This is simply not true. As a small app developer, I can tell you first hand that Apple only promotes and supports larger apps in the ecosystem. It is the exception, not the rule, when they promote a smaller app.
As a developer, you are on your own on the marketing and discovery front. The billing infrastructure you allude to would be easily replaceable with a dozen or so startups and wouldn't warrant a 30 percent hit that Apple charges.
Of course they're going to hype the big games. It's opportunity cost. Advertisement leads to sales, but feeding a hype train gets you more. If they stop advertising the hot new game to showcase yours then that person is not getting promoted. The guy who had no problems ignoring your game gets promoted and now everybody answers to them.
Is it awesome? No. Do I like it? Not really. But it's rational, and getting large companies to be rational is often better than you can expect.
It's no coincidence that on both stores you cannot filter out apps that have in app purchases
Go look through the Today/Games section right now. All of the featured games will be from super high quality indie developers. It isn't the ones that make the most money.
I have friends at Apple who curate the App Store and I have a number of apps on the store as well. Your statement is categorically wrong.
Apple absolutely supports small developers. If you look through many of their "editor playlists" you will see plenty of smaller apps that get a lot of attention e.g. Bear, Notability, Calm. Even apps like Instagram were small once.
We have rave reviews on one of our apps and a very enthusiastic community in a unique space, but having a hell of a time getting the eye of anyone at Apple.
Then be polite, succinct and be specific about what you want. Don't just say "feature me". Say can you please include me in the playlist "Favourite Travel Apps" etc.
We’re a two person shop. We’ve taken zero funding. We’re nowhere near Fortnite revenue.
Apple has done an outstanding job promoting us. Last month they gave us our first Today tab feature, and at any given time we can be found in several lists.
I am actually fine if Apple doesn't do any sort of discovery or promotion of our apps. Just don't charge 30 percent then.
I’m sure many great apps went nowhere. That’s the nature of entrepreneurship. I’d say Apple’s promotion significantly improves the survival odds for small teams doing great work.
If your app doesn't meet a certain level of quality then Apple will not feature you. But if you do then it is almost certain that at some point they will. I suspect your app falls in the former category.
That just seems silly. They should at least be rotating through a list of a few hundred apps per day.
Also, as a consequence I am quickly bored by browsing the store. Top-10 lists virtually never change. Featured lists seem like the same 3 apps forever. And a “See All” link that shows nothing more than the same 3 apps from the front page is just insulting. Apple needs much, much, much more in their featuring.
that is fine if you ever show up as featured. Which is 1% of the apps, and even then, from already big companies after they spent the marketing money. Other than that, for distribution (really?) and payment, there are tons of alternatives/competition the small apps cannot even consider.
App store is nothing other than a racketeering scheme where you have to pay if you can't "protect" yourself against. It is "robber barons"/"ma-bell"/etc all over again.
The Apple app store is actually a huge improvement over that model; it just seems unfair because digital sales shouldn't cost much, right? Right??
Well, Apple created the marketplace. They spend a lot of money making that marketplace work correctly, keeping their software platforms and merchant facilities robust for customers and developers, and putting that marketplace in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. They built this opportunity for devlopers and every developer who has built an app did so knowing exactly what the terms were.
If you don't like it, don't complain after you voluntarily and knowingly agreed to the terms.
It used to be that the maker of the OS spent tremendous efforts to attract developers. They did this for free to gain app market share.
So, your argument falls flat. Apple is doing this to generate profit. They continue doing so because of their dominant iOS market share and that for apps there is no alternative.
Please stop making excuses for trillion dollar companies.
Yes, that's what companies do. If you don't like capitalism, your beef isn't with Apple, it's with your government.
In the past, you bought hardware that could run software from more than one retailer.
You are free to make that choice.
Meanwhile, I'd appreciate if you didn't object to my right to choose a managed ecosystem if that is what I prefer. I like the Apple ecosystem the way it is, thank you very much.
i do not believe that apple allows you to sideload apps without jailbreaking (which voids warranty iirc). Therefore, the user is not free to make that choice.
You are free to make that choice [of running software from more than one retailer] by choosing a different computing platform. Hundreds of models of Android phone are available at every price point, from super-budget to super-premium.
It's important to me that I can choose a platform that has a strongly walled ecosystem because I greatly prefer the advantages of it more than I dislike the disadvantages. That's my opinion and I am happy that a product exists that satisfies my needs. If you don't like Apple's ecosystem, don't buy their products.
Asking for an Apple device that uses the Android/AOSP business model is like insisting that Jeep builds a Wrangler with a Tesla drivetrain. If that's really what you want and you're willing to put the effort in, you can make it yourself. It's entirely possible.
Or even if Jeep started adding specific "features" that attempted to make it difficult for people to modify their car.
Apple used to literally sue people for this stuff. That's immoral. And the courts shutdown those frivolous lawsuits from Apple.
It is perfectly reasonable for people to modify products that they own. If you don't like then, then feel free to not modify your product. You own it, and all.
The market has your back though, because Android gives you a very different experience from Apple.
You could never buy software for your phone from more than one retailer. Or are you trying to force the desktop computing model onto Apple ?
I don't think I found any of these through their listings or search, maybe those could be better? But the space is huge, maybe random blogs etc. can do better than any centralised store.
1. Citation needed (because looks like you are pulling these numbers out of your ass).
2. And by your argument, looks like people have more choices on Android. Who would have thought?!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines so often that I've banned your account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
This is why both Apple and Google introduces the reduced rate after the first year of subscription, which in my opinion will eventually become the norm from the get go. It’s only a letter of time.
Ultimately, even such seemingly large losses are still a really small fraction of Apple’s bottom line. Once more apps find ways to do this is when Apple will start noticing.
Recurring revenue is a much different proposition— even for small or first time apps. A player like netflix which handles it’s own marketing, payment and all other ancilliary services doesn’t need to anything the apple store is offering other than distribution. I would understand if apple took $1 or some one time download fee but to regularly claim 30% of Netflix revenue seems like a stretch. While I think apple could make the case that they signed up through iOS, i think it is equally fair for Netflix to disable this option.