Guess Apple got another letter from the EU to cut the shit. Still doesn't seem like enough. There is absolutely no reason apple should receive a single cent if you're publishing outside of their store.
Should these rules also apply to things like the push notification system, iCloud sync infrastructure, or access to training materials etc.?
Apple might have a valid court case if they are forced to provide a service for free if it's costing them something. European Union is walking a very tight line and the fact that there is no European company declared as a gatekeeper might lead to some concerns.
The materials that are freely available to anyone on the Internet? Besides, if you develop for alternative stores, you still need to pay the $99/year fee.
> the push notification system
How much does running that system cost for the average app? Is Apple willing to allow alternative push notification systems?
Just as a reminder, I'm not saying iOS should stay closed. Mobile computing platforms should be open and allow innovation.
However, we cannot simply force private companies to provide services that costs them money. They are also under no obligation to implement any other continuous communication system to devices on their platform. It is their platform, with good and bad.
Being free or open does not constitute that every valuable product or service Apple created are now in the public domain and nobody should be paying for them.
> However, we cannot simply force private companies to provide services that costs them money.
Ah, but we can.
> They are also under no obligation to implement any other continuous communication system to devices on their platform.
And yes, they are.
Just like how utility companies aren't allowed to shut off the water because someone stopped paying. They can choose to stop doing business if they do not agree with these laws.
So this is not about creating an open and free market but instead forcibly taking the property of private companies and making them sell product at a loss.
Anything that uses their servers they could potentially charge for. Of course they must also make it possible to implement these things yourself without using their servers.
> There is absolutely no reason apple should receive a single cent if you're publishing outside of their store
This is a really bad take.
People do not merely pay for the rearrangement of atoms into what ends up being their phone.
The software is critical and deserves all the money earned to make it happen. Apple still stands up all those servers, engineers, and operations for apps priced at $0 -- at min-cost to the developer (before you start: no, $99/year covers zilch; $99/year is a mode of spam prevention dev account creation).
It is unreasonable, nefarious, and even grand theft for anybody to make money on the phones and refuse to pay for the services that made it possible: the software engineering into Swift, Xcode, CoreOS, Darwin, FoundationDB, Data Centers, the engineers on on-call rotations, and who knows whatever else. All those things don't come for free. App developers who make money off the ecosystem should be held account to pay up.
What servers, engineers, and operations are needed to sideload an app?
How did literally every OS before iOS manage to provide all of that for free, then? (Not counting game consoles, which always had a very similar distribution model, but importantly were often subsidized by their platform operator, and I hope nobody is claiming that iPhones are loss leaders for Apple.)
In my view, SDKs for third-party app development aren't premium/value-add services, they're a core OS functionality. Few people would be happy with an OS that can only run first-party apps.
The only things incurring costs to Apple scaling with the number and popularity of third-party apps that come to mind right now are malware protection and push notifications. If Apple really thinks that baking these into the device price would break their bank, I suppose they could always make an iCloud subscription mandatory for that type of service.
> Not counting game consoles, which always had a very similar distribution model, but importantly were often subsidized by their platform operator, and I hope nobody is claiming that iPhones are loss leaders for Apple
Sounds like you're proposing one of two possible business models:
1. Pay a fixed price for the device at time of purchase that includes costs for services used in the future
2. Subsidize the physical device in favor of pricing the services at a margin to recoup costs for the device
Blackberry for 1. or Amazon Fire Phone for 2.
Why force some other company (Apple) to bend to your will?
I'm also in the minority for thinking if what apple charged wasn't worth it, then no one would pay it.
What did it take it the bad old days to actually get your app into consumer hands, a publisher and a retailer who if you were lucky decided to do a deal with you and then you were given a small percentage cut.
I think this is a bad take. The idea that the device manufacturer is owed a cut of all third party software sold for it is a new one. Apple never would have asked for a cut of all Apple II software sold in the '80s because that would have been preposterous.
If I buy a piece of hardware, I can do with it what I want. It's mine, I own it, and everything on it. Nonsensical "terms of service" be damned.
It’s completely different when you have networked hardware. IMHO it’s the equivalent of road taxes to make sure there aren’t any giant potholes swallowing up 18-wheelers and bicycles alike and that your bridges are still standing when you drive across the water.
It’s a never-ending uphill battle against entropy and unless you do it, you’re guaranteeing major problems.
They're free to charge for their networked services if they want to. Doesn't change the fact that the end-user bought & owns the device & they should be free to use it as they wish, potentially without using those networked services and instead opting for an alternative. Their choice. Not yours.
There’s no equivalent to coloured diesel for electronic devices, unfortunately. So everyone has to pay the tax even if you’re not going to use the roads, to complete the metaphor.
Like I said: they’re not buying a simple rearrangement of atoms. Heck they’re free to dunk those atoms they paid for into baby oil. Nobody cares.
Nobody is entitled to dictate what _software_ should be on the device. If end-users have the right to _software_ then that right cannot be selectively applied in the case of phone or laptops: it should fairly applied in all cases: including your refrigerator. Why doesn’t the government compel Samsung to enable Spotify & third party App Stores on those devices?
The wall socket in your house is completely your property too. Yet, you don’t have a right to demand the socket company to put a semiconductor chip in it, along with the installation of an OS, along with an App Store and tools that allow you to download Netflix directly from their own App Store.
For example when is the last time my customers paid for Ruby, Python, Linux, PostgreSQL? The list can be very long. Companies paid people to work on those technologies, they are not only free labor.
In the case of Apple, they developed those technologies to control the platform. They already got a very good return. It is fair to ask developers to pay for the Apple services they are using (cloud services, messaging?) but it would be even fairer not to force developers to use Apple technologies, starting with having to use Macs to write apps.
> For example when is the last time my customers paid for Ruby, Python, Linux, PostgreSQL?
Well, those examples are cherry-picked; ergo, I present to you a picking my own cherries: Companies pay for MATLAB, Windows and MongoDB. I will concede this list not "very long". But length of lists shouldn't really matter here right? I mean, one example of MATLAB vs. Ruby/Python is good enough to make a point via counterexample.
The point I'm making is: It would be immensely unfair to expect developers to force MATLAB engineers to submit to whatever business model the devs want instead of the other way around. Companies that develop technologies own the right to price it however they please.
Competition in the free-market ensures companies do not employ price-gouging tactics.
So your phone should come with a lifetime license for all its software for free ? What about new apps and features ? You can currently get everything in the iOS ecosystem on an iPhone 11 that you paid for how many years ago?
It is funny to see people on HN arguing against paying for software. Of course software should be paid for, unless you want everything included for free - which means outsourced to India.
I'm not sure I understand the segue you've made here. But, it would be absurd to suggest that Google is entitled to charge a fee for every app installed installed from F-Droid.
Your original claim was that a device owner downloading an application from elsewhere somehow means that Apple could not afford to provide basic development tools. This is demonstrably false.
In any case, most of these outside apps have tended to be free, so if anything sideloading should reduce burden on their servers, which seemed to have been part of your concern.
There is technology that goes into ensuring an app runs on a device — the dynamic linked libraries being present, the compilers adapted to the specific instruction set shipped on that device’s chip, the algorithms, ci/cd pipelines, that go into ensuring all that language design, debugger tools, profiling and performance tools, and then the online infrastructure to support things like backups, iCloud, cross-device sync, device to device transfers on upgrades/new phone purchases. Yeesh the details!
“Afford to provide basic development tools” is a conniving way to put it. Forcing a company via legislation to fund, and develop tools is more like what’s happening.
What’s happening here is a couple of greedy app developers want to skimp out on paying for the nitty gritty details of making a customer experience actually work.
So, yeah, pardon me for inaccurately categorizing them all as “server costs” — I definitely misused that word — but there’s no way in hell you can expect all of the other tech to come for free or even at a price that the _developers demand the tool maker to set_
All this litigation, back-and-forth is going to tarnish the user experience.
DLLs preexist the iPhone by a long time. The implication of your argument is that Google is bankrupt because of F-Droid. Again, all of the big companies (Apple included) were shipping those things before the iPhone came along and blocked sideloading. In fact, those other companies still are provided those things (Apple included if you consider the mac). Some examples (non-exhaustive), since you are ignoring it:
Microsoft: Onedrive, VS, VScode, C#, Visual Basic, .NET (upto and including core), windbg, MSVC, Windows, Windows app stores, etc
Google: Dart, Go, Android Studio, Android, Google Drive, Google Play store & services, etc
Apple: xcode, objective-c, cocoa, llvm, lldb etc all preexist the iphone as well
The facts are:
1. Device owners should be able to install programs onto their phone without any interference from Apple.
2. Apple allowing this will not significantly affect their ability to remain profitable.
3. Most smartphone devices (Android) already do allow this.
I do not know. My hunch is because it's easy.
All I know is: Twitter/X is facing a crisis of spammy accounts and their mitigation strategy has been to require new accounts to submit payment info for the X subscription service.
