Eh, I get the position here. Different device classes, different markets.

I've gotten more than a few apps approved on tv, watch, Mac, iOS, iPad. They are distinctly different. As much as Apple is helping us leverage 'one code base to rule them all' there are so many gotchas and detail required to make great experiences on each.

I agree. Almost anyone of these one size fits all approaches hits a wall sooner or later. Besides very basic applications, I would never make use of frameworks like Flutter or React Native. Same goes for Windows Universal Apps. Great concepts, but not very feasible in reality for slightly complex apps with good UX.

Do you think it is worth the increased time to start out as a native app, or is it still worth rolling your MVP as flutter/reactive native?

IMO, roll your MVP with something like React Native, although it all depends how important the user experience is for your end users.

Snapchat built with some platform-independent UI toolkit would have felt kind of wrong, and the speed at which I've seen teenagers use it (this was years ago) shows that they would have been frustrated with anything that is slow-ish. I assume similar trends dominate for TikTok and Instagram today.

So unless you're attracting a very hip, fast-moving, perhaps even young-person's market, you probably just want an app that basically works and is available to folks on whichever phone they use. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin / .NET MAUI will all get you there.

This depends on the number of platforms you're trying to support.

iOS, Android, mobile web, Windows and Linux? Flutter or Expo.

I strongly disagree. This is just big companies artificially separating their market segments to argue against too large of a market, and preserve their enormous profits with their huge percentage take. The world would be much better off with multiple stores. It will take legal action by the eu, and it will be hard, these rich companies are very influential. In the us we have too much capture of federal politicans, I only hope the eu can push it.

I hope multiple stores shake a bit the iPad ecosystem. It's a great device and, unlike in mobile, there's no competition.

Android tablets are pretty bad. Google dropped the ball, although they seem to be coming back.

iPads could be fantastic devices to program in, but they are quite crippled by limitations.

Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.

I believe that Google's ball drop with tablets has to do with that the phone manufacturers that Google partners with for Android are not as interested in tablets (likely using wifi) as they are with phones. Combine that with a lack of standardization and lack of focus for the tablet form factor... and that's what you've got.

The iPad, on the other hand was the original "this is what we want". The iPad was the first thing that Apple was trying to make.

> Work on the iPad itself actually traces back to 2004, when designer Jonathan Ive and others crafted a new tablet prototype. The product was originally supposed to ship before the iPhone, but the company came to decide the latter was more important, premiering it in 2007 using similar technologies.

( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-o... )

So from the very beginning with the iDevice, the idea of different form factors and sizes was part of how it was written rather than as a phone that grew bigger.

They've been trying to make the iPad since the Apple Newton. The tech to do it just wasn't there.

The desktop OEMs lament their inability to differentiate their hardware offerings. I had always wondered why some of them didn't see the opportunity to enter the tablet space on Android as a path to differentiation. The only risk I would imagine would be the potential cannibalization of their laptop lines, but that really shouldn't stop them.

The cannibalization is one part of it (compare Apple - https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-on-cannibalization-201... and https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/apples-dwind... -- Jobs reportedly said “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”)

The other part of it is that android has been poorly designed for the tablet interface. For an OEM to try to make a tablet out of android they would have to invest significant software development resources into what would amount to be a fork of android (compare Amazon Fire tablets). While they likely have some software developers, they probably don't have enough to maintain that amount of development on android (and always being behind with Google preferring phones).

... and even if they were close to parity with Android (and the challenge that would imply at trying to keep their devices up to date - with the largest investment customers would expect them to last longer) you would still have difficulties with the developers for Android aren't making things that fit well in the tablet form factor (Amazon was trying to bribe/incentivize developers to write for its form factor - https://readwrite.com/amazon-give-developers-rewards-build-f... ).

All that means that unless Google wants to do it and you're willing to go head to head with Amazon its probably not that good of an investment of time, reputation, and resources.

> Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.

If that’s the case why hasn’t Omni or Panic written these apps already?

The 30% cut Apple takes is indeed large. But any new store will likely attract only a small fraction of all App Store customers.

Can you help me understand this better?

AFAIK it's because you can't publish an iPadOS app on the App Store that allows you to compile and run native code within the app. So there are "cloud IDEs" for iPadOS, and local IDEs for interpreted languages for iPadOS, but no local IDEs for compiled languages for iPadOS.

A third-party App Store would presumably not inherently have this restriction (although individual third-party App Stores might.)

I'm currently on a four-person team developing/maintaining a popular React Native app. Working with React Native is awful, but having two of us doing Android and two doing iOS would be worse.

Yeah, sort of how Microsoft could argue that there exists two separate markets for Windows running on stationary compute devices and Windows for mobile devices. Except this is a sad joke and letting Apple get away with two devices running the same OS would be playing into their hand that they stacked years ago when they split them off. What is up with the enormous amount of people on this site who are inexplicably apologetic to Apple and other FAANG giants.

I don't think it's apologetic, it's two different approaches. MS has chosen to try to kill 2 birds with one stone, and Apple has allowed their devices to become more focused. As someone with an iPad, I appreciate Apple not trying to force that iPhone and iPad apps be the same thing. The experience is better.

This is hilarious considering that the classical, yet irrational, fear amongst long time MacOS users is that Apple might be secretly planing an OS convergence. This is usually perceived as doomsday for MacOS and have been feared by some for up to 15 years.

You are basically stating the opposite while completely ignoring the actual complexity of such an hypothetical merge for codebases that forked 15 years ago. They share a kernel and some API, but on the UI side recent cross platform framework are more like a proof of concept than a production ready thing.

Another thing that's hilarious[1] is in the Epic lawsuit Apple wanted to define the market as big as possible while here they define it as small as possible.

[1] not actually hilarious

Almost like the word "market" can mean different things in different contexts. Some people define it as the place you get produce... crazy!

Catalyst, fka Marzipan, definitely did not help alleviate the concerns that Apple would prefer for the operating systems to be unified.

Them pulling ill-suited features over to macOS, like the Control Center[0] and toggles, also give me pause.

[0] Which lives in the menubar, lacks any keyboard accessibility, and introduced bizarre new interface behaviors, e.g. multi-step dropdowns where you click inside the dropdown to navigate back. Ugh.

The OSes have been the same since forever. It's just the same macOS kernel, filesystem, and basic userland with different UI and a few different core libs (given the different form factor and hardware features needed to hook to).

Most of the same people that fear the convergence also ask for "iPadOS" and "iOS" to be more like the Mac (add mouse support, multitask like the Mac, and so on).

So what they do fear is the mythical "dumbing down" of Mac, as in the outcry when Logic got a different skin, and everybody losts their minds as if it's now "just Garageband Pro" (meanwhile it has never been more powerful). Same for FCP (where a few features were lost due to the rewrite, not for any dumbing down).

I mean convergence was a 100% goal internally when I worked at Apple 8 years ago. afaict they’ve been gradually bringing the experiences and software stacks closer and closer together and they’ve been locking down MacOS more and more.

Not sure why you see it as an irrational fear. What timeline are they actually working under / how are they prioritizing that convergence? I don’t know but it’s clear it will happen. I’m sure there’s a lot of unification going on of background services (radio stacks, security hardening, etc) in addition to more visible UI pieces.

The Microsoft comparison would be more like the Microsoft Store on Windows (the PC client version) vs. Xbox.

Would it? Xbox never ran Windows and never had access to Windows applications as far as I'm aware.

The App Stores share user accounts, send a shared invoice at the end of the month, and many of the apps you buy are compatible with multiple platforms (eg. my calendar app comes with an iOS, a watchOS and an iPadOS version).

And the store is called just "App Store" on every platform.

Claiming that I somehow used 3 different stores to buy a single app is an accounting trick, nothing else.

But does the iOS app run directly on the iPad? (with a good user experience?)

It does not run on watchOS without extra work, correctly?

I think their position is kinda defensible here. Yeah maybe with iPad/iOS not so much, but for the other devices, definitely

That's a weird argument. Are Aldi supermarkets the same, "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2". It's still really the same and particularly they advertise it to be the same.

I think there should be a hard rule, that if companies try to sell something as the same to consumers, they immediately loose if they try to argue they are separate things when it comes to regulations.

But all Aldi stores sell the same stuff more or less

> "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2"

But that's not what's happening here

Is an iPad app the same thing as an iPhone app? Or a watch app?

If an iPhone app took minimal work to work on the iPad, then I'd say it's the same thing, sure

You can literally run iPhone apps on an iPad and have been able to since day one. You can also run some iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac if the developer allows it. Often the iPhone/iPad apps are the same binary and the same purchase gets you both versions, you just get a different UI depending on the device.

I don't think it matter what the developers do on the backend. If I buy XYZ app for iPhone, does that mean I also have XYZ app for iPad (if its available)? If so, they feel like the same store.

That's an implementation detail that the dev needs to worry about.

As a customer, I go to the store page on one of my devices, it says the app is compatible with my device x, y and z. I click the "Buy" button once. Then I get the app on all my devices. I get a receipt that shows I purchased one item.

But what Apple is saying is that I somehow used 3 independent stores?

Thanks, I was not so familiar with the behaviour of the app store for multiple devices like that

And yes, if you click buy once and get 3 different apps, then I'd say it's the same store

Counting iOS, iPadOS, and macOS app stores as different is going to be challenged by the EU for sure, since their own marketing touts the 'unified app store experience' of buying once across all platforms.

> iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store

the whole idea that applications written in software shouldn't handle screensize differences (and dynamic changes) intelligently is just so broken. I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach like "who let these people in? is the door wide open out there?"

i mean, to each their own, that's just me, but that's how I feel software should be written, and while we're at it, give the user some input/options at runtime.

iOS/iPadOS does allow you to have one code base that dynamically responds to screen sizes.

But almost always the experience for iPad users is terrible.

Which is why Apple's initial approach of forcing developers to build distinct iPad apps was the right one and a large reason why its tablets dominated the market versus Android competitors.

> iOS/iPadOS does allow you to have one code base that dynamically responds to screen sizes. But almost always the experience for iPad users is terrible.

are you saying the tools aren't there for developers to create equally pleasing (mutatis mutandis) apps, or simply that the developers aren't able to create equally pleasing (mutatis mutandis) apps? Or that designers can't grok the mapping between their equally pleasing ideas and the tools available?

I'd say it's on the other end. users can't find the apps which are properly designed for tablets, and get tired of wading through crap to find them. the tips are totally there, but if you search for, eg, python, you can be sure the iPadOS app is decent and designed for ipad, vs you have no idea if the Android app is actually pleasing on tablet.

That developers have the tools and can or cannot use the tools is secondary to that, imo.

A phone and a tablet are just wildly different devices. Screen size —sure— but also usage patterns, input methods, workflow conventions, etc.

The “mutationes” that must be made reach deep into the functionality of an app, not just UI-level stuff. The whole purpose of the app should probably change. It’s therefore a big and challenging job to make an app scale seamlessly from one device to another. That’s irreducible complexity. The tools available will always be at best “necessary but not sufficient”.

There is no tool that can scale a mobile app to tablet size whilst maintaining a great UX.

You need to optimise for the particulars of each device.

Having worked on an app that, at least in my opinion, was pretty well done for each platform (phone and iPad), this is the case.

Our UI for the iPad was a completely separate one. The core code was shared via various internal libraries, but the UI was entirely different. Adding a feature to iPhone required one entirely separate set of code compared to the iPad app. The app was a universal binary though and one app ran on both device types.

This was, at the time, an absolute requirement. There was no way to scale the app from iPad to iPhone in such a way that it would give a great experience on both iPhone and iPad. It just wasn't possible to give an excellent app.

I've long since left and the app does seem to be written in SwiftUI now and seems to be one shared codebase. But I wouldn't say it's as good as it was previously.

If you're brave, you can configure views for all sizes (portrait/landscape/iphone/ipad) using XCode's UI Tool with trait based constraints. When you get it to work, it works quite well, animating changes when switching from portrait to landscape, but if things go wrong, it can be a massive pain to debug.

Software that dynamically changes to fit different form factors is difficult to write and rarely comes without compromises to the UX.

I prefer it when my iPhone and iPad apps have separate bespoke UIs that take full advantage of the different sizes and shapes.

writing software is about writing the hard-to-write parts one time, so that users aren't confronted with the anomalies all the time. Computers are our servants, we need to let them figure things out for users, and take care of the headaches, not simply declare "here, this is a headache".

yes, what you are pointing out is the challenge. solve it, don't slough it onto the user.

However, the same app can appear on different sized screens with different skins, it doesn't have to be a different app.

I'm not saying we should slough it on to the user. I'm saying there is no true substitute for hand tailoring your app for each platform you choose to support.

The iPad store didn't break away from the iOS store until 2019. The original app store came out in 2008, eleven years earlier. While you have as certain point, the division is meant to highlight apps which treat the iPad as a mini laptop, with a keyboard and pencil, vs just a bigger phone. If you've ever coded a website to resize, that's child's play. to actually get an app working properly across both sizes, you've got to put in significant work for each. For developers that don't want to put in that work *, listing in one or the other is fine, and possible Uber the current regieme.

* the developer for papers please's blog about the mobile port is indicative of the work that goes into supporting other screen sizes. Asking developers to have infinite time and motivation is just not realistic. also note that it took a few years for the mobile port to be released.

https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/

This is not true. From the day that the iPad was introduced, you have always been able to sell separate iPad versions of an app then iPhone versions.

You can still do it without doing it well. That's probably not at issue so I think the parent is not false

> you've got to put in significant work for each

Even Apple themselves couldn't expend the effort to make an iPad version of their vaunted new Classical music app: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/03/apple-music-classical...

I like your comment and not because I polemically see this as correct compared to the other people who disagree with you. I think it is a good comment although I don't agree with you, so thanks, and (on second thought I suppose you comment frequently so I am not referencing any other comments in general but) happy to hear more of your sensibility in various threads.

To each their own indeed. I think mobile responsive design has crippled the desktop experience of software, particularly on the web.

> I wonder why iTunes and Apple TV+ aren't included, and why Podcasts is only counting paid subscribers. Is there some obvious reason why these kinds of services would be out of scope?

Probably because they don't exceed the 45MM MAU threshold.

> Online platforms with 45 million or more average monthly active recipients

Most of the services they listed were nowhere near the threshold, so that can't be it.

I don’t think they will be out of scope, because they all uses the same AppleID backend and users can cross login with the same AppleID everywhere. To be out of scope, Apple would have to block iOS AppleIDs and iOS purchases from working on the other gadgets and stores.

They share the same AppleID backend.

But users don't have to use the same login for each store.

Note that this is the Digital Services Act compliance, and not the Digital Markets Act which affects sideloading.

Yes I know, and they share the same AppleIDs/AppleID Backend/Purchages. These AppStores are not fully independent and have to be seen as one. Many Apps even share the same binaries and are cross Apple Device available. You can install iPhone Apps on iPads, and you can install iPad Apps on Macs.

That won't work on court.

> That won't work on court.

How do you know? If there was no chance of it working, you would think Apple's lawyers would have said so.

There is a reason why they bend over for EU's DSA.

They can view the stores as they want, but they know that per law they aren't distinct online platforms, as long their Userbase, AppleIDs, AppleID Backend, Hosting Services, Databases, iCloud Services, Apps, Games and In-App Purchases works cross Apple devices. The DSA sees it as one(1) united Online Platform and would not care for Apple's Store breakdown.

This is just the typical Apple FUD: Without prejudice to further consideration of the legal characterisation, Apple views each version of the App Store as a distinct online platform under the DSA, and only the iOS App Store may qualify as a VLOP. Nonetheless, Apple intends, on an entirely voluntary basis, to align each of the existing versions of the App Store (including those that do not currently meet the VLOP designation threshold) with the existing DSA requirements for VLOPs because the goals of the DSA align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal content.

> This is just the typical Apple FUD

Thanks for including that prominently enough it made it easy to skip the comment without reading.

iTunes and Apple TV aren’t app stores.

The Apple TV App Store is listed.

That explanation does not work. The DSA isn't a law restricted to App Stores.

Also, podcasts and ebooks are not apps, but they listed their ebook store and podcast subscriptions platform in this disclosure. Why not the music store, the TV series and movie subscription service?

Apple says this is a list of their App Store user counts, and the things they’ve listed are their app stores.

Perhaps they’ll release those other numbers in a different document.

I can’t say why Apple appears to be doing things this way. I was only pointing out why Apple may not have included them here.

The explanation I see as relevant: the relevant portions of the DSA are about online platforms, which it defines as:

> ‘online platform’ means a provider of hosting service which, at the request of a recipient of the service, stores and disseminates to the public information."

For some content, particularly music, video, and some ebooks, Apple is the merchant of record. They are not acting as a platform for that content but as a traditional retailer. Compare this with the App Store, where Apple instead acts as a platform, intermediating the dissemination of information between non-Apple content providers and the public.

A service like Amazon would have this distinction as well. Some interactions are direct retail transactions between an Amazon entity and the public. At the same time, its Amazon Marketplace service provides a platform for non-Amazon sellers to disseminate information to the public.

Don't purchases literally work between the iPad and iOS stores in most cases?

I have one app that doesn’t have an iPhone equivalent - Duet.

But a developer can sell separate iPad versions of an app. Most don’t anymore.

It's worth noting that they assert still wanting to comply on the other platforms:

> Nonetheless, Apple intends, on an entirely voluntary basis, to align each of the existing versions of the App Store (including those that do not currently meet the VLOP designation threshold) with the existing DSA requirements for VLOPs because the goals of the DSA align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal content.

Yes, but the regulatory fee you pay annually is calculated by reference to the in-scope service(s)' userbase, so by slicing you reduce what you pay, and your rivals end up footing more of the cost (since it's a cost-share system). Well played, Apple.

Yeah, in the EU bold strategies are pretty expensive. But sadly Apple is a slow learner.

They wouldn’t base their strategy on numbers but function.

They are very different app stores. Only android is still in the world where a tablet app is a phone app zoomed in.

I think you’re conflating separate issues. There’s barely any difference between iOS/iPadOS/macOS app stores. I can ship the same app for iOS and iPadOS in the same binary even.

The issue you’re describing is just the lack of investment in adding multi-pane views to android apps.

There are still iPad apps that are essentially iOS apps zoomed in. X1 credit card app is something that comes to mind that I have to use

Fantastic, now Epic can use this as evidence for their inevitable appeal against the recent decision which decided exactly the opposite.

It's strange that the iPhone apps I purchased also work on the iPad. I don't have to buy them again.

How is it then a "different store"?