What then would be a fair commission? Credit card processing starts around 2-3% (though I'm sure Apple has negotiated a rate well below that, but it's not free). Hosting has value, as does marketing/discoverability (though apps like Telegram are big enough that it's diminished)
It’s not entirely about the %. The problem is that there’s no alternative. I have no real problem with someone like Google with the Play Store or Valve with Steam giving developers the option of shipping on their platforms for a commission like 30%, because you don’t need the Play Store to install apps nor Steam to install video games. In those cases it can actually be a decision about whether or not the hosting/visibility/platform is _worth_ the cut. But in Apple’s case there is no decision to be made. You can’t opt out. That’s why you see so much more flak thrown at Apple for this commission than you do other platform providers.
If they open it up, market forces (via competition) will determine what is fair. That equilibrium would probably be below 30% if serious competition occurs.
But yes, it would be fair for Apple to ask for 30% because others are free to offer the same service for less, and you as a consumer of that service have a choice between them - which will eventually force Apple to bring its commission down.
Of course, I think most money comes from IAPs, not app downloads. The issue then is whether Apple would be forced to open the payment APIs, or if apps would need to implement a separate solution.
An alternative would be to open up the payment provider api to different processors.
For example if my bank implements the payment provider API, then let me use that. All the other apps need to care about is a payment request method which can be satisfied with whatever payment provider I have picked.
Apps would be able to ask the provider how much they’re gonna get after the payment processes etc, and decide if they want to reject it or not.
That's not how corporate commercial agreements work.. apple would better immediately bogged down in multiple, endless negotiations and trial periods. As a developer, I don't think you should want apple involved in your processor choice at all
I think so. If apps could do their own payment processing and still decide to use the apple one, it means it was a fair deal. Rather than it being forced on them.
The problem is large companies bundle too much market power together. If you want to avoid paying App Store fees currently you have to pull off a Herculean effort no company in existence is capable of.
Zero. Apple tries really hard to pretend they own the relationship between the user and the app developer, when in reality they do nothing to deserve it. Most app developers, Telegram included, treat the app store as a nuisance, pain-in-the-butt of an obstacle they have to clear to have presence on iOS devices. It provides negative value to them. All the discovery features are irrelevant to them. They do their own marketing and could as well have done their own distribution if Apple allowed sideloading.
Yes, this.
If I was to switch from Android to Apple, I'd first re-buy the apps I currently own. I wouldn't be rebuying them because Apple had brokered the interaction in some way - I'd just be using the single option I have to get the apps I want onto the phone in my hand.
There might be some new smart-phone user out there that buys apps based solely on recommendations from the store, but this is a minority (and maybe an argument for allowing paid promotion of apps, like everywhere else).
Stepping back to the point, I'm guessing 99%+ of Telegram users decided to use Telegram for reasons outside of the App Store. Seems ridiculous that Apple has any claim to the income those apps generate.
Maybe if US or EU wanted to fix this (without forcing apple to allow 3rd party installs), a solution might be to just get rid of 'free' apps.
Say every app costs $1 to install (if kept for 12 months) and 10c a year to provide updates - and then it's up to the app dev to cover the costs to Apple if they want it to be "free" to the user.
Side note: the app store is literally beyond useless from a discoverability point of view. It will often fail to display an app which are almost perfect matches and may only show it on perfect string equality.. was that shit made by some junior in a naive way?
Oh and on the front page you get like the exact same selection of apps on the thousandth “our productivity picks” list.. I think they could probably significantly increase their app store revenue not by increasing the price, but by actually showing the users apps they would actually want to download..
This is a valid criticism. The app store provides little, if any, advertising or even ease of discoverability for 99.9% of apps on its app store. Charging 30% or any percentage of sales for that matter within apps when Apple provides little marketing value beyond producing the device and a simple catalog of apps is excessive.
They own the app store. The don't allow competing stores or side loading. They own the app certification and charge a fee for it. They don't license any software or permit VMs. They broke Flash and keep their browser a generation behind so anyone trying to deliver a good user experience needs a native app. They block data collection because it hurts Google. They've been anticompetitive for years and everyone just accepts it. They're as bad or worse than Google or Amazon but coast on their brand halo to get away with it.
Apple created the platform in which the apps run, and without which (or an alternative platform, which can and do exist) the apps could not exist. That has to count for something.
A similar example would be gaming consoles. The console makers definitely take a cut of all the games that are released on their platform
> That certainly covers all the R&D that went into them.
Ref?
On the contrary, it's likely that getting rid of the Apple Tax would mean needing to significantly reduce development and maintenance of the software.
Think also of how the incentives work: If Apple is paid only when people buy a new phone, that adds pressure to shorten the lifespan of the software on the phone. If Apple is paid on an ongoing basis as the phone is used, this pressure is reduced, leading to longer-life phones.
Proof is in the pudding. They have like a 40% profit margin. They are not just keeping pace with the cost of innovation. They are charging the absolute maximum the market will allow and squeezing suppliers for every nickel because no one can stop them.
Yeah: it isn't like Apple is spending their money on R&D or operations and they just have some extremely elaborate and overly expensive way of providing value to the customer that someone might value... they are literally just hoarding a ridiculous and almost embarrassingly large amount of cash. They have a money-printer that is being defended with anti-competitive lock-in mechanisms.
> Apple alone last week reported sitting on $202.5 billion in cash and investments. That's 7.4% of all the S&P 500's cash. And it's up nearly 4% from 2021.
iOS is already feature-complete and has been for quite some time. No one would be especially sad if it stopped updating except for security patches, new hardware features, and bug fixes.
I would be sad. Passkeys, built-in OCR, "Sign in with Apple", offline Siri are all from the past three years.
But also.. over the past several years I've grown to regard all new features as "god, _of course_ computers should be able to do that". So from my point of view iOS is neither "feature-complete" nor even "good enough". I'm annoyed that the future is coming much more slowly than it should, but I'm still thankful to Apple that it's coming.
One tiny example: "Lift object from background" seems like a gimmick, but in my head it's more like a completely natural feature that we just didn't have for whatever reason. For me, images are very naturally composed of _things_. All those standalone features like "face recognition", "dog breed recognition", "plant recognition", "lift object from background", "search by location" should just be one feature: the phone should see photos as collections of things in space, and it should know what those things are, because I know what those things are. Eh. One day we'll get there.
I'd like Apple to have more money than just covering the R&D, because I believe they can do unrelated cool things with it (VR, Mac improvements, Apple Car, whatever).
Historically mobile phone hardware is a loss leader for the platform products that they afford access to. Just look at cell service providers giving them away for free, or at Amazon Fire Phone.
> Just look at cell service providers giving them away for free
In North America which is in a different universe in this regard compared to the rest of the world. Where I'm from, carriers sell SIM cards and that's it. Postpaid plans aren't a thing. You buy your phone separately in an electronics store, for full price. This applies to iPhones as well.
Yes, because I have no idea why it is so apparently special. I do know that they sell kindles so cheaply because they hope people would be buying books from them.
> Another example would be gaming consoles.
Except those are never marketed as general-purpose pocket computer devices like iPhones are. They are appliances. Getting your hands onto an SDK for a gaming console requires being a company, signing an NDA, and probably committing to lots of other conditions.
There is a difference with games consoles, in that games do not compete with each other in the same way. Someone might buy Zelda by Nintendo, but also buy a third party RPG. Very few people will pay for Apple Music and Spotify at the same time.
I also see many people saying that they won't install WhatsApp, and will only use iMessage.
As long as Apple competes directly with its own customers the platform will be unfair.
Why should the Amazon Fire Phone be looked at as an example for anything? It was a colossal failure by every major except for the amount of e waste it generated.
A similar example would be a road. Mobile phones are so ingrained in our every day lives, they shouldn’t be that controlled by a single private entity. The same way Facebook and the like shouldn’t be able to unidirectionally control what is and is not publishable on their platforms, because after a certain size these cute little “private company decides who it wants to do service with” rules simply break down.
Like, honestly, do you think it is fair that google and apple could potentially display any sort of message to pretty much the whole of society? They are crazy powerful entities to the point where they are a new pillar of power next to the standard Legislature, Executive, Judiciary.
Haha yes! And toll roads are very common, people do gripe about them, but they are generally accepted. Plus local businesses, that are connected by the roads to their customers, pay taxes to the municipality which built the roads.
Would you be OK with Chrome blocking all websites that do not use Google as a payment processor, and them taking a 30% cut? They built the platform where websites run, and other platforms exist..
I wouldn't be okay with that, but it wouldn't be completely unjustified either.
Google has put an incredible amount of effort into creating the delivery channel for websites/webapps. Not just as in "let's make a good browser", but "let's have feature parity with the OS, while still having the security and ease of use that the OS can't match". (There was a giant Chromium team googlesheet somewhere tracking which features are still missing, but I can't find it at the moment.)
For example: let's say you're selling stuff online. How does Chrome help you?
* HTTP/3 makes your site load faster. HTTP/3 stems from QUIC, which was a Google thing.
* CSS improvements mean that you can make it prettier. Google works on pushing new features into CSS.
* Advanced video/image codecs mean that you can show higher-quality pictures to your customers (assuming constant bandwidth). Google works on codecs.
* The very concept of evergreen browsers (I think Google has also put a lot of effort into making into happen?) means that you can save your money developing the website.
* At the checkout, Chrome autofills the card and/or lets the customer use Google Pay. The card is synced between the customer's devices, using Google's servers. This is good for you. Easier payments = better conversion rate for you.
* If the customer creates an account (which will help you sell them more things later), they might be logging in via Google. Or they might be using a password, which Google also autosyncs. Both options are good for you. It's you who derives extra money from the customer being able to easily log into their account and buy shoes etc.
* Finally, if the web was insecure, people would be more hesitant to use it to buy stuff. Google works on making the web more secure (Google Project Zero and just in general a ton of security work being put into Chromium).
This is not counting stuff that is Google and not Chrome per se.
I'm not going to say that you have to pay Google for simultaneously working on 10–20 different areas of infrastructure that enables you to sell things and services to people. And heck, they also benefit from it (because ads). But if tomorrow Google said "everybody who makes money on the internet have to give us a cut", I would feel like they actually have a good case for it, having contributed to very large chunks of the infrastructure that enables me to do business on the internet.
We do need common grounds to function as a society, I don’t understand why some people like to look at companies like they are some Gods to us. Roads, railroads, electricity cables, etc are probably a better analogy to this whole ordeal.
True. Imagine if John Deere was a monopoly and insisted upon 30% of all crops that are harvested using their machines. Or if AT&T insisted on 30% cut of all sales performed on their phone network. Or an innovative prosthetic developed by a medical company insisted on 30% of income generated when using the prosthetic. Should this be allowed and does this damage the economy in general allowing for these companies to suck money out of transactions when using their devices?
I assume you’d feel the same way if your cellular networks or internet provider started charging fees for all purchases using their networks. How about a refrigerator monopoly charging for food you put in your refrigerator?
Hosting a 200mb executable has negligible cost. They don’t advertise anything. Nor do they make things discoverable. You can pay them separately to advertise your app, and increased discoverability comes from your own marketing efforts.
Most apps have an API they use. Apple hosts the binaries to be installed, and hosts the payment APIs if they are use IAP. Perhaps it could be argued that each service that Apple provides should be billed separately.
This ignores the point that companies are required to use the App store to host the app and do payments though; I think plenty of companies would prefer to distribute the app and process payments externally to avoid the fee, but it's not feasible to provide apps to users any other way, and any external payment options are both not allowed to be communicated to users within the apps and not allowed to cost less than they do from within the app (making it impossible to pass the 30% on to users). Taking a cut of payments facilitated by your platform is a business model; forcing people to use your platform and then insisting on payment for your work is a protection racket.
