> And Epic doesn't even provide quality control, a discovery mechanism, or payment processing.
Apple takes 30% off all purchases upfront, and maybe they'll cut you a deal if you're Netflix-size.
On top of that, Apple's "quality control" allows through scam apps with scam IAPs, while they will reject your well-established app if you don't change the wording for your IAP copy for the second time in one year.
Or if you have no presence, they may well just reject you for not meeting the ambiguous minimum functionality requirements or for functionality they don't want users to have access to. After you've already paid them $99 for the privilege of being rejected, of course.
And then on top of that, Apple's "discovery mechanism" puts other people's ads above your app when people search specifically for the name of your app.
Epic, however, takes 5%..... after you pull in $1mil in revenue. That's it.
Do you really not see the glaring issue with your comparison here?
Netflix, like Kindle & Spotify are "Reader" Apps which pay 0% Royalty.
[1] https://www.apple.com/ios/app-store/principles-practices/#:~...
All the "reader" designation does is allow this off-site option to exist at all, still with the restriction that you are not permitted to even imply that you can sign up elsewhere.
The only thing this does is make the customer experience worse. Now we have a Netflix app that can't tell you how to sign up, and a Kindle app that can't sell books. The alternative is the customer has to pay more, or the company has to eat the cost. Nobody wins except Apple, but you could make the argument that they're harming their own platform with this stuff.
That's it, for now. Epic is trying to set themselves up as publisher like Steam. Once they can get first-party status as an app store on iOS their tune will change.
This is about money, and one way to make money is to get people hooked on your product then jack up the price.
How does Epic store become first-party, they get bought by Microsoft? I don't get what you are claiming
I suspect that where the line is drawn depends on what benefit you feel you get from one side of the line versus the other.
Nipping it in the bud was wiped clean off the table the moment Trump won the Republican Party presidential nomination for a second term..
As far as I'm concerned, now, it's a complete free-for-all.
But this is the worst/dumbest/most off-topic reply to a comment I have ever read on this site, and maybe the entire internet. I regret having had to read it.
The proper analogy to Epic charging for its game engine is Apple charging for its developer licenses - which it already does separately from the app store.
FWIW, Google (illegally? according to Epic, anyway) blocked Epic's attempts to address this through partner deals with phone manufacturers, so their hand was relatively forced.
If Google and Apple didn't require all installs to go through a blessed path, people would just type "fortnite" into their search engine of choice and install that way instead. Of course, Google & Apple have good reason for not allowing that, but in the case of Fortnite they really are not delivering much for the 30%.
More importantly, Google does not prohibit sideloading. It simply does not make it convenient to do it.
In essence Apple is running an Apple App incubator :) Getting 30% of anything, anybody ever makes on it, with basically no risk on it since the actual cost of reviewing the apps and hosting them is pretty fixed.
I pretty happily try out subscription apps on iOS (which I rarely to never do online). Why? It's darn easy to cancel. I get a reminder in advance even. This contrasts in my experience with nearly EVERY other auto-billing approach out there. The time I sometimes spend calling people to cancel stuff (that I could sign up for online) is ridiculous.
Another nice touch that builds trust. I once deleted an app and iOS reminded me to cancel the subscription if I wasn't going to reinstall! I mean, every other store will keep the auto-bill going forever.
But you guys aren't arguing the actual point anyway. The question is whether the forced app store is always a plus for developers, not users. The answer is certainly no. And the answer is also no for users who can manage their own trust, and could happily live with direct downloads outside of the app store. They pay higher prices, and are forced to effectively subsidize everyone else.
One result - they have a pretty high level of trust among users. And so they can charge a pretty remarkable premium. This level of control has also made them popular for developers. Their ecosystem has a much more consistent development experience, many more users are on a relatively recent iOS and the per user spending is far higher to name just a few elements.
Many of these things are benefits for DEVELOPERS. Sony and Microsoft make the PS and XBOX, also closed systems with networks they hope benefit developers.
And finally, does apple have an obligation to help developers make money or is their focus more properly on consumers?
Do you have a record of that (your emails and their cancellation notice)? Would be very interesting to see how that went down.
> Purchasing the same app more than once on the same device shouldn't even be possible.
It’s not and I don’t think it has ever been.
But Apple believes the opposite of you, has direct contact with nearly a billion customers, and spends massively on safety/security which they wouldn’t do if it wasn’t important to customers.
Apple has earned trust with me as a user. When I download an app from Apple’s stores it extends its trust to those apps.
I feel more comfortable spending money on iOS because of that trust. Take away the trust, and I promise there is significantly less money to be made.
This is all my opinion and most importantly feelings about spending money though the AppStore and through any other channel.
I will say, for me no other company has built the good will that Apple has. I really doubt that Epic understands the “trust” I speak about. Both because of the general sentiment I see online and as a Fortnite player.
Have any of you actually played Fortnite?
Do any of you know how many bugs exist in that game? I’m not even talking about “wall hacks”, rendering issues, difficult collision detection stuff or the many in game broken mechanics. I’m talking about the many, many out-of-game user interface bugs. Logging in fails 1/4 the time (need to reboot the app). Matchmaking fails 1/10 the time (just stuck in an infinite loop). Matchmaking for groups fails 1/10 the time (at least one person in the party will not be in the same game!!! How does a software company fuck up atomic transactions for the full party?)
lol Epic is not a company I want handling financial transactions. I’m very happy to buy Vbucks from Apple/Google/Sony and then “safely” use Vbucks in the Fortnite store.
The type of trust building Apple does is a “value add” that a company like Epic doesn’t understand yet.
Epic choosing to make this decision isn’t data about Apple’s ability and mindset to earn trust. Epic choosing to make this decision seems to be a short term play at rent seeking before Fortnite stops being popular.
Also please read my other comments in this thread for anecdata about my experience/feelings as a customer of both Apple and Epic.
You're not even making a coherent argument. Epic is making a short-term play at rent seeking? That doesn't make any sense. They're trying to be able to charge for individual products the way they do on any other open platform. Platforms that do not filter through single monolithic app stores, and which - surprise - are successful and enjoyed by millions of users and developers.
He copy pasted the exact same comment in a conversation with me, which is why I am bringing it up. Instead of actually saying anything related to what I said, he just posted that copy-paste comment.
Likely, because they had nothing to add, related to the actual comments and points that you or I brought up.
- used an iPhone as your primary device?
- used an Android as your primary device?
- played Fortnite, and on what device?
For me it was 6 years of Android before switching to an iPhone for the last 4 years. I've been playing a lot of Fortnite (less during the waterworld season) on a PS4 over the last 11 months.
Rationale:
Especially because you're arguing for sideloading and Android already allows that, yet Epic is still suing Google. I ask because when you keep saying you're arguing "for customers" and "pro-competition".
I'm just wondering what background experience you have with all of these different companies and platforms that helps you judge what is best "for competition and the customer".
Does iOS make the success of any app?
It’s the same for Epic on PlayStation, Switch and Xbox.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. A game produced with the Unreal Engine could just as easily be created through a natively developed engine or another licensed engine instead of Unreal. Unity, for instance:
Apple has a monopoly... on Apple products?
It was made from a bygone era, where the digital concept didn’t even exist.
I imagine if Apple tried to restrict third party apps from doing that through the legal system, we would see another suit but this time about "graphics" instead of "payment processing".
I agree. Operating systems are not App Stores.
This is false; unless theoretically means there's no concept of "money" involved in our world.
A game deployed to an iPhone must be compatible with the hardware chip supplied on the iPhone, must be built using APIs designed, built and committed to be supported by the iPhone.
Apps can't be built out of thin air. Programming languages, debuggers, IDEs, distributions channels, commitment to support cost money, time and people's energy. Apple, as a private business, can choose to monetize however they wish to. It would be really dumb for the govt or other parties to dictate what pricing policies Apple has to set for a product they're building. Heck, they're free to ask for a million dollars for each copy of Xcode people use.
Apple is trying to balance the costs of building an iPhone ecosystem with the benefits of ease of accessibility to that ecosystem.
Customers pay Apple to handle _everything_ from rearranging sand to naming functions accessible to developer to make the iPhone.
> This is false; unless theoretically means there's no concept of "money" involved in our world.
I am fairly sure that Apple has already produced a general purpose computing device that also requires applications deployed to it to be compatible with its CPU and to be built using APIs designed and built by Apple, but nonetheless lets applications be acquired for it through other means, including direct download.
Ultimately, it's their product. I mean, can you imagine the world we'd live in if some arbitrary group of people (who are _not_ the product developers) decided that the iPod should be opened up to side-load any arbitrary software, such as a music store, run by some other company.
In what world is that legal? Just because the iPhone has majority profits of the smartphone market doesn't mean they ought to share that platform with everyone else. If developers don't like Apple's policies they should not build for Apple's platforms. It's pretty simple.
Go make your iPhone, and App Store, and Retail distribution channels and marketing that works to your specification. Isn't that what competition means?
The "the app store pays for libraries" argument is total bullshit. Apple wants 30% of your Spotify subscription because they saw it, they wanted it, and now they're having a temper tantrum about it. Not because they laid the foundation for Spotify.
Sony and MS games can be programmed without licenses or devkits (which make it much easier to debug games by providing debug access not available on retail consoles).
Moreover, devkits are frequently made available for free by both companies to indie developers and even major partners.
Xbox developer mode [1] appears to require a valid, current Partner Center app developer account [2]. Individual accounts are $19 and "With a developer account, you can submit apps and games to Microsoft marketplaces, including the Microsoft Store."
so you dont need a devkit but would need an Xbox and you do need an account to publish. so yes, while you dont need a xbox dev account to program, you dont need an apple dev account to program either. you just need a dev account on either platform to publish.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki... [2] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/store/register/
In Microsoft's case, UWP on XBox doesn't count as it is castrated to the actual OS capabilities, and hasn't been updated for a while and most likely it won't.
In some version of Visual Studio the SDK can be downloaded from within the program.
XDK: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/xbox-live/get-starte...
The XDK (aka HDK) includes physical hardware and is intended for more demanding games.
Sony SDK: https://www.companyregistration.playstation.com/SCEInternetA...
The Sony SDK and HDKs are available to registered partners only, though registration is free and the SDK (but not the HDK) is free to all partners.
You're comparing Epic's dev tools to XCode.. but then you're also comparing them to the App Store later in your comment?
Epic has an equivalent of the App Store that does the things you listed: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/about
(saying either does QC is a little disingenuous imo. Apple does "QC" insofar to make sure you're not trying to submit a flaming hunk of garbage, they're not there to be your QC. Epic does the same.)
Which is just _one_ of _many_ licensing terms available for that product. You can just buy a license outright and avoid the royalty fee if you so choose.
This isn't how the software development eco-system works. There are tonnes of examples of providing free development tools with restrictions on use and revenue sharing agreements. For example, there's this little known company called Epic Games which provides the Unreal Engine for free- but with the following clause:
> This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
And Epic doesn't even provide quality control, a discovery mechanism, or payment processing.