I also think apple's 30% cut is excessive, but I don't think this line of argument helps. We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have.
Here's a little story / timeline from 2009-2010 (from my perspective as a dev on Kindle for iOS):
* we submit the Kindle app ...including an in-app bookstore... to Apple for initial app review
(Note: multiple ebook readers with in-app bookstores are already on the app store at this point)
* several weeks pass with no response
* Apple announces in-app purchasing (to be released several months later)
* Apple rejects our app: we have to give them a 30% cut of all sales through the app, or remove the store and all references / external links to it. We chose option 2.
* Apple forces the other ereader apps to remove their stores or go with IAP. Several (most?) just gave up and pulled their apps entirely
* Apple negotiates agreements with most of the major book publishers that if they want to sell books on iBooks, ebooks must be listed at the same price on ALL stores, and have a 30% margin
* Apple launches in-app purchasing and the iBooks store (with the iPad announcement, IIRC)
...aka even if we (or any other ereader app) wanted to sell books via our app, the terms Apple set forth effectively meant that ALL profit from those sales must go to them (and we would have to eat the bandwidth / service costs on top of that)
Another random app store anecdote: way back when (2010?) Adobe made a feature where you could publish flash content as an iOS app. Like you build a flash game, hit publish, and an .ipa file comes out. So the feature goes into open beta, and a bunch of flash devs make iPhone apps, they work fine, they get accepted into the app store, users are using them, everybody's happy.
Then a few days before the feature was scheduled to leave beta and be formally supported, Apple changed the app store terms to disallow it, by requiring that apps be "originally written" in certain languages like objective-C or C++. Nothing to do with what the app did or how it worked, and no definition for what "originally written" specifically meant. And there were lots of other technologies for building apps by then, so of course they all freaked (though AFAIK Apple never actually enforced the new terms for anything besides flash).
Anyway shortly afterward Adobe reverted the app-publishing feature, and then a few months later Apple quietly reverted the terms to what they were before.
You would think that as the web platform is starting to pick up things like WASM and many new capabilities that there are an extremely large set of apps all of a sudden where you would be insane to think about
- writing it in a different language that only really runs on one operating system
- pay $99/yr for the privilege
- at any point and for any reason you can be cut off from reaching your audience
- you have to pay them 30% of your revenue (not profit) for any money your application makes
- you can’t make updates in a timely manner
- you have close to zero avenues of recourse if you disagree with any of this
- the deal can change at any time and you don’t get a say in it.
Why the fuck would anyone choose that option in 2024 if they didn’t have to? It’s no wonder Apple went out of their way to try and cripple the web for over a decade now, it was only legal action from the EU that forced them to staff Safari properly about two years ago.
And even now, they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus.
That’s a hostage taking business. Get out of that ecosystem if you can
> And even now, they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus.
That isn’t true. It takes two taps. You tap the share button, then you tap Add to Home Screen. That’s it. That’s not “hidden deep in a series of unrelated menus”. It’s a top-level option.
And don’t complain about the “share” button – that’s just a bad name for what iOS users understand as the “Send/Put/Open this somewhere else” button. It makes total sense if you are an iOS user, don’t be misled by what people call it. People tap it when they want to “do something” with what they are looking at. It’s exactly the button you’d tap if you wanted to add a PWA to your home screen.
> It is absolutely set up in such a way that normal people not only can not do it but don’t even know it’s possible.
Would you say that Apple are deliberately hiding how to bookmark a website and that people are unable to do that? Because you do that the same way too.
How about printing? Does Apple have a secret motive to stop people from printing? Because you do that the same way too.
The share button is the “Send/Put/Open this somewhere else” button. That’s just how iOS works. It’s not a devious plan. It’s a standard platform convention.
> I should be able to trigger an install prompt as a developer at a minimum.
This is not currently part of any web standard. It was implemented unilaterally by Chromium and hasn’t been accepted by any other rendering engine yet. It’s explicitly not on a web standards track:
> Status of This Document
> This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.
I don’t understand why you’re acting purposely obtuse here.
They have a multi billion dollar incentive here along with a long history of actions all clearly focused on protecting that revenue stream at the expense of the web platform.
I’m making an argument that like any other application delivery platform I should have a clear and standard way for my users to install my software.
The reason we don’t currently have that is largely tied up in Apple yet again with the exact same incentive structure as every other time they pulled shit like this.
> I don’t understand why you’re acting purposely obtuse here.
Do you want to try that reply again in a less insulting way? Perhaps consider the possibility that people can have a legitimate difference of opinion with you without it being a stupid act?
Im not trying to be insulting but this also isn’t a legitimate difference of opinion scenario.
You tried to do a weird gotcha by claiming that the ability to install a web app is no different to print a webpage and implied that I was seeing conspiracies where there were none to be found.
I’m saying that the thing I’m talking about has a very clear difference when it comes to incentive structures and I know you’re aware of it because we are in the middle of a discussion about it.
So I don’t know what other conclusion to draw here other than you’re pretending to not understand the difference.
> Im not trying to be insulting but this also isn’t a legitimate difference of opinion scenario.
You are claiming that it’s literally impossible to honestly disagree with you; that the only possibility is that I’m deliberately acting the fool? Do you really believe that?
I feel like you’re getting more worked up here than the situation requires.
If you took offence at the original comment where I said you appeared to be playing games by ignoring something I’m sorry.
I am however asking that you present some kind of rebuttal rather than trying to make this a thing about polite discourse on the internet.
I made specific points, you came in talking about unrelated points, I pointed out that your reasoning had a major hole in it and now we are in a conversation nobody wants to be a part of.
Let’s just say we both understand why an install prompt and printing a web page aren’t the same thing because I think we covered that ground already.
To get it back on track, I’m saying that they don’t belong together and that when you listed all that other random set of actions people could do that appear in the same screen that this illustrates the point I’ve been trying to make from the start.
If the argument is “oh that’s just iOS, it’s totally innocent and how could you ever seen anything nefarious there” then make that argument but as discussed, it has major holes.
> I feel like you’re getting more worked up here than the situation requires.
I’m not getting worked up, I’m refusing to accept direct insults. It’s possible to do that without getting worked up. This place is supposed to be better than this and you’re falling short. If people don’t push back on behaviour like yours this place will be dragged down into the muck. Insults should not be tolerated here.
And telling people they are getting worked up when they complain about you insulting them, in itself, additionally insulting and inflammatory. Don’t do that.
> If you took offence at the original comment where I said you appeared to be playing games by ignoring something I’m sorry.
You didn’t accuse me of playing games, you accused me of “acting purposely obtuse”. You’re saying that I’m pretending to be a moron because my argument is far too stupid for anybody to really believe. You don’t get to put me in the catch-22 of either taking your insults without complaint or getting accused of being worked up. It’s entirely reasonable to reject your replies calmly until you stop being insulting.
> I am however asking that you present some kind of rebuttal
I already did that. You called it a “weird gotcha” and ignored it. I suspect you missed the point because you were so sure I was pretending to be an idiot. You are free to go back and read it again. If you still don’t understand it a second time, ask for clarification instead of throwing insults around.
Just to be clear… your argument is or isn’t “That’s just iOS and there’s clearly nothing nefarious about it”?
That’s my good faith understanding of the point you’re making at the moment so I will try one final time…
Do you care to address the incredibly specific point I’ve made repeatedly that that line of reasoning has a huge hole in it which you seem to be ignoring no matter how often I ask you to acknowledge it.
> which you seem to be ignoring no matter how often I ask you to acknowledge it.
I wasn’t ignoring it. I was refusing to respond to replies with insults. I have been very clear about that.
> Just to be clear… your argument is or isn’t “That’s just iOS and there’s clearly nothing nefarious about it”?
No.
Your argument is:
> they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus.
Let’s deconstruct that to three assertions:
- It’s deep in a series of menus
- It’s in an unrelated menu
- It’s being purposefully hidden by Apple.
I have pointed out several things:
- It’s a top-level item in a very commonly used menu.
- It belongs in that menu.
- Other items in that menu are also there for the same purpose.
- Apple has no incentive to hide those other items.
So right away, we can get rid of the first assertion. It’s not deep in a series of menus. That’s just plainly false, as anybody who has an iPhone near them can verify. It’s a top-level item in a primary menu. It’s a single tap away.
Next we move on to whether it belongs there or not. As I repeatedly point out, the “share” button actually exposes a whole lot more than just sharing. I’m not even certain “share button” is its official name, I think it might be called “action button” or something. You can consider it the “put this somewhere else button” because that’s what it actually means, even if the name doesn’t roll off the tongue. That’s the platform convention. That’s how iOS users perceive it.
Want to send it to somebody? Tap the button. Want to open it in a different app? Tap the button. Want to save it somewhere? Tap the button. That’s what the button is for. You are looking at something and you want to put it somewhere.
What else is in that menu? You can save a document to files. You can print it. You can bookmark it. You get a list of other apps you can open it with. You can add it to a note. You can copy it to the pasteboard. These all fit the same theme. You are looking at something and you want to put it somewhere.
Does “I want to put this PWA on my Home Screen” fit there? It absolutely does. That’s exactly where I’d locate the feature. You are looking at a PWA, and you want to put it somewhere. So tap the put it somewhere button.
So no, it’s not in an unrelated menu. So the second assertion goes.
Finally, is Apple purposefully hiding it there? Well, showing that it belongs there should be enough to disprove that, but there’s also more. What else is in that menu? Let’s skip over sharing to eliminate quibbling over “but those belong there”.
Saving a file isn’t sharing. Printing isn’t sharing. Bookmarking isn’t sharing. Opening in another app isn’t sharing. Adding it to a note isn’t sharing. Copying it to the pasteboard isn’t sharing.
Are all of those purposefully being hidden by Apple where users won’t look for them? How does hiding “Add to bookmarks” have a “multi billion dollar incentive” behind it? How does hiding “Copy to pasteboard” “protect Apple’s revenue stream”? Why would Apple even implement these features in the first place only to hide them?
They aren’t being purposefully hidden. They are all there because they all do the same sort of thing – the same thing that Add to Home Screen does. They take what the user is looking at and put it somewhere.
And users use this menu all the time. It’s not some obscure part of Safari you’ve got to dig to find. The average user has probably scrolled past Add to Home Screen thousands and thousands of times.
If Apple were trying to hide this functionality, this is the very last place they’d put it. They’ve put it somewhere that a) is accessible with a single tap, b) makes sense conceptually, and c) will be seen by users all the time. So the final assertion is no good either.
And like cpuguy83 pointed out elsewhere in the thread - this has been how you add a site to your home screen since day one, when Steve Jobs was telling everybody that web apps were the only way to build apps for the iPhone. At that point PWAs didn’t even exist. And that’s the spot they chose for it back then – before native apps were even allowed by Apple, when Apple wanted everybody to build web apps and add them to their home screens. It completely contradicts the idea that this is a hiding place where they don’t want people to see it. That’s where they chose to put it when it’s incontrovertible fact that they wanted people to use it.
So why is it that after this existing for so many years that nobody seems to even know it’s an option or how to do it.
Just to give a bit of context on my own background because it’s relevant here but I spent most of the last ten years running A/B tests for companies and then analysing the results.
One of the core truths in my particular line of work is that default options matter a lot more than people tend to realise.
So when you take an idea such as “I would like to install this app” and you then:
1. Don’t provide a way to ask users if they would like to do that.
2. Put it in a menu that’s cluttered with many other unrelated things.
3. Call it something entirely different “add to home”.
It’s not a mystery what is going to happen here. We are talking the overwhelming MAJORITY of people will have no idea and it won’t get used.
I’m just a random person on the internet so I’m not asking you to take my word for it.
It’s specifically why I mentioned the test before of go and talk to any person with an iPhone and ask them how they can install an app without the App Store. You can prove this to yourself tomorrow by asking ten people.
You can even incentivise them with money. They absolutely can not do it and will look at you like you have two heads.
They have no idea it’s even possible.
So the next logical question that comes to mind is why do you suppose that is?
There’s a few potential options:
1. They somehow have no idea that this is a problem their users struggle with.
2. They are bad a UI design
3. It’s an intentional choice to try and keep people in the dark while still avoiding any legal action for anti competitive behaviour.
I can only find evidence for one of those options but I have a LOT of it. It’s not a coincidence that it happens to align perfectly consistently with all of their other actions towards treating the web as a competitive application platform.
That’s just who they are and how they do business.
I think they gave you a clear answer to the difference:
The Web Standards Committee has decided the correct way for the web to work is that there is an expectation that a user understands how to bookmark something and can elect to do so if they choose. They don't make a part of any web standard a developer being able to ask a user to add a bookmark. So not just Apple, but on the standard web, developers don't have the install rights you are saying they should have. It's hard to argue it's a conspiracy by Apple when a standards body outside Apple has defined how it works.
Maybe enough users don't know how to bookmark on iOS. Could Apple do more to make sure they know how? Yes. But I don't think we should change the web to allow websites to ask to create bookmarks because Google Chrome thinks its a good idea.
Based on your comment I think there might be some misunderstandings here.
That committee you are talking about isn’t actually independent of Apple. They are a part of it.
Historically Apple have repeatedly used those exact committee bodies as a way to shut down a whole range of things that would bring the web platform closer to iOS in terms of capabilities.
The point about the bookmarking is also a bit hard to follow. I don’t know if this is getting a bit abstract or something so I’ll just restate my main argument.
Apple have repeatedly tried to make sure the web wasn’t able to compete with iOS and actively worked to get as much lock in on their platforms as possible. They have a terrible track record in terms of interoperability and as I stated numerous times in this thread they have an obvious reason for doing so.
The only point I saw them concede any ground towards a more consumer friendly and away from an overtly anti-competitive approach was specifically when serious talk of antitrust litigation emerged from the EU.
At that point they had a miraculously coincidental change of heart and began a hiring spree for Safari so they could try and close some of the more nefarious gaps with interoperability so they could point to it as evidence that they shouldn’t be fined billons of dollars and have new restrictions placed on them.
I am claiming that that looks like the text book definition of a conspiracy and you need to understand the arguments about installability in that wider context and the point you’re making about bookmarks is in no way relevant to what I’m talking about.
> That committee you are talking about isn’t actually independent of Apple. They are a part of it.
> Historically Apple have repeatedly used those exact committee bodies as a way to shut down a whole range of things that would bring the web platform closer to iOS in terms of capabilities.
That’s not what’s happening, neither for this specific case nor in general.
There are three major rendering engines: Blink by Google, WebKit by Apple, and Gecko by Mozilla.
It’s an ongoing theme that Google will write a spec. and implement it in Blink, then Apple and Mozilla will either reject it outright or not express interest, and then people come along and accuse Apple of “holding back the web”. This has happened with Web Bluetooth, with Web USB, and more.
In this particular case, the ability to trigger installation prompts from a PWA was originally part of the manifest spec. But it got removed because nobody was keen on implementing it as-is except for Google. That’s how it ended up in the non-standard manifest-incubations instead.
Now there’s a chance that further work will be done on it in manifest-incubations to the point where Mozilla and Apple think it’s worth implementing. If consensus is reached it could become a web standard in future. But just because Google implemented something by themselves does not mean that “Apple are holding back the web”. Google are not the sole arbiter of what constitutes the web platform and Apple and Mozilla aren’t obligated to implement whatever Google wants. This is a case of Google promoting something by themselves, not Apple holding something back. Mozilla and Apple are in agreement; Google are the ones acting unilaterally.
> Apple have repeatedly tried to make sure the web wasn’t able to compete with iOS and actively worked to get as much lock in on their platforms as possible.
There is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple.
That last sentence is truly one of the most deranged things I’ve heard all year.
You’re literally talking to an audience of largely web developers and trying to claim with a straight face something that they all know full well not to be true because they spent the last decade having to deal with Safari’s bullshit and lack of interoperability.
Any web developer seriously asking for yet another web prompt is delusional. The web in general has suffered because prompts enrage and discourage users. We, collectively, need to rein in the ability of websites to bother us. It's what's needed to protect our privacy, and save our sanity.
iOS has "app clips" which websites can (and absolutely do) prompt you to use.
As for how to save a webpage to your Home Screen, that literally hasn't changed except maybe to have it together with other on-device interactions. It has been there since before there was even an App Store.
It's not hidden in any way and never has been.
It was demoed on stage by Steve Jobs.
The App Store is a scam, for sure. But Apple has not been crippling the web... at least not in the way you claim here (only one browser on the platform is sucky, but that's a different discussion).
Well, they definitely drag their feet on keeping Safari up to date, not unlike what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.
IIRC, there are also some limitations in what web apps launched from the home screen can actually do, which are not in regular Safari - but I've not looked at this in a long time so I could be wrong.
What I do remember very clearly is that the common consensus, as reflected in data from app developers, is that people just don't know (or don't want to use) the "pin to home screen" feature. One could argue that Apple should, maybe, sprinkle on that feature a bit of the effort they lavishly pour on emojis, so that more people could be enticed to use PWAs. That would go some way towards reassuring developers that they are not slaves to the AppStore.
> Well, they definitely drag their feet on keeping Safari up to date, not unlike what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.
It’s entirely different. After Microsoft killed the competition and gained >90% market share, they disbanded the Internet Explorer developer team for five entire years.
Apple releases a new major version of Safari every year like clockwork and pushes people hard to update.
> What I do remember very clearly is that the common consensus, as reflected in data from app developers, is that people just don't know (or don't want to use) the "pin to home screen" feature.
What data? The internal data I’ve seen across ~500 community apps is that when given a choice, two thirds of people use the iOS app, a quarter of people use the Android app, and about 10% use the PWA. And that’s across all users, including desktop.
“Don’t know” and “don’t want to use” are two entirely different things.
If people preferred PWAs and it was just down to Apple holding them back, there wouldn’t be any such thing as an Android app; people would just use PWAs on that platform instead. People don’t install PWAs because they don’t want to.
> Apple releases a new major version of Safari every year like clockwork and pushes people hard to update.
That's largely a byproduct of their attempt to keep support costs low by forcing yearly upgrades of the entire OS. Other browser makers release 10 times more often (literally!). When you're 10 times slower than everyone else (while being 10 times wealthier...), I think it's legitimate to say you're dragging your feet. The fact that they're not as atrociously bad as Microsoft was at its worst, doesn't mean they are not bad.
> “Don’t know” and “don’t want to use” are two entirely different things.
Come on now - discoverability and education are things. If Apple wanted to, they would make that feature so easy and promote it so heavily, that everyone would do it or at least know how to do it.
> If people preferred PWAs and it was just down to Apple holding them back
Don't strawman me, I never said that. I said that Apple is not making any effort to change a status quo where consumers are not keen on the feature, which tallies with your experience. There is nothing stopping them from aiming their reality distortion field at the feature, as a service to developers.
> The fact that they're not as atrociously bad as Microsoft was at its worst, doesn't mean they are not bad.
Your exact words were: “they definitely drag their feet on keeping Safari up to date, not unlike what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago” and my point is that it’s very unlike that.
They picked up the slack only after they were shamed multiple times, including by websites like https://issafarithenewie.com/ (which now reflects their progress, very honestly). A brief look at items from the last several years will return lots of pretty bad press.
> They aren’t ten times slower than everybody else.
Just to mention one, WebRTC took 7 years to go from the first Firefox implementation to Safari. Chrome had it less than 2 years after FF, so I guess not 10x but 3x-4x - still a very significant lag, which is definitely not explainable by lack of resources.
But that’s just it – you are just mentioning one. No mention of the many, many improvements that were made. Safari has been advancing steadily every single year since it was first released. Which makes it an entirely different situation to Internet Explorer, which held the web at an absolute standstill for five straight years.
Sorry, no, not an absolute standstill. Windows XP Service Pack 2 tweaked how an HTTP header was handled. That was the most significant movement in the front-end development world in a five year period. Because of Internet Explorer.
Compare Safari 12 to Safari 17. Now imagine we were still stuck with Safari 12. That’s what it would be like if Safari “dragged their feet” like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer. They aren’t the same thing, not even remotely close. Anybody saying that “Safari is the new IE” clearly does not remember what Internet Explorer did to the industry, especially if they are saying it because of things like Safari won’t let websites vibrate your phone.
The difference is simply a function of smarter leadership and experience.
Of course nobody, today, would act exactly like MS did - that would make it trivial for people to see their game. Instead, Apple gives you something to show they're trying, "honest, guv" - but in ebbs and flows, only when pushed, and slower than everyone else despite being the most profitable company on the block.
To be honest, nobody would really care how many releases they push or how many features they push, if only they let other browsers compete on iOS. But they don't; so they carry a responsibility to be at the forefront of standards and look absolutely beyond reproach - which, at the moment, is not the case.
> The difference is simply a function of smarter leadership and experience.
Look, the difference is glaringly obvious: Microsoft brought front-end development to a standstill for five long years. Apple has not. Apple has continued to add features, standards support, and interoperability bug fixes year after year like clockwork.
This isn’t a matter of nuance. This isn’t Apple being “smarter”. Apple fundamentally has not done what Microsoft did in any way, shape, or form. The two situations are extremely dissimilar.
You’re replying to me here suggesting that they don’t cripple the web by providing an example of another proprietary thing that they control and has zero interoperability with any other devices.
I don’t know what to do with that argument other than to use that exact same set of facts to support my own point.
Also, that’s a nice historical fact that Steve Jobs once did a demo on stage years ago but my point was that nobody knows how to do it in real life or that it’s possible.
I’m explicitly making the argument that this isn’t a coincidence but is very much on purpose.
So you are saying they are crippling the web because they don't allow websites to add themselves to your home screen through a button on the page.
OK.
I'll cede this is to drive people to the App Store where they can get their cut.
I just want to be clear here that when I made that claim it was in no way just because of that but was a decade of actions (or largely inaction) where they made sure that the web platform would be missing lots of functionality that app developers would require to consider the web as a viable option for their software business.
That’s very interesting but we aren’t designing the web around your personal set of preferences so I don’t know if it’s particularly relevant to the conversation.
I’m sure when it arrives like other APIs that require certain permissions you will be able to disable it and live in peace.
How did we get from “I think app install prompts should be a thing so the web is on a level playing field with operating systems” to me somehow being responsible for the ills of capitalism?
I literally said you should have an option to opt out and your response was an impassioned speech about “the will of the people”.
It's not just my preference. People would want a nice and easy button to install a webapp to their homescreen. People would not want alert boxes from every website they visit. The latter will happen along with the former.
I cannot disable these things when Apple has a profit incentive. I haven't been able to make the dumb Game Center thing permanently quit appearing. I guess they don't have a profit incentive, here, huh? So the result is that people who understand how to turn it off, will turn it off. Most everyone else will be trained to hit no instantly. A few people will have hundreds of webapps on their home screens like the browser bars of yore.
For the record; I completely agree that side loading should be possible with minimal barrier and it would be nice if web apps were more discoverable and integrated. But preventing websites from nagging people with a system-level iOS prompt is a feature.
> You do understand that the main thrust of my argument here is that it doesn’t have to be like that correct?
No, I don't
> I should be able to prompt the user to install and it would just work.
No, you shouldn't. Not until you prove that you can actually make proper prompts and not turn the web into what it is today: a collection of in your face modals, calls to action, popups etc.
This was the topic of Steve Jobs' infamous "Thoughts on Flash" memo, which was essentially a blueorint for the coming iOS App Store walled garden strategy.
This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year.
So $MEGACORP abuses their absolute monopolistic position in the market to underhandedly negotiate with book publishers and force their hand into working the way $MEGACORP wants: in order to gain access to $MEGACORPs completely dominated (but technically not a monopoly*) audience who wishes to buy books in a convenient way online, book publishers must bow down to $MEGACORP and pay the tax. Meanwhile, everyone else who sells books through alternative avenues is decimated because the audience only wants to buy books through $MEGACORP.
And you can replace $MEGACORP with both 'Apple' and 'Amazon', and it is 100% factually accurate. Beautiful. It's fucking turtles eating turtles all the way down.
It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel. The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.
Unless you count selling books at a loss to hurt their competition.
It's a less direct form of market manipulation and one that doesn't usually meet the US's legal standards for antitrust, but it's a strategy Amazon loves to use.
A quick google search doesn't turn up many good sources on that allegation. The best I could find says that they do make a small profit but at a much lower margin than bookstores, which makes sense given Amazon's business model. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/07/13...
It's mentioned in the lawsuit which described how Apple orchestrated the publishing industry to raise its prices for Apple to have room to mandate a 30% share [1]
Amazon was selling eBooks at $9.99, for Apple it was an issue because they couldn't ask a 30% share from publishers AND compete at $9.99 because Amazon achieved that price due to wholesale volume-deals, and likely not with a 30%+ margin.
Publishers wanted Amazon to increase sales-prices from $9.99, but due to their wholesale model they couldn't dictate that. Even when they increased wholesale prices, Amazon kept their sales-price of many NYT bestsellers at $9.99 making a loss (probably to drive eReader growth).
Quote: "Amazon continued to sell books at $9.99, losing money, even when publishers increased the wholesale price of books they were giving the online giant."
That article lists one example which "likely still turns a small profit", and contains allegations from other groups that Amazon is selling some books below cost.
That small margin above wholesale in the article's example is probably still effectively selling at a loss when you account for overhead of running the store, shipping, etc. It certainly would be for a smaller competitor.
Either of those represents a price that a competitor whose only business is selling books cannot compete with. Amazon can offer these prices as a loss leader because of their position in other markets, not because it has found a more optimal way to run the business of selling books.
News articles are for clicks. If they could find an example of selling at a loss, they would have used that because it would get more clicks. The fact that they couldn't find one tells me that the allegations are likely to be false. The fact that googling "Amazon selling books at a loss" didn't turn up massive amounts of articles from anti-tech media companies also tells me that. The fact that selling books at a loss to drive out competition (which is, in fact, illegal) is not even mentioned in the anti-trust complaint against Amazon tells me that the allegations are false.
>It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel.
Neither does Apple. Amazon prevents all of their sellers from selling their goods at any sort of discount anywhere else (including through direct-to-consumer channels).
>The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.
It's not apples-to-apples comparison. Here's a better one ... Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, rig their search (to prioritize their product) and ultimately drive them out of business.
Apple is bad, but their terribleness is limited to the Mac-iOS ecosystem ... Amazon is way worse.
> Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, and rig their search
Brick and mortar retailers do the exact same thing and make generics that are exactly the same as best selling brand names, put them in favorable shelf position, and even put "compare to <brand>!" on their labels. This practice has probably saved me multiple thousands of dollars over my lifetime, so it is definitely to the benefit of the consumer and I am 100% in favor of it continuing. If you, as a company, add nothing that can't be replicated to your product other than a brand label, then you deserve to be replicated and undercut. That is a perfect example of the market working towards the public good.
Nobody in the digital-marketplace business is a Good Guy. Unfortunately, sometimes we need two sets of scumbags to fight it out to find some decent compromise for society as a whole. See also: Miranda rights, VHS vs Betamax, etc.
Indeed - the irony was not lost on me of someone from Amazon complaining about Apple's anti-competitive behaviour. The difference is that what Amazon does is not limited to the book publishing space and a particular device. Amazon forces ALL of their sellers to normalize prices for all customers an all platforms.
This must be f*cking really hard with our culture. I for once can say that I have been reading less because Amazon's recommendation algorithm keeps throwing at me books with trendy covers that make me cringe. And same with the blurbs. Sometimes, if I manage to go over my cringe reaction to those two things, the book under it is actually good. Therefore, I get a feeling authors and publishers feel they need to imitate the crowd and make the book look childish from the outside, in order to mollify The Algorithm.
The missing part is that Apple's maneuver was to effectively destroy the wholesale model in favor of an agency-model, and orchestrate all major publishers to charge more for ebooks just so they can earn their 30% commission from it.
Apple actively engaged as facilitator to help publishers raise prices on the whole market, for a 30% cut.
The result was that books previously available for $9.99 were suddenly sold for $12.99
To highlight the untold level of harm Apple caused, I now realise this event stopped me reading for years.
I loved ebooks and my reading went way up. They were cheaper than paperbacks and cheap enough that I was making curiosity and impulse purchases. The problem with digital sales is that unlike a bookshop, I could not browse and take a book from the shelf and start reading and get hooked.
Once ebooks suddenly jumped in price and absurdly became more expensive than paperbacks, I was done, and didn't buy a book for years. You might try and argue this was irrational, but when I feel I am being scammed, my wallet stays in my pocket. I will indeed cut off my nose to spite an asshole.
Jobs was deeply cynical about ebooks, claiming early on that Kindle would fail because “people don’t read anymore”[0].
There’s some level of irony in the fact that the most successful product from the guy who wanted to build a “bicycle of the mind”[1] ended up being something more like the floating chairs in Wall E.
I just looked and the last Song of Ice and Fire audiobook is 41€ in Apple Books. That is hilariously insane. I could perhaps pay that for all of them but for 1 — the others are basically the same price. That's 200€ for the set.
There are weirdly other audiobook versions that cost only 29€ so I wonder what's the story here.
Audiobooks are just expensive in general. A song of Ice and Fire is $39 in Audible on android (well it's on sale now for $27). Sadly $20-40 is a fairly normal price for a audiobook.
Yeah I think they are though artificially inflated by Amazon and co since why on earth can Audible sell them 8$ every month. Luckily there are a lot of old public domain books that you can listen to. Reading what Brandon Sanderson has to say about Audible to me was really revealing.
It's a professional reading/acting out a full book in a professional studio, with at least an editor, a production team, a corrector. And the market for audiobooks is still very minuscule.
If a band of professional musicians can put out an album with original music and multi-track mixing for $10, a pre-written book with a single voice performer and minimal production crew shouldn't cost multiples of that.
> If a band of professional musicians can put out an album with original music and multi-track mixing for $10, a pre-written book with a single voice performer and minimal production crew shouldn't cost multiples of that.
Not saying this is fair, but musicians often do economically sub-optimal things for the love of creation and because it is a passion. Hopefully, the musician also gets added revenue from concerts.
The voice performance doesnt get the fame nor after-performance revenue -- so naturally they are charging market rates for their time reading. Further, most of the credit/glory goes to the author, not the voice performer. I doubt most people know who the voice performer is on audiobooks.
> the market for audiobooks is still very minuscule
> A song of Ice and Fire is $39 in Audible
Is this really surprising? Production costs for a single audiobook are _significantly_ less than something like a movie, but the audiobook is more than double the cost of seeing a movie?!? I straight up refuse to buy audiobooks based on the price alone. Ebook prices are bad enough, but audiobook prices are ludicrous.
Movies amortize their cost over a much, much larger audience than books do. A book that sells a 100,000 copies is a fairly successful book. A movie that sold 100,000 tickets is a complete flop.
Then add on top that Audiobook sales-volume in total is still smaller than book-sales, that Audible controls the majority of the US Audiobook sales, while the majority of consumption is actually their monthly subscription tier (which probably doesn't pay much at all).
Then Audible takes a revenue-share of 30~50% depending on content, publisher and author also want to earn money,...
Then the audiobook of "A song of fire and ice" is apparently 33 hours and 46 minutes, which is more than 3 times the average length [1], so just the narration production-cost is 3 times higher than the average audiobook.
So overall there's not so much left to make a profit, leave alone break-even.
> Younger people are more likely to consume audio format, as 57% of Americans younger than 50 listened to audiobooks in 2021.
I know I only have anecdata (I'm in that cohort), but that seems off based on my personal experiences and the people I know. Perhaps 2021 was an outlier?
> Over 23% of Americans listened to at least one audiobook in 2021, 15% more than in 2020.
This also seems off. Almost 1 in 4 Americans listened to an audiobook in 2021? That seems... high.
I couldn't find a link to the source data used to generate those statistics.
Based on your link, you'd be looking at something in the range of $24,000 for ASOIAF. Even if you double that you're looking at $48,000. If we factor in 50% (WTF?) rev share with Audible, that's ~2400 units to break even. And then they are clearing ~$20/unit after that. Yeah, I know I hand-waved a bunch of minutia, but my point is that the volume of sales needed to start making a profit, even considering a large rev share, isn't _that_ high.
I can't stack that against sales numbers, but I'll say this, even if it's a legit price based on costs and volume that it doesn't _feel_ legit to _me_. As a result, I won't buy audiobooks. I don't think I'm totally alone. I can't say much past that.
> Based on your link, you'd be looking at something in the range of $24,000 for ASOIAF. Even if you double that you're looking at $48,000. If we factor in 50% (WTF?) rev share with Audible, that's ~2400 units to break even.
That's ONLY production-cost, it doesn't take into account the royalty/license for the actual content-author and the cut the book-publisher takes for "publishing" it. I doubt that the author takes a smaller share just because the book was recorded instead of printed.
If you assume that production cost should make up max. 10% of that revenue (like the actual cost to design a cover and print a book), then the break-even shifts ALOT farther away...
> Yeah, I know I hand-waved a bunch of minutia, but my point is that the volume of sales needed to start making a profit, even considering a large rev share, isn't _that_ high.
Yeah, the scale is indeed hard to estimate, and I can't find ANY statistics on the actual volume-size of the market (actual amount a bestseller Audiobook has sold)
But the stat from the same source stating that "Audiobook revenue accounted for around 3.8% of the book publishing" is an indication that despite glorious growth-figures of the Audiobook industry, the actual market-size is still VERY small even in comparison to the book-publishing market.
AND at the same time, Audible controls ~50% of that market, and drives consumption with Spotify-like flatrate offers.
Making big upfront investments for Audiobook production seems to be a risky call for a publisher then. Unless you have a title like ASOIAF and set the price at 36 USD I guess ;)
Given the lack of source data I can't tell if they talking X listens across Y population, or are they saying that Z individuals listened to at least one audiobook. Do you have some insight from another data source? If not, I stand by my claim that 1 in 4 Americans listening to an audiobook is hard to believe.
From the article in the post I was replying to[1]:
Audiobook production is a multi-step process that requires equipment, software, a studio, and a narrator. Depending on the cost and availability of each of these aspects, the price of producing an audiobook can vary.
* Generally, around 9,300 words of text equate to one hour of audiobook length.
* The average audiobook is around 10 hours long, containing close to 100,000 words.
* The average narrator charges around $200 per finished hour, meaning that the expenses on the narrator will amount to $2,000 for recording an audiobook.
* On top of that, it is necessary to either rent a studio where the recording will take place or invest in the equipment and sound production yourself.
* In either case, producing an audiobook will take between $4,000 and $8,000.
* Some companies offer a complete production service for a fixed price, usually at the $6,000 range.
They are saying it's something on the order of $8,000 to produce a 10 hour audiobook. I tripled that to get to $24k since ASOIAF is a little over 33 hours, then doubled it just to account for things like more expensive voice actors or more expensive production. Keep in mind this was just napkin math to get a general range for what it would cost and I'd rather inflate it a bit just to be safe.
For anyone interested, I think I tracked back to the original study.
Edison Research’s Share of Ear is a quarterly survey of Americans who are asked to keep a detailed one-day diary of their audio usage. Share of Ear utilizes a nationally representative sample of those age 13+. The sample for this study was 4,118
Don’t forget the kicker, that IAP at the time was unable to support more than a few thousand SKUs! And (iirc) that pricing, naming, etc for everything would’ve needed to be done through their atrocious web app.
In retrospect, yes, the consequences of what happened are now very obvious, but at the time, whilst there were a fair number of people sounding the alarm across the blogosphere, most people didn't care because the iPad was a hit, and the Apple reality distortion field was at its peak of effectiveness.
>Apple negotiates agreements with most of the major book publishers that if they want to sell books on iBooks, ebooks must be listed at the same price on ALL stores, and have a 30% margin
That's also what Amazon does, except with everything.
It's terrible what Apple is doing, but is peanuts compared to what Amazon does.
I did my first iOS development about a couple of years ago. Question, how in the world do you tolerate the storyboard XML files? One small change in XCode results in so many line changes. PRs are impossible to review with any confidence.
That's a big argument for SwiftUI, which replaces storyboards.
But if you must use them, keep each storyboard small enough it's only going to be used by one dev at a time to avoid conflicts, and then combine trusting the GUI won't make stupid XML plus some automated UI tests to make sure functionality isn't damaged by e.g. a button being deleted.
SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit).
You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine. And writing your UI in code indeed easily solves the whole versioning conflicts issue that storyboards have.
So no, not a big argument for SwiftUI, but instead for writing UIs in code.
SwiftUI vs. UIKit and IB vs. code are two entirely separate discussions.
But yes, I totally agree, if you must use storyboards, keep them as small as possible.
> SwiftUI does not replace storyboards. It replaces UIKit(/AppKit).
Unless I've missed something, by doing the latter it automatically also does the former?
> You can build UIs without storyboards/Interface Builder in UIKit just fine.
Eh, perhaps the examples I've worked with of that were especially egregious (it's certainly possible given some of the other things very very wrong with that code), but my experience of such a codebase was very much not fine.
I have worked with lots of codebases using UIKit constraints in code. These were non-trivial apps (200k lines of code). You can create wrappers of your own to simplify things or use libraries like Snapkit. It works and there's no need to use Storyboards.
The bad codebase I'm thinking of was 120 kloc. But I'll take your word for it being possible to do better than that example, one example is merely an anecdote.
I think they want to make the distinction that SwiftUI is not necessarily to replace Storyboards, although it will replace them.
UIKit works okay in code. But unless you have experienced people actively laying groundwork, it's IMO more likely to be a mess than SwiftUI. Even the explicitly declarative part, Autolayout, will only be understood by like 10% of the team and the rest are kinda winging it. Using Autolayout outside of Storyboards makes it less declarative, so it is then more conducive to programmer error (like non-idempotent updates).
Apples behaviour vis a vis the App Store is the textbook definition of monopolistic practices. It’s beyond the pale these stories. The only reason I can think it continues is because there are a lot of AAPL holders in Congress.
Honestly this is the only thread of comments that really get to the meat and potatoes of why Apple can be evil although while making good product. Their evil must be curbed as they go out of their way with certain actions to completely punish their customers and partners.
>We should be rooting for better outcomes for consumers. Not picking between which megacorp is less bad.
I will argue that pointing out the hypocrisy of a megacorp complaining about the anti-competitive behaviour of another magacorp, when it engages in the same type of behaviour but at a much bigger scale, is a pro-consumer move.
Here’s a very simple example. Search ChatGPT in the App Store. The top result is an ad that’s not ChatGPT but looks extremely similar. The top 10 results are basically intended to look as much like the ChatGPT in name and logo as possible.
Ostensibly this 30% cut is supposed to prevent things like this from happening, as Apple argues it uses that money to keep the App Store clean from fraudulent or misrepresenting apps, among other things. There is a much touted “review” process that is supposed to be partially funded by the 30% cut.
So if that isn’t really happening, what, pray tell, is that 30% going towards? It isn’t making the App Store a better experience
To be fair, roughly half of Apple's money is made from hardware. The app store is extremely lucrative and apparently 70%+ of their revenue from the App store is just leeching off of mobile games, but Apple can definitely survive without the app store if push came to shove.
BUT, I will also mention that part of its market capture comes from all the charges on devs even before the rev share. You need apple equipment to develop, and they (apparently) don't sell server racks anymore for businesses to scale off of, nor any legitimate form of emulation. You have a small cost per year to have a developer account, and a cost to submit your app for review. Then if you care about visibilty they have their own ad discovery program you can pay into.
So I did disagree with a brief judge statement about how "It's possible to skirt around Apple's innnovation for free...". Apple controls and charges for the entire pipeline, even before you launch the app.
As someone who has developed a commercial app and spent time on the app store - their review process is a joke... there are non-compliances all over the store and I suspect a lot of their review process is highly automated.
Yeah just because it's labor intensive doesn't mean it's good.
Im sure both App stores have lot of automated tests. But I've submitted a lot of apps and the feedback from Apple is much more specific and from humans.
I agree it's very annoying, often complaining about things that are explained in submission notes.
But if I submit and do around 5-10 updates per year that seems highly unlikely it covers their salary cost.
Most of their review is for their own interests so they should foot the bill.
Their priority is to ensure every dollar gets taxed and to block features they want to monopolise. The idea that it is a service to developers that they should pay for is insulting.
Would you pay a drunk rich person $99/year, so that you can publish a community newsletter to your local town or sell custom decals to your state's car enthusiasts club?
Who then randomly decrees your newsletter is not allowed, forgets why, then slurs THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER and bans you yelling "I'm everybody safe, keeping!"
In this case, who exactly are they protecting, the townsfolk or car enthusiasts that you have an independent relationship with?
Would this scenario seem like a good idea to agree to? If no, why is the app store/walled garden model an appropriate use case at all/how is it substantially different?
It depends how often you submit. Also they do it mostly in cheap labour countries.
And it doesn't have to conver the cost really. It's not a service to developers like developer support would be. It's more an impediment due to its randomness.
Yes, exactly. It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place. Apple is already getting their cut of the symbiotic relationship by selling their massively profitable iPhone hardware, full stop. Any chance you remember the first year of the iPhone when there were no third party apps? Other than being a good phone, it was basically just a technological novelty, and that was about it. Third party apps are literally what give value to the iPhone (and other iOS devices).
It's symbiotic because Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place.
And developers need a solid platform with users willing to pay money. I feel like you have the wrong answer to the chicken and egg problem. The first iPhone was a marvel to pretty much everyone, and blew everything else at the time out of the water. I don't recall much sentiment of people being disappointed about the lack of apps, because there was no reason to expect that at that point. Just being able to use a lot of the web like you would on a computer was a massive leap from a RAZR or whatever.
This is not to defend the 30% tax or anything, but I don't think it does any good to downplay the value they've built. The elephant in the room with your argument is that, if it were true, app developers would simply flock to Android and Apple would be forced to course-correct.
People seem to think that the customer exists because of the iPhone app store, when it's often usually the other way around. Other than a small handful of apps being promoted for free in the app store, the majority of businesses have to spend very real, very expensive advertising dollars or offer a unique product to attract customers. If you have your own product your customers want but they just happen to have an iPhone, you're now forced to pay the maker of their device 30% off the top of your gross revenues like some kind of Mafia. This same Mafia does everything they can to make sure that web/Safari experience is as poor of an experience as possible so that users prefer native apps delivered through the app store.
Imagine if you sold expensive CAD software through your own sales team and advertising efforts completely offline but because some of those users were on Windows they have to get it through the Windows store and 30% of your topline revenue went to Microsoft?
Because of the way online marketing/advertising works with competitive bidding in a lot of cases I would bet that Apple is making more margin than the developers of the apps are. Your competitor who doesn't have to pay a 30% Mafia shakedown fee for their product will be able to outcompete you on clicks every time.
This same Mafia does everything they can to make sure that web/Safari experience is as poor of an experience as possible so that users prefer native apps delivered through the app store.
Can you expand on this? I prefer to use the web when I can, and every time I've begrudgingly downloaded an app, it's the service itself that was actively pushing me away from their poor/hamstrung web client. I'm still left with the impression that users are staying there and developers jump through the hoops because it's just that good. That doesn't mean it's right, but - that's Capitalism, baby!
Also, the MS of yore would have absolutely done that if they thought they could get away with it, and definitely engaged in more than their fair share of unsavory tactics.
> The first iPhone was a marvel to pretty much everyone
IIRC its sales figures weren’t that great though. Of course from Apple’s perspective it was more of a prototype than the actual final product.
> Just being able to use a lot of the web like you would on a computer was a massive leap from a RAZR
IMHO not having 3G basically turned it into a toy.. also comparing it to a consumer flip-phones isn’t that fair. You you had touschscreen/stylus “smartphones” from SonyEricsson, Nokia etc. which weren’t that awful at the time (of course the UX was inferior after it actually became possible to the internet on your iPhone when the 3G was released).
You seem to be doing some history revisionism, at least from the point of view of someone in France. At the time of iPhone release (that I imported in France) there were very few phones of what you could consider smartphones.
I actually had one of those, on windows mobile 6.5, complete with the stylus and it just sucked. You could get one of the early 3G contracts, but it wasn't really worth it unless you really needed that for business use. Because outside of receiving mails there was not real application that would benefit a lot from the connectivity (that only existed inside the big city, and only at certain spots since it was just the start of 3G rollout).
The iPhone made it so there were at least 3 use cases that were worthwhile getting that : full internet browsing with decent experience and speedy enough ; real-time map download for navigation and emails.
Of course the first iPhone was limited by its connectivity speed, but it didn't matter because at this point 3G was not even really there for the vas majority of peoples. Then the next year we got the 3G iPhone that actually made sense to buy with a 3G contract because it became viable in the big cities.
The other "smartphones" who had 3G before that were largely irrelevant because even if you had the connectivity, using them wasn't worth your time and that's just ignoring the fact that outise of city centers you were out of luck (I know, been there, done that...).
There is a reason before the iPhone, Blackberrys were so popular, that's because they were the only decent option for the only use case that made sense before iPhone : email/messaging.
I really don't like the recent developments at Apple, but pretending that they didn't completely changed the game at the time is bonkers...
I had the first iPhone. Sales were low in part because it was locked to Cingular (then ATT when they bought Cingular). It was very much a beta device, but you could see and feel the future as soon as you used it. It certainly was more than a toy. I remember walking into my office the day after I got it and told everyone 'this changes everything'. It's not often those types of moments happen with such clarity (the one I remember prior was when I got my first 3dfx Voodoo gaming card, but I digress).
The 3g version and when it went multi-carrier is when it started to really take off sales wise. Then the iPhone 4 (first retina phone) was the next big bump, followed by the first 'big' iPhone.
I have never fully agreed with this premise. On the face of it, yes apps help people stay on the store. But at the same time, Apple does come up with many good apps.
Comparing it to the first iPhone is probably valid. They saw the writing on the wall and opened the gates, but could have easily chosen the other way of doing it themselves. No one wins in this scenario - nor the devs, nor the users, nor Apple. But it's not as clear as "Apple needs apps to sell iPhones in the first place".
Idly wondering, say you don't download any third party app and neither does anyone. You can still surf the internet for the most part. You can still connect with others via FaceTime/iMessage. You can still check mails etc. Things you won't be able to do is play games, go on dates, browse tiktok, book a cab (though all that is possible through safari but not a great experience).
A caveat here: The original 30% was on infinitely reproducible digital goods only. Which is 80-90% gaming skins and artifacts and digital subscriptions. Don't know if that is still the case.
Apple was just fine building all those platform SDKs for macOS without charging people to write apps for it. Why should iOS be any different?
The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
But none of that matters. Very few businesses set their prices based on how much it costs them to provide their goods or services. They charge what the market will bear. The problem is that there is no "iOS app distribution market"; Apple controls it, 100%, so they can set prices wherever they want, without regard to competition.
> The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
Specifically, the transfer cost to download a 50MB app is approximately $0.0005. That's 200,000 downloads per $100. Even assuming a low average revenue of $1 per download, that's a $60,000 take for Apple for maybe $105 worth of hosting.
That's not to say there aren't other costs involved in running the store. But we definitely shouldn't be pretending that hosting is even relevant to the conversation. Hosting costs haven't been relevant for over a decade.
It's probably orders of magnitude smaller than that, like 2e-7 dollars per MB.
People have gotten use to AWS/Azure/GCP pricing when bandwidth is essentially free at scale. You can rent a few 100Gb/s ports for ~$500 to ~$5000 per month depending on location.
But I guess this is best case scenario and not everyone will have the capital/clout to colocate at POPs.
This disregards side costs like storage, global distribution, retries, re-downloads, updates, backups and the likes. It's probably still cheaper than AWS outbound pricing in the end, but hosting apps is more than just the bandwidth used exactly once.
Late on the reply, but I don't think your argument matches reality.
1. Storage for 50MB is less than $0.001 per month. So, even if you're storing and backing up every every version of an app, and they update a very high 50 times per year, and they're storing on 12 different locales, that's less than $1 per year for the typical app.
2. "Global distribution" is a one time cost per app update at approximately $0.006 per 50MB per server. For 12 updates per year spread across 12 servers, that's less than $1 per year total. Over 75% of apps are updated less than once per month.
3. Retries, re-downloads and updates are already insignificant transfer costs, per my original comment. Even if you want to attribute 90% of those downloads to being updates from the same set of users, and keep the lifetime revenue per user at a very low estimate of $1, Apple is still taking $6,000 for approximately $105 of hosting costs.
All in all, that matches my original estimate of $100 per 200k downloads for transfer and $5 for server fees. So, as I said, hosting isn't relevant to the conversation, at all.
The original comment only listed bandwidth cost. Storage is also equally cheap, global distribution is equally cheap if you have your boxes at POPs. Someone that is at Apple's scale could very easily manage this.
We're looking at cents per app per user in lifetime costs.
The "Cloud" is disgustingly expensive at nearly any scale. It does require some capital investment and competent people to host your own however. Although there really is no alternative to the cloud if you are small scale but need presence globally.
I feel the App Store is one thing differentiating Apple from Android phone manufacturers.
Money from the App Store gets reinvested in the entire iPhone supply chain. Whereas in the case of Android, App Store money goes to Google only.
It also encourages Apple to support their phones long term as its preferred that you stay on your aging iPhone and keep spending at the App Store then risking you leaving the Apple ecosystem because Apple allows their older phones to become obsolete. Android manufacturers on the other hand have every incentive to obsolete your phone ASAP because you buying a new phone is the only way they make money.
Do you seriously believe this?
It's Apple that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates when you don't receive iOS Versions Updates anymore, while Google Play doesn't care about it, as long as the app itself is still developed for that version.
Also they make more than enough money from the Hardware itself, they just take the profits off the software purchases.
No, Xcode requires you to have an up-to-date MacOS to develop, not iOS.
However, developers are strongly encouraged to raise their apps' minimum iOS versions since Apple does not backport any APIs to older versions, any new thing presented at WWDC is only for the new iOS version. This also applies to bugfixes in some cases (SwiftUI).
So as a developer you either stagnate your knowledge or keep moving forward. Google does backport many APIs, so the issue isn't as problematic on that end.
And if no one wrote apps for iOS how many people would buy iPhones and iPads? Yes, it is a symbiotic relationship. But Apple has better position to negotiate, because it is as single entity, and have a lot more resources than the the other side. If all the app developers were able to organize and boycott apple, they might be able to force Apple to negotiate better terms. But that would probably result in many of the smaller companies going out of business, unless the boycott was very short lived.
> Your $100 does not cover it.
There are almost 2 million apps on the app store. Assuming there is roughly 1 developer license per app, (some developers will create multiple apps with a single license, but others will have multiple licenses to develop a single app), that is at least in the ballpark of "hundreds of millions on SWE". And that doesn't include revenue from selling the devices themselves.
So what? Shut down the App Store tomorrow, and forcibly delete all non-Apple-authored apps off of everyone's iPhones. Watch everyone flock to Android, no matter how much they claim to hate it. Watch Apple's stock drop into the toilet.
Apple needs all their third-party developers just as much as those developers need Apple -- more than at least some of those developers need Apple.
If the AppStore was shut down tomorrow, and all my apps forcibly removed: I'd keep using my iPhone with Safari. Might even become a better experience.
I'd need to save some short cuts for things like Google Maps, my banks, etc but that seems like all of the hassle.
I might miss the notifications (exclusively for the messaging apps - for all other apps I don't want them to have notifications) but otherwise, the biggest annoyance would be on the airplane I wouldn't have some pre-downloaded streaming content from apps like Netflix and Youtube.
I guess you do not really use your iPhone that much :)
For me removing non-Apple apps would render my phone useless: losing contact with my friends on WhatsApp and Signal, no way to call an Uber/taxi, no mobile authorization for my bank accounts, no MFA apps that I use for work...
You just proved your point wrong.
Hundreds of million is peanuts, and it’s very improbable that it covers anything near the HR costs of Apple’s App Store infrastructure and department.
There's a point where the phone becomes similar to infrastructure, and allowing a single market actor to charge 30% tax on anyone using the roads, for any business conducted where someone took a road to get there, is ridiculous.
I'm not saying the App Store is infrastructure-like. But the market share of Apple is so large, and it's quasi-impossible to conduct consumer business without being required to have a native app... that it's starting to be infrastructure-like.
Can a viable B2C online business exist without being present via a native app? It seems untenable due to consumer expectations. Consumers also expect to be able to drive to coffeeshops, yet road providers don't charge 30% taxes on coffeeshop revenues.
It’s no surprise countries like india are indeed treating phones as infra, with their whole government stack centered around smartphones.
You’re forced to have and use one, but in return you get free transactions, strong identity and various other perks. It _is_ a monopoly, but the monopoly is the government so everyone has a say on how its run and audited. It’s still strange to me how the states allows private companies to do things the at should be public goods/services.
>Why do you get to run a business off it for free?
There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights.
>They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. At least see it and acknowledge it.
I don't feel like paying for an Apple executives BMW car payment. But you do you.
> There isn't a divine commandment as to what rights we "should" have. We vote, fight, protest and get to make up our own rights.
Not in America. The only venue to change you have is to spend, or not spend money somewhere. Since people think they profit more from developing apps for iOS than not developing apps for iOS, Apple’s profit is “right”.
And a century or so of indoctrination has made most Americans believe that this is just the natural order of things.
This isn't about rights. You already have all the rights you need here.
You would like others to work for nothing, or for what you care to give them, instead of the price they offer their services at, and you'd like to vote, fight and protest until they work for your price.
So like developers working on macOS or Windows? It's so horrible that Apple has allowed third party developers to exploit them for for free for over 40 years now...
Well yeah, obviously. Because Apple benefited a lot more from developers making apps/etc. for their platform than the other way around. Now that the balances has shifted (of course only on mobile) Apple became a lot more exploitative.
> Why do you get to run a business off it for free?
So Microsoft did all of this on Windows (or Apple itself for that matter for macOS) due to entirely altruistic reasons?
Also platforms need developers a whole lot more than developers need specific platforms. You can always go and works at a bank or something. Apple would be skewed with no 3-rd party developers they always knew it.
> They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Maybe the ads on the app store would more than cover it? Not only do you need to pay 30% you also have to pay extra for placement so that Apple wouldn’t put your competitors apps at the top of the results when users search for your app?
Would Apple even approve something going on the app store that tried to do things in ways that were that non-standard? More generally it’s not like you can choose to host your own servers or, in forgoing all of Apple’s work, not have to pay that 30%. When Apple isn’t going to let you do things another way, they don’t get to argue that all of the benefits they do provide are what people are paying for. People have to pay the price to be allowed on the ecosystem at all.
>They’re also operating all the servers. Your $100 does not cover it.
I mean, let's be real here. Most people even if Apple fully allowed other payment processors would still opt into Apple's payment. Easiest to setup, most visible and familiar interface for consumers, and lets them push liability back to Apple. So they'd still get 30% from many consumers.
This angle only applies in a situation where you think 1) the pareto principle applies and 2) all of that 20% decided to roll their own payment processing, which isn't trivial nor a risk many want to take onto themselves. It'd take a lot more than a dozen megacorps doing this to make Apple sweat.
And if this does happen, it sounds like a service issue a that point. If you can offer all that convenience but people don't view it as worth 30%, then maybe the rate should be re-negotiated.
>They spend hundreds of millions on SWE salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use
they spend hundreds of millions to get other businesses to do business with them, and still charge many upfront costs along the way. Back then, we simply called that the cost to do business.
Adtech also spends hundreds of millions each on salaries to make a nice SDK for you to use. I don't exactly feel I owe those companies for their labor since I'm (the dev) not the primary point of revenue.
I look at it like this. If someone is doing it you have to do it too, you cant run a competitive business if your competitor is taking 30%. It is not something you chose to do but you have to.
The most important angle is what this grows into. Apple doesn't have to make hardware. They can simply stop doing that and live on rent alone. Hardware is hard work. It might just be that they have to stop doing it.
How much they put the squeeze on who and who makes how much money isn't even important. This is not beneficial to the industry or to society.
After the age of working your ass off while starving comes the age of contributing and thriving, this period ends with the age of entitlement. You do the work, I enjoy the benefits. we can only afford so much of that before our civilization turns into a hell hole. You will be working day and night to make ends meet while I have all the time and resources in the world to figure out how I'm going to take just a little bit more from you.
It's not about wealth, people should be able to EARN whatever they EARN.
It isn't even about mortality, we can go back to the age of working your ass off while starving, we know how to do that. The bigger issue is to have people in control who cant tie their own shoes. It sets us up for total failure. It takes one small incident to end humanity.
To be honest it seems like what it is for the younger generation in life generally. A nice legacy from the boomers and unsurprisingly Apple is a very big boomer company.
I think many here do not see this since they earn enough that those considerations are kind of irrelevant, but I believe current Apple problems reveal a systemic problem across society.
Apple acts like an old entitled asshole who just want to capture value for not doing much because one day they did something good and I feel in general this is exactly what the current governing generation is doing...
I mean, if you were self-distributing your iOS app right now instead of having Apple do it, and you had to look up how much transferring data in the terabytes costs, you'd just use Cloudflare R2 instead.
I'd be willing to bet that, all things being equal, most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store.
> most apps would save money if the developers were self-distributing them instead of using the App Store
There must be a reason why almost all games are still published on Steam despite the 30% though. The increased customer reach almost always outweighs the additional revenue (and this also applies to major companies like EA, Ubisoft etc. who have tried building their own storefronts).
The thing is that you can't really talk about Steam like other platforms. They are already competing with themselves on price somehow.
Games that are launched on Steam do not cost more than they do elsewhere in the first place, and secondly people very often buy on sales at prices low enough that it doesn't make sense to look elsewhere for the convenience of having it all in one place.
There are also plenty of big games with publishers big enough that they have their own platform (EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Microsoft) and depending on many things their games may or may not be on Steam also.
Steam also accepts keys purchased from elsewhere so in principle even if most of your sales are somewhere else, it is better to have it on Steam.
I also think you Steam is offering some valuable community/platforms tools.
Not much of this applies to the Apple app store. The truth is the reason people use it is because that's the only thing allowed.
If peoples could install apps from anywhere with its own self-update mechanism (like sparkle or something more modern like a hybrid web-app) I doubt it would be used as much appart from free stuff from developers that do not want to figure out distribution.
If there was a large price difference, most people wouldn't use it, just like most people do not go to the more expensive supermarket unless they absolutely have to.
> If there was a large price difference, most people wouldn't use it, just like most people do not go to the more expensive supermarket unless they absolutely have to.
Yet developers still use Steam and most people prefer buying games on there than on any other platform or direct? How is this particularly different?
Of course the App Store UX is atrocious garbage (and I won't even mention the paid ads...) so maybe competition might force Apple to do something about it. However I would bet most consumers and developers will still primarily use it rather than any other platform (just like Play Store is still dominant on Android) because of discoverability, trust and other rational reasons. Of course you do have a point about IAP (Apple would likely have to cut prices to 10-15% or risk a significant proportion of apps switching to something else).
Yes, people use Steam because they can make pricing competitive enough (low) that they will find users that will pay for the game instead of just pirating it or trying to buy it somewhere else cheaper.
Steam also has built-in market arbitration, since they do not charge the same in all countries and you can buy keys that are still valid worldwide, people who find some games still too expensive will go and buy a key from a third-party seller and still play the game on Steam.
From the point of view of devs it is very worth it, because even though steam might take as big of a cut as Apple (at first, and debatable) this is on what wouldn't be sales otherwise so it ends up being better in the long run.
On top of that, Steam actually lowers the cut they take if your game is successful, which makes a lot more sense than what Apple does (if you make more than a 1m you are back to 30% which makes zero sense, because the more your product is successful the less relevancy Apple has in your success...).
And it seems pretty clear that those are just what is publicly available information, considering the number of latitudes/tools and options Steam give to developers it is obvious that most even moderately successful developers get to negotiate their terms. Unlike Apple they are willing to work on a case-by-case basis, instead of going the route of a giant soulless corp that will treat everyone the same, because the rules are the rules or whatever (all the while working out deals with actually powerful corporations in the back, still maintaining that extremely wrong do-gooder better than you attitude they have).
Another reason Steam is very different is that they are not exclusive, you can very well distribute both on Steam or somewhere else cheaper, including your own solution with no issue at all (many games do this). And it means that sales on Steam maybe wouldn't have happened somewhere else, which makes the cut feel a lot fairer.
So here you have it, Steam is very different in many ways, first and foremost because it is not your only option for the platform and they cannot have monopolistic behavior. But also, even though I think it is still a big corp with many issues, they are less of a pain in the ass to work with than Apple.
I agree that most people would still primarily use Apple's App Store, but this is exactly the point and the whole reason their arguments are irrelevant and anti-competitive. If people were to start using some other solution in large numbers, it would mean that Apple is indeed doing something very wrong.
And I do believe that they are way too greedy, on top of being way too controlling of the devices/systems they do not have ownership anymore. All their arguments about privacy and security are horseshit because if we accept them, it means private property is a rather vague concept and there would be no reason they get to keep their intellectual property at this point.
As for what you said about Android, I find it funny because just a few days ago I helped a friend install an ad-blocker from F-Droid to play a Tetris game (that has an insane 3euros/months subscription if you want to get rid of ads). So yeah, the majority of people use Google Play, but also the majority of people mostly use popular social media, a few utilities (cheap or free mostly) and some games. The Apple tax doesn't even apply to most cases because an app making a lot of revenue can figure out a way to make users pay in-app with no Google tax and the solution of their choosing.
And you are talking about Apple lowering rates to 10-15% and I think it seems acceptable because payments seem to be weirdly expensive in the US (because of credit card and cashback programs I have been told). But in the EU, it still seems like an absurdly high tax / cut for what is a payment solution. If you are dealing with micro-transaction (in the cents amounts) it could make sense, but with the app pricing inflation, it is largely not the case and you are talking about multiple euros amount most of the time. Payment solutions for this kind of transaction would work out to about 7% in the worst-case scenario, and mostly depending on the profile of customers, many devs could get rates as low as 3-4% if they have large volume.
If you think about the market as a whole, it is a huge amount of money, which is exactly the reason Apple is making so much of it.
Since I know, some are going to argue about Apple making their dev tools available and their distribution infrastructure, I will cover this very easily.
They need their dev tools for their own apps and the reason you have to use them is because they make it almost impossible to use anything else; on top of that without this their platform would be extremely uninteresting and completely irrelevant compared to Android, because who would buy a smartphone (that is just a small computer) that can only run apps from its manufacturer (they were called feature phones before...). Before Apple launched the App Store, people figured out how to make and publish apps without them just fine, without much need of Apple tooling. So, if the system was accessible as any computer system should be, the value of their tools would be almost non-existent in fact or a very low amount compared to what they take. Anyone that isn't a complete hypocrite knows they make those tools to make it easier and desirable to develop for their platform, they have a big interest in it, and every developer already paid for it when they bought their extremely expensive hardware (but modern Apple has no issues double-dipping everywhere).
As for the distribution, I actually think they should charge for it, even the "free" apps (I would say ESPECIALLY). There is no reason a small dev would have to give Apple at least 15% of all of his revenue for distribution when Facebook can distribute their app for free even though it must use an extremely large amount of bandwidth.
This would have many side effects: first the apps would become slimmer (since peoples start caring when they have to pay, even more for corporations, you can be certain they would they find ways to reduce the bandwidth bill), second there would be less updates (and that in itself would be an achievement) and third it would automatically cleanup the store since devs wouldn't publish trashy/scummy apps if they had to pay for the waste of ressource they cause (can't give back the time stolen from users anyway).
In any case, I believe that those "app stores" are a modern problem created by network effect inherent to technology, and it just isn't right to let companies run a very large tax rate on economics activities happening on their platforms. Apple is being targeted more because they are by far the worst of the bunch and also the richest target. There is often a lot of talk about market value, but it is irrelevant since it can be wiped pretty fast. The fact is Apple has a mountain of cash, and they got there by stealing more than their fair share from society.
This is a biased view that disregards basic available metrics. Apple is a hardware company. Developers are instrumental to its devices success and a point can be made that 30% might be too high of a fee. On the other hand many of those developers wouldn’t have a job in the first place if it wasn’t for Apple creating the App Store.
I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already".
So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"?
Agreed, While there may be people who think they're defending Apple "on principle", I hope those folks also realize that there is no "principle" that is ingrained in nature. We're all just making up rules, laws, taxes, as we go along. Just because a law or article of constitution is old, doesn't make it any more 'natural' than others.
There is no "right" of any student for their debt to be forgiven, but we want to do it anyway. Apple has taken advantage (as have others) of a ridiculously broken tax code, availed of the strong US legal system, property rights, etc. How about we shift the balance back?
> I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already".
Do you account for the fact that it might not be the same people making both arguments? Most websites’ readerships are not monoliths and even on HN there are plenty of people with different perspectives, and who are not necessarily vocal in the same threads.
> So, how long does Apple get to reap the rewards of their old accomplishments from 18 years ago? how long should such works be benefited from before we shift the dynamics back to being "a public commons"?
That’s an interesting argument, but it’s usually not discussed with any nuance. Basically there are several layers:
- are we entitled to Apple opening their platforms? (AFAICT the opposite would be a first though the EU seems to be going that way)
- is Apple entitled to profit from the App Store in principle? (Some people are arguing that they are not, but they are a fringe; Epic lost their argument about that)
- is 30% too much? (But then, where is the line? It’s more or less the standard for closed platforms
Where would you put your “public commons”? Did this ever happen?
>Do you account for the fact that it might not be the same people making both arguments?
I don't. It's possible to (dis)prove this with comments but that would be a bit invasive (ironically enough) without doing a lot of work to anonymize the dataset I gather and prove sufficient random sampling. It's possible for admins to (dis)prove this through voting habits, but not for me to bring about such evidence.
All I can say from here is that so far, there's a local sample of one reply to me that seems to indeed think this way.
>Where would you put your “public commons”? Did this ever happen?
The "commons" in this case would be the OS. I don't think we've ever historically had another OS as locked down as hard IOS. Game consoles come the closest to this, but are ultimately ephemeral; no gaming OS store has lasted (i.e. been officially supported. I cannot submit a PS3 game today even if I wanted to) as long as IOS, and I don't see IOS closing anytime soon.
On top of that, there is the argument on IOS being a general OS compared to games being specialized; no one de facto seems to desire doing much more than consuming media on consoles (consoles don't even have proper web browsers these days). So that's another factor to consider when determining what is a "major OS" and if/when it should be opened up if closed down.
These seem to be questions that are slowly being asked in formal channels. So I suppose these are all TBD. But if you want my sample of 1 answers:
- At some point I do think a "major OS" should become a commons for those who seek to publish through it. Microsoft was dinged 30 years ago for much less and Apple has way more control and restrictions now than MS ever did.
- Apple is entitled to profit from the App Store, but isn't entitled to be the only store able to distribute apps on its platform. Again, MS was considering this with Windows 8 and 10 and it was an absolute disaster. Another aspect of an "existing commons" trying to close up in a way that MS in theory feels entitled to but in a way that would hurt consumers and developers.
- the 30% is definitely a question to ask and not one I have a particularly strong answer on. I feel this is where the invisible hand should take charge, so it comes down more to "would the audience take a lower cut if they were able to find an alternative (which may or may not include themselves)?". So my concern here is with providing alternative options and seeing if the market shifts rather than throttling existing rates.
What someone is "entitled" to is an opinion. AFAIK, Courts do not adjudicate opinions, they decide if a law was broken in the context of the existing legal framework. These are arbitrary systems we set up to help us flourish as a society. If it is no longer doing that, we should change it.
50,60,80% cut would still be legal, but there is no way Apple can get away with that. What Apple is entitled to is going to be based on peoples feelings and opinions, and the amount of pushback generated. Its good to generate push-back on things you don't agree with.
> I find it interesting seeing the arguments here on how Apple should keep its large cut for years after it's become sustainable, but when mentioning the idea of giving copyrighted artists any sort of royalty (it'd be far, far, far from 30%) for training LLMs that the argument shifts back to "well they got paid already".
There are multiple people on here, who say different things.
Those artists learned the same way generative AI did, by ingesting copyrighted art. I couldn't care less about that unless the AI companies are somehow preventing people from purchasing from those artists or taking a cut out of their sales like Apple does with the app store.
They are a hardware company.
By the same token, can you imagine a car company controlling the fuel you put in your car, the tires you buy, the repair shops you use, the radio stations you can listen to?
Yes, and that's why printers are nearly universally reviled as exploitative. Even people who aren't keyed in on why open source is important all understand the ink costs more than it should.
That may be, but IMHO its impossible to be completely neutral on this issue. All analysis is somewhat compromised and biased based on subjective weightage to historical facts, etc.
People also need to remember how it was before in the CompUSA or telco provided phones. The retailer or marketplace would take > 30% margins closer to 50% and to get on a pseudo-smart phone before the current smart phone era one had to ask the AT&T's and Verizon's very nicely. But now one can build apps now and publish and just pay the 30% comission or 15% on subscriptions after the second year and look at the explosion in the app marketplace.
I honestly think Apple will need to be compelled by law verdict or congress to open up the appstore or allow other appstores and have some sort of cap on fees charged -- I dunno.
The ideal would probably be what Steve envisioned before the AppStore was a thing and that's basically PWAs. But I think it's been alleged that Apple is arbitrarily nerfing Safari to prevent PWAs on iOS running as well as native applications -- though I've no source.
How to effectively "disrupt" the appstore model is a billion dollar question I'm not sure of. What I do know is that the Tim Sweeny's et al of the world are hypocrites in that they just want to create their own rent-seeking AppStores and charge their own commissions and skirt around paying the platform anything for being on the platform. This is akin to wanting to be in a supermarket and put your kiosk inside and sell your product to the supermarket's customers without some sort of financial agreement between you and the supermarket.
It's just imessage. If imessage falls, so will the iPhone.
The courts don't take stuff like "social compliance" into account when evaluating something like the iPhone, so it all looks rosy. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to be a social young person in the US without an iPhone. Which naturally spreads to families becoming "iPhone families".
That's often true, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule, because we also have to look at the capabilities of the two combatants. It's why you would probably/hopefully assist the underdog who was being bullied.
We're talking about the wealthiest company in the world who can obviously afford to run out the clock on the court system and bury an opponent with legal fees. There's a monster difference of offensive capabilities, even if we realize that Epic is a sizeable company; in this case, Epic is really standing in for every other tiny company or one-man shop in the App Store, and we should thank them for doing that.
The merits are centered around the outcomes, which in this case are the consolidation of wealth by a few who don’t need it from the many who do. What other merits are more meaningful than the observable outcomes of the practice?
I think it's kind of the same argument. if you can justify an excessive marketplace tax for a company that "wins" in a wins a winner take all market dynamic then you get a $Trillion company. not sure how you get one without the other.
Apple charges 15%. The only developers who pay 30% are the ones earning over a million dollars a year through the App Store. Even then, they get charged 15% if it’s a long-term subscription.
