> D. It is no secret that the 30% fee has nothing to do with consumers, but will instead be used to increase the developer's profit margins. Expect to pay the exact same after the fees are lifted.
I could not disagree more.
> B. Android also charges 30%. It's actually better on iPhone, because developers making under $1M per year pay only 15%. On Android, everyone pays 30%. So you'd be paying more to Google on Android than on iPhone.
Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
> C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
Will I get refunded for the apps I bought? What about the macbook I bought because I entered the apple ecosystem?
> A. That's not exactly secret information, so your ignorance is not an excuse when you could have easily found that information if you cared. It's not a secret contract.
How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
Well, we can agree to disagree, but call it a prediction - in three years, prices will be exactly the same as they are now. No business, especially in this economy, gets an opportunity like this to raise margins without affecting sales.
> Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
Yes, and literally nobody will install it. And the few app stores that are available - Aurora will get your Google account banned, while F-Droid re-signs all apps with itself, meaning you are opening your device to serious security risks. A middleman in F-Droid would mean every app you install from them could be compromised with fake developer signatures. Fun.
> How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
How about paying attention since the 30% commission was announced at the iPhone App Store launch in 2008, literally by Steve Jobs on stage when iPhoneOS 2.0 was announced? There's no legal requirement to advertise every possible detail to cover every possible person's perspective - especially when it's old hat announced a decade and a half ago with fanfare.
Edit for the comment below about iPhone being anti-competitive (because I'm "posting too fast"):
Well, here's the problem with trying to investigate the iPhone.
Remember how I showed that announcement in 2008? iPhone market share, at the time, was less than 5%. Almost the entire smartphone market was split between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.
Now look at where iPhone is now, despite the fee. That demonstrates, to a regulator, that it is a competitive product, and the market preferred it, despite the fee which was implemented at the beginning. Apple didn't build the iPhone to where it is now and then lock it down - developers signed up right when it was beginning and didn't care then, so they can't care now that it's a success.
Apple has basically an ironclad argument for competitiveness. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored. This came up in the argument with Epic - Apple argued, successfully, that the market chose them and their "anti-competitive practices" despite them having almost no clout, which can only be the result of market support for being a competitive product.
Edit 2 (same issue, thanks @dang):
> What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
The iPhone took off because of third-party support, any market analyst will tell you that. If it didn't have third-party support from the App Store, it would have died.
Why was that third-party support there? Previously, on almost all other cellphones, every carrier had their own App Store. With their own policies. And a 50/50 split at best. Some only gave the developer 30% with the carrier taking 70%. With the developer paying for your own credit card fees and hosting fees. Many carriers had severe upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars to get a half-functioning SDK. The 70/30 deal with one App Store was revolutionarily competitive for the time. Developers flooded Apple's scene because it was, by far, the cheapest and most profitable App Store available at the time. They can't claim, high on the success that Apple gave them, that Apple's the problem now when Apple did not even change the deal that they initially signed for. At least, not legally easily.
> If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored.
I don't really get this point. Internet service providers are all anti-competitive, but they're doing quite well, because there are no alternatives. When the iPhone was released, so so so many people immediately saw it as completely in another class above all previous phones, and there were no alternatives in the same class. (Obviously there were trade offs: I personally know quite a few Blackberry people who scoffed at the iPhones lack of physical keyboard.) Even barring all that, the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field was still going strong at that point. The iPhone was cool. (And at that point, there wasn't even an App Store, and no SDK for third parties to build apps.)
Most people don't realize that they're negatively impacted by anti-competitive behavior until it's too late. They've already bought into the ecosystem. Sometimes they don't even know things could be more innovative or cheaper or whatever, because they have nothing to compare it to. To revisit my ISP example, a simple reason I'm mad at Comcast's anti-competitive behavior is because I know it can be so much better, based on people I know who live in other places and have an order of magnitude faster internet connection for a fraction of the price. If I had no other examples that suggested that 1200/35 for $90/mo was a bad deal, I might think that was just how it had to be in order to provide the service.
> If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored.
What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
I also think youre mixing up your markets here. The app store is not the same thing as the iPhone. The iPhone was a very competitive product that has an anti competitive market in it and some consumers are willing to look past that. Doesnt make it acceptable.
Or maybe I can just assume that the government will enforce anti competitive laws and not waste all my time trying to sus out whether a product has some anti competitive trick going on.
F-Droid is strictly more secure than the Apple App Store. The same MITM attack works on Apple, but since the App Store doesn't have reproducible builds, you have no way to detect it. The App Store is the least secure of the mobile app stores that most HNers use. You've been sold a bill of goods.
Aurora isn't an app store. It is an unauthorized client for the Play Store.
I don't disagree with your overall point, I don't think, but having reproducible builds doesn't -- alone -- make a distribution method more secure. I can publish an app with a bunch of security holes and maybe even some obfuscated malicious behavior, but if the F-Droid maintainers don't notice, it doesn't matter one bit that a user could reproduce the build they made.
Of course, I don't know if we can say that Apple's app store approval process filters out more or fewer security issues or malicious apps than F-Droid's vetting process does.
I could not disagree more.
> B. Android also charges 30%. It's actually better on iPhone, because developers making under $1M per year pay only 15%. On Android, everyone pays 30%. So you'd be paying more to Google on Android than on iPhone.
Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
> C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
Will I get refunded for the apps I bought? What about the macbook I bought because I entered the apple ecosystem?
> A. That's not exactly secret information, so your ignorance is not an excuse when you could have easily found that information if you cared. It's not a secret contract.
How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?