Didn't customers pay a premium for Apple hardware because of the unified ecosystem and superior security to begin with? And developers also pay a premium to be on the App Store ($99+30%) because it costs them money to create the infrastructure and ensure safety?

I'm pretty ignorant on the whole situation, but it does sound nice to be Apple. Raking in hundreds of billions while charging premiums on both sides, convincing them it's for their own good. Meanwhile, customers and developers descend into a feedback loop of even heavier dependence on Apple: the more customers there are, the more devs have a financial necessity to publish apps on the platform, the more value the platform has, the more customers they get.

People are quick to point out Apple is the one providing for developers, who should be honored to be able to get on the App Store for a 30% cut. But, really, how many users would Apple have without those apps? They do deserve their cut, but at some point it went from a symbiotic relationship to "oil the Apple machine." The economies of scale simply work in their favor here.

Not defending Apple, but offering forever-services for one-time fees is a great way to go out of business. I would not expect the App Store to be subsidized by hardware sales.

Also, assuming you accept the premise in the first place, it makes sense to charge the developer, who is the one generating work for reviewers.

For instance, why not charge for the services used and a low payment processing fee? If developers bring associated costs, they should pay for it. It just seems 30% is overshooting quite a bit. They want to treat developers like regular customers with regular margins, when they are more like partners bringing them nearly free revenue.

I guess I'm too ignorant to understand how building, maintaining and securing the App Store is 10x more expensive than doing the same for something like Mastercard.

Perhaps I should find a better way to communicate that - making it literally the first words of my post didn't work.

As someone currently building an app-like website – https://wormhole.app – let me tell you that Apple's neglect and underinvestment in the web platform definitely precludes websites or "PWAs" from having the "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". Safari suffers from the twin effects of (1) limitations that Apple has intentionally put in place and (2) intentional under-staffing of the Safari team. Here's how it's affected us:

- Apple recently broke our website by adding support for a new API `blob.stream()` in Safari 14.1 (which we correctly feature-detected) but when you call the function you get a null pointer exception which crashes the renderer process [2]. Worse, the bugs was fixed on `master` several months before Safari was released but it wasn't included in the release.

- IndexedDB has been full of bugs for years and shows very slow signs of improvement. We have no other storage options on Safari, so we're stuck using their buggy implementation.

- Safari limits websites to using 1GB of temporary space after which the app must prompt the user for an additional allocation, each 200MB at a time. So if the app needs 5GB of space (for example, a video editing application, or in our case a P2P-enabled file sending app), then the user will need to click "okay" on twenty prompts for 200MB more space each to make the app work. Needless to say, this is totally ridiculous and definitely not an API that Apple would ever find acceptable to ship for native iOS apps.

- If we choose to use in-memory storage then Safari warns the user that our website is using lots of RAM. So that's not a real option.

- We can't offer streaming download + decryption from our servers because Safari's ServiceWorker implementation doesn't allow intercepting HTTP requests for file downloads.

- Missing many APIs that would actually let websites truly compete with native apps. Just a few that we use:

  * Web Share Target API (https://web.dev/web-share-target)

  * File System Access API (https://web.dev/file-system-access)

It's hard to see Apple's decisions here as anything but outright hostile to the web and designed to push developers into making native apps.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...

[2] https://twitter.com/feross/status/1386835131780931587

Apple 30% cut is for developer access to the Apple cultivated and exclusive selection of customers.

They built the platform, infrastructure, distribution channel and trust of the users, creating a market where there was none.

One can argue that a 30% margin may be too fat, but considering other industry margin and that Apple consolidates in that margin logistic, distributionship and dealership I haven't yet seen a convincing case comparing it fairly to other industries

But still, exclusive distribution rights are neither unheard of nor have scores of people up in arms about them restriction people from of choice, so why is Apple singled out and targeted?

I believe Apple is ready to die on this anti-malware hill.

This isn't just blind fanboyism, either: PC gamers absolutely loathe Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, because they want their entire collection of software to live on Steam. Yes, a decade and change ago everyone hated Steam, but now it's the established way of doing things. The more developer-friendly, competitive option is to have 15 different launchers, one for each publisher, with their own payment systems, terms of service, and so on.

You can see this in the reactions Apple users have to the Epic lawsuit, versus their reaction to stories of Apple demanding their cut from developers that don't have it to give. They're way more sympathetic to companies that aren't trying to split their app libraries in half.

(EDIT: I should probably clarify that I, myself, don't think alternative iOS app stores would actually take off without major cross-subsidies from powerful industry players. Google Play has a stranglehold in markets where it's available, even though Android has no technical lock-out like iOS. EGS on Android is a joke and I would never install it. On the other, OTHER hand, though... Android in China, where Google Play is banned, is basically PC digital downloads, pre-Steam.)

If you want to shop in the mall vote with your wallet if there isn't enough demand to convince merchants to situate themselves there then deal with it.

Laws forcing merchants and customers into the mall ought to be themselves illegal.

Even if only 50% of those 23M devs are actually paying the $99 fee that is still over $1B a year.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/03/apples-wwdc-2020-kick...

The one I personally experience is sheet music where I'm very careful to never buy in-app which are always priced 20-25% higher.

If they charged $5-20 per release, that I would be fine with, and not only cover costs but would generate profit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/07/playst...

This is of course very different from apple business model.

Apple does have their app-review thing - but they said it’s paid-for by the $99 fee, so the 30% cut with all the other Kafkaesque restrictions is not a tenable position.

Anyway - my company stopped publishing to the iOS App Store over a year ago and switched to PWAs and no-regrets here at all.

Apple, on the other hand, wants to take a cut of every non-physical item purchase on their platform regardless of what it is. They also don't want any non-physical item purchases to occur off their platform. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Apple's platform is a gateway to all kinds of businesses selling all kinds of goods, both physical and digital, with a range of business models.

Apple could even take a cut of physical item purchases if they wanted; they just decided they don't want to (for obvious reasons).

I agree it's similar but it's also not exactly the same.

In terms of business relationship and product something like this can't exist on gaming platforms. Game platforms are strictly for publishers to sell their own gaming content.

iOS is a gateway to businesses selling both physical and digital wares of all types. By their good graces, they don't force physical items through their payment processor but they do for digital goods regardless of what that good is (with a few notable exceptions).

Also, that's a "but they do it too" fallacy.

Why is this so controversial for you?

The number of restrictions on top of Apples cut is what makes the difference. The mafia wishes they could enforce the same restrictions. Apple makes them look reasonable.

Edit: your point seems to be revolving around the access to physical disks for playstation/xbox, which is 1. Limited to devices that have a disk drive, 2. Limited to software that would similarly be sold on the sony/xbox stores, and 3. Still gives sony/microsoft a cut of the sale.

Edit 2: No, I'm not talking about webapps. You can sideload apps with a free developer account, similar to xbox.

Edit 3: Right, well I guess I'm being "purposely ignorant" and am actually talking about web apps. This was fun HN, lovely discussion.

Edit 4: It does indeed only require a free developer account, and you can strip and resign apps without needing to compile from source.

This is disingenuous. Not only do you need a paid developer account, you are limited by the number apps you can sideload, you need to compile them yourself and sign them with your key, and they must be resigned and installed every 7 days. You also need to do all of that from a Mac.

Edit: Can't reply further, but the way of doing this is much the same as installing unsigned apps on an xbox. Using a (free) developer account you can sideload things quite easy using something like https://github.com/ios-control/ios-deploy

Anyone who pushes Web Apps as a viable option is being disingenuous about what it provides or purposely ignorant.

Edit: So the only way to do it besides jailbreaking is for literally everyone who wants to do it to pay Apple an extra $100 on top of what they already paid for their iDevice. (Sharing will get your certificate revoked.)

Using the web apps as a defense only shows that you won't admit to the massive problems with it - from bluetooth restrictions to lack of hardware level driver support.

That isn't a realistic option... it's a deflection from the subpar user experience Apple supports to enforce their mafia level protection racket.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22421912/iphone-web-app-pw...

Anyone who pushes Web Apps as a viable option is being disingenuous about what it provides or purposely ignorant.