You can provide a walled garden. But that's not Apple does.
Instead, Apple is a mafia that shakes down all the vendors for the right to sell in their semi-open market square.
If Apple iOS were a walled garden, it would have contained only Apple applications.
I think they actually have a monopsony since you can only sell to apple. If there were other app stores, you could sell to them instead.
"In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
(And they probably have a monopoly wrt iphone customers)
I agree. However, consumers have the right to go to a different supermarket, without selling their house.
We can take these analogy absurdities wherever — the harsh reality is that nobody is stopping someone from building an open ecosystem phone. But there isn’t enough demand.
As a consumer, why should I care? As a company, unless I’m building my own walled garden for company phones, why should I care? What’s the market here?
I don't think there's too little demand, I think there's too much profit incentive in the other direction.
Only a tiny number of companies on earth have the resources to build a successful mobile platform. If you are lucky enough to be one of those companies, you're not going to leave money on the table.
The harsh reality is that manufacturing capacity and network effects actually prevents building an open ecosystem phone. You will never be able to purchase the best chips and displays.
I think we need to stop pretending that regulating competition is a bad thing. Competition is what makes capitalism work as an economic system. Without competition capitalism is inefficient and harmful. If we can inject more competition into the system as a whole, wherever possible, it's going to be good for consumers.
It's to the point where you can't look up local government apps here without getting some advertising garbage in the results first because Apple started selling app space.
Consumers bought this house with their eyes wide open knowing that they can only access one supermarket.
There are billions of iphones out there. Unless you're working with data (which you should share) then your anecdotal experience from talking with other tech literate people is so ridiculously non-representative that it's hard to even visualize.
Might want to Google "Confirmation Bias"
Edit: I suspect I’m wrong, adding it probably causes their assumptions to be given more weight for no reason, as happened here. Interesting observation, that’s in line with the research that disclosing conflicting interests actually causes people to weight the compromised advice more highly than they otherwise would.
Apple doesn't have multiple competing stores. It has ONE store.
And if you are a software vendor that makes mobile apps, you HAVE to support Apple or you will go out of business.
When I first started, I used to think of Apple as the best option available to me. Now I think about it as the least bad option. The cost of leaving involves so much time and money, that it’s not a realistic option.
DVDs come out. Now I have to rebuy all my VHS movies on another platform...
Even using Apple, you can't do this, because you need a separate Android and iOS app already.
Big picture though, I don't think you really have a "right" or entitlement to just access everyone.
You're not entitled to use someone else's business, even if it's a good one. You can't just go and sell your product in the AT&T store, you need to agree to their terms. Even if you make a phone that only works on the AT&T network, you still need to agree to their terms.
You can't sell in Target or Walmart or Costco or even Amazon just because you want to. Oh and you may be quite disappointed to discover many of them take >30% cut too.
Apple thinks of the iOS App Store as another storefront, and you need their permission to put your product on their "shelves". The courts agree.
Prior to the 1980s, AT&T, as the dominant telephone service provider in the United States, had a policy that only allowed customers to use telephones that were leased from them. This policy was rooted in the belief that non-AT&T equipment could harm the telephone network. Does that sounds familiar?
Several legal cases (and the eventual breakup of AT&T) eventually opened up the AT&T network to third party phones and consumers rejoiced.
And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.
And yet you can literally pick up a [product engineered to a phone company’s specifications], dial some numbers [assigned by a phone company] and reach everyone else who [also agreed to the phone company’s TOS] [as long as you and them have paid a large monthly fee].
This isn’t freedom. Companies still decide how you can use their services.
The sneaky part of Apple's counterargument is that they try to apply your argument not to their own App Store, but to the entire OS. This is a land grab - the App Store is their service, but I own the phone, so the OS should respect my decision to circumvent Apple's curation if I so choose. If I'm not allowed to sell in Target or Walmart, I'm allowed to open my own store and people can circumvent Target to go to me directly. This is how it works for every other form of computer except phones and tablets.
But only because macs existed before they were able to get away with this. I would bet a huge amount of money that if macs were invented/created after the iphone, they'd be locked down exactly the same way. And many of the same people who love it on the phone would love it on the computer, even though now they would say that it's a general purpose computing device not an appliance like the phone is.
They can't shake down someone out of their reach.
They can identify them though ( green icon... )
When someone comes to your store and says "I made the streets and regulate the power, water supply, sewer, and everything else in this place, cut me 30% of your revenue in taxes" that's the government.
And you'd do well to not confuse those so haphazardly. Apple didn't come to your app and with no cause blackmail you to get your money. They created an ecosystem that did not exist before, and they have to maintain it. Paying for it is completely rational.
Am I doing this right?
> Am I doing this right?
No.
Apple allows you to ship infinite amount of apps 100% for free, if you don't in return ask your users for money.
What kind of a mafia works like that? Heck even taxes have fixed components, whether you make a dollar or not.
That's exactly what Apple does. If you make a mobile app (for example, a presentation manager) you _have_ to support iOS, or you will go out of business.
As a developer, you simply don't have a choice. You have to either support iOS, or get out of mobile apps entirely.
If you want to charge money, Apple will collect it for you and take a cut. If you don't want that deal, you can still distribute your app for free, you just can't charge money for it in the app. You can still charge money for the service, but you have to do that on your own website and infrastructure (a la Netflix, etc.), not Apple's.
Basically, you can't make money. Duh. You can't even place a link for a third-party payment system (the case to allow that is on its way to SCOTUS).
Apple is a mafia.
Seems to me you're not noticing the Kremlin levels of cognitive dissonance in your statement here. With this severe lack of self-awareness, if you were in Apple's place you'd be way worse than they are right now.
> They want money from my app when I want money from their store!
Apple is a mafia because they want money that they do not earn. They didn't do anything that deserves 30% of gross to help me write my application, and they are not promoting it for free.
All they do is they provide a shitty autoupdate service.
> Seems to me you're not noticing the Kremlin levels of cognitive dissonance in your statement here.
Are you paid by Apple's Reich?
Worse, you can't make money and you have to pay the $100 developer fee every year. The developer fee is trivial if it's a business expensive, but quite expensive otherwise!
What? That’s not true. There are plenty of Android-only developers.
Beeper Mini replicates native iOS functionality - it's obvious why it can only exist as an Android-only app.
Fortnite is the product of a massive studio, whose decision of not publishing it on iOS was deliberate as part of their anti-monopoly lawsuits. They can easily afford to do it because Epic Games has other revenue sources, alongside with running Fortnite on pretty much every other platform imaginable.
Google doesn't really cash in on their more niche apps, publishing them on iOS is unlikely to change anything for them. However, not choosing to publish them gives Android - their own product - a tiny boost in appeal due to exclusive functionality.
Fortnight is the only example, and it's on its way to SCOTUS. Google apps, which one?
But anyway, you said "As a developer..." not "As a major developer...".
By your logic there would be no towns, cities, countries, unions, companies, any kind of organization at all. Because any time you need to pay for something, you feel like it's the mafia.
- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay time for rent. "I HAVE to pay rent or I'll be kicked out on the street!"
- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay your bill at a restaurant. "I HAVE to pay my bill or I'll be hungry!"
No one owes you anything. You ask for money for your apps, don't you? Because why are you complaining otherwise? 40% of $0 is $0, isn't it? But you require money, despite maybe someone could be like "you're mafia unless I can play your game for free".
Things cost money. Grow up and start acting like an adult.
Are you a part of mafia? How else would you defend Apple that is bent on destruction?
30% is way too high. 15% seems high as well without knowing the costs or benefits of the App Store.
A reasonable fee with 0 competition would be fine. No fee, while hiking the prices of the devices would be fine.
Imagine you're working on a hardware product that can communicate with your other devices over Bluetooth. How exactly do you avoid Apple in this scenario?
You can't, or you won't be in business for very long. You need to develop an app because Apple intentionally gimps their browser, and to release the app you must agree to their terms.
They're in a dominant position that allows them to dictate unfavorable terms to the rest of the industry which, among other things, stifles innovation.
I can't think of nothing that is paired over Bluetooth that couldn't be done better with some other medium. Even Apple use a superset of Bluetooth to get its devices working properly together.
The HN audience in particular is not just tinker-friendly, but the vast majority surely lived through the era of Apple where Jobs pitched the iPhone as more of a gateway to the internet in your pocket, web apps were even mentioned as being a major feature/philosophy.
Not to mention the "old world" of premobile OSes which still have the basic understanding that I can install programs programmed for this platform, without "protection" and the "protection fees" associated with a centralized monopoly, an old world of which macOS could never shed in the name of profits, but iOS and beyond has become the battleground for redefining the computing experience to the mainstream: is it supposed to be a bladerunner 2049 esque experience of hitting the predetermined icons on my pocket vending machine, infantilizing and commodifying people's lifestyle for wealth concentration of a company that uses it's wealth to...hmm.
It is, at the very least though, a bit of a betrayal to those used to the old ways.
At the worst, it's part of a larger regression against individualism.
For comparison, Amazon charges 15%. AWS marketplace charges <10%.
Yes. Why are we so ok on giving up our rights like this? "no company is allowed to inside trade/use slaves/have a monopoly" - yes!
Framing things as you have leads to the impression that, by analogy to oppressing a person, restricting a large company is bad. But a company is not a person. Companies are legal constructs that exist because they are useful to society. A monopoly distorts markets and stifles innovation by disadvantaging potential competitors. This is not beneficial to society and so should not be permitted. So yes, a sufficiently large company should not be permitted to do things that might be permissible for a smaller company.
Exactly. If you take US antitrust law as written, once you're close to being the dominant player, you can't have a walled garden.
I think tech savvy users should be able to (after jumping through a few hoops) do whatever they want with their phones, without any fear of reprisal from software and hardware manufacturers. If Apple and Google insist on strangling this market then Tim Sweeney has the money to develop a competing phone ecosystem, it could be a great business opportunity if a large number of users and developers are actually not being well served. But he may find that this underserved population is a quite small slice of the total addressable market, and that walled gardens actually do a good job for the vast majority of users, protecting my oblivious grandma who clicks on everything from a horde of scammers.
You don't have to buy an iPhone, this isn't like a railroad or a telecom that owns all of the possible infrastructure. If you want a walled garden get an iPhone. If you want freedom with all that implies, go Android.