You and Apple are conflating "App Store" and "Content Filter".

We can have multiple App Stores and multiple types of content filters. It doesn't need to be like the current situation, with Apple in full control over everything.

It’s not content filtering that I care about, it’s the ability for Apple to enforce standards around usability and features that are better for their users.

Without control of the store they lose that leverage.

App devs will just ship outside of it and include all the tracking they want. It’ll also block Apple from being able to require things like Apple ID or Apple Pay support which provide direct benefits to users, but can run counter to what app devs want.

It wouldn’t be an “alternative choice” app devs with leverage would ship outside of the store to bypass policy and force users to install shitty versions.

You might have to do this because of network effects.

The choice I want won't exist in that world and I don't have the leverage to require it to exist.

Apple does and that's why I choose their products.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Others like to go base jumping from some mountain in the Alps.

Shouldn't both be possible? Or do we want a Mickey Mouse in the Alps telling us to go back for our own safety?

And I don't want to punch Mickey Mouse every time I go climbing.

I’m genuinely curious, because to me that’s the equivalent of telling Ford that you want a Ferrari engine in your mustang.

Maybe if someone could help me understand this I would be more open to those kinds of ideas.

Yes it does. Because otherwise you will need to install tons of app stores to install all the apps you currently use.

For instance, I would have to install the Epic store to install Fortnite. Now that’s two apps (the store app plus Fortnite app) and then I’d be less confident about the level of quality and security that the added store provides.

It is this particular situation that seems very hard to overcome from a regulatory perspective. So one you allow multiple app stores, the specialness that people like me have for our trusted devices disappears.

How many Spotify users paid through their App though? I'd imagine it would only be a tiny fraction.

They also started to prevent apps that don't have IAP for subscriptions.

> ...that app developers be allowed to provide consumers with information about alternative payment options...

The only thing I really like about Spotify is spotify connect. I don't understand why none of the competitors have anything competing. It's the key selling point for Sonos

That’s when they’re actually in violation of monopoly and consumer protection laws. Consumer harm is part of it.

Like for example, consider their restrictions on third-party browser engines, JITs, etc. Are you happy about all those choices too?

I would have to think about it honestly, I don't know what I think.

It's a little funny because I think someone reading my comments absent context would think I don't care about general purpose computing. I do care about it though, a lot. I think the centralization of communication services behind a few megacorporations is a sad outcome and a lost promise of decentralized communication between users on the net.

The issue I have is the inbetween - in 'the world as it is' at least apple has leverage to stop the shittiest data mining, tracking, email harvesting, call-to-cancel retentions, just general user hostile 'features' on our behalf. If they don't have that leverage, we don't suddenly gain a better environment - we're in the same shitty centralized thin client world, but now it's worse. In the idealized world of decentralized applications or strong data protection legislation I'd be in favor of it, but in our world I think the tradeoffs are serious and its one of the main reasons I buy Apple hardware.

Forcing the ecosystem to use shared libs for common, expensive taks like browser engines, JITs, etc, has clear benefits in terms of storage and battery life.

This is most stark with their recent announcement of supporting paid podcasts. Particularly because of the anonymization around sign-in with Apple, the podcaster doesn’t actually get to know who their subscribers are. Want to have special rewards or a subscriber only discord channel or forum? Too bad! If any of your biggest fans first started donating through Apple Podcasts you’ve got a big hassle in the way of verifying who they are. Got a weird customer service problem that you’d like to address with a personal touch or maybe offer some store credit or a special reward to make up for it? Once again, too bad. There is no capability to do that.

Most likely it is in the interest of majority of consumers conditioned to this type of control. I realize that it is a benefit for older computer illiterate people. It completely sucks for people like myself.

>"10 different game distributors all with their own shitty incentives"

That's one classy way of describing business approach. Yes they're shitty in a way that they're there to help you part with your money and everything else is but a fluff around it. You just forgot to add Apple itself to that group.

It's a benefit for computer literate people too.

- IAP allows easy tracking of subscriptions and cancellation. You don't have to call and argue with a retentions rep for an hour to cancel a service.

- Apple restrictions on tracking limit abuse from ad driven business models.

- Apple can require features like Apple ID to be implemented alongside FB connect or whatever. Apple ID has privacy friendly features for users like obscuring your email via a relay. This would never be implemented by app devs because hiding your email is counter to their incentives. If they could deploy outside of the store to avoid these constraints they would.

Apple's interests are aligned with their users. The reason they can get away with charging 30% is because Apple's users don't care about all the shitty anti-user things Apple blocks app devs from doing.

The reason I care about the 30% is because it worries me that they will be forced to allow side-loading or multiple stores and lose their leverage over app devs. If they lose that leverage we as Apple users will lose these benefits, and for what?

Because you literally don't get people in autocratic regimes killed because the single choke point of software that might enable them to escape detection is removed. Because you remove Apple's rampant discrimination against some kinds of speech and the people that effects. Because Apple attacks businesses with any involvement in sex whatsoever.

[1] I'm assuming that "autocratic" here refers to China - though despite the lack of political freedom and the awful situation with regard to ethnic minorities, I don't think that's a very helpful or expressive label.

If anything, Apple’s control here enables better protection for users. You think authoritarian regimes don’t own phones? You think Android is safer in China?

Sure, maybe. I do not care as I personally do not feel any benefit. I am most likely in minority but that does not mean I have to tailor my opinions.

Not even really criticizing Apple / Google. I want my phone to be able to function as normal Windows / Linux PC except that its phone capability would be able to function even if the rest of the OS is crashed. Such product simply does not exist outside of half baked attempts and I am not willing to waste my time/money on those.

The end result is that my current smartphone is mostly just a phone with couple of off-line apps like GPS and apps to install firmware to various gizmos like a drone. I do not even have data plan.

That's probably technically 'most', but it's not the large sector that matters.

Also 15% is still quite high.

That 15% includes the 1-3% creditcard processing fee. They also take care of VAT and multi currency for your customers.

I don't understand this argument at all.

You're almost certainly taking more risk driving in a car than downloading an app, yet you're probably willing to embrace the full degrees of freedom of the roadway.

We shouldn't be afraid to use computers. Security is possible without an app store.

Apologizing for Apple's exploitive system is doing us all a disservice. It's making it harder to do business, launch a startup, use your own device, refurbish your device, and compute freely.

Technology wasn't always a locked-in time share. We're witnessing a hostile takeover. An invented scam, sold to us by the Jobs and Ballmers of the world.

The Apple and Google stores make us serfs in their kingdoms. We're renting, not owning.

Your choices are impinging upon my freedoms. The more people that accept this, the more companies are willing to take.

A Department of Justice breakup is looking like the only solution at this point.

Your liberty is not at stake here, nor any real detriment to your quality of life really. The more companies take, the more opportunity for disruption there will be.

A Department of Justice breakup is certainly the easiest and most immediately gratifying solution. It is hardly the only solution, and in my mind I am certain it is the wrong solution.

Would you say the same if the car market suddenly coalesced into a duopoly and the car companies become very restrictive? Would you defend only them being allowed to do basic repairs in the interest of safety? One going as far as saying you need to buy their tires or tires from companies that pay them tribute or the car won't start, their seat covers unless you manage disable some weird detection, etc The other allowing such stuff just making it a pain. Would you then say a company just needs to pop up and meet this demand? Despite all the stuff involved and the size of cars would be a lot lot easier. Because at least cars don't necessarily need an ecosystem, userbase and developer community outside of the company to get of the ground and get sales.

As soon as you apply these things the other industries they start sounding ridiculous and hilariously anticompetitive but with phones people for some reason have come to accept it.

My take:

Car company requires third party manufacturers to adhere to its quality standards and pass review before being installed. The car company installs all of the third party parts for you and distributes them globally, handling payment, they charge 30% (or 15%) to the third party for this.

If you refuse to adhere to their quality standards they refuse to install your third party accessory.

Drivers can only get approved service from the car company.

Seems fine? Probably an exclusive benefit for owners of that car. I could see people choosing that car because of this.

So no, there is no part of that thats fine.

When laws around cars were put together people actually cared about their liberty, and I have the right to open car repair tomorrow and BMW and Toyotas of the world wont interfere. And unlike iPhones,cars actually are dangerous.

Your car, your choice.

You want to install an aftermarket supercharger and fish fins? Your prerogative. Toyota and Apple have no right to tell you what to do.

You can even still hack the fins on your car despite the policy, but it might be difficult to do yourself and it'll void your warranty.

Secondly I vote to get laws passed that they make sure they can shove this policy. I've had enough of this corporate lawmaking and stockholm syndrome victims covering for them

Which now also charges more fucking over consumers because they can and limits more in their favour because ...hey it's a duopoly. There's no pressure to make it a monopoly.

Also as someone else noted apples own actions show that this isn't how they do business given the opportunity.

Yes it is.

iOS controls a sufficient part of US revenue that wider ecosystem effects on what is permitted speech come directly from the app store terms, or at least in some cases about trying to second guess the inconsistently applied, arbitrary and vague as hell App Store rules.

We've got direct testimony from all sorts of app makers that what speech they do and do not censor on the platform (especially around sex, impacting the fundamental liberties and safety of sex workers, queer communities, artists and educators) is directly because their business is such that they need to watch the terms of the app store.

We've seen examples in China of Apple blocking apps that literally lead to people failing to escape authoritarian governments and them disappearing, quite possibly to their death.

Liberty is the fundamental reason that a singular control of what software can be run on mobile device is a thing too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Competition law is probably the most expedient route to fix it, but a centralised app store should be a criminal act on it's own merits.

> We've seen examples in China of Apple blocking apps that literally lead to people failing to escape authoritarian governments and them disappearing, quite possibly to their death.

This seems very flimsy but I would be genuinely interested in reading up on this, if you could provide a source/reference. Either way, this is a great reason not to use and publish on the iOS platform. But the irony of suggesting government overreach as a cure for the ails of extreme government overreach in another country is not lost on me.

And an iPhone being your property does not change the properties of the iPhone you bought. You can tinker with it as much as your ability allows you to, but if you are not happy with the limitations of the device than you should not have bought that device.

Actually that's literally exactly what it means.

It's gone beyond your choice or my choice - Apple is gravitationally distorting the entire industry and bending it to its will.

You don't have to drive on the highway either, so I assume you're fine with having that freedom removed too.

Yes, you do. If you want to reach 50% of Americans, you're forced to build and distribute an app on the App Store.

Try building Netflix without an iOS app.

Try writing a new social media app and not building for iPhone.

Pick any modern vertical without an iPhone app. You just can't do it. Apple is the new AOL for a lot of folks.

You immediately surrender 30% to reach 50% of your customer base, and on top of that, you have to dance to Apple's arbitrary rules and app approval release trains.

1. This is not how technology should work.

2. Apple's fees are extortion.

3. This is using monopolistic advantage to strong arm an entire industry.

Several people (including me) access social media sites through the browser rather than having a native app, in part because of the abuses done by social networks in device profiling in the past.

> Apple is the new AOL for a lot of folks.

So the same sort of companies who made a marketing decision to invest in AOL keywords are now willing to write an app and give money to apple so that users can find their service through a search in the app store?

> You immediately surrender 30% to reach 50% of your customer base

I assume you do not realize that it is well documented all of the ways you can pay less (e.g. subscriptions, small business program) or nothing (external payments and subscriptions - you are only limited by your ability to advertise those as alternatives to offering in-app purchases, and can raise your in-app price if you prefer to cover the difference).

There really aren't, because the HTML5 DRM implementation isn't reliable enough.

I like local control, I think urbit is cool and hope they succeed. I'm a little disturbed by the need for mighty and how we've ended up in a such a messy state of things with modern computing.

It's not about reducing risk or scam apps really - it's about Apple being able to incentivize user-benefiting behavior that ad-driven business models corrupt. Maybe we wouldn't need this in a world that had more CCPA laws with teeth, I'd be happy to live in that world, but we don't.

At least with Apple I have the option to buy hardware from a company with aligned incentives that gives a shit.

Apple isn't doing this out of their own good heart! They've built one of the largest monopolies in the world.

Is it okay for one megamonopoly to tax everyone else simply because they reached market penetration first?

Let's fix our laws. This is utterly unfair.

But the control and leverage is good.

The control and leverage are fundamentally evil, and they get people discriminated against and killed.

It has been this way since November, and it seems like either nobody noticed, or they seem to still enjoy quoting the 30% number. If you make more than $1mil a year you probably can afford to deal with that. You're also probably putting significantly more bandwidth off Apple's servers than an app that's had 100 downloads.

Unity does a similar thing, but it's free for up to a certain income, pay after that.

I personally would like to see that reduced to 10%, but at least Apple responded to the constant criticism that 30% was ludicrous.

From Apple:

• Existing developers who made up to $1 million in 2020 for all of their apps, as well as developers new to the App Store, can qualify for the program and the reduced (15%) commission.

• If a participating developer surpasses the $1 million threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year.

• If a developer’s business falls below the $1 million threshold in a future calendar year, they can requalify for the 15 percent commission the year after.

Source: https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-ap...

And for the entirety of the following year.

Apple has done a lot to revise the App Store charging policy over the last few years, and I think they deserve credit for that. Also their hosting of free apps for only a nominal developer registration fee is a huge boon to users and a lot of iOS developers.

So I don’t think those criticisms are entirely accurate or fair. I am ok with regulators looking into this though. Apples revisions to their charging structure probably wouldn’t have happened without the threat of regulatory review. It’s important they be held accountable. However Apple invested many, many billions of dollars to develop the technologies in iOS over many decades and took huge commercial risks. iOS and these devices are their product and they have the right to decide how they work and what features they have. Those who don’t like that do have alternatives. The fact is an awful lot of people do like the way Apple does things.

That's still pretty extreme imo when you control the only store and you directly compete with them/undercut them.

> "Also their hosting of free apps for only a nominal developer registration fee is a huge boon to users and a lot of iOS developers."

They charge a fee for it, I wouldn't consider it nominal - the ecosystem of apps also obviously benefits apple.

---

I'm a huge Apple fan which is why I find this racket irritating, it worries me that it'll blow up in their face and we'll end up worse off.

I'd probably charge a (low) flat annual fee for app store distribution and that's it. Apple should be focused on making money with great products, not taxing devs they force through their channel.

Keep the rules, lose the tax.

Regulators don’t (yet I suppose) care about this because of opportunity cost. If I’m making $3/user/mo off your $10 subscription and I decide to enter the market and compete with you at then every user I steal and every user if not for me would have gone with you costs me $3/mo plus cost of providing them service. So if I’m able to still undercut you then either I’m ridiculously more efficient than you or you have fat margins.

Neither of these are true so something else is going on here. Either I’m bleeding money and this is some strategic play in which case it might be unfair for different reasons, or the market is segmented and we actually have two different customer bases with insignificant cross pollination.

If Apple enters with Apple Music and charges $10/month - they're undercutting Spotify while charging the same.

If Spotify charges $10 and pays Apple $3 then Spotify makes $7 and Apple makes $3.

If Apple enters the market and charges $10 then consider a user that would have otherwise went to Spotify. Spotify makes $0 and Apple makes $10 from the subscription but loses $3 from what they would have been paid from Spotify so Apple makes $7.

Apple has lots of advantages stemming from their control of the platform but "not having to pay the 30% fee" isn't one of them.

Spotify gets $7 or $0 from a user

How is this not an advantage?

Anyway as I already pointed out it’s effectively 15%, not 30%. Also the vast majority, over 99% (literally, I looked it up) of Spotify app users earn Apple nothing because they use it add supported and all the add revenue goes to Spotify.

They bought the phone from Apple, so Apple made their money.

Apple 'made their money' on the hardware, therefore Spotify is entitled to a larger ratio on the software? Is that the correct interpretation?

Edit: I'll take your downvote as being it was the correct interpretation. It's okay, I didn't expect a reply.

They force companies to ship through their store, I think that is okay because it enables them to enforce quality standards for users.

I think it’s wrong for them to force this distribution model and then take a cut from every software company.

In the Spotify case Apple forces them to pay a tax and then Apple shows up in their own store priced the same where they obviously don’t have to pay a tax to themselves.

Spotify is entitled to an even playing field.

Apple makes money off the sale of their iPhone from the user, with Spotify's existence here being completely irrelevant. Should Spotify be granted increased monetary entitlement to their app creation because of this physical material sale between Apple and the user?

iPhone sale to user is irrelevant.

Apple forces distribution via their store and they force companies to pay a cut.

I think this is bad, but at least it's across all people that participate in the store.

Then Apple itself enters the market via the store selling the same product at the same price, but without the tax.

That's cheating. It has nothing to do with the 'physical material sale' - it has to do with requiring store distribution and taking a cut of competitors margins, but then entering yourself. It's not Spotify 'getting more of the pie' it's Spotify not having to pay an anti-competitive tax to the platform controller.

They can either allow distribution outside of the store (which I would not want) or they can remove the tax on apps that they directly compete with.

I'd prefer they remove the cut entirely and replace it with some low yearly fee for distribution.

Thank you. I agree. The iPhone sale to the user is irrelevant to Spotify's return.

The rest of the post is yelling at a cloud. I have not given my position on any of that so I have no clue to whom you are arguing with.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...