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Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by rimliu on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:08AM (#17225285)
A different look may be like this: I made an app and I gladly give away 30% (it can be less, btw) for not having to care about setting up and supporting payment, distribution and updates infrastructure, dealing with PCI and chargebacks, etc.
Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by throwaway13337 on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:14AM (#17225308)
You didn't get to make that choices. It was forced on you.
Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by rimliu on Monday June 04, 2018 @04:12AM (#17225570)
Nobody forced me to program for iOS.
Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by Scarblac on Monday June 04, 2018 @05:16AM (#17225933)
The fact that iOS and Android are the only smartphone OSes did force you to do that.

Unless you mean that you could have made a competitor, but that's inane -- that's a completely different market, with huge barrier to entry.

Apple is using its huge market position in one area (smartphone OSes) to give itself a huge advantage in another (music apps). That's the sort of thing companies have got huge fines for in the past, or were broken in parts for.

Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by ttoinou on Monday June 04, 2018 @10:40AM (#17228159)
You can have alternative app store on Android there's no technical limitations, right ?

And at some point you could jailbreak iPhone and iPod Touch and crack apps but no real alternative market rose up

Re:American tech giants are making life tough for startups by radley on Monday June 04, 2018 @02:18PM (#17230527)
Aside from setting up payment, all of those issue are still present with Apple / Google payments. The difference is 3% (MC, Stripe, Visa) vs 30% (Apple, Google). That 27% can easily cover those issues and far, far more.

In fact, it's worse. Payment & fraud disputes are also bound to the marketplace. What are the chances that app devs will end up being the ones eating big losses just to continue to exist?