If you’ve ever been in the App Store for any length of time you’ll see how lazily retributive Apple is.

It’s not a company I’d ever do business with.

Is it even fair to call it “doing business with a company” when you’re basically just probing an opaque automated system? Sure, if you’re a supplier or say large advertiser, perhaps you are “doing business” but this sounds more like fighting for scraps together with a mix of honest and dishonest players hoping that the anti-fraud gods show you mercy and bless you with rev-share.

Is Play Store or Steam any better?

All these stores are basically little monopolies with zero incentive to not suck. They also suck from a user point of view. Search is terrible, they’re full of shovelware, etc.

Steam has been, and for now continues to be, much better.

IMO this is directly due to Gabe Newell's leadership. Taking an attitude of "piracy is a service problem", and proceeding to offer such a good service that it's preferable to pirating, results in a great service for everyone involved.

Whether this will outlast GabeN's tenure as CEO remains to be seen, but for now my understanding is that both users and developers are overwhelmingly happy with Steam.

> Taking an attitude of "piracy is a service problem", and proceeding to offer such a good service that it's preferable to pirating

My favourite way to phrase this is that "steam is the most anti-piracy store available. With piracy, you play games you didn't buy. On steam, you buy games you never play."

Steam isn't a monopoly, it provides ease of catalog and access. smaller companies can still sell on their own website or any other number of storefronts. The gatekeeper here now is generating MS signed apps.

> The gatekeeper here now is generating MS signed apps.

And Valve saw that coming some time ago, and invested in making both Steam and the games sold through it run on Linux.

Steam will moderate or at least put a notice when a game is being review bombed for things unrelated to the game itself, such as a controversy with the developer.

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-takes-steps-against-steam-revi...

Though sometimes they do that when the reviews are about the game itself.

Sometimes the reviews are about the game, but they're being left because that's the thing to do according to the internet that day. So a legitimate grievance but blown of proportion due to factors outside the game.

I don't think it's unreasonable to flag that.

Play Store is the same level of crap as Apple App store (experience across multiple projects for like 10+ years).

No experience on Steam but a few indie-game devs I know think it's OK. I've not heard them complain like App-devs on those phone-stores.

You can moderate reviews of your app in the App Store?? How does that work?

Devs can't, only Apple can. But they're punishing developers for fraudulent reviews anyways.

you cant, "It's apple punishing you for their own failure..."

That sounds like the modus operandi of so many companies.

Google can’t figure out how to make money without ads, so they punish people (blocking ad blockers on chrome and not allowing access to YouTube if using an ad blocker) because of their own failure.

> Google can’t figure out how to make money without ads

They can and they have. YouTube Premium exists! You can pay for it!

The two business models that are feasible for YouTube are (1) free and you have to see ads and (2) paid and you don’t have to see ads. They offer both. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to be allowed to pick (1) but opt out of the ad side of the bargain. Their ad-blocking shenanigans are obnoxious, but it’s disingenuous to claim that they “can’t figure out” how to monetize YouTube without ads when they actually do provide that option.

I subscribe to YouTube premium because I think it's worth it.

Lots of people have called me a "sucker" or worse, a Google shill, for paying money for a "free service." These same people then turned around and threw a temper tantrum when YouTube started detecting and punishing ad blockers.

I think after years of enjoying a free service people have become extremely entitled about it.

Some content on YouTube is worth it but I would say most of it actually isn't. The rules have been gamified for max monetization. So now something that shouldn't take 10 min to say is full of fillers and bullshit. Most "pro" content creators are also double-dipping with sponsors ads inside the video. I think it's disrespectful and it should be an either/or situation. If YouTube displays ads, then they have to be reasonable and the videos themselves shouldn't have any ads. If creators want to display ads, then they should pay YouTube for the video hosting and bandwidth.

YouTube created this mess. Under the disguise of "free money" they attracted all kind of creators/organisation lured into a video hosting platform (something that is expensive to do at scale) under the unsustainable promise of "we host your stuff for free and you can even make money out of it". This removed most of the risk for launching video production activity but also killed diversity of potential business models and alternative sources/technical solutions. Now both parties are extremely greedy and want even more money because somehow, they think they have a captive audience. YouTube shove more ads and creators shove more sponsor bullshit. They are the ones full of shit, it's not the people requesting a fairer deal that are entitled, you have it backward. I used to watch YouTube completely with ads up until 1-2 years ago; it just became unwatchable and pretty much every "creator" has some sort of ad in the video anyway.

It's particularly disgusting because in general those are people already making 3-4 times median/average wage with complete freedom and what would be considered low output in a traditional job paying way less. Like most tech companies, YouTube enforced winner take all feudalism and single source for maximum control on the market.

If those creators had started their own website with their own hosting and figured out a way to monetize this (subscriptions, their own ads with sponsors, products, etc) and actually taken any risk to start (like pretty much every single business has to) we would not be here.

It's a situation entirely created by dishonest representation of reality and then trying to impose rules by force to extract even more money. If YouTube needs more money to run, they better ask the creators placing ads all over their content to pay for the bandwidth/views. It's completely wrong to blame AdBlock users, they alone created wrong incentives and they alone are the one responsible for all the monetization shenanigans/cheating going on...

As far as I'm concerned, I'm pretty happy they are going at war with AdBlock, because we will see what's what. It may open up opportunities somewhere else, because I don't see people paying for Premium and I don't see people sticking around with so many ads. People's attention is going to be redirected somewhere else (free or cheaper content exists, starting with the public library or TV) and we may get something better out of that.

I pay for pemium and youtube still sucks. I still see ads in the form of embedded and in the form of other shit on the page, and now my home screen is blank, and I only get to use my account about 1/2 the time anyway because in the real world I'm often watching on someone else's device, and I have no option to disable shorts, and I'm subject to their capricious copyright and censoring bs which both directly removes content and indirectly cows all the creators into self censoring.

The problems with youtube are not the victims fault. It's fucking garbage.

Your experience is very different from mine! I pay for YT, and I really love it. So does my family. The sponsored messages are annoying... but the creators choose that. The good news is that I can fast forward? I'm free to unsubscribe from creators where annoying > value.

Honestly, Youtube is probably the service I'm most happy to pay for. Could it be run better? Probably! But it's still great.

> They can and they have. YouTube Premium exists! You can pay for it!

No they haven't. YT Premium price goes up by a significant amount each year, without a corresponding increase in value. That's not a business model, it's an experiment to see what the profitability price point is.

If they knew what it was, they could go Netflix and make it paid-only. But then they'd lose out on all the sweet sweet ad revenue which apparently still doesn't cover the bills.

Since they haven't reached it, and since 95% of their audience still accesses it with ads,

Not even Netflix is paid-only any more…

Netflix’s ad-supported tier still costs money! As does Hulu’s.

Considering how much data Apple also has on their users, it’s insane that they haven’t yet solved this problem.

Why would they if they can keep aka escrow $100k?

$100k is literally meaningless to Apple.

If any amount of money was meaningless to apple, they wouldn't be where they are today.

That's not how money or business works. Opportunity costs means that many "amounts of money" can be meaningless to the business depending on the activity to get to them, the negatives (from processing hasles like lawsuits to PR and brand image), their overall strategy and focus, and other such concerns.

A company at Apple's level absolutely doesn't see "frozing $100K" from random devs (or the amount that would result in aggregate from all those freezings) as a profit center.

The irrationality is the problem. $100k is nothing. The loss of developer good will is worth far more than that.

But Apple doesn't care, because it relies on shady apps for a significant part of App Store income.

So the decision is "Do we make significant money from addictive games and scams and tolerate the occasional false positive that nukes a legitimate developer? Or do we spend significant resources curating an App Store full of quality apps and no noise, with high quality support for devs with problems?"

Guess which one of those is going to bring in significantly more money.

"The loss of developer good will is worth far more than that."

This has been going on for a long time.

Developer good will lost? Then they can just go to the other iOS store to sell there apps, oops.

From the large corps I've worked with - those that made $B in revenue - they do everything to reach rev goals they told investors they would reach, every $100k counts. If you think a large corp is throwing away money, think twice.

My experience is that for ever one event we hear about or makes the news there are 10-100x that suffer in silence and never get heard.

Apple's revenue is $12,000 per second.

The revenue you make is not important, the growth in revenue is important.

In the time it took you to compose this reply, Apple made more money (in profit, not revenue) than the amount in TFA. Your cynicism borders on conspiracy theory!

The accounting hassles of escrow and eventual escheatment of the $100k will probably cost Apple more than $100k. This is not a profit center.

I see it more like coupons, you escrow $1M and b/c companies go bankrupt, management change etc. in the end you keep some of the money.

What are you on about? Apple collects substantially less data about their users than anyone else.

They have cryptographic proof of what types of devices you’re on. There’s a lot of metadata that they have access to because of their closed ecosystem.