"except the websites are mini apps, and a mega corporation gets to control whats on it"

There is more to it. Using apps instead of websites we're killing the whole concept of making information and services available using a standard protocol. That's like going back over 30 years, even before gopher. Then there is the cloud->mainframe similarity, with data and services being moved somewhere into the net where the user has no control over his/her own data, and the whole email/usenet->social media migration which puts private and public communications in the hands of corporations having no intention of guaranteeing interoperability with competing systems.

Basically the industry screwed 40+ years of IT development, not just in a technical way, but they did it behind shiny graphics and animated emoticons, so nobody really cares.

> Using apps instead of websites we're killing the whole concept of making information and services available using a standard protocol

I think the interesting thing to note here is that for most end users a standard protocol is not nearly as appealing as a standard user interface. Like how most iOS apps follow common navigation paradigms, so users don't need to spend time learning each new one. And how people tend to prefer buying things on Amazon instead of any random webshop. And how WeChat has almost become a little web of its own with custom chat UIs for e.g. ordering pizza. If open software for consumers is ever to stop being beaten by these walled gardens, it needs to get a ton more UX people involved and focus on the end user UX, not just the technical implementation.

IMHO I think you've hit the nail on the head. iOS main attraction for many users I know is the simplicity. You can complain all day about Apple's guidelines and iron fist enforcement, and I'd occasionally agree with you too, probably many times. Simple fact is though that outside the walled garden everyone complains about is a jungle of terrible UX, laggy interfaces, slow loading web pages dumping megabytes of trackers and advertising through a connection you're paying for.

I'm not saying the App Store is perfect, not by a country mile is it. I'm just saying if you compare it to the Play store, and the wider Internet, holy moly do walled gardens look nice.

"I think the interesting thing to note here is that for most end users a standard protocol is not nearly as appealing as a standard user interface."

That is very true too. I often wondered what would have happened had someone created say 10 years ago an email client with strict protocol compatibility but employing an higher abstraction layer where discussions/attaches are managed automatically just like in a Whatsapp chat (chat -> mail list) using a similar UI. Probably most users would have rejected the idea because they had no intention to learn a new thing nobody was using. So, back to square one.

One of the most appealing things for end users is instant loading. That's why apps are preferred on mobile, but websites on desktop.

And branding. If an user downloads your app he puts an icon with your logo on his phone screen, possibly near other people watching. That doesn't happen when he taps on a browser icon. Not to mention that he also executes your code on his phone, code that almost always will ask for full access to media and contacts to be installed.

That's why we need decentralized solutions that break the hold the current centralized platforms have on us.

Not every user is smart. That's why there is a necessity for centralized/trusted solution. I wouldn't sleep well if I knew my mom could install a malware by mistake on appstore. Unfortunately, life is not this simple and every path there's a toll.

The problem wasn't that we didn't have decentralized solutions since the 1960s -- it was that we've never figured out a way to make hosting your own environment as easy / cheap as using an externally managed one.

The ebb and flow is kind of neat to watch.

(1) Load AOL and visit keyword "UBER" to get started requesting a car now!

(2) Type UBER into your web browser location bar then hit control-enter to visit http://UBER.com/ and get started requesting a car now!

(3) Load your app store and search for "UBER" to get started requesting a car now!

> And takes 30% of everything you make.

Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero?

Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something), but will not pay for web sites. Third-party advertisers might pay, if you're lucky, and if you don't mind treating your users as a commodity, but the users themselves will not.

> but will not pay for web sites.

Subscriptions to web-based services don't count as paying for web sites?

The only way people would pay for web sites in the extent they pay for apps is if it’s as convenient. I don’t want to log in to get the paid benefits for example. I don’t want to enter my cc details to pay the subscription if it could be avoided by “the store” already knowing it, and so on.

In the end reality is that I just pass on buying subscriptions and would probably prefer buying subscriber access to a website if they made an app facade for the site that handled payment and login. The UX of web sites and subscriptions is that bad.

With Stripe's integration of Apple Pay/Google Pay are you more willing or less willing to pay to use a web site?

How many people would you say subscribe to something they pay for online? For example news? The pool of subscribers for magazines and news is an ever shrinking pie. I know of no one in the last three jobs that maintains a subscription that’s under under age 40.

Netflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions.

Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.

If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.

Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.

They're also not exactly something a developer can launch and start making money off of.

Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

> Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

I don't do that on the app store either.

And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?

I happily pay for games and apps, including upgrades if they are valuable to me.

I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.

Flappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.

What makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule?

There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.

The number of apps in all app stores combined that are profitable from store sales is also likely a rounding error.

How many apps are profitable and of those how many are made by independent people?

More than one out of 50 million, you can bet.

Are you saying there’s only like 30 sites with a subscription model that are profitable?

This feels like kind of an aside - do those under 40s you know readily pay for news apps, but not for web subscriptions? If not it's not really related to the issue at hand.

Happy blendle user.

Love to be able to pay for quality content.

Same with Spotify.

Both models are OK with me.

What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.

Here are some of the online services that I subscribe to, delivered over the web: Github, AWS, pinboard.in, spotify, ancestry.com

Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.

And all those magazines and newspapers also have apps, yet that hasn’t somehow led to floods of money pouring into their coffers.

News is free on the web and free as an app. You are not making a distinction. I paid nothing for my NPR and BBC apps.

The BBC is fully funded by the government (i.e. the taxpayer). NPR claims they are minimally funded by the government but sure does fight hard to keep that supposed 2%. But the main point is that someone else had to pay for what you espouse as free.

About a quarter of its revenue comes from BBC Worldwide selling BBC content to markets outside the UK.

Confidence in news is also an ever shrinking pie.

Not a great example.

> Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero?

There's more to the Internet than websites. Believe it or not, there are lots of protocols out there, not just HTTP.

The parent explicitly said "websites".

And the incentive/risk tradeoff is too much in favour of the former for optimistic entrepreneurs to ever think they'll be affected by something like this.

It's supposedly more secure than the normal internet.

But ya figure for a large company of creative geniuses they could figure out how to democratize security so that the whole system isn't wholly owned and controlled by a single entity.

Ahh the App Store. It's just like the Play Store, except no viruses, far fewer scam apps, and there's a legitimate and thriving market for paid apps.

This is not a matter of saying that a bad thing is good just because the counterpart is worse, I think that the dialog have to go a bit beyond that point. We lost control of the communication channels for the internet, it was meant to be free. This is the important topic.

In what sense is the app store a part of "the communication channels for the internet"?

The app store isn't. Apps are.

> We lost control of [Apps], it was meant to be free.

That makes even less sense.

You watch YouTube. You use an app in your phone that maybe in the future is going to be allowed only for Android devices. I think my case is settled.

The app stores you mentioned are inextricably to their respective operating systems. The problems with the Play Store are a compromise I'm willing to deal with so I can easily install apps using alternative app stores or none at all.

The store is their way to control their ecosystem, has nothing to do with the OS. This effort is a power-play against decentralized apps that threaten the centralized platform model.

Yes, but my point is that the Play Store inherently allows for competition and limit's Google's control because they chose to develop it on a platform that allows for competing app stores and sideloading. Regardless of Google's choices in managing the Play Store, that stark difference between Google's approach and Apple's approach remains.

> Play Store inherently allows for competition

Really?

https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/developer-distribut...

> (4.5) Alternative Stores. You may not use Google Play to distribute or make available any Product which has a purpose that facilitates the distribution of software applications and games for use on Android devices outside of Google Play.

You have no chance of bootstrapping an alternative store outside of Google Play. Sideloading APKs is not how users get software on Android. Amazon failed hard with their attempt, and they pumped tons of money into it by paying developers to give away their apps for free; that, and they shipped hardware that has their store preloaded. Still didn't even make a dent.

Well, there is advantages in Android approach too: as far I remember in App Store there is no emulators thanks to the stricter policies of Apple, while Play Store have genuine emulators for tons of gaming consoles. And you can also sideload apps without needing of jailbreak, allowing the use of interesting apps that for some reason is not allowed in Play Store (for example, NewPipe, a alternative YouTube client with tons of extra features).

No BitTorrent clients in the App Store either. So I have to watch everything on openload instead.

You compare the store to another sore while op compared it to the internet.

Yeah uh, I don't think they were attacking the Apple App Store specifically, the comment would read exact same if it were Google who removed the app. But sure, go ahead and knee-jerk defend your favorite corporation, that adds to the discussion.

But they remove any apps that might show boobs?

> But they remove any apps that might show boobs?

We are not much better, sadly. https://floens.github.io/Clover/gp_unavailable.txt

The problem I have with the App Store or Play Store or any of their ilk is that they are taking over the public space and making it a private space.

Imagine a city where public parks are all bought out by private entities, that is the Internet right now.

We have less and less public space in the digital world and that is not looking good for the future of democracy.

What are you arguing here? Why do some people always have to use the, "Well, at least we don't do what that other guy is doing!" (non)argument? Why can't we make arguments for or against what a single company has decided to do? Doesn't that make so much more sense?

This is a big plus for me. A vetted walled garden where I can give things a try without much fear of nasties is a big plus.

The problem isn't that the vetted app store exists. It is that the vetted app store controlled by the device manufacturer is the only way you are allowed to install applications

My point being I knew that before I bought my iPhones/iPad. I actively like there being the one well kept store where things are verified and that apps can only be installed through. Granted not everyone will feel this way and I guess Android offers them more freedom in this respect.

iPhone users (like myself) need to look no further than the Mac to see what a better alternative might be. The Mac only allows App Store or signed apps to be installed by default. However this setting can be toggled to allow any apps for those who need that. You can also toggle it to allow only vetted App Store apps if that’s what you prefer.

Apple could keep the default to what it is on the iPhone right now, but should at least allow signed apps from other stores as a non-default option, even if they don’t allow unsigned apps at all.

And Android has done it that way from Day 1.

You might enjoy F-Droid then. All apps are built from source from public repositories, with known malicious libraries stripped, with a broad definition of "malicious" (tracking and advertising). Also everything's free, in both senses. No need to wall up the garden.

You're stating this as if it is an argument against the parent's claims, but I fail to see how it is.

Why can't we have the best of both worlds? Apps that have been manually checked or curated can be marked as "Trusted/Certified" (similar to WHQL certified drivers), while others can be marked as "Untrusted/Use at your own risk".

Your comment seems a bit neurotic. Nobody was even talking about Apple vs Android.

It's always been Apple vs The Rest Of The World.

And how much does it cost to build and maintain your own domain, storage, delivery/updates infrastructure and billing system? Oh, and how about marketing for your app?

The app stores market your app for you? Ha!

Apple’s ‘App of the Day’ featuring boosts downloads by 1747%, games by 792%[1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-feat...

Sure getting featured helps, just like if a fashion designer has a celebrity photographed in their clothes, they will probably see a temporary bump in sales.

Getting featured on the App Store is one time, possibly incredibly beneficial, event, but it is not a marketing plan.

Ask developers how much difference being made a featured app makes to sales. Apple recently radically redesigned the App Store so that it could more effectively promote apps.

Ahh the race track. It's just like the highway, except the roads are smaller and a corporation gets to control who drives on it. And they make you pay to use it. Brilliant.

I'm not sure why anyone argues against Apple's 30% cut like this. It's app developers who make the determination whether the cost is worth the benefit.

As you point out, there are alternatives. Why do you think developers have massively and overwhelmingly opted-in?

> are alternatives

Are there? Really? No, they're not. No one who isn't in tech is going to install F-droid. Few people will uninstall untrusted sources, or even know what that is. Fewer Apple users than ever jailbreak their phones.

For over 90% of the market, no, there are no alternatives (other than a mobile website). Due to the non-standard nature of ARM and SoC/binary drivers, we don't even have a real alternative OS for old Android devices that's universal like most Linux distros on the PC in the 90s (although PostmarketOS is making some huge strides in this area).

30% is an insane cut. Bandcamp sells music with a 15% cut, literally half of Amazon/Google/Apple. I always prefer it because I know the band gets more money and I get a higher quality version of the song without a patent encumbered codec (FLAC and OGG downloads are supported).

But no, there are no real alternatives. AppStore/Play are bastardizations of the software repo concept from Linux.

If Google Play was a real package managers, it'd keep standardize shared jar files across apps (dependencies to reduce massive app size) either by mirroring maven repos and signing dependencies or creating their own system, and they'd also allow for easily adding 3rd party app trees.

Both Apple and Google are closed walled gardens, where everything you need has to be contained in your bloated package, and where their corporate overlords get final approval of what is in and out.

Exactly, similarly, I'm not sure why anyone argues against the troll watching the bridge. It's the travelers who make the determination whether the price is worth crossing the bridge.

After all, there are alternatives to bridges, why do the travelers opt to pay the fee?

-- Obviously, /s

Unfortunately, as others have already mentioned, this is not as easy as "it's app developers who make the determination whether the cost is worth the benefit". Depending on your business, having an iOS app is not something you can choose.

Talking about my own experience, once we've made clear that In-App Purchase wasn't a fit for us as we already had our own payment system (we are a SaaS business), things got way more difficult to us. As you can imagine (but I didn't at the time), our app would be in review for weeks sometimes, we started to see arbitrary denials and a lot of "issues" not present on their guidelines started to be identified on our apps.

If there is one thing that I'm now sure is that, if you decide to not play their game (even though following their rules) there will be retaliation.

Please explain how developers can ship native iOS apps outside of the store?

I think the point was they're free not to ship iOS apps.

Yea, but this isn't necessarily an alternative.

> As you point out, there are alternatives.

Not if you want to build a secure system which runs on an iPhone, there aren't. JavaScript crypto is fundamentally insecure; the only secure option is a native client.

Because of network effects outside of anyone's control?

Which internet are you on that requires 30% of all made on it? If news is any indicator the vast majority of people have no interest in paying for and even reading the content - the headline will suffice. Curation has its merits, for example not nearly as many trojaned clones. Ransomware does not exist. Ahhh users, bless them. The public daily demonstrates a lack of interest in owning and operating a well maintained and updatable/ed device.

He's saying that the app store takes 30% of your earnings.