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Of course the "risk" is primarily to Apple's own business interests - competition with Apple's own apps and services.

There is a benefit, though. If there was competition between app stores on the iPhone, the quality and quantity of apps available to iPhone users would increase substantially. App stores would compete on fees, attracting developers, protecting consumers, and so on. Fees would drop, developers would face less cost and friction bringing their apps to the market, app stores would have to innovate to keep protecting consumers. Monopolies cause consumer harm.

The biggest irony of all this is that consumers don't seem to realize the harm Apple is doing, because Apple is busy pulling the wool over their eyes by telling them they are protecting their security and privacy. iOS is a nanny state. Apple maintains a culture of fear among consumers to achieve its business goal, which is to maintain its monopoly position.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of those Linux laptops, and will definitely check them out. I hadn't seen the Zephyrus G14 either. How great to have so many choices!

Watch out, you are sitting on a ticking time bomb. It's just a matter of time.

I feel your pain. I would encourage you to grow and develop your audience on Android. There is a big market there to be tapped, which with some effort could equal or exceed your revenue from Apple. It's much easier to write cross-platform apps now than it was five years ago, thanks to frameworks like Flutter.

Of course, Apple would like to have us all believe that app developers couldn't make a living by writing and selling apps before the Invention of the App Store, and that they have done us all a great favor, one that warrants us paying them 30% of our income.

However, the reality is, this has always been possible. As early as the beginning of the 80s, indy developers made millions writing games for the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Amiga, and so on. You just had to work with a publisher or distributor, of which there were hundreds and it was a free market. In the 90s millions could be made from DOS and Windows apps in the same way. In the early '00s, it became possible to self-publish on the web and our apps would be indexed and marketed for us by search engines; we didn't even need a publisher, but could still choose to go through one if the value add merited the cost.

So there has been no radical innovation, no Invention that has changed what is possible for us to achieve as app developers. It's arguably a little bit easier to get our apps to market than it used to be, but given how onerous Apple's "guidelines" have become, I'm not even sure that is true. Writing websites serving apps and integrating with checkout engines just isn't that difficult... and most apps still need marketing to succeed because being listed in the App Store is not by itself sufficient.

The only thing that has changed, now that the mobile computing revolution has almost reached saturation point and the majority of screen time by consumers is on mobile devices, is that we are now all forced to publish through a single store on each platform, and we are permitted no alternative if we want to reach our customers. Equally, our customers are permitted no alternative way to obtain our products. There is no competition between publishers on Apple's platform, because there is only one publisher, Apple, by fiat of Apple; and we are now forced to pay a 30% tax, a figure which is not challenged by the usual mechanisms of competition, and supply and demand, which make markets efficient.

The difference is, they don't then lie to the public and to Congress about it, as Apple and Tim Cook have now done.

Thanks, I'll give it a try! I'm looking forward to testing out Win-Kex also.

Since being apartment-bound due to COVID, I've switched to doing most of my development on my desktop machine, so there hasn't been any urgent need for me to have a new laptop. I still have my late-2013 MBP, one of the last non-Butterfly / non-Touchbar laptops Apple made, which I use on rare occasions.

I've looked at the Windows laptops extensively though, and will likely get a ThinkPad X1 Extreme G2 or G3, or a Dell XPS 15, when the time comes. They both seem very good, with superior keyboards, displays, performance, and value compared to Apple's current lineup.

It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone. Yes, there is a simulator available which you can run on Mac OS in a VM or on a Hackintosh, but you still will need a real device at the end of the day. Certain features like in-app purchases can only be tested on real devices. Furthermore, the App Review Board has the power to reject your app at any time until you provide them with a demonstration video which must be screen recorded on a real physical device, and on this ridiculous and unnecessary hoop to jump through I am speaking from personal experience.

Of course, you could always have a personal Android device and an iPhone solely for development purposes. Apple tries to force you to own a Mac and at least one iOS device (be it iPhone or iPad) to develop apps for the App Store. This is yet another example of their corporate greed. You can develop Android apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there's no need for a physical device.

Yes it's fantastic. Even the small things make a difference - for example, it's really nice to be able to use the same package manager on my local machine as I use on my Google Cloud servers, on which I'm running Ubuntu, instead of having to use brew. I can use GNU variants of CLI utilities like ps, head etc. rather than the quirky BSD variants found on Mac OS X. iTerm2 was binding me to Mac OS for a while, but Windows Terminal Preview is getting quite good, and IntelliJ itself has a very good built-in terminal that works well with WSL2.

Absolutely, yes, but if you are writing your own apps rather than being paid to write apps for other people, there's a strong luck element as with any entrepreneurial activity. I have six apps out right now, of which just one accounts for 90% of my revenue. Rather than setting out to write apps, I think it's better to think about an app as merely a vehicle to deliver a service, a product, some unit of customer value, from you to your customers. If you have something to offer that is of high value, you can definitely make a lot of money from an app. If you don't, no matter how well designed and built the app is, it is likely to fail.

Thanks for the link, it's great to see the EU regulators starting to tackle these issues with actual regulations. I agree that it does not in its current form go far enough, but it's a good start.

> On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store.

Yes, I certainly would, and the only reason I haven't already is I have no other way to get my app into the hands of users who own only Apple phones and tablets.

As an app developer myself, with apps on both the Google Play Store and the App Store with over 250K monthly active users, I have become so frustrated with Apple's arbitrary and capricious enforcement of its App Store regulations, its bullying and coercion of developers, its extortionate fees, and its monopolistic anti-competitive practices, that I have stopped updating my apps on the App Store. I wonder how many other developers are in a similar position. As a consumer, I now know that if I want the latest, up to date apps, I'm better off turning to the Play Store or one of the many other app stores that can be used on Android devices.

I've also given up on the MacBook line, tired of the touch bar, the slate-like keyboards, and (now) the transition to ARM. My next laptop will be a Thinkpad or Dell. Most of my development these days is done under Windows using WSL2, and my primary focus is on Android.

It used to be that my apps made more money on Apple devices, but now I actually make more on Android. The Google Play review process is a breeze compared to Apple's laborious and stifling rules (although it is not perfect either by any means), and at some point, it's just not worth the hassle.

It's sad, I was an enthusiastic endorser of Apple products just 7 years ago, but can no longer recommend them. This is the first year I won't be buying a new iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, too - I'm looking to switch to the Pixel or Samsung Galaxy line and Wear OS.

I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank). The law should make illegal restricting developers to any specific payment processor(s), too.

I would love to see a similar list for de-Apple-ing. Apple's anticompetitive and monopolistic practices with the App Store, the terrible direction MacBooks have taken, its price gouging on hardware... the list goes on. Google is saintly by comparison.