. I can download a .exe from a publisher's website if I really want to. How is that "almost ... a monopoly"?
It's worth noting that Epic Games isn't really making headway into the market by providing innovation. They're just dumping money into it, making everything worse for Linux users.
With its drive for fragmentation, even with a gaming distribution like SteamOS, Linux gaming community keeps changing between 1 and 2%.
No one is betting their business in such tiny communities, while having exponential costs in development and dealing with very vocal and entitled gamers.
So naturally a couple of studios test waters, and then they just target Android instead.
Do you have a source for Linux users being "very vocal and entitled"? Someone linked this Twitter thread here and, while they ultimately chose to stop supporting Linux, the picture painted of Linux users is very different from what you describe. https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
Really? I've had pretty much no issues playing video games on Linux for the past 2 years. At least not any more than I did when I used Windows.
Steam has been providing support for the Linux community for years, through native ports of their games, explicitly selling Linux ports on their store, and just making sure their client works on Linux as well. This isn't to mention their actual innovations such as the Steam Controller, Steam In-home Streaming, Steam Remote Play, and even Proton.
In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games (which is likely going to end when/if they feel like they have a good enough share), actively killed the Linux version of Rocket League when they purchased the game.
I appreciate Epic Games for the Unreal engine, but if this is how they want to get a share of the PC game store market, they're not getting a dime from me.
> In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games
You shouldn't talk about things you don't know about...
- Millions in grants for developers
- Unlimited free backend services for game developers, the same the power one of the most successful games in recent history (and the first serious offer for this caliber of service outside of Steam despite AAA publishers having stores for years)
- Millions invested in arguably one of the most technologically advanced game engines freely available
- Thousands of dollars in free content to help developers kickstart their projects
- Finally moving the needle for developer revenue splits after years of stagnation
- No built-in DRM (Games can still optionally include their own DRM, but there's no Steamworks-style DRM options)
- Built a publishing house with a blanket deal for studios which is very competitive, (50/50 split of all profit)
- _Retroactively_ waived fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars running on Unreal.
Say you didn't care about anything Epic did besides release a few free games, they did plenty more than that
Can't reply to your comment directly but for a reply...
How is massively supporting the game industry and providing a real competitor in a the market not doing anything for the end-user?
You realize the games the end-user plays benefit from literally every single thing I mentioned right?
Nothing of that is directly impactful like the features I listed about Steam. I'm not arguing for Epic Games being an "evil corporation", they just don't do anything to the end-user except for a couple free games.
I'm speaking explicitly as an end user here, and from my point of view the Epic Store is a straight downgrade from Steam in almost every aspect.
> Really? I've had pretty much no issues playing video games on Linux for the past 2 years.
Yes, really. This just sounds like the standard Linux Desktop evangelist "Works for me! (TM)". Take this case [0], where in it is claimed that support requests for Linux were vastly disproportionate to the number of Linux users.
Linux has huge problems as a platform due to its fragmentary and ever-changing nature combined with its near-total disregard (in userland) for backwards compatibility. People have been screaming this at the community for the better part of a decade and a half (including Linus himself!) and mostly falling on deaf ears.
Which is not to say that one should support Epic if you do happen to care about gaming on Linux. Quite the opposite, as Valve has done more than anyone[1] to try and make it work.
I agree. Linux definitely has a long way before it's usable for the majority of the public for gaming. I only wanted to point that out because the myth that Linux can't play games still exists for some reason, while I'm sitting here playing every game that I want (except for those with rootkit anti-cheats. I have a VM for them).
It's ironic to watch non-technical gamers hoot and holler about how evil Epic is while they pour millions into a world class engine for devs, and build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam (meaning they include free unlimited backend services in addition to the store front)
> pour millions into a world class engine for devs
That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
> build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam
So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam, a superior platform that has (a) an instant return policy [1], (b) the ability to emulate input for any game for the disabled[2], and (c) the ability to share your entire game library with family without having to share accounts and save files.
[1]: Obviously hasn't always been the case.
[2]: Via Big Picture Mode, which allows you to use any controller for any game and remap inputs for games that have no such settings. A total blessing for anyone disabled or with a preference for different controls.
> That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
They retroactively waived licensing fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars in revenue going back years!
But, ah yes, you got them! They're a company in a capitalist society trying to make money, what crooks!
>So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam
I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. By that logic anyone who makes any store that isn't Steam is just trying to control the market.
Anyone who makes anything that isn't the current incumbent in a monopolized industry is just trying to become the new monopoly!
And the rest of your points are in the worst faith.
Epic games is how old? You're complaining that a new player hasn't matched every feature of a decades old incumbent?
Not to mention, Epic games has instant-refunds on some games (developers can disable this, also yeah, bringing up Steam in a conversation about refunds is a joke, you knew that enough that you had to pre-emptively footnote it)
And Steam was an accessibility NIGHTMARE until very recently, to the point that I had seen petitions come out against it! Not to mention accessibility in games is largely on a game-by-game basis, acting like Big Picture was made to improve accessibility is laughable when it launched without the ability to even change text sizes for years.
As I understand it, people were mad at Epic when many game projects on Kickstarter, formerly announced and crowd-sponsored as multi-platform, were suddenly funded by Epic and changed to be exclusives on Epic. Many people viewed this as a breach of trust by the projects, and as even worse done by Epic, by prompting and encouraging this.
I think more competition in this space is great, and overall we'll all benefit. However, notice that when you open up Steam, the default view is your library of games, whereas when you open the Epic Games Launcher, your default view is the store. This suggests to me that BD folks are running the show, rather than folks who are interested in games. Valve has spent the better part of the last 20 years proving that they generally make decisions for Steam that put gamers first- enough so to convince me, a dedicated FOSS and free culture supporter to pay for DRMed games. I've also purchased a game from the Epic Game Store, and while the experience wasn't as good (the Epic Games Launcher is pretty half-baked software), I expect them to iterate and improve it, unlike EA's Origin software which is almost comically broken.
There has been controversy around them paying third party developers to release their game exclusively through Epic Games Store. From what I recall these are timed exclusives so the games do eventually end up on other store fronts but people seem to be really up in arms about it.
Some of the complaints are about Epic's lack of any interest in the minefields of Linux and macOS support. It's not a PC gaming store, it's emphatically a Windows gaming store. (Some of those complainants seem to overlook how long Steam was Windows-only or how much of the Steam catalog will likely remain Windows-only.)
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
While it's true that Steam has a lot of critical mass, there are several viable alternatives for distribution in a vacuum (whether publishers and developers use them or not doesn't mean they aren't there). In addition to the EGS and Itch you also have GOG (which has a huge catalogue and is highly curated), and the Humble Store is still around even though sadly it has mostly become a Steam storefront these days. Add to that other publisher-specific distribution platforms and the landscape is hardly as bereft of choice as the smartphone/tablet app distribution ecossystem.
Note: I do wish all of these people's official clients supported Linux.
In a vacuum - sure. You have to stop viewing everything through the eyes of a technical user, they have literally billions of end-users. All of them know "internet explorer" which MS is desperately trying to get rid of. It makes absolute perfect sense to walk users through Edge when they're getting rid of the default browser that billions of people expect to be there.
Were you expecting them to just get rid of the old browser and leave users in a lurch? You'd be on here blowing them up for "taking away a browser without any instructions so my grandma is calling me now" instead of whining that they made you actually acknowledge the change.
Not sure if you have experience the unskippable ad but it was egregious. I force quit edge from task manager before it finished but I cannot uninstall Edge from the add or remove programs.
I'm with you, launch a guide on how to use edge as soon as they click on the Internet Explorer icon. Please do not unset my preference of default browser, please do not make me crash your program to avoid your ad... in general why does my start bar get worse every time it changes as it lurches towards an ad display vector.
You're overestimating the technical aptitude of the average person. If it's not a URL or in an app store, it basically doesn't exist for a lot of people.
This may be very true for the generations born with tablets, but I'd expect the average layperson to be accustomed to 30 years of installing software or moving things via floppy drives or USB drives, but be wary of getting something from the Internet as it always was the source of malware.
Gates is the living proof you can still buy indulgences in these times. Watch out for Zuckerberg, Bezos and similar people becoming saints in 20-30 years.
I mean, the good he does in his later years is far disproportionate to the harm he did before, so that's how it should work right? No one's all good or all bad, you take the bad with the good. In the case of Bill Gates I would hope for a lot more like him which is what I hope people will one day say of me...
Highly debatable, maybe you are very young and dont recall how Microsoft absolutely attempting to crush any competing tool, company, framework or standard with absolutely 0 remorse. Hell, they even financed the ludicrous litigation of SCO against Linux. Cool than now Gates and his partner can promote great social campaigns, with all the good-willing, free publicity and tax benefits it generates, but let's not forget there is a long trail of pain and misery behind it.
Not saying he wasn't very bad, and it's true I wasn't around for the worst of it. But it's almost impossible to believe that it's not outweighed by the good he has done in the last couple decades, the sheer scale of which is hard to wrap my head around.
The damages they made by forcing to install that crap that is Windows, are still here and ongoing. I don’t think the costs of that monopoly is even calculable.
Don’t forget “developing countries” too: a brasilian friend was running a copy of windows “licensed” for poor people. Wtf.
The glorification of Gates nowadays still worries me.
(To not talk about their server and enterprise monopoly)
While he is doing a lot of good work, even today's Gates is not a saint. He has investments in shitty companies like Monsanto. There have been reports about bullying people who speak against his foundation. He has used his enormous money and power to go against the will of voters on education, at least once. And so on.
I am coding since 1986, so old enough to remember those days.
Apparently there is this revisionism where Microsoft was doing Mafia style visits to everyone, giving advices at gun point that accidents happen.
It is incredible how there is this culture that only the man is to blame, while those taking the money couldn't be helped to do otherwise, those pour souls.
Please. Crushing competition in the software field hardly compares to saving lives. Some estimates put the number of lives saved at over 100 million. Hell, saving one life would make up for all the business hurts Microsoft caused and more. One has to be exceptionally callous to consider businesses going out of business greater than human lives.
> Some estimates put the number of lives saved at over 100 million
I want a source on that, because even Gates in this absolutely self-serving report(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-phi...) did explicitly not claim he or his foundation is responsible for the 123 million estimated reduction in infant mortality since the year 2000 . As important as vaccination is, child mortality has decreased by many many reasons, including rising standard of economic conditions,decreased world fertility, an accelerated movement to urban life and widely distributed medical care. To attribute this complex and global set of conditions to just one individual is beyond sycophantic.
> One has to be exceptionally callous to consider businesses going out of business greater than human lives.
Spare me this sanctimonious take. So Gates used some part of the money he extracted in monopolistic and quasi-criminal practices to buy children vaccines and now he cannot be criticized because "can somebody please think of children?
By the way many of those countries who receive vaccines from the Gates foundations had to pay exorbitant license fees to use monopolistic MS products.
Feel free to criticize. All I said is comparing lives saved to businesses destroyed is ridiculous and stupid as a criticism. Even one life saved is greater than all businesses destroyed, but that's just my opinion. You seem to think losing businesses is worse than losing lives. That's an opinion I call callous. But the reality is, it's stupid to compare the two in the first place.
the good he does is questionable. he's paying for drugs from us big pharma for a few years to destroy any competition from cheaper indian drugs, then they let the poor African countries caught in dilemma : continue paying for the costly treatment of their citizens or let them die. I call that an elaborate corruption scheme. I wouldn't be surprised if some american politicians were involved
Devil's advocate but is that really so bad? You see it as plastering unwanted Microsoft Edge everywhere, where my grandparents are just glad to have a modern browser that's easy to find.
And none of these lock-in measures mean shit. If Microsoft is providing a service that people want/need then why is that bad? They can't lock anybody in if nobody switches. People switch since they provide value.
well, on Mac Safari comes pre-installed, so it's not like there's a good alternative out there. You should remember it's in their interest to shove their own browsers down your throat.
Funny enough, I guess they would get less criticism if Edge just came preinstalled like Mac does with safari.
There's still a full screen unskippable ad post-update, and an Edge setup process, and then additional reminders that you might want to make Edge your default browser.
The prevalence of popups and other notifications in Windows designed to drive user engagement with a specific product / feature / team has been increasingly noticeable lately, while actual productivity features like searching your local files and applications have been gummed up by web results instead.
I still use Windows on a daily basis since Visual Studio is the best tool for the work I do and Windows is the best platform for PC games, but they do plenty to exercise their leverage as the platform owner.
I still remember Microsoft's chokehold on the entire industry in the 1990s, their "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy, and nearly total monopoly.
But even during those times, you were still free to install/mod whatever you wanted on your computer, and even now it is (just barely) possible with Windows. Apple has always been far more controlling than Microsoft, although the latter is slowly moving in that direction too. Maybe this is finally a welcome change in direction, but I doubt it...
I agree with you in terms of iOS but macOS is super easy to run custom software on. I might have to click a security box for non-notarized apps (but not CLI tools) but I don’t see that as a bad thing.
When it comes to permission dialogs Windows has always been worse IMO
I would not characterize that as just "clicking a security box for non-notarized apps".
A few days ago I downloaded a non-notarized app. The dialog that I saw baffled me and it took me a while to recall how to run a non-notarized app.
You have to right-click on it and clock on "open", something that should be equivalent to double-clicking, but isn't. That's harder than clicking a security box. Someone with no knowledge might never find out how to run these apps.
Try getting a non-notarized VST to run in your DAW. At least in my experience, even after allowing the plugin in security and privacy it still never loads in Reaper. It's entirely possible, even probable, that I'm doing something wrong. But what a headache.
> But even during those times, you were still free to install/mod whatever you wanted on your computer, and even now it is (just barely) possible with Windows.
True. For the users, app installation wasn't a problem, until Internet Explorer came for Netscape.
The problem was mainly Microsoft having the majority of manufacturers like, Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Hitachi, Toshiba having Windows pre-installed and threatening a rise in prices of their Windows license or even revoking their licenses if they sell PCs pre-installed with desktop OS competitors like Be Inc's BeOS. [0]
> Apple has always been far more controlling than Microsoft
How so? Both MacOS and Windows for years had a completely unhindered app installation process. Though it was much simpler on MacOS because you didn't need a custom installer, and you could easily move apps from one computer to another.
I don’t see why this is downvoted. It’s simply true that since the original MacOS the Mac was less controlling of software installation than Windows before gatekeeper and the App Store.
It’s completely reasonable to argue that this is no longer true, but it’s denial to say that it has always been this way.
I also remember their much more recent attempt to funnel Windows app purchases through their own app store and take their own 30% cut via Windows 10 S, a version of Windows intended to be pre-installed on cheaper laptops that only allowed apps to be installed from their store. It failed, and that's presumably why they're taking such a strong stance now against the companies that succeeded in this business model.
That locked down crap made it possible for the non English literate and non computer literate to have a consistent experience video calling their loved ones (FaceTime) and use WhatsApp and browse the internet on iOS Safari without worrying about clicking on malware links, and that was as of at least 7+ years ago.
Although, I am questioning the utility of WhatsApp as they seem to be particularly fond of forwarding absolute garbage on WhatsApp.
Nokia Maemo, Openmoko, webOS, Firefox OS - outshined by locked down crap. Pulling resources out (no place for third contender).
It is hard to beat advertisement machine by powerful organization with unlimited resources which utilize small window opportunity gain monopoly. There is nothing magical about Steve Jobs and iPhone, it was obvious so much that design was tried again and again through decade.
Investing tons of money into developing a physical retail preference where people can go to if they have issues might not be magical, but it certainly is a difference maker.
I don’t want to troubleshoot my older relatives tech issues, I just point them to the apple store. Time is worth a lot.
As far as I can tell, only Apple wanted to invest in this route. Nokia, Google, Microsoft all have tons of cash, but no one wants to invest it into low ROI high liability physical retail options.
Nokia was perfectly okay letting the mobile carriers and their uneducated minimum wage staff deal with customer service. Apple decided to invest in customer service.
Also, all of this migration to smartphones happened in 2010 to 2014. If other companies had invested as much as Apple into the user experience (including what you do when you have a problem), maybe they would be in their position.
Making physical stores around the globe - impressive and absolutely can make a difference. But also only possible for megacorporation.
Corporations do no not care about people. People form communities to help themself, open small shops. LineageOS, postmarketOS - that is magical.
Debian can't open brick and mortar stores.
Android while perfectly able resolve your first request (video calls and web browser) become more and more closed over the years. Because user freedoms is not valuable differentiator for most of the customers. Google and manufacturers are corporations too. They seek profit.
Users value experience, true. And Apple understands that support is part of the experience, they invest to build their brand. That's good, but they do it to exploit customers as much as possible, 30% cut is part of it.
It does not matter who is on top of the mountain. It is underdog who is trying to differentiate. Maybe if nonprofit, but it could not produce newest and shiniest, without support it does not work. Support either from government (like do not sell poisonous products) or customers (conscious choice). History shown again and again that government does not care and for customers it take a long time to figure out [1].
> Android while perfectly able resolve your first request (video calls and web browser)
Android did not have a FaceTime equivalent back in 2010 to 2014. I know, because I tried it. A simple app where you pressed the contact name and it called the person, reliably and consistently was all that was needed.
There might have been Viber but I didn’t trust that company at all. But when I’m dealing with non tech literate people, I want a consistent, unchanging experience, and that’s what FaceTime was and what all the Android video calling apps lacked.
Skype involved logging in, passwords, and creating accounts, which was a no go for elders who don’t know English and never used computers. I know because I tried it. What worked was Facetime.
My point is that Apple offered the buyers something they wanted, and no one else did, hence they were rewarded.
And it's entirely our fault, as I said in my first comment. Had we collectively refused to buy locked down crap, they (or their competition) would bend over backwards to open it all up.
I did refuse at first, and tried Android and Windows and whatnot. And I wasted too much of my time trying to figure it out. At the end of the day, I need to spend more of my time living life and less troubleshooting.
Unfortunately, I don't know if a non lock down system is possible. The incentives for bad actors and the attack surface is so huge, I wonder what can be done.
Nagware, though annoying, is not in the same universe as the control that Apple has over the iOS ecosystem. To further reinforce the point, you do realize that Apple with nag you endlessly to upgrade your OS (on iPhone and Mac).
True, but as the man said in that Gozilla movie, "let them fight". If MS wants to use its legal power and influence to take on Apple's monopoly, that's fine by me. It will make more of a difference than a legion of indie developers.
Pot, kettle: The Azure Marketplace for b2b apps is also 20-30%. Worse, while most app stores pay out 30-60 days after use, Azure can hold on to your payments about 3-6mo. I am a fan of the concept, but this kind of stuff is entirely flexing and broken PM politics. Imagine if Intel did that to juice proceeds of all x86 users for a couple of years!
While this isn't entirely comparable (just run compute on Azure and install your services). I'm pretty sure this is a reason Steam completely gave up on their remote app for iOS.
Apple's demand for 30% of all in-app purchases, with no other way to get an app onto their platform, and its increasing censorship efforts to block an app from informing a user of alternative payment methods, isn't going to last, because antitrust regulators are going to kill it.
The credit card companies found that 1-3% is all they get away with skimming from the top. That being said they have massive volumes. I wonder why everyone is so accepting of such a massive cut of the profits. We need to demand 2% and NO MORE of a cut of profits and that should go to everything from Ubers to software sales.
I think a really low percentage wave is going to disrupt these markets as new competitors that are bootstrapped, slimmed down and not VC money hungry enter the scene. All it takes is for people to start demanding they get paid for the real work and not the sale.
Interchange fees on personal credit cards have been capped to 0.3% in the EU (in a law from 2015). As a result, there are no 1-2% cash back options for cards to keep track of or any other silliness, you can just use your credit card as a method of payment, without thinking about which card to use for what.
I'd personally welcome similar regulation caps on app stores (higher than 0.3%, but also certainly lower than 30%) in the EU.
> As a result, there are no 1-2% cash back options for cards to keep track of or any other silliness, you can just use your credit card as a method of payment, without thinking about which card to use for what.
In other words, consumers get offered fewer options, which results in a far worse deal, overall, but in exchange they can avoid the hassle of evaluating all the better options they'd have if they hadn't been legislated away.
I'm not too familiar with day-to-day payments in the US (I'm in Germany), so please enlighten me if I have something wrong here. Is there an actual option I have as a consumer to avoid the fee when buying something?
My understanding: everybody pays the same price, independently of payment method. If the standard credit card interchange fee is 2%, then the vendor has to raise their prices by around 2% to make the same amount of money on the product. As a consumer, I would have to pay the 2% of the inflated price if I pay by cash (or debit card or something).
So I'm forced to pay by credit card with a cash back option or some other rewards to make back part of the 2% that were added on top of the original price.
I lose, if I don't play the game, and I'm back around a zero-sum-game if I do play along. In any case, the credit card company wins.
If the fees are capped, the vendor doesn't have to raise the price, and the consumer wins no matter the payment method.
1) The 2% fee might mostly be captured by the credit company and thus represent a net benefit to most consumers (at the expense of retailers) because retailers tend to want prices like 1.99 and would be reluctant to raise that to 2.01 because of the reduced sales. Over time there might be other options like slightly reduced portion sizes to help the store, but profiting a little bit extra on most products is hard, and profiting a lot extra on a few products is near impossible because consumers will buy from competitors.
2) The 2% fee isn't reimbursed equally to all consumers, so individuals with higher credit scores might have a preference for the current system even if it's a zero-sum game overall. (this point also easily allows arguments the other way in favor of regulating fees because we probably shouldn't be extracting an additional percent here and there from young people and those with financial hardships)
>The 2% fee might mostly be captured by the credit company and thus represent a net benefit to most consumers (at the expense of retailers) because retailers tend to want prices like 1.99
How does it benefit the consumer if the credit company takes 2%? I cannot see why it would make a difference to the consumer (at least in the short term) whether the retailer or the credit company takes the 2%.
That’s a valid pushback on my assertion that the U.S. market benefits consumers. It’s still true that you can do better than 2% if you’re diligent, but most people aren’t, so point taken that it may be a wash for even moderately tuned-in consumers. Thanks!
Credit cards are near the bottom of the value stack. Uber, Apple, et al are built on top of that and need to pay the credit card transaction fees, which means they need to charge X% more than 2-3% to keep any money for themselves.
You could argue that their chosen X% is too high relative to their value add, but any competitor will definitely need to charge more than your proposed X=0.
Electronic credit card processing was born in the 70s, a few years after the ARPA research project was started and decades before the modern internet was born. At first it took a five minute phone call to authorize charges, so the infrastructure to support credit cards before commoditized networked computers was substantial. The credit card processing fees have gone down substantially since then with improvements in technology.
I'm not saying 30% is justified, but there's a significant difference between the service provided by storefronts vs credit card companies. You're comparing Apple to oranges.
Having my app on a large store front such as Steam or Play Store can and often does bring a lot of organic views. I don't know any business getting organic views from credit companies, except the sponsored once, which I'm sure are probably paying a good chunk for that. App stores also handle feature development, hosting, and many other services. What do credit card companies give to business?
Now the question is, how much is the storefront traffic worth to you in terms of cut. If you get 30% or more sales being on Steam vs selling on your own website, then isn't it technically worth it being on that store front?
I am sure Apple owns the cars. Speaking for myself I would gladly part with 30% if it means not dealing with the payment processors, distribution CDN's etc. myself. Also, do not forget there are many free apps on the App Store.
This is why Google’s strategy with PWA (Progressive Web App) intrigues me, although android is not a walled garden (sideload, 3rd party appstores) pushing for PWAs seems counter intuitive to increase its Playstore revenue; same reason why Apple has been hesitant about supporting PWA.
So what's the deal? It's hard to beleive Google cares more about open web platform than their Playstore revenue or it's just they want to ditch android/ART completely in future.
P.S. As a consumer I'm glad PWA exists and can't wait to see the end of duopoly in the smartphone ecosystem.
My guess is Google wants a closed web platform eventually. Highly optimized for Chrome websites adhering to Google made standards, hosted on Google servers for optimization and higher ranking in the 95% search engine. Site origins hidden from users so they won't know the difference if it is Bloomberg or Googlberg anymore. Chrome browser itself pushing boundaries of standards and ever changing to keep others in the dust and lagging months/years behind on Google invented things. Proprietary email extensions so that full feature set will work only in gmail to gmail exchanges. Proprietary google docs extensions which will work properly only in Chrome. And so on. This is system will work extremely well when used everywhere and by majority of users, so nobody will want to try alternatives. And all this will be with very nicely done, quiet and non-intrusive Ads, provided by Google of course.
I think the answer is simply that Google is massive and sometimes competes with itself. Android’s Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.
As a whole I think Google wants to chase ubiquity. A PWA will work on laptops, phones, Windows, Mac, Android... an Android app won’t. So they’ll push PWAs.
I too thought of just blaming it on Google's idiosyncrasy, but PWA has stood the test of time with multiple parties (browsers) extending their support.
Perhaps, I'm thinking other way round; May be PWA was supposed to kill traditional web apps and was intended to bring web apps to Playstore/Appstore but it didn't happen(yet).
>Android’s Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.
I think android instant apps are meant for Google Assistant ecosystem, Google Smart Display have it and Fuchsia would have GA; so instant apps might come handy.
They have made it unusually difficult to get it bundled up for the Play store. I mean, it should be as simple as proving ownership and supplying the manifest URL. I think solving the distribution problem would definitely be key to having developers think about it as an alternative to native apps.
Most of Googles revenue comes from Ads.
Having their products everywhere takes precedence over a monopoly on Androids which they can't never totally have due to licenses and OEM deals.
And there is always the google way of constantly throwing products at the wall, even if some conflict.
I think we're reaching the end of the era of app stores.
Apps often are single purpose information silos. You need an app to do every little things.
My guess is that eventually, we'll have an OS with a different user experience where you tell the system what to do (order pizza) and it will create a UI with all the nearest pizza places. You then choose where you want to order (let's say Dominos), and the system pulls all the informations from Dominos database. You make your selection, you pay, done.
In that way, Dominos doesn't have to spend money on making an app and users don't have to download one either. Win-win.
Google has to play it both ways. They have the Android platform and ChromeOS platform for the client. Android has a pretty toxic reputation in many ways and the OEMs control the experience.
PWAs play into the idea of ChromeOS as a bigger platform. I'd guess that Google politics have more to do with it not being more prominent than anything.
Xbox is a thing, and Microsoft is the sole gatekeeper for that platform. Obviously the Microsoft Store is also available on Windows, though it's easy to go around it there, of course.
It's decently likely a ruling around app stores will have impact not just on mobile and desktop, but the console world as well.
At least with a console you have the option of buying a physical copy of the game and loading it onto the device, compared to mobile where you need to enable developer mode in order to load apps from alternate sources (and even then, it's not an officially supported method as the steps can change significantly between versions).
But I do agree that there will be a console war if this is continued. I would hope that it leads down the "I own this device" route and level the playing field in general - I've paid Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony the money for the device, therefore I should have the right to run whatever I want on it. Gatekeeping what can be run on a device is a significant problem that needs to be resolved, along with the right to repair (Apple's a good example of the problems) and the second hand market (Tesla is a good example of the problems).
Which operating system requires developer mode to install apps from a different source? Not Android. It only requires you to enable the "Install unknown apps" permission from the source app, with this warning:
"Allow from this source? [ ] Installing apps from this source may put your phone and data at risk."
And it's not like this is hidden the way developer mode is. It pops up when you try to install an APK file.
Except that the physical copy of the game is still gatekept by Microsoft or Sony. People complain about apple's app store and 30% tax but compare that to the craziness it takes to get on a console and it's not even close.
As a developer I pay Apple $99 a year and i can release my app to the store as long as it meets some pretty lose guidelines. To get on a console you have to basically audition your game and met some arbitrary guidelines that aren't published anywhere. Either a company can build a curated system or they can't. XBox, PS4, and the switch aren't monopolies for gaming and iOS or Android aren't monopolies for mobile.
> Except that the physical copy of the game is still gatekept by Microsoft or Sony.
And Nintendo.
I don't follow consoles these days, but the gatekeeping by region that console makers used to do (even if I understand the reasons behind them) was incredibly annoying as well.
I think the perception of game consoles is different from PCs and mobile devices. Even though the game console is a computer, they're still not seen by the public or governments as a general computing platform no matter how blurred the lines have become.
Absolutely, not saying it's a perfect system. But at least I can go to GameStop, or even Amazon (lol), and buy a physical copy instead of having to go to the console specific digital store to buy and download it. At least if the digital store shuts down, and/or the console goes out of support, I still have a physical copy of the game I can play.
Physical vs Digital is a whole nother holy war though.
> "At least with a console you have the option of buying a physical copy of the game and loading it onto the device"
Possibly not for much longer. Sony is releasing the two versions of the PS5, the "digital edition" of which has no BD drive and can't use physical game media. It'll be interesting to see whether it has much uptake.
I feel like that's an interesting approach though. My PS4 sits idle most of the time, the rest of the time it's playing a bluray movie. only fractionally ever playing a game on it nowadays.
I guess the sales numbers will tell the bigger story.
Yes, but I don't need the store to be online and supported to access my physical copy of an offline game. At least there's a chance I can continue playing if/when the store gets taken down.
Look at every retro console - their games still work on their platforms, and there's a second hand market for games. It's a shame they're no longer made, but at least there's a physical copy that can be traded instead of a digital copy DRM'd to an account on a store that's no longer operational.
Except I don't need the console's digital store to be online and active to be able to play a physical copy of an offline game.
Agreed, it's not a perfect system, but it's not exactly the same as the Apple app store - the only way to get software on to iOS for the longest time (recently, side loading has become easier and less gatekept, but still not the same as the desktop experience).
Great! Facebook's Oculus store, more locked-down than any smartphone app store, is the canary in the coal mine for the future of independent developers.
Are there many applications these days which are not available as a "web app" aka website?
If we (developers) go for a "website first" approach, there is not much the device manufacturers can do against people using our products.
From a business perspective, is there a strong incentive to develop apps at all, when you already have a website?
Any stories of startups that had a running website already and then boosted their usage by an order of magnitude by adding apps for the various appstores?
We make four to six times as much through the Windows Store than we get through donations on the krita.org website; with about 80,000 downloads through the website, and about 2000 downloads through the Store...
Do you know why? It might seem obvious, but corporate users for example who want to support development often can buy a product that they couldn't donate to -- so greater income doesn't necessarily show that people more likely to pay prefer Windows Store, that might just be the easiest way to pay.
Tax for independent purchasers can change the way one will pay -- like if you're a UK charity I can donate and get you Gift Aid (if you use the scheme; a government increase in the money you get), or purchase and show it as a deduction in my taxes.
Obviously you know your users better than I, but I wonder if you've surveyed/canvassed to understand their motivations?
4. Any kind of application that needs to interface with a server that doesn't support TCP (webRTC kinda solves that, but not really, at least not yet)
5. Any kind of application that needs to feel fast. I have a pretty fast phone & computer, but I really feel the difference between a web app and a native app. A bit of data viewing is alright on the internet, but real productivity for prolonged periods of time? I'd rather have a native app.
6. Anything at all that needs to interface with your device. Web apps are extremely locked down, and for good reason, but this does mean that you can't use them as a file manager for instance.
Applications that only need to display, search and edit some data are absolutely fine as a webapp. Anything else gets a lot harder. Although I do feel like we are slowly shifting to more and more web based apps. For better or for worse.
even office applications the web based offerings are years behind their native desktop versions. they are good for some basic work but if you need to do proper work you have to use the desktop versions in most occasions.
> Any stories of startups that had a running website already and then boosted their usage by an order of magnitude by adding apps for the various appstores?
I'm not sure why an order of magnitude should be the effect we're chasing. Doubling would be phenomenal, even a 10% lift could be massive depending on your current size. The only threshold you need to hit is that the value gained from building the apps exceeds the cost to build them. Certainly that can happen at much less than 10x growth.
With that said, the problem is that this is an infeasible proposition for businesses. Ignoring any specific tasks that are actually just better when run native, many users of high-touch apps (used at least once per week, for example) get real value from having a native experience. If your competitors have it and you don't, you'll likely lose users because of it. Asking Facebook to drop the Instagram app because we want to stick it to Apple is only going to help Snap.
In theory, there is potentially some future hope for WebAssembly and PWAs, but if/when they get to the point where they can truly replicate a native experience, I see no reason why Apple wouldn't restrict them the same way that they do native apps. That is, unless a court rules against it or legislation changes.
Many things just don't work well in the Web. Notably games or productivity tools that are expected to be fast and always available. The hey app in question also has a (REALLY FAST, seriously its like a 99% lighthouse score!) website but the App is much faster than it and 'feels right'
> Are there many applications these days which are not available as a "web app" aka website?
I hope you mean "are there many application these days which cannot be replaced with web app". The majority of desktop applications are not available as web apps.
I'd say the majority of several dozen applications I use on a daily basis could not be replaced with a web app, at least today.
Of course with web browsers becoming their own operating systems, most of the applications could in theory become web apps...
I find the feeling of rooting for Microsoft very strange indeed but the Apple Appstore is really a thing that needs to be broken down/opened up ASAP. Microsoft gets slapped over IE and Media Player but Apple can go way further and lock out every browser but their own (all iOS browsers are just a skin on Safari). Apple has become what Microsoft used to be - IMHO worse.
It's interesting that app stores rose in the 2000s when we were at the tail end of selling software in boxes. Margins on packaged software were often 5-15% at the distributor level and 10-25% at the retail level for consumer software. For enterprise software, it was customary to make 40% on the first license and 10-20% on upgrades. So, the app stores aren't too far off of what the reseller share would have been...
That was the original argument by Steve...But imagine a world where you couldn't just give software to someone you know without going to the big box store, giving it to them first and agreeing that if the other person wanted to pay for it the store would take 30%? Even worse, the big box stores back then also bought shipments ahead of sale and managed inventory, sales, and the like. The publisher would pay production and take B2B orders at a 30% cut or so.
The issue is that they both are asking for 30% while doing basically little to nothing to deserve it (with the app store netting very few devs any sort of promotion value), applying the rules to only some companies, while also outright banning the sale of software elsewhere.
Maybe this is fair in a small company but in a large company that controls 70% of the US market? Thats borderline like setting up a tax on an entire industry as if your company was a state in the US.
Oh Brad Smith. Like, only few years back he was heading Microsoft’s onslaught against Linux and open source with exactly the opposite, calling Microsoft technology “open” because they published APIs. I wonder where Republican law makers got their straight face hypocrisy and cynicism if not from companies like Microsoft.
It is so strange that corporations fights for what essentially is iPhone owners freedoms.
The right to repair - fix app store owner decisions.
And that's not the worst. Apple sells devices with limited support. Perfectly functioning devices with no way to change OS once it become unsupported. Devices with expiration date.
App stores on the desktop are nowhere as close to their mobile counterparts. Web versions of mobile apps exist, but people always choose to go with the native versions. While on desktops, the opposite is true. I've always wondered why that is the case.
Apple could allow alternative app store which then can be permanently banned if any of the app distributed via it contains malware/adware or privacy issues
Walmart called on regulators to do the dirty work of controlling how Target negotiates the sale of shelf space within its walls.
“As one of the largest retailers in the world, making billions each year in profit, it’s unconscionable if we sat by not calling out others for doing the same.”
Walmart continued, “It’s imperative that we sully our competitions brand to make gains in the financial markets. Without state backed protectionism for large enterprises, us Barons are really just being hung out to dry.”
Walmart has continued to profit mightily, but it says the complaint is predicated on the fact they could be profiting MORE if someone forced Target to behave more like the rest of the majority.
When asked if Walmart had considered rebuilding its own image to gain business, there was a pause, before the conversation returned to targeting Target.
Walmart blew of criticism it’s used the market to wipe out competition in the past. When asked why they simply don’t do that to Target they replied, “Target is too big financially. So we need a bigger bully they can’t damage in return to stand up for us gritty, ruggedly individual elites. It’s the story of humanity to build government that’s coddles and pampers a privileged minority. It should be no different now.”
When it was suggested the public should advocate for dissolution of middlemen landlords in general, rather than drag the public courts through a pissing contest between blowhards, and stop wasting its precious time resource arbitrating the concerns of petty rich guys, the room laughed.
This is a great example about why despite the self-interested crying and whining, the App Store policy is a good thing.
Why does Microsoft care about this? They have the market power to negotiate better terms. The answer is simple -- they want to reassert control over email. The Outlook app no longer uses ActiveSync, and Microsoft architects usually imply or state outright that ActiveSync is a legacy product.
The MS client stack has a weaker technology advantage than it ever had. AD was the great anchor of enterprises, and it is eroding slowly as things shift to cloud. (Remember, enteprises are a decade behind startups) The whole point of moving away from open email protocols is that things like access control that enterprises need must use Azure AD. That drives deeper entrenchment in MS SKUs and drives products like ATP, Dynamics, the MS Voice stack, etc. Better PR/branding aside, Microsoft is more like 1995 Microsoft than ever.
You can see over the years, Microsoft has bolted all sorts of mobile user experiences over traditional Exchange/SharePoint/etc. Teams was the first one that has had staying power. They can't add functionality to the mail/messaging/video/collaboration stack unless they break legacy.
It would be really awful if Apple caved, and 80% of the commercial email market became a walled garden of a historically hostile platform owner, all so that Basecamp can make a few bucks selling an email client.
That said, it sucks that I cannot tell people they can also download Krita from krita.org. There's always the fear that some day, the Windows Store will be closed, or Krita will be kicked out or whatever.
Publishing in an app store means you're a sharecropper, with all that entails.