> anyone who claims to care about user experience, and yet only gives a solution that results in Apple getting more money, is giving a bad solution.
You seem to be getting easily confused or seem to have difficulty grasping the main point. You’re confusing the notion that “anything that puts more money in Apple’s coffers and not developers’ means it’s automatically a stupid idea”.
First, requiring developers to pay or placing any financial gates to developers disincentivizes non-committal, spammy, or even unidentifiable devs. This is a user-friendly policy.
Second, is the need to set up sustainable financial incentives. (This is not _directly_ related to user experience, which is where you’re getting confused and calling the idea dumb or stupid). There’s no way _any_ group of people who work on building the SDKs, Compilers, Tools, Marketing & Distribution, or anything remotely related would ever sustain their operations on 0% revenue. _Requiring_ devs to pay _proportional_ to their revenue is the sustainable process. Epic does that, Unity does that, AWS does that etc. Whether that’s implemented as a fixed price of $5000 per user or whether that’s an annual subscription of $100 (like Jetbrains’) is completely up to the creators of those systems (in the App Store’s case, Apple). I’m the end, it is _indirectly_ user-friendly: more trusted, well intentioned devs implies more trusted apps and a virtuous cycle of more users/customers.
Apple chose to proportionally charge devs based on their revenue. They could’ve chosen a hundred different options, sure. But they chose the method that created a financial incentive to build all development tools for free (practically), and set up systems to distribute, discover, maintain, update apps at per-user level (ie: they need to run servers that users download apps from; 3p devs don’t; nor does a user need to go bittorrent.com or cnet.com or softonic.com or whatever else could’ve been the hosting provider)
My idea on Xcode pricing is meant to emulate those same underlying policies. My idea is not meant to be the “holy grail” of solutions here. I merely use that to illustrate the much deeper, much more passionate point of view: that 3p devs are monstrous, vile, nefarious actors. They _ought_ to taxed! They ought to pay up!
And yes, they ought to pay up particularly to the hardware platform provider! Don’t think it’s fair? Well, go complain to Nokia or Blackberry circa 2007 when you _had_ zero avenues to get your app in front of users without those companies controlling the developer fully.
Or even the web in the 2010s where there’s an ungodly amount of tools, APIs, frameworks upon frameworks that none of them work cohesively well. The fact that web developers had to write custom polyfills or resort to user-hostile behavior such as charging IE users more To disincentivize people from using insecure browsers.
In both those instances developers made a 100% of all their revenue and acted like pure a*holes. Apple put an end to that by demanding devs conform to their platform!
> anything that puts more money in Apple’s coffers and not developers’ means it’s automatically a stupid idea
The reason why it is a stupid idea, is that the recommendation only gives Apple more money, and does nothing else.
> or anything remotely related would ever sustain their operations on 0% revenue
Apple sells iPhones. It can make its money off of that.
Apple is getting more than enough money, from its phone business, such that it will continue doing what it is doing now, even if it loses some revenue from alternative app stores.
So no, I am not convinced by your argument of us having to be worried about a multi-trillion dollar company losing a bit of money.
> is completely up to the creators of those systems (in the App Store’s case, Apple)
It is actually not completely up to Apple anymore. Because now there is a law, and they can either follow the law or leave the EU.
> And yes, they ought to pay up particularly to the hardware platform provider! Don’t think it’s fair? Well, go complain to Nokia or Blackberry
Actually no. Instead of your recommendation, we can instead make laws to force things to change, and this is what just happened. Apple is the one that lost here. You, or them, are the ones who are crying about the current situation.
Apple can either follow the law, or leave the EU market if it doesn't like the law.
You are the one crying here. Everyone else is basking in our victory. You are the one who is going to have to go cry to someone else, to change things.
Apple lost. You lost. The laws are being passed. And none of your arguments are convincing to anybody who is in support of these laws.
A convincing argument would instead be one that results in Apple getting zero money, and also protects users in some way. But you do not seem interested in a better outcome here.
And no, I or these law makers don't have to come up with another solution, because people like me who support this law already won.
Instead, it is Apple, and people like you, the one's who definitively, and completely lost, that are going to have to come up with a solution that convinces everyone else, that actually results in a 0% cut going to Apple, because you are the loser in this political situation.
The winners do not have to change anything, because we are getting our laws passed, and Apple is going to be forced to follow the law or shutdown in the EU, or other countries soon.
You seem to be getting easily confused or seem to have difficulty grasping the main point. You’re confusing the notion that “anything that puts more money in Apple’s coffers and not developers’ means it’s automatically a stupid idea”.
First, requiring developers to pay or placing any financial gates to developers disincentivizes non-committal, spammy, or even unidentifiable devs. This is a user-friendly policy.
Second, is the need to set up sustainable financial incentives. (This is not _directly_ related to user experience, which is where you’re getting confused and calling the idea dumb or stupid). There’s no way _any_ group of people who work on building the SDKs, Compilers, Tools, Marketing & Distribution, or anything remotely related would ever sustain their operations on 0% revenue. _Requiring_ devs to pay _proportional_ to their revenue is the sustainable process. Epic does that, Unity does that, AWS does that etc. Whether that’s implemented as a fixed price of $5000 per user or whether that’s an annual subscription of $100 (like Jetbrains’) is completely up to the creators of those systems (in the App Store’s case, Apple). I’m the end, it is _indirectly_ user-friendly: more trusted, well intentioned devs implies more trusted apps and a virtuous cycle of more users/customers.
Apple chose to proportionally charge devs based on their revenue. They could’ve chosen a hundred different options, sure. But they chose the method that created a financial incentive to build all development tools for free (practically), and set up systems to distribute, discover, maintain, update apps at per-user level (ie: they need to run servers that users download apps from; 3p devs don’t; nor does a user need to go bittorrent.com or cnet.com or softonic.com or whatever else could’ve been the hosting provider)
My idea on Xcode pricing is meant to emulate those same underlying policies. My idea is not meant to be the “holy grail” of solutions here. I merely use that to illustrate the much deeper, much more passionate point of view: that 3p devs are monstrous, vile, nefarious actors. They _ought_ to taxed! They ought to pay up!
And yes, they ought to pay up particularly to the hardware platform provider! Don’t think it’s fair? Well, go complain to Nokia or Blackberry circa 2007 when you _had_ zero avenues to get your app in front of users without those companies controlling the developer fully.
Or even the web in the 2010s where there’s an ungodly amount of tools, APIs, frameworks upon frameworks that none of them work cohesively well. The fact that web developers had to write custom polyfills or resort to user-hostile behavior such as charging IE users more To disincentivize people from using insecure browsers.
In both those instances developers made a 100% of all their revenue and acted like pure a*holes. Apple put an end to that by demanding devs conform to their platform!