- Upton Sinclair

A 1% "Apple Platform Safety Fee" on Robinhood wouldn't surprise me....

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...

Would they? Don't they literally already do this too?

Isn't Apple Card https://www.apple.com/apple-card/ them literally skimming off the top of every financial transaction, despite them doing nothing but provide a branded whitelabeled Goldman Sachs Mastercard? (admittedly, a very pretty fancy card)

I don't think the general population will ever be terribly up in arms with Apple's behaviour anymore, so long as Apple keeps forcing other businesses to hide Apple's taxes/fees/cuts for them.

But they're only standard because the credit cards asserted these fees, we got used to them, and now they seem obvious, right? (I remember plenty of merchants who used not to accept credit cards to avoid the fees, but, whether by bank pressure or just the weight of expectation, there aren't many of those any more.)

It surely won't be too long until these fees are 'standard' too, in the sense that they're totally usual and customary, whether or not they're reasonable.

It's a difference between small merchants and large merchants. Small merchants still feel free to refuse cards or charge higher prices when you use them. Large merchants aren't free to refuse (too much of a customer loss) or to charge (against the credit company terms).

A tax for existence on a platform is just rent seeking and increases prices for everyone but Apple. That's not desirable and likely illegal.

The worst case scenario is Spotify-cation of services where Apple used the App Store to identify popular services, counters with their own, and then charges extortionate fees such that they cannot compete with Apple's native services. I would be concerned if we start seeing an Apple Brokerage.

Apple Pay doesn't have a direct competitor in Venmo since Venmo is about payment processing between people who don't normally deal with credit card processing, and cross platform functionality is the biggest value prop. Apple Pay isnt a threat unless it works on all platforms equally.

If you are a web app developer who wants users to pay you, Apple Pay is awesome in that it takes away a lot of friction.

Edit: The context of my pro-free-market comment is app stores. Of course it's not absolute. You very well know this. Please don't argue in bad faith.

An honest reader would not interpret my pro-free-market comment as being 100% absolute in any and all circumstances. An honest reader would consider the context. You're not arguing in good faith.

Try again?

FWIW, based on my experience, whenever I see Americans arguing pro-free-market, I am going to assume that they genuinely argue in absolutes. ("FWIW" because I can see from your profile that you're Canadian.)

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to participate less and less in online discussion. HN's rules require people to interpret comments charitably but it's still full of stuff like this. It's exhausting.

I just don't have the energy for it anymore and honestly that makes me quite sad.

Yes, but

(a) some, as opposed to all which is the dream of the pro web-app camp.

(b) forbidding custom JS and web engines helps keep this low

(c) even the crappy mobile-webview apps at least have to be wrapped in an app container, be installable and uninstallable the same way, be notarized, use the same payment system with central control, and be tied to the same policies (e.g. regarding privacy, notifications, use of apis) as native mobile apps

iOS Safari already lags behind in features. Apple would just make it even worse if it started to cost them significant amount of money to have a truly great web browser.

Besides, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place if other web rendering engines weren't forbidden on ios. Google / Mozilla could have their own browsers that aren't just safari reskins.

How does that work? It's not like Apple spent money to develop the games or the apps. And they are diverting money from the profitable games to the unprofitable apps. So how, exactly, are the games subsidizing the apps?

It's not slow, it's not broken. It's a great mobile browser. So stick to reality and not bunch of made up "what ifs".

Google's strategy is simple:

1. The web should be able to control everything (i.e. PWA features not normally found in a browser).

2. Google should control the web (they can index it, track, monetize it, but it has to be on the web).

3. Profit.

Do you think Apple users are super excited at the prospect of most apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences, instead of using the iOS frameworks? No, they're not.

And push notifications on iOS work as a service, to avoid battery drain, they all go through Apple on a single connection. This is free for all native apps. It can't be implemented for web apps both for technical reasons and because web apps can't be curated, so it'll just be abused like there's no tomorrow.

Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.

EVERY single feature not in Safari, has a reason not to be there. And I'm sick of everyone eating up Google's propaganda and becoming their tools in this. I don't mind Google at all, they should fight for their PoV on all this, and they have a right to expand their business.

But not at the expense of Apple or Apple's users. F that.

HN is mostly frequented by developers, and it's so frustrating to see how many of them are outright lazy and don't think about UX but rather about how to get quickest from point A to point B.

Rest assured most phone users are with you all the way. But again, we wouldn't know it reading developer forums.

Sometimes it's politics (I had a colleague leave a job because the new director of development mandated they rewrite their flagship enterprise apps in React Native because he got a song and dance from a React Native trainer/consultant and wouldn't listen to the people who knew what they were talking about).

Sometimes it's different priorities (a meetup buddy of mine some years ago had to write apps in PhoneGap because "We're in the oil bidness, not the app badness").

It isn't always "the best allocation of limited resources", either. Apart from having to do extra work to make the UX close to native (which isn't trivial), using a "cross platform" solution means you've just included a giant third party dependency that you don't control or maintain. Call it FUD if you want to, but in the forty-odd years I've done programming/development that's never been a good bet. If resources are really limited, the best bet is to have a decent design and very clear (reasonable) expectations and pay someone good to execute them.

If the PWA concept had caught on, users on all platforms would have an equally good UX, increasing user choice.

Installation, push notifications, etc... are all optional and can be mixed and matched based on what users actually want.

An example would be individual forums are a great use case for PWAs.

Funny enough I couldn't find a decent native app for HN, so I just placed a link to the site in my folder with social apps. That site is the worst thing in that folder.

I have a workstation that deals with 3D rendering and huge Photoshop files, or compiling sizable projects with no problem, and my CPU is still pegged to 100% when I browse Reddit.

I shudder at the thought of those same people being in charge of my mobile experience. I don't feel like having to replace my phone battery every 3 months, thanks.

Let websites be websites. If you cripple them without a good technical reason then they become exactly the sort of app you're complaining about.

There is no reason why non-native apps should be a shitty experience that drains the battery. That is just a tooling/feature issue.

> Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.

The spam for installing the native app is 10x worse when using a mobile browser.

Have you not noticed that EVERY APP asks for push notifications and uses them as a marketing funnel?

Instead of websites asking to send notifications, they are now nagging us to install useless apps that ask to send notifications and clutter our screens. An honest curator would never even allow these apps into their app store.

This is purely a business decision on Apple's part, nothing to do with user interests at all.

Okay.

These "apps" should never be allowed in the app store. They should be websites that get to ask me exactly once whether I want to receive their notifications. Instead they keep pushing and nagging me to install their apps and Apple's policies are encouraging this behaviour.

In some cases, the notifications are useful, but there is no other reason for them to be apps installed on my device.

And you don't have to install any apps. Use the sites if it's the same for you.

Sure sometimes apps get promotion and featured by the store but for the vast majority of apps, any downloads they get have about as much to do with Apple as the results of your web searches do.

>Are there additional fees to accept Apple Pay?

>No. Apple doesn't charge any additional fees.

They do charge additional fees, just not to customers. Those fees get tacked onto the bank/merchant in the transaction. Apple charges between 0.15% to 0.30% of total transaction, according to Financial Times.

https://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/12/more-apple-pay-details/

iPhones concentrate rich users who buy stuff. There’s nothing delusional about this. Likewise, Epic Game Store giving away games they paid huge advances for also makes those games more money than they ever would directly selling on Steam.