Maaaaybe competition would force you to drop prices but a lot of consumer software isn't fungible and doesn't really compete on price.
Taking away Apple's 30% cut shouldn't be talked about as a pro-consumer move because it isn't. There's this pot of money that is either going to go to the app publisher or Apple. That's who the fight is really between.
If those people really exist in large quantities (and I can believe they do!), the developer is losing business by not providing Apply Pay as an option. But that'd just lead every single customer to use Apple Pay, which is not what the developer wants. So you need to somehow give the people an incentive to choose your version, unless they really think that going through Apple is giving them a lot of value. Differential pricing seems like the most obvious way of doing that.
> Maaaaybe competition would force you to drop prices but a lot of consumer software isn't fungible and doesn't really compete on price.
That seems implausible. If you think that software prices don't matter at all, such that lowering prices does not increases sale, it'd follow that raising prices doesn't lower sales either. In that case, why hasn't the developer already raised prices?
That is very situational and hard to predict. There is a whole discipline behind this statement for figuring out the right answer.
If it was just 5% or so then sure it wouldn't be very noticeable, but just taking 30% outright is huge and will push many from being viable businesses to being forced to stop. The appstore isn't like steam which gets you a huge ecosystem of extra features for your games and tons of marketing. I'd pay extra to be able to add a game to steam even if I bought it elsewhere simply because steam adds so many other things.
if that's how things worked then we wouldn't be having all this commotion. Part of the reason why devs are going after apple is because they /can't/ charge more on iOS compared to other platforms and they /can't/ explicitly state that they have to pay 30% to apple.
That is not true. As a specific counter-example, subscribing to YouTube Premium via the iOS app costs extra compared to subscribing to it via the website or Android.
But the way I see it, it doesn't make sense when dealing with companies I have a preexisting relationship with, like my phone provider, energy provider, kids' school, work serices, all kinds of online entertainment providers, etc, etc. I may want to be able to interact with them through my phone, and there shouldn't be any third party controlling and profiting from that interaction.
"Are you using your iPhone app as a digital storefront for digital goods or services to be consumed on your phone? => Apple gets a 30% commission"
What is - on my opinion - problematic is that apple prohibits alternative payment options. Eg I’d be happy to see (8€ per month with apple [pay now], 7€ per month direct [register on our website], but even that’s prohibited. That is Apple using its position as one of the 2 major phone offerings to prevent competition in a way that I consider monopolistic.
Even on really weakly policed platforms like windows, people still tend to leave virus scanners enabled; and on android similarly most people don't choose to expose themselves to unnecessary risk by sidestepping its store - at least as far as I know. Users regularly do really stupid things, so some level of external control is perhaps not unreasonable, but how much, and for what? And should Apple even get to be involved in that decision?
Therefore, that argument really has no bearing on this discussion.
Whether Apple should try harder to stand up to these repressive governments is a good discussion to have, but it’s not the one we’re having right now,
Nothing even remotely similar is possible on non-jailbroken iPhone.
"Freedom from" is a quite liberating concept.
I'm almost positive many people would gladly pay extra - certainly temporarily - to be sure no untrustworthy third party gets direct access to their money. The question is merely whether apple gets to force that when both end user and app developer would prefer otherwise, and if there are any conditions on such requirements by Apple.
I just hope that Apple would be allowed to say that if you are going to use outside payment providers, you must allow paying through Apple and the outside price can be no lower than 30% (or whatever Apple's cut is).
I don't spend a lot through Apple each year. Maybe $200. If I'm paying 30% more than I would otherwise that means it's costing me something like sixteen cents per day and I'm okay with that.
When I was younger, I used to focus a lot more on price. When Zappos came around it clicked for me that paying more can be smart if the service you get is better. I'll pay $0.16 every day if it means a few times per year I avoid a lot of bullshit.
Setting it worse opens up effectively a "soft disable" like Apple price at $1000 and their price at $1.
If they for some reason decided to charge $1 through Apple and $1000 through their own that poor decision is no skin off Apple's nose.
Most sellers on the App Store are now paying 15%, if anything at all. Most apps I’ve seen are using ads to bypass paying anything to Apple. Some of them support IAP to remove ads. But that’s just an option.
Don't they have rules that companies aren't allowed to charge a higher price for services on Apple devices than elsewhere? Seems to me they DO try to compete on price here. They want to have their cake and eat it too, and they absolutely should not be allowed to.
If you subscribe to Spotify in iOS, it costs more than doing so over the web. I think this is ultimately going to be a huge problem for Apple because they directly compete with Spotfiy.
But that said, those shops should have a right to choose which payment processors are appropriate for their business. Let the market decide what is the best for the market.
The OEM model (at least for computing platforms) is how the world works. Fragmenting it helps no one, save for perhaps the software freedom crowd.
They continue to fight the old war and at some point, it just might come back to bite them.
"There's no advantage to being a platform owner? Eh, OK, let's just not bother trying then."
It's a bad look.
It's quite obvious that the only reason Apple hasn't added that feature is because they have no intention on losing their stranglehold on the App Store. Without sole propriety of software, Apple's value proposition starts to crumble. So, why should we let them keep it? What do we, as a society, gain from letting Apple be the richest company in the world? The answer is nothing, and eventually some day when they go under we'll come to the realization that it was all a zero-sum game anyways.
This is almost Orwellian. Imagine Standard Oil customers cheering the demise of the corner mom and pop.
All of this while Apple collects a dossier on each of you that they'll willingly hand over to the FBI, FSB, or Chinese Ministry of State Surveillance.
If none of that convinces you, then do me a favor. A thought experiment.
Imagine an alternate history wherein we replace Apple with Microsoft. Imagine that the iPhone lost and became just a footnote or history and that Steve Ballmer's Microsoft ZunePhone Pro 10 won the market. That's what we all have in our pockets now.
Would you be happy if Microsoft owned the customer relationship? Would you feel just as happy?
Apple is immaterial in this. We don't need companies to be this powerful.
I do agree that companies shouldn't be so powerful tho
I understand that I end up paying more than I would otherwise, but Apple doesn't really compete on price.
Perhaps if I was in the EU I would feel differently because they have better data protections.