Apple execs might have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a huge cut of pretty much everything that goes on an iPhone/iPad/etc.
To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.
Ok, but please don't post this sort of shallow riler-upper to HN. We're trying for something more interesting and less repetitive here, and subthreads like this end up choking that out.
There are lots of conflicting opinions on this. Personally I think its fine that apple provides payment processing but not fine that it forces developers to use their payment processor. A more fair system would allow the developer to present the devs own choice as well as the apple payments and allow the developer to explain there is a 30% charge on using apples payment processor.
Part of the problem is that the in-app purchase cut isn't just for payments infra, it also includes the rest of the infrastructure and value prop for the app store(s), which is otherwise only $100/year, which is nothing for huge companies. The problem is they also force users to use the official app store. tbf this is all less true on Android. I feel like a competitive market would have decoupled these costs.
Yeah I think its fair that Apple charges whatever they want for whatever service they provide. They can charge for the App Store, they can charge for the dev tools and SDK.
But that everything they charge money for, they _must_ allow alternatives to exist. If they want to charge a large fee for getting on the App Store, they must allow alternative app stores. The problem is not that they charge money, but that they use their massive user lock in to force people to pay for these services to exist in the market.
But… this is not true just about anywhere. I can’t go to. Ford dealership and buy a new Chevy or go to Kroger and buy Costco brand. Or when I go to some stores they don’t allow me to use American Express.
And yes you do have choices. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers out there. Can I install Ford UI on my Tesla? Do you think those companies won’t make you use their own payment processing once apps become prolific in car UIs? Can I hail Uber with the Lyft app? Why are they locking me in to only using Lyft on the Lyft app? Can I buy PlayStation games on Xbox?
If you’re against all of it fine, but let’s not pretend Apple is doing anything out of the ordinary here.
The problem is not the exact thing Apple is doing, but the scale they are doing it at. If Ford and Chevy owned every single commercial plot of land on the country and if you wanted to start up a new brand, you are told you just have to buy your own unpopulated island, start a civilization, convince people to move over, and then you can open a new store selling your own product. That would be where Apple and Google sit right now.
Are we talking about phones or operating systems? Apple has decent market share of course but there are other companies out there. You can buy a Pixel, or any number of other phones.
And even so, many of these “issues” are not problems on Android right? You can use 3rd-party app stores and so forth right?
I’d also suggest.. why does the scale issue matter? I prefer that Apple enforces Apple Pay. I prefer that Apple enforced Sign In with Apple. That’s why I buy an iPhone. If those things bothered me I’d buy something else.
It’s totally out of the ordinary. Apple sells about half the smartphones in the US. There are many other options for manufacturers but they all essentially share one other operating system. This big of a market with this little competition and this much vertical integration would normally be an obvious example of a monopoly. None of your examples come close.
But why does Apple have 50% market share? It’s because of these exact things that I as a user prefer. And on top of that, while 50% is obviously a great position, the other half is Android. And then if you compare based on phones there are still tons of options. If customers hated things like privacy warning labels or sign-in with apple they’d buy other phones. But they don’t. So it seems pretty clear to me the best product is winning.
You may stick with Apple because you like all of these policy decisions. Many stick with Apple because changing is so difficult. You lose iMessage, have to move your pictures out of iCloud, and repurchase your accumulated app library. The mere existence of another phone option doesn't necessarily make it viable. This level of lock-in is by design.
It was always like that, and on Android too. This isn't even lock-in, you have to move your files after buying new SSD, or relocate your documents after installing a new OS. It is a lock-in in the same way `apt-get install coreutils` is, because you can't just move to Windows and expect the same workflow.
Yes. Switching from Android is difficult as well. But, I disagree it's always been like this. When I buy software directly from the developer/publisher, I often can get a license that works on both Windows and macOS (or can get a dual license for a nominal fee). It wasn't really until mobile app stores took off that I needed to repurchase software if I went to another platform. And repurchasing that software would not be cheap. It's an actual cost of changing platforms.
I switch between Windows, Linux, and macOS with regularity and while there are platform-specific services, the mobile platform is considerably more walled off. Mobile storage stagnated for years while the apps and any captured media became larger, really pressuring you to use their cloud services in a way I've never had with a desktop. I can store data on a NAS and access it pretty easily with any of the desktop platforms. I'm not sure how someone is supposed to be able to be able to migrate off iCloud when moving to Android without involving a non-mobile computer. It doesn't appear to be anywhere as easy as copying files from one SSD to another or using AirDrop/SMB/NFS.
The iMessage thing is another layer to this. You may not want to call that lock-in, but there have been extensive threads about this topic recently [0][1]. The Epic lawsuit surfaced some emails that strongly suggest Apple views iMessage as a way to lock customers in [2].
Regardless, the original point is switching platforms isn't going to happen without a fair bit of cost and likely some social upheaval. Switching platforms is technically an option, but it's not a realistic one for many. I don't think it follows that if someone has stuck with the same platform for several years that they tacitly agree with all the policy decisions made by that platform.
This doesn't mean anything when so many things are coupled in to one product. I buy iphones because they have the best hardware and get updated for a long time. I don't buy iphones because they force one payment processor.
That is a very different argument than the one I replied to. It’s one thing to say this situation is ordinary, another to say that you’re fine with it.
Remember that there's nothing at all illegal about having a monopoly. If you have such a superior product to everyone else then it's the expected market outcome.
What's illegal is anti-competitive use of monopoly market position.
Since it is a two sided platform, not a single product ("phone and apps"), and as Apple is constraining the payment downstream market, and causing harm to the consumer (30% markup), there is a case.
Some textbook rulings will apply, since Apple exces admit that if they do no constrain downstream, no one will use their 30% markup product. So consumers could be better off by definition
although Apple will argue that they will charge more to downstream producers directly, but this is also difficult to argue (they can do this anyway and extract rents from consumers and producers at the same time).
If you have a monopolistic platform market on which you also produce, it seems rather hard not to get sued
You'd be wrong about going to a Ford dealership and buying whatever you want in most states. They are independent operators that again, have a high amount of independence from the manufacturer. They will gladly but your old car and sell it on their used lot.
This is why we talk about Tesla direct sales all the time. Because we are moving car sales to the apple model.
> I can’t go to. Ford dealership and buy a new Chevy or go to Kroger and buy Costco brand
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if a customer already purchased a ford car, and then tried to fix the car with a 3rd party repair person.
There are literal laws about this, for cars, that require ford to provide manuals, to 3rd parties, and require ford to sell replacement parts for 3rd parties to repair cars from.
The problem is that, effectively, it is customers making the decision to buy Apple products, but developers who have pay to get access to them. This split means the incentives don’t get to the people in power, and the mechanism breaks down.
It’s exactly the same dynamic as in net neutrality.
Developers have to pay Nintendo a lot to get access to customers with a SNES, Wii, Switch, etc as well, which is the OP's point - if someone makes a good product that gains a lot of market share (iOS, Nintendo Switch, Tesla, etc) that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.
I think the same thing should apply, but it's just not as harmful to society currently, because it's just one platform among many, many others, and it's just for games. Whatever the proper regulation is to counter this, it might very well apply to pure gaming platforms as well, making it so that anyone is allowed to make, market and sell games on them, no matter how small.
> Developers have to pay Nintendo a lot to get access to customers with a SNES, Wii, Switch, etc as well, which is the OP's point
The different here is that Nintendo is not a 3 trillion dollar company, that owns 50% of a massively important market in the US.
Yes, anti-competitive practices are allowed if you aren't a huge company.
Literally it is the law, that if you become a big enough company, and have enough market power, then certain actions become illegal, that were not illegal if you weren't as powerful of a company.
> that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.
It actually literally does mean that they are entitled to that.
For the same reason that 3rd party web browsers, were entitled access to windows users (and before you say it, yes I am aware that windows had a larger control of the market than apple, and it is not literally the same in every single exact way, but the same principle still applies, just in a smaller amount)
Payment processing trivially invalidates your premise: I can walk into a Ford dealership and buy any vehicle using any source of cash-like funds I'd like -- I don't have to use Ford's preferred lender.
Is that true? They aren’t required to sell you a car. I think they could require you to use their preferred lender as a condition of selling the car to you.
App store would be there even if they could charge no money for developers and have 0% cut - it's a prerequisite for the iPhone and they are making huge margins just in the devices, this argument that without allowing anti-competitive behaviour there would be no investment in the appstore is nonsense precisely becaus it's a first party integration.
For example I have no problem if a third party store forced one payment option only, but only allowing one store and one payment option is just milking your market position/rent seeking.
> For example I have no problem if a third party store forced one payment option only, but only allowing one store and one payment option is just milking your market position/rent seeking.
See that’s _exactly_ the problem I have. I don’t want to use your shitty payments system that’s likely less secure than anything Apple is doing. Allowing a single payment source that’s not Apple would directly harm consumers from a security and privacy perspective.
I am an exception. I use phone as a phone and offline GPS. Do not even have data plan. So yes anything that can make a call will do. Productivity: for me it is all on PC / servers.
I might reconsider my attitude when / if I can have phone as a generic computing device where I can download and install whatever I need without much hassles and where I can distribute my applications without needing to sacrifice a virgin first.
iOS safety measures do not rely on the App Store. The whole sandboxing and permissions model is there to protect one app from accessing things it shouldn't.
imo the value prop of the App store can be entirely propped up by the $100/year developer subscriptions. They don't even need a profit cut. The app store infra is a joke. You could probably fund it with under $1m/yr
iOS has allowed side loading for half a decade now. Companies that find $100 prohibitive have a free path that’s nearly identical to Android side loading.
iOS most certainly does not have real sideloading. You can if you recompile the app with your own key every 7 days. Or you can use testflight with some very serious restrictions like not being able to monetize at all.
Sideloading on iOS is nothing like sideloading on Android, you have to compile the app from source with your personal key and even then it's only valid on the device for 7 days.
There is tooling to manage self-signed certs beyond the seven day window. Unrelated but I find it weird that “you have to compile the app” is a bad thing now.
There are ways to go past 7 days but all come with even more downsides to both the end user and company trying to get users to sideload. "You have to compile the app" is extremely related if you're a company wanting users to install your app, especially since that requires more than just knowledge to be able to do.
To ask you the inverse question, in what way is any of this "nearly identical" to Android sideloading which allows indefinite sideloading via any delivery method, including installation of 3rd party stores, with no more than a click on an approval prompt from the user?
Optimizing for people who want to side load ~and~ cannot click the build button in Xcode seems wild to me. (No disrespect!)
It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
> Optimizing for people who want to side load ~and~ cannot click the build button in Xcode seems wild to me. (No disrespec
When you personally limit sideloading to be "I compile the app and manage a personal security chain to keep it active" it may seem wild, that's not what the vast majority of Android sideloading/3rd party stores is though. Xcode, beyond requiring installation, requires a macOS install to run it on. There are other ways to compile iOS apps, each even less accessible to users or distribution by companies. And again: the obvious statement that the vast majority of revenue generating apps on the App Store are not open source.
Even amongst the Android tech nerds 3rd party stores like F-Droid are popular because users don't want to compile their open source apps constantly... and there are even less requirements around compiling Android apps than iOS apps!
> It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Not true, sideloading apps on Android means loading them from a different source not disconnecting them from Google services or the Android ecosystem as a whole. It of course allows for that if it's what you're after but it's not limited in such a scope.
> Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
On Android sideloading is being able to pick which app sources you trust, even if that means "not Google". That could mean "I compiled it myself on an air gapped computer" to you, "I loaded it from a 3rd party store" to another, and "I downloaded it from the developers site" to a third. Which you personally choose is irrelevant as each user gets to pick their allowed sources so it can fit any user's need.
There are several methods for doing it but they are all crippled in ways that make it impossible to actually use the system for anything but QA testing and development.
You can install any app you compiled with your own key and it lasts for 7 days before requiring it to be recompiled.
AltServer can do it but in my experience the Windows version of AltServer is extremely unreliable. AltStore never really auto-renewed properly for me until I put AltServer on an old MacBook Air. Furthermore, the fact that this process needs a second device to bootstrap provisioning at all[0] might be a non-starter for some. Take a week-long vacation? Well, now all your sideloaded apps stop working.
A far bigger limitation for me is the three-app provisioning limit. There isn't any way to work around it[1], and if you do want to do serious sideloading you almost certainly will need to upgrade to a paid developer account.
[0] Specifically iOS only allows app provisioning over USB or Wi-Fi, not locally. Locally installed software cannot actually communicate with the remote debugging daemon. You can work around this with network extensions, but you don't get to use them in dev-signed apps unless you have a paid dev account that's been approved by Apple to use them.
For the record, that isn't to make sideloading harder; that's because Facebook went and shipped a spyware VPN with their enterprise cert.
[1] Personal experience time: Even when jailbroken, and with AltDaemon and Immortal installed, AltStore still bumps up against the three-app limit.
A charge for payment processing should be closer to what Visa or Mastercard charges, something more in line with the cost for providing the service. They charge on the order of 1.5% to 3.5%, depending. 30% is extortionate.
The majority of those percentages is the various gimmick bonus programs that convince people they are beating the system and getting back more than they pay. In Europe, the cap for credit cards is at 0.3% and that's still making a ton of money.
If it were, many companies would come in at 0.01% and bank on all the customers that immediately switch payment systems. Or maybe there is a bunch of overhead and investment involved in doing such (personnel, equipment, fraud systems, etc), so no competitor charges a price that would mean break-even or losing money. If a company really doesn't want to use a payment processor, they're free to go back to tab-based/credit-based accounting and hope that everyone pays in cash or everyone pays with ACH.
On that note, I hope FedNOW works well enough to become an alternate PoS payment method[0].
It absolutely has impact in the cost of the transaction. Even if we forget the fact that US credit card customers are bribed with percentage based cash back, card processors are both providing a form of insurance, and giving both merchants and customers cashflow easing loans. If I pay my credit card in full every time, I am, in practice, paying days later than when the merchant received my payment: I think the issuing bank is dealing with that part, and is not charging the customer for it. Many a transaction processor also ends up paying merchants faster than their bank gives them the money too: Their agreements with the merchants are often a little too friendly, and they have to secure loans for a day or two: There are entire teams out there dedicated to avoiding cash flow problems on the first of the month, when so many subscriptions come in, and a lot of money changes hands.
We also have the insurance component: Say some famous musician and a few influencers decide to launch a new music festival, get a lot of money paid to their festival-making company, and then, due to mismanagement, fail to have a working music festival. Most of the people that paid with credit cards will ask for refunds, and will get them, even if the festival company goes bankrupt. Some of those people managing transactions hold the bag, and end up losing millions in refunds. There's also a wide gamut of fraudulent operations that will try to extract money from the system, either by posing as merchants, or as customers. Some of that fraud is also eaten by the companies that handle the transaction.
So while fees could go down in a world with little fraud (and they do, as companies that are large enough, and have sufficient controls, end up negotiating serious discounts), it makes sense for fees to have a flat base and a percentage base, even if the entire system between you and your customer was just attempting to break even. The right percent though, barring the most fraudulent of environments, has nothing to do with a 30% cut.
The merchants lose when there's fraud/chargebacks, not Visa. Visa forwards that cost to the original merchant. That incentivizes them to be more vigilant about fraud protection, e.g. having to put your zip code in at the gas station.
And the banks that issue the cards are the ones that pay points/get interest, not Visa. Visa simply processes the transactions. If you noticed, your "Visa" card has a bank issuer, like the Capital One Quicksilver card (which uses Visa network)
The cost of running a transaction network has nothing to do with credit card points, insurance, chargebacks. Those are all handled by other parties.
I'm not making a statement on what the right or wrong rate is, but in the case of credit cards there's also a level of risk involved with fraud, which does scale with the size of purchase. Debit cards have less risk and thus have a lower, if not totally fixed-rate, fee.
For chargeback-able transactions and transactions that are reversible due to fraud, it seems intuitive that the expected value of loss would be a function of the size of the transaction.
As someone who sells software in the App Store I tend to agree with you although I'll add that for the majority of us it's 15% not 30% and they do handle a fair bit more than just the payment processing.
At this point, I think the way this will all end up (and would be fair) is for Apple’s payment system to remain, but you can choose to use another one. Apple’s take will probably fall in line (otherwise no one would use it).
I also kind of like the idea that something like that happens, except games all caps must use Apple‘s system and pay the 30%. That’s not as fair, but might be workable.
If I had my way over all of this? Do you know what I really want?
No consumable in-app purchases. Period. Outlawed.
One of my favorite things about the early iPhone was the incredible games that you could get. Now there’s almost none of them, the developers of practically abandoned the platform. The only ways to make money are ads and consumable in app purchases which are just complete scams. Like $1000 buckets of Smurfberries.
That’ll never happen. But I wish it would, because it would bring back the great games.
Check out GameClub, for those old great games. They buy the rights from developers that don’t want to continue, then do the maintenance for newer versions of iOS and Android.
But I think we should be able to agree that demanding 30% of nearly everything and completely banning any sort of alternatives is extremely overbearing and ends up taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people struggling to get by.
Developers would be interested in taking 30% and not interested in even trying Apple appstore, which btw sets product quality level guidelines. As a result, user experience will suffer. Those who prefer apple as it is will seek apple-level quality but wouldn't find one, because apple format is now equal to a regular one, and there is no superapple. Apple instead implicitly suggests to just charge apple users more in IAPs and for apps, when a charge is related to some electronic type of value. Whatever price developers see fit, there is no practical limit.
What you are basically trying to do is visiting a vip club (user-value wise) and then making it open to every crap dj out there, because otherwise it's "unfair". Why don't you just go to a regular one then? It is the same as this vip would turn into in a heartbeat. And where should other members who liked it go after that?
good example, that would certainly force them to have more competitive rates. Probably a premium, but still under competition. With how they control the app store though, how could it ever be a fair competition, there's always the risk of being unfairly treated?
We need to throw it back on the user. Apple uses this line of reasoning all the time. They justify their tracker blocking stuff on "the user clicked a button saying they wanted this". So for Apple to justify their fee they need to be able to convince the user that clicking the Apple payment option was worth the 30% fee while allowing other processors on the same playing field.
Users might be ok with some extra fee for conveniences like trust and the ability to easily unsubscribe. Let the user pick and let Apple compete for those sales.
Consumers buy the phones that are advertised to support features (e.g. LIDAR) and iMessage. They pay for the OS development.
Granted the SDKs would probably be much less comprehensive if there were no 3rd party apps but Apple advertises how their hardware can be used incl. by 3rd party apps and providing the libraries to access that hardware is expected by users (even if they don't think about this, most people expect Snapchat to access the camera).
Bandwidth/Hosting is covered under the $100/yr but if it wasn't, they could easily charge devs for tiers of downloads. Most of the support I'd bet is on the consumer side which wouldn't apply if there were other payment processors.
What bothered me as an app developer over a decade ago when Apple Facebook and Google all started taking a cut of app revenues is that they all magically decided that 30% was going to be the number. They didn’t even bother pretending to compete to undercut each other, it was as if they all decided together behind closed doors that 30% was the number and that was it. After that I realized I didn’t want to be developing apps for these platforms anymore.
Apple subscriptions provide me an extremely valuable service. They are easy to track, cancel & pay for. To the point I will not use an a subscription on my phone that doesn’t go through their mechanism.
Is that valuable enough to charge 30%? I don’t know but it’s certainly not outside what seems reasonable by orders of magnitude to me.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that they are a monopoly and should be forced to allow alternate app stores or payment processors but it’s not what they are charging that puts me over the line.
So allow for both Apple subscriptions and alternative mechanisms.
Most likely the non-Apple route would be cheaper to the consumer and get 90% of the traffic for that reason alone. If that's the reality, does that not imply that Apple's practices harm most consumers? Seems self evident to me that they do.
Besides, there really should be some common spec/mechanism to manage subscriptions from any vendor.
That is until you meet some subscription wizard like Adobe or a similar "you have a couple of weeks in December to cancel your sub" legal artist, then you likely miss it, and https://youtube.com/watch?v=8k5oAaXINX8
I think the worst outcome of their attempts to tax others this way is that it'll blow up in their face and they'll lose leverage over the app store.
I'm okay with them enforcing app store policy guidelines etc. I think what they're doing here though is just a racket.
They may have deluded themselves about this (seems that way from their comments about it), but I think most people outside of Apple see it for what it is. You can make a good argument about app store rules being in the interest of customers and chosen by customers. You can't really make a good argument for the profit grab they're doing here, it's just abuse.
> Apple execs might have convinced themselves that they are entitled to ... pretty much everything
Here I fixed your quote.
Including in everything is the $750M bonus Tim Cook received[1]. We've seen that exec comp is inversely correlated with performance[2] and buy backs only cause greater equity packages to be issued (doesn't reduce the dilution)
> To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.
What’s really interesting to me is that moves like this are the embodiment of the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News for years. For a long time it felt like every HN thread about pricing or salary negotiation was full of people insisting that you needed to “charge more” in every conceivable situation.
If you made a thing that was producing a lot of money for your clients, you needed to “charge more”! If your customers weren’t complaining and leaving, you needed to “charge more”!
Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move, HN reaches for the pitchforks.
It’s interesting to see how clear-cut this dichotomy is depending on who the reader thinks is being charged more.
> Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move
"Charge your customer more for your work" is VERY meaningfully different from "Charge someone else's customer more for someone else's work, because you own the storefront for someone else's business".
Sure, building the storefront is hard and high leverage. But figuring out the moral answer to "who reaps the rewards" is an entirely different journey.
I'm not sure it's that different. Not everything is an easily tangible product: We can debate the specifics of effort vs. reward, but I think it's pretty indisputable that the App store does provide at least a little bit of value add in the form of exposure for the vendor and convenience for the customer. So "charge more" applies to that value-add.
> but I think it's pretty indisputable that the App store does provide at least a little bit of value add in the form of exposure for the vendor and convenience for the customer.
I think it's disputable. It would seem to be adding about the same amount of value that the Windows store does for Windows users. How much is that?
The windows store is barely used and devoid of probably 99.99% of applications. You can't search, for example, for "note taking" and find many of the most popular options. Heck, their search is so bad that even apps they don't have done show up. Microsoft's own app OneNote doesn't show in the results.
It is simple not at all comparable in quality to the app store on iOS.
Let's not depict Uber and Lyft as victims. They would do the same - and they do, when freezing rain is falling on me and I need a ride to protect my health.
At least for surge pricing there is argument that you need to manage scarcity somehow. If everybody wants a ride because it’s raining, you can either rise prices or not, and make it a lottery. The latter is more fair, but the former has higher chance of bringing more drivers into circulation.
Could be, but that is a separate problem. For example places I've been in Europe have multiple competing services, even when Uber is present. But that's because the typical Uber business model where drivers are not professional drivers is banned most everywhere.
I fail to see how it’s different. Uber is the one paying this cost not the end customer. Sure they may pass the cost on, but they also would pass the cost on if any other layer of their stack started charging more.
Much different point than the other comment was making. As far as their choice in using Apple’s platform I don’t disagree that it’s not really a choice and it’s potentially a problem.
Apple intentionally limits the capabilities of its web browser to keep it from being competitive with its native platform, and I’m sure there’s an email out there that says as much explicitly.
s/Uber/Costco/ to see a better example: an iOS app is at best a minor convenience to an average costco member. Almost all costco customer acquisitions are through word of mouth / brand recognition and the vast majority of sales happen at brick and mortar stores. Why should costco fork over some 30% of revenue to apple?
Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.
> Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.
As of September of 2021 in the US[1], both Apple and Google's mobile app payment policies have converged[2] as Google mandates that all app developers use their payment platform and only their payment platform, along with mandating a 15% to 30% cut of all app payments. I believe Google's policy matches Apple's when it comes to this example.
The first sentence in your first link links to an announcement saying this:
> Android has always allowed people to get apps from multiple app stores. In fact, most Android devices ship with at least two app stores preinstalled, and consumers are able to install additional app stores. Each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features. This openness means that even if a developer and Google do not agree on business terms the developer can still distribute on the Android platform. This is why Fortnite, for example, is available directly from Epic's store or from other app stores including Samsung's Galaxy App store.
The implication is that apps can choose to only publish in stores with more favorable IAP terms, not that each store is somehow eligible to a fixed percentage of the $120/yr fee for a costco membership that may or may not have originated within the app store's ecosystem. Otherwise, at a cut of 30% per store, an app would owe platforms 120% of subscription revenue to be on merely 4 stores, regardless of how the customer converted.
So is passing on any other cost. I’m pushing back on the idea that the problem is passing on the cost. The problem is that they don’t get to choose whether or not to pay this cost.
It’s different mostly in the sense that iOS is essentially a monopoly. You can not create anything like Uber without being present on iOS, even if Android has the other half of the market.
When you raise your prices on your own work, there’s usually an implied alternative like not hiring you. We know there’s no such thing when it comes to iOS.
Different things are different, sure. I just wonder who is the authoritative source of morals and who deserves what for doing what.
Creating and providing access to a lucrative market is valuable. What's the moral imperative for allowing others to provide access to the market you created or reduce your fees, both of which would reduce your profits for the benefit of everyone else who is trying to increase their profits?
HN is full of these cognitive dissonances; another example is the generally pro-immigration stance when it comes to low-wage workers, which is contrasted with the anti-tech immigration stance. I used to think it was different groups of people on different threads, but I have come to believe that many maintain diametrically opposed views.
There could be solid position there, as I have argued in the manner you have stated here.
"Tech Immigration" is largely H1B immigration is prefectly valid to be opposed to H1B while being pro immigration.
H1B is a predatory program designed to lower wages and put immigrants in a terrible stop when in comes to the immigration status, i.e the employer holds not only their income, but their ability to remain in the nation in the palm of their hands. This created a toxic and coercive relationship with the employer.
At the same time a correction to this program, and a correction to the low skilled workers is simply allowing more open immigration, if you want to come here to work you should be able to.
The 'open borders' position you describe would definitely be a consistent one, but it's not compatible with most of the HN arguments against tech immigrants. Most HN anti-H1B posts talk about how they depress wages, and it seems likely that a significant increase in software developer immigrants would depress wages even more than the H1B status quo.
The alternative is a sane program that is detached from your employer’s whims and provides you some stability and control. As of this writing, that program in the US is called a green card. But don’t get me started on how hard that is get.
I want to be clear no where did I say anything about "open borders", I said "more open immigration"
I do believe in some controls on immigration, security controls as an example. However I also believe it should be vastly easier than it is today, order of magnitude more open than it is today.
Of course I agree with my peer comment, that the alternative to an H-1B isn't open borders. There are a number of other countries with much more reasonable immigration programs - Canada and Australia for instance - which prioritize immigration of individuals that would provide the most value for the labor market by assigning skills and attributes a point value. It's important to separate out the quantity of immigration, what they do/where they go, and how they're restricted in the process.
With that in mind, consider also that 'and according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or cofounded 55% of the United States' billion-dollar companies.' [1] It's not a zero-sum game, and stapling would-be founders to companies they would rather not work at for decades (H-1B for Indian born folks) hoping to get the freedom to found the next unicorn is quite a waste of time, talent and their risk-on years.
As an aside, it's interesting that folks want high wages, high disposable income, low inequality, low prices and low inflation all at the same time. I strongly suspect that these are fundamentally incompatible goals. Feels like, at most, a pick-two kind of thing.
This contradicts my experiences, as someone who personally went through it. Of all my immigrant friends and acquainteances (around 50 people) at different tech companies, around 90% are or are or were on H1B. Not a single consider themselves abused by their employer. Many of them have changed companies when they've been on H1B. Your status is tied to your employer, but you can find a new sponsor. H1B transfer is standard procedure.
Of course there is abuse. Even systemic abuse. This goes both ways though. For instance, Indian applicants can wait for over a decade for green card, we're talking completely americanized, fluent and self sufficient people, often with high positions at companies. People who did everything right, by any standard. Are these people abused? Perhaps, but if so, it's because the US government refuses to acknowledge them as permanent residents, which they clearly are for all practical purposes.
Alternatives and improvements to H1B is important, but suspiciously few in this community were interested in such a discussion at the time. Imo, parent comment is spot on that this is one of the hackernews dissonances.
> There could be solid position there, as I have argued in the manner you have stated here.
I may have done the same!
Parent and gp are scrubbing any nuance and leaving cartoon version of arguments, then fighting that strawman. Not all immigration is the same, IMO, sameness is a requisite for arguing the only "rational" positions can either be pro-immigration (all of it) or anti-immigration, which is absurd and reductive.
This is not about Apple charging more - it's about Apple charging for something they did not add any value to. This is closer to Oracle's billing tactics, that rightfully get pilloried on HN, the only difference is I'm yet to encounter anyone on HN defend Oracle's billing practices.
As someone who has gone through the immigration process, I can affirm that once you are no longer beholden to your employer for work authorization, more opportunities are available, and that leads to significantly larger salaries.
I am sure a large part of it has to do with the fact that until certain points in the process, you cannot change your employer without restarting the process, so a lot of people just stay without making a fuss about it.
Edit. Regardless, as it stands, the current H1B is indeed a broken system ripe for exploitation.
Who decides H1B is predatory? Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.
It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services. To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
Facts, Reality, 1000's of people that have exploited by the system and talk about their experiences publicly just like your fellow commenter that seems to have had a different experience than you.
>>Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.
2 things can be true at the same time as well, it could very well be a boon for the person, but it could also artificially stunt their growth due to the restrictions placed on them by the program, I am not sure how anyone could honestly argue that is better for the immigrant to be locked into their employer, and for the employer to have the power to deportation over their employee.. Or honestly argue that would not be abused by less than ethical employers of which there many.
You may have found a good one, I can assure you not everyone does
>>It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services.
That seems to be a huge leap based on an assumption that does not track with reality. I am unclear as to what would prevent highly educated people from immigrating to the US with more open immigration, but how H1B does not?
>>To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.
Does not serve my interests at all really. I am not impacted by immigration one way or the other.
Are you talking about victims of Indian consulting companies that are basically hacking the H1b system? Yes they need to be dealt with. Perhaps they need to just block consulting jobs from the program generally. Stick to at least enriching employers who add some value to the system other than just performing arbitrage.
> generally pro-immigration stance when it comes to low-wage workers, which is contrasted with the anti-tech immigration stance
I have the opposite view and don't believe they are diametrically opposed. I see many legitimate reasons to cap unskilled immigration while seeing virtually no good reasons to cap skilled.
Imagine a web developer gets hired to build a landing page for a product. Yes please, charge twice as much for your work, sure. But say they tried to charge an ongoing 30% of all future revenue for that product. Do you think HN would be behind that?
Exactly, if a small company decides to charge more for their work, it's a risk they take, and their customers might just decide to go elsewhere. But if tomorrow Apple decides you owe them more, what are you going to do? Not stay on the Apple Store? I don't think so.
That’s a nice dream, but it’s highly unlikely individual companies that are already dominating a market would leave billions of dollars on the table to make a statement
Computers are such an interesting and free mathematical concept.
iPhone is compute.
Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.
Apple views the iPhone as a sovereign territory, not just some generic compute resource. They can delete accounts, block access to the CPU, and charge whatever taxes they want. It's their land. In their minds, you're blessed to have the opportunity to be on their platform. Your users are strictly on loan from Apple, and you're going to pay for access to their customers. Your app better behave.
The market evolved into the shape that it did because Apple had a great product, a fun evolution of iPod, and a simple and compelling UI. Microsoft missed the shot, Android took time to get its act together.
None of this was a bad deal for developers at the time, but now there's no way to avoid it. We're now living in a sort of North Korea. Entrenched, with no way out. Over half of your potential customers don't have other devices and you can't reach them any other way than going through Apple.
It sucks for small companies in tech having to carve out ever smaller pieces of the pie. Year by year the market shrinks because the giants take it, tax it, and ration it out. If we'd have known then what we know now, we would have bought up every first generation iPhone and buried them all in a ditch.
iPhone is compute, but they'll be damned if you do anything that threatens their dear platform and profits.
We should push for our legislators to require open installs without an App Store. Customers already pay for the device. They shouldn't have to pay additional taxes for us trying to develop for them, trying to survive in this already hostile market.
> Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.
That wasn’t always true of phones (pre-iPhone smartphones), PDAs, games consoles, workstations, or some mainframes. Platform owners requiring license fees for on developers on their platform, using their dev tools, was not invented by Apple.
The App Store and new iOS APIs is an ongoing fee, much more akin to a developer charging a fee to continuously support their (for example) Wordpress theme than a one-time fee for creating the Wordpress theme.
The "charge more" advice I've seen, e.g. from patio11, seems to be aimed at charging _new clients_ or for _new contracts_, and in almost all cases has the caveat that one should almost never up-charge existing clients for the same service that they already have. You can add a new higher-price service tier, or grandfather them in _forever_ at the original price, etc, or quote them a larger price for the next consultation ("My fee is now X"), but in every case they have the option to walk away.
Agreed. HN cheers in the name of disruption and competition when rideshare apps gouge taxi drivers and when delivery apps gouge restaurants and couriers. But when it’s developers being gouged …
For startups, the advice is specifically given in the context that cheap customers are often "high maintenance", whereas deep-pocketed customers w/ accounts payable budgets provide more reliable income streams with less drama.
The only thing that is interesting to me is that you somehow have no idea how to mentally differentiate between a solo developer trying to find a way to be successful on their own, and the world's biggest company with cash reserves large enough to purchase entire countries. It's almost as if advice is naturally context dependent!
Apple didn't become to worlds biggest company with cash reserves large enough to purchase entire countries by missing out on opportunities to generate additional revenue.
Apple, much like the solo developer, is looking out for its best interests and what will help it continue to grow.
What shouldn’t be context dependent, in that way at least, is the law. It should apply equally to everyone and each company regardless of how successful they are.
> the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News
You'll need to ask patio11 for comment. He might have had some disciples regurgitating it, but he's ultimately responsible for this viewpoint. (Not saying I entirely disagree...)
Groups tend to look homogeneous from a distance until you zoom in like this. And when you find a dichotomy, it isn't necessarily that the group is a hypocritical entity, it's that it consists of sub-groups with differing opinions.
It's true that it isn't necessarily hypocritical at the detail level, but the question remains: to what degree is it actually like that at the detail level?
Everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes. It’s one thing to “charge more”, when people can actually take their business elsewhere.
It’s a different thing entirely when you’re the sole gatekeeper between hundreds of millions of customers and anyone wanting to sell them apps and digital services.
It might not qualify as monopoly in the legal sense, but you’re still being a bully, abusing a position of power in the market.
Charging less sometimes can give you interesting advantages. For instance, Xiaomi effectively crushes their competitors by purposely cutting their profit margin[1], such that:
- If you are to build a product with similar quality to Xiaomi's, it has to be priced higher than Xiaom's, because unless your production/sales volume is on par with Xiaomi, your production cost is very likely higher than Xiaomi's. Customers will prefer Xiaomi's product because it is cheaper.
- If you cut down production cost by bringing down quality, you might be able to price the product in Xiaomi's price range. But customers will still prefer Xiaomi because it has better quality for the same price range.
No Dichotomy there, its one thing to 'charge more' for your services, its another thing to ask for 30% of your client's SaaS subscription revenue, because you built them a website.
The 30% cut was worth it to me early on when there weren't a bazillion apps and they handled payment processing, return processing and gave you some decent visibility. Now it's just payment processing and return processing, which typically is around 3-4% using a credit card, not 30%.
I’m pretty sure the average spending of consumers on software today is far more than just a 30% increase from the times before the App Store. Realistically, the market easily tripled with its introduction.
From that angle, it’s easily worth a 30 % fee. Not because it costs that much to run it, but because it creates that value.
It's worth it to all the Legend of Heros games that are visible on the app store, certainly. For everyone else who doesn't get visibility, it means nothing.
It is a weird situation because it's hard to decide where to draw the line. Even right now the exceptions are weird and semi-arbitrary. Everyone paying 30% doesn't work, but neither does no one paying 30%, since every app would just switch to subscription model to avoid paying Apple.
It's also tricky to change the status quo since at this point a huge chunk of their revenue is the AppStore, and any serious change in the 30% will impact that greatly, upsetting investors. Once you take the step forward, it's very hard to take a step back.
They have to know their cash cow is under threat from legislation though don't they? Or maybe they are confident that no legislation will get through somehow... They could try to keep cutting that percentage until the majority of people aren't pissed anymore. A 15%-5% annuity forever is better than 30% bond that lasts a few more years.
They need to collect the 30% fees, how else are they going to invest and purchase $280B from Chinese Supply Chain. While offering iPhone at a discounted whole sale price in China.
TBH, they've basically gotten away with it for years because consumers aren't effected in a way you can see, because the blackmail of the app store platform lock in is so effective. Its absolutely extortion since you literally won't be allowed to do patches on your app until you cow to whatever policy they put in place that month.
And distributing a mountainous pile of cash to shareholders. In FY2021 alone, Apple repurchased $85.5 billion dollars worth of shares and spent $14.5 billion dollars on dividend issuance. That's 1/10th of a trillion dollars per year in distributions. [1]
Buffet alone collected almost $1B in dividends since taking his position. [2]
Is it fundamentally any different from Google charging for clicks that direct traffic to other commercial activity on the internet? You enable some commerce through your platform and take a cut in both cases.
> Apple execs might have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a huge cut of pretty much everything that goes on an iPhone/iPad/etc.
Why would Apple agree to having its intellectual property being used for free? As long as you have an app on the App Store taking payments, Apple is still entitled to take a commission out of that regardless even if IAP is optional.
Even after the Epic v Apple court case, Apple unfortunately still wins. Don't like it?, Maybe use PWAs or failing that build an alternative. Good luck.
Since the Venn diagram of this is concentric circles, with the Greed circle on the inside, you can also be sure about the Evil part (greed being a subset of types of evil) ...
This is business. I don't see the mustachio-twirling evil here unless you're coming from an anti-capitalist perspective. I won't won't debate the merits of that perspective, but this seems pretty mundane strategic business planning by today's standards.
Edit: To clarify further, I'm not saying "the status quo is fine", I would be in favor of legislation that would force Apple and Google to allow alternative app stores as first class citizens, but in the world we live in, I don't think trying to extract profit out of the platform you built is that crazy, this is what every big corp does.
This is Hacker News after all, a lot of us owe our careers to the fact that computers have trended towards open platforms without gatekeepers collecting rent. “Just business” or not, it's sad to see that innovation in commerce has shifted from the relatively open platform of the web to the relatively controlled platform of App Stores.
> This is Hacker News after all, a lot of us owe our careers to the fact that computers have trended towards open platforms without gatekeepers collecting rent.
I daresay a lot of people here owe their careers to the actual (and aspirational, especially considering the site sponsor) gatekeepers collecting rent, too.
A lot of HN is also FAANG and other billion dollar companies, all of which behave exactly the same way. I don't see it as sad, this is the future we, the HN people created.
If they allowed 3rd party app stores or let users install apps directly on their phone, sure. But why should Apple get 30% of a subscription between me and a company?
You could almost argue that it's worth 30% for the initial discovery in their app store (meh), but I just don't get how anyone could think it's fair for Apple to take 30% of a subscription, when developers don't have a choice but to use the platform.
I don't think you need to be 100% anti-capitalist to see the harm. It's a bit of a false dichotomy. A purely liberal capitalist market is bad, so is communism, so what? A market is a highly dynamic non-linear system that nobody fully grasps. We are thousands and thousands of years from having a fair world. We need to keep trying to make it better, by talking about it, exploring it, trying to come up with ways to fix it.
> I don't think you need to be 100% anti-capitalist to see the harm. It's a bit of a false dichotomy
What I mean is that this is not something exceptional, literally every single billion dollar tech corp operates this way, the only way you accumulate insane amounts of profit is by cynically examining every possible angle to extract more revenue from the business.
Sort of, it would be just business if developers were allowed to release and install apps from somewhere else other than the App Store, and if there were allowed to use any type of payment system they wanted to, or even the mere fact if there were allowed to tell users to go somewhere else besides Apples IAP system to make a payment. It's monopolistic and anti-capitalist if you compound all the facts together.
You can't just say "capitalism", there are many flavors.
"Competitive capitalism" is the one which is generally best for consumers, as businesses must compete, which drives down their margins (thus passing savings to consumers).
"Free market capitalism" is effectively hands off. Monopolies can form, and without any regulation it can become quite bad for consumers. Typically monopolies rarely form, but obviously in areas like utilities it happens quite naturally.
Most people strive for competitive capitalism, when used colloquially, IMO. In the general case they are one in the same, but owning whole platforms that are broadly used is new territory, where it bleeds into anti-consumer impact IMO
To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.