> You’re standing up for companies that are doing far more sinister things going after “whales” than anything Facebook has ever done.

There are several things wrong with that statement.

1. If these companies engaged in truly destructive business practices (and it could be proven), then Apple has a duty to remove those apps. Every developer has to pay them $99/year to be registered, so that money should be funding the removal of these supposedly exploitative and 'sinister' apps.

2. You cannot prove that the majority of these businesses are all big.

2a. Even if you could prove that, it's common knowledge that Apple is the largest company in the world, which renders that entire argument moot.

3. How do you delineate between indie developers and 'whales'?

3a. When you do differentiate the two, how is it ethical for the largest company in the world to ask for more of their profits?

4. Apple isn't standing up for the poor indie developer either, which is why it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to do better. There is not a company on this planet with more liquid cash than Apple, so there's nothing wrong with asking them to just improve their treatment of developers when consensus is that they're one of the most exploitative and destructive companies in the field of consumer electronics.

1. I agree. While Apple hasn’t gotten rid of the scammy apps, they have introduced an alternative - Apple Arcade - where they do fund Indy developers so they don’t have to make scammy pay to win games.

2. I said that most app revenue comes from “whales”. Those are the players who spend the most money on play to win games. https://medium.com/shopify-gaming/mobile-gaming-is-a-50b-ind...

3. Indy developers are selling a product that has value. The “whales” are the 5% of consumers buying loot boxes and candy crush coins (?).

3a Most of their profits are not from the App Store. Most of their profits come from a simple ethical business model - I give them money they give me stuff. Unlike Google and Facebook or the aforementioned games.

4. Who are all of these poor developers Apple should be standing up for? In the link above (and the numbers were confirmed during the Epic trial), most money is coming from games with in app purchases. If you look at the top selling apps on the App Store now, the last one that I can remember that came from Indy developers is WidgetSmith. How many Indy developers would be successful if Apple took a 15% cut instead of a 30% cut?

> Who are all of these poor developers Apple should be standing up for?

Well, there's the FlickType guy[0] who got kicked off the app store only to have his product completely cloned by Apple. Then there's the Hey! email people who went to hell-and-back just to get an inoccuous update approved. Not even a year ago there was a class-action lawsuit against Apple by developers[2], and Apple's "compromise" was to charge less for a service that was provably garbage. They know their 30% cut is illigitimate, that's why they backed off so quickly. Even still though, they charge certain people 30%, others only 15%, and then the big companies like Netflix get away with 0%[3] because of insider deals that other apps cannot benefit from.

So fixing that would be a good start. Then they need to allow for alternative payment processors (as pressure mounts from countries like South Korea and France), and hopefully get rid of their asinine sideloading requirements that do nothing for the user except make it harder to get the functionality they want. These feel like non-negotiables to me, and as a developer I have no intention of supporting their software or using their hardware until it's fixed.

[0] https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-wa...

[1] https://www.engadget.com/apple-basecamp-hey-email-app-store-...

[2] https://www.axios.com/apple-settles-developer-class-action-c...

[3] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1444367219509637123

Your point was that Apple was taking money from developers - Hey isn’t going through in app purchases. Apple makes no money when people subscribe to Hey.

Netflix hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years.

Every developer with in app subscriptions only pays 15% after the first year.

If Apple’s 30% is garbage, so is Google’s and every console makers.

Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.

As far as not allowing side loading - that’s a feature not a bug. Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?

I’m referring to well known software companies.

- Zoom installed a web server surreptitiously on Macs so when you uninstalled the software, it reinstalled it (https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web-serve...)

- DropBox does all sorts of evil on Macs.

- Fortnite side loading introduced a vulnerability on Android (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...)

- Google and Facebook convinced users to install VPN software using a corporate certificate that allowed them to track users in other apps.

- not on purpose. But if you had system integrity protection turned off on the Mac and installed Chrome, it made the system unbootable (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...)

> If Apple’s 30% is garbage, so is Google’s and every console makers.

I agree. We have to hold Apple accountable first though, because they're abusing it hardest.

> Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.

I do support Android, through F-Droid, and while my app wouldn't benefit from existing on a console I've sideloaded several apps to my Xbox One without any problem. I played through Castlevania last week and it ran flawlessly, so it's mostly Sony and Nintendo who are holdouts at this point (and I say that as someone with a hacked Switch).

> Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?

I'm fully aware. I just don't think it matters when the iPhone has much more malicious attack vectors, like zero-click iMessage exploits that cut straight through BlastDoor like it didn't exist. Maybe once Apple fixes their more egregious security vulnerabilities and embraces transparency they'd have an argument: but right now it's a poorly-disguised and obvious excuse for lock-in.

So Apple is “abusing the hardest” even though to develop a first class console game you have to pay much more to develop on it up front than $99 and you have to pay a license fee for each game sold either physical or digital? All of the console makers make it much harder to develop than Apple or Android - yet you bought an XBox One from Microsoft.

In the eyes of the Supreme Court, games consoles are not general-purpose computers. Even if they were, Apple still drives wider margins than any of these console manufacturers do. The cost to manufacture an iPhone is about 40% it's retail price. The cost to manufacture a game console is ~90-105% it's MSRP. Without the ability to drive hardware margins, they stand a lot better chance in court than Apple does.

There already had been a court case. Epic vs Apple. Epic lost on every point showing Apple to be a “monopoly”.

But it wasn’t about court. It’s about you selectively choosing who to have moral outrage against. So Apple makes too much money as the most valuable company in the world. But Microsoft and Google are the good guys even though they are also making obscene profits and are worth a trillion+ dollars?