
Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers - twapi
https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312
======
cglong
The original source is here:
[https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312](https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312)

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll change to that from [https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-
shipley-every-...](https://medianatives.blogspot.com/2020/06/wil-shipley-
every-year-i-fill-out-this.html). Some people may find the latter easier to
read though.

------
fossuser
Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely
obnoxious.

Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real
competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam).

It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it
also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It
seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.

The other suggestions are also really good, I'd love to be able to pay for big
updates (though I personally don't really mind subscriptions for apps I
regularly use).

I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't
native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.

~~~
intopieces
Apple should wind down their ads system (iAd) entirely. Advertisements are
antithetical to what Apple stands for - privacy, premium experience, doing the
right thing for users. They should lower their cut to 10% (not to 20, as the
article states) and start offering curated experience bundles like they do
with AppleTV.

~~~
fossuser
Yeah I agree (at least on the ads piece, not sure about the rest of your
comment) - I think the ads are an unnecessary dilution of their brand.

They can help developers with ad discovery in a bunch of different and better
ways that are less hostile for devs and users.

~~~
thunderrabbit
*app discovery

Thank you for the funny typo "ad discovery"

"We curate the finest ads for your consumer experience.."

~~~
fossuser
Ah yes - my bad, too late to edit :)

Ad discovery is more Facebook and Google’s business.

------
jennyyang
The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING.

Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by
one, and ignore us. Google does exactly the same thing. If we organize as a
large enough group, they have to listen. I firmly believe what Apple does is
anti-competitive and they need to be regulated firmly by the government. I
also think Google and Facebook need to be firmly regulated by the government
as well.

Apple needs to allow other people to create their own App Store or they should
be regulated by the government. We need to organize as a group of software
developers and sue Apple and lobby our politicians, because that seems to be
the only way Apple will listen.

I also agree that subscriptions are NOT the way to go, and having paid
upgrades are the best way to go. Driving down the costs such that things are
freemium has ruined our industry as far as I'm concerned. I want to pay good
money for a good piece of software, but even $0.99 is "expensive" for most
people these days. This needs to stop otherwise iOS app development will
become the sweatshop of the 2020s.

~~~
lytedev
Is it wrong of me to think "vote with your wallet" and don't buy an iPhone?

~~~
musicale
More like don't _develop for_ iPhone or Android. OP seems to be suggesting
that developers organize against the de facto app store duopoly.

> Google does exactly the same thing

~~~
valuearb
Apple is paying developers nearly $30B a year, that dwarfs all these minor
complaints fir most developers.

~~~
syshum
WOW, that is a gross reversal of the sales model. I thought Apple had a warped
sense of their role but here you believe that Apple is entitled to 100% of the
sales from the developers apps, and are graciously paying the devs 70% of
money Apple is entitled to, instead of the reality that Apple is taking 30% of
the revenue from Developers for the "privilege" of access to consumers that
already paid apple thousands of dollars.

Apple is a Payment processor, that is the service they provide. a "Fair"
amount for a payment process is maybe 5%, not 30%

~~~
valuearb
Apples App Store service does far more than payment processing, and it’s
disingenuous to compare them to one.

They host and distribute petabytes of data.

They have a large team hosting and maintain marketing sites for developers in
dozens of languages all over the world. Another team develops and distributes
mobile apps for store access in all those languages.

They have a large team providing developer support and developer tools.

They have a thousand employees screening app submissions for malware to help
ensure customers feel safe buying your apps from the App Store.

They have hundreds of employees marketing the store and promoting developers.

They do all these things for free if you distribute free apps. So he
developers have distributed hundreds of terabytes of free apps without paying
a dime.

Clearly Apple makes a profit from the App Store, but also clearly it wouldn’t
be able to remotely cover these costs at 5%, their break even is closer to
15%.

Developers long for the day some government or court will force Apple to
reduce their profit share, but as a iOS developer I warn those devs to be
careful for what they wish for.

Apple taking 20% or less is a recipe for developers getting nickel and dimed
by Apple. They will start charging hosting and bandwidth fees, submission
fees, support subscriptions, etc, etc, and Apples profitability will be back
where it was. Free app devs and small developers however will take a huge step
backwards.

~~~
syshum
>>They have a large team providing developer support and developer tools.

Many devs would disagree with you here, Apple Dev support while better than
Google is not much better. It is normal large faceless company with impersonal
legal responses not customer service

>>They host and distribute petabytes of data. ... They do all these things for
free if you distribute free apps ...

Ohh cry me a river... They made that choose so they could CONTROL the
echosystem, they then can not turn around and claim this a bullshit
justification for their fee extortion. They do not give anyone the option to
use anything other than apple for app distribution so no I will not give them
points for this

>but also clearly it wouldn’t be able to remotely cover these costs at 5%,
their break even is closer to 15%.

Show me the money.... Show me the citation for that claim

>>Developers long for the day some government or court will force Apple to
reduce their profit share

I long for the day when the government or courts ban Close ecosystems and stop
allowing companies treat a product they SOLD to customers as if they still own
it there by merely renting it out

------
reeddavid
I'm not an app developer, but I am equally frustrated as a user on several of
Wil Shipley's key points:

1\. Ads for competitors. Sure, show me ads. But don't replace my exact match
with an ad that takes up the whole screen. As a user who searches for apps, I
find this outrageous. If the App Store was solely an advertising network I
would understand. But Apple takes a 30% commission! Get out of my way and let
me find what I'm looking for, then take your commission.

2\. Upgrade pricing. I'm tired of abandoned apps, especially those I paid for
initially. I don't expect developers to work for free (nor do I want to have
100+ subscriptions). Let me upgrade to major new versions.

3\. Subscriptions for everything. Ugh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to
buy something outright and use it for its useful life. There are many apps I
never use because I don't want yet another subscription, but I would have
happily purchased.

4\. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials?
I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out
for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps
because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money
on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't.

EDIT: I see trials have been possible for 2 years! I had no idea. I guess I
haven't encountered any, which seems odd.

As a user, I feel that Apple has created a race to the bottom and they've made
the app ecosystem way less valuable to me. I would be happier if upgrades and
trials allowed me to spend more money to get more valuable iOS apps. Instead I
regret some purchases, avoid some purchases, can't tell how much apps actually
cost, have to find new apps when old ones are abandoned, and don't trust that
I'm able to discover and buy the best apps.

~~~
vageli
> 4\. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get
> trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to
> try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly
> great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've
> wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't.

I would be surprised if Apple didn't have in place a policy similar to the
Google Play store (and others, like Steam), where you have a limited amount of
time (a couple of hours) during which time you can "return" the software and
not incur the cost.

~~~
viraptor
That's true in my experience. It happened maybe twice, but I got pretty much
immediate refunds for purchases from previous day that I wasn't happy with.
There wasn't anything wrong with the app itself, it just wasn't what I
expected I'm getting.

------
ericflo
People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and
onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more
mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call
you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want
this type of curation.

The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing
was self-serve at all. Basically what I'm saying is, we need to nip this in
the bud, or indie development is over.

~~~
whatshisface
The "don't call us, we'll call you" model already exists in the form of game
consoles. Nintendo is probably the most restrictive in this way. If you don't
have a pile of money for the development equipment, don't bother calling.

~~~
toast0
I don't think this is as true for Nintendo anymore. The switch store is full
of tons of stuff. Maybe they're not letting everything through, and they
certainly aren't letting everyone make physical games, but the digital store
seems like it must not have a big filter.

~~~
the_af
I don't own a Nintendo console: what's a physical game and how does it differ
from a digital game?

~~~
toast0
To add on/clarify. A physical game for the switch is basically a memory card
--- put it in any switch and you can play. A digital game is a download, tied
to your device and/or account.

~~~
the_af
Ah! The downside is that you can trade memory cards but you can't do the same
with downloads?

~~~
toast0
Yes, exactly.

------
danielrhodes
I was curious about the arguments for not including upgrade pricing on the App
Store. Apple maintains that upgrade pricing is a relic of shrink wrapped
software and subscriptions are better.

I lean softly towards Apple on this one. A few reasons I can think of for why
subscriptions are preferred over upgrade pricing:

\- The app developer can keep making money over a longer period of time.

\- Generally means somebody can try out software first before committing,
whereas upgrade pricing implies you either have to commit before trying it or
nothing -- there are no demos on the App Store.

\- Subscriptions also mean a developer does not hold out new features or bug
fixes for customers unless they upgrade -- it incentivizes developers to keep
working on an app and maintain a relationship with customers. This is
especially true as the app needs to be updated to be compatible with new
devices and OS versions.

\- Potentially lets customers choose feature sets in the app. This is a good
thing as it means developers can broaden their market to customers who want to
pay less for fewer features or more for more features. It doesn't lump
everybody into the same bucket.

~~~
NikolaNovak
There's a lot of arguments one way or another - but the killer deal-breaker
for many of us is the feeling of being held hostage: once you stop paying
subscription, you typically don't get to "keep last paid version" \- you loose
application, and any files, data or artifacts that you created with it or
would open/manipulate with it :-/

The other aspect is just how well we each feel we can keep track of and be
disciplined with dozens of subscriptions. I'm the other way around from you -
I'd pay $5 for an app without blinking, even to "try it out"; but I hesitate
to "commit" to $3 a year, let alone $3 a month, for something new.

~~~
p1necone
I think the way Jetbrains does it is ideal - every chunk of 12 months you pay
for with your subscription gives you permanent use of that version.

~~~
electricviolet
But this only works if you're releasing a new version every subscription
period -- and in that case, it's equivalent to upgrade pricing.

~~~
hansvm
If the developer isn't providing upgrades then they shouldn't keep getting
paid for a product someone already bought. If the argument is that developers
need _regular_ pay days then we have dedicated financial instruments for
smoothing an irregular cash flow.

In any case, subscriptions aren't directly equivalent to upgrade pricing even
when an upgrade is provided every subscription period because in an upgrade
pricing model the end user can always choose to stop paying and continue to
use software they already bought.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_If the argument is that developers need _regular_ pay days then we have
dedicated financial instruments for smoothing an irregular cash flow._

I think that ignores how little most developers make in the app store. They
aren't rolling in money, most are just trying to figure out a way to eke out a
living.

~~~
_ph_
I think developers would make a ton more of money, if the App store didn't
suck so badly. My spending on iOS apps has rather gone down over time, because
the App universe got increasingly worse.

------
etaioinshrdlu
One nit to pick, Slack on iOS is apparently fully native:
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459)

I think this shows, in my opinion, how little native vs. web/electron actually
matters to overall quality. You can generally make a smooth, fast, bug-free
app on any platform. Or not...

I used to use the Android version and I was never quite sure whether it was
native or not. I couldn't think of a way to tell.

~~~
twhb
You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app.

Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a
good app in many dimensions; I didn’t mean to say that an Electron app can’t
be good in some ways, even in the most important ways, but rather that
Electron introduces flaws that prevent the app from being good in all ways. In
particular, while faster than most Electron apps it’s still sluggish on old
devices. It still loses track of files when renamed unless you do the rename
through Visual Studio Code. The UI elements aren’t as polished as native let
alone consistent with it, settings aren’t synced and backed up to iCloud,
system-wide keyboard settings aren’t obeyed, Quick Look previews aren’t
provided, etc. All of these problems were either introduced by Electron or
made more difficult by it.

~~~
dangus
Only takes one counter-example to dismantle this method of thought.

...........VSCode

~~~
sneakymichael
VSCode is the most sluggish app I use on my 2019 Mac, by far. I genuinely
don't understand how people can say that it feels responsive and like-native,
unless they have much more performant equipment than I.

I use it because it's packed with useful functionality, but …I resent using
it– I think I'd _adore_ it if it were native.

~~~
pier25
I agree. I tried it recently for a couple of weeks and went back to Sublime.

~~~
brutal_boi
Wtf. It really makes me wonder if we are in fact using the same thing at all?

Started using couple or three months back for a relatively large C project
(with large amounts of lib includes) and so far the experience has been really
good. Then switched to remote ssh devel, still really good.

What's these slugish/perf issues on vsvode all about? What am I missing?

~~~
pier25
For me it's because it could never really break the illusion I'm using a
browser and that is annoying. I'm reminded of that on every little (or not so
little) stutter.

I could totally work with VSCode but I just prefer the overall experience of
Sublime.

~~~
the_lucifer
My biggest gripe with Sublime has been the lack of Extensions.

------
CharlesMerriam2
I buy an app on my iPhone once every couple months. I simply cannot find
anything. I cannot buy.

The 'freemium' games hide.

I want:

\- games that offer a single purchase, or a one time upgrade for full features
without ads. Yes, some people will buy the 'bucket of coffee beans' upgrade. I
won't. I don't want to search through twenty games that offer it.

\- productivity tools that do something useful. My phone is stuck in 2001.
Universal menu ordering? Teach me in two minutes? Manage my contacts to call
people I haven't talked to in a while? Anything?

\- privacy. Why does the Peet's Application in the background still get
updated location services, draining my battery? When is the microphone on? Who
is really calling me?

Seriously. A business model based on "the other players aren't doing well
either" seems excessively fragile.

------
alexashka
One day it'll dawn on people that we should provide infrastructure that
guarantees safety and freedom, not walled gardens that provide safety and
freedom only if it also happens to be profitable for somebody.

There seem to be enough people who don't see this as self evident and are
motivated to try and create their own walled gardens in the hopes of becoming
the next rent seeker overlord.

These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their
naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just
needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. It
reminds me of children who beg their parents into buying them a toy they want.
It makes me sad for both the child to be stooping to such a level but even
more so for the parent, for letting the child end up in such a situation in
the first place.

I don't know, is begging trillion dollar companies to provide basic
functionality not in conflict with having an iota of dignity?

~~~
zadokshi
We already have laws for this. Look up what “anti trust” is. The real question
you should be asking is “why are anti trust rules not functioning properly” or
why aren’t they being applied for this generation?

~~~
scarface74
True. Why isn’t anti trust going after a company that is less than 50% of the
market.....

~~~
manigandham
Perhaps "anti trust" needs to be revisited as a broader concept. A similar
corollary is the "right to repair" which often falls under the same excuse of
being able to use a competitor's product but ignores the high price consumers
in giving up any control over what they purchased.

~~~
scarface74
Sure. Let’s give the government more power. What could possibly go wrong?

------
lancewiggs
A great list.

Also: Capping in-app payments (I’m targeting games here) at a certain multiple
of cost price, or a fixed amount for free apps, would fix the absurd gaming
mechanisms aimed only at extracting more money rather than great gameplay.

~~~
mod50ack
It's a bit sad. I feel like mobile gaming is in large part dead because of
these stupid pay-to-play games. Back in the early days of the iPhone, even the
iPhone games were one-time $2 games (and good for that!), while you had the DS
where games were $20+ (often more). Now mobile games of quality are mostly
dead.

~~~
unix_fan
unfortunately, the market isn’t willing to pay for high-quality games.

~~~
reificator
> _unfortunately, the market isn’t willing to pay for high-quality games._

Because they've been repeatedly abused by free-to-play nonsense. Take out the
IAPs and forced ads entirely and watch game quantity drop[0] while quality
skyrockets. Customers might still be willing to buy back in, if all trust
hasn't been eroded already.

[0]: Normally that's not a thing you want from a game/entertainment
storefront, but I think the App Store (and Steam) is actually at the point
where it would benefit from fewer games. Consumer confidence is at an all-time
low.

------
MintelIE
I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite
a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer
device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid
of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian
or OpenBSD.

Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going,
they will support and then drop some technology on an apparent whim. I've had
serious issues when they dropped WebObjects, Java as a first class Cocoa
development language, and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my
work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple. The promise of ZFS on OS X
made me buy a Mac Pro, and then several months later they just dropped all
mention of ZFS on OS X.

I'm not going to stick with a company which is so secretive about what they
are going to do, failing to even publish roadmaps for their customers and
developers. Mindshare among the tech geeks is how OS X took off. Now they're
losing it - many developers I know are moving away from the platform too.

~~~
pier25
> and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C
> will be thrown away by Apple

Totally.

Cocoa, Objective C, OpenGL, etc, are all going to die some day and Apple will
announce it a year or two in advance like they usually do with major breaking
stuff. Any serious company would announce these EOL 4-5 years in advance.

With Apple the only safe strategy is to keep investing dev time to update
everything to the newer stuff or let the project die because in 2-3 years max
it will most likely stop working.

It's no coincidence all big Mac apps (other than Apple's own stuff) are
actually cross platform projects. No wonder Apple is trying to bring people
over from iOS with Catalyst.

I was going to start a macOS product this year but with the transition to
SwiftUI I decided it was a really bad idea to invest in a Cocoa project.

And Jesus don't get me started on having to update the OS to get the latest
Xcode version every year with their half baked macOS versions.

~~~
MintelIE
I think we are meant to divine Apple’s plan from clues. Much of the Unix side
of OS X or whatever it’s called now is getting pretty old, much apparently
unchanged from years ago. So my guess is this stuff is going away sooner than
later. They finally admitted that OpenGL is being deprecated but in retrospect
we should have known this by 2010 at the absolute latest.

Since I no longer use OS X and haven’t installed the current or past few
versions I couldn’t tell you what is being poorly maintained or ignored but my
guess is a more familiar person could guess what Tim’s abandoning next with
some scrutiny and a handful of yarrow stalks.

------
saagarjha
The survey was great, because it hits basically everything that developers
hate about Apple:

* Search Ads

* Documentation

* App Store Review Guidelines

* Codesigning

* Apple Developer Forums

* App Store Review

The only thing missing is bug reporting, and I stuck my response for that in
it anyways when they asked what was wrong with their developer tools ("Respond
to our feedback!"). Sadly, I think the results of this survey are anonymized
so thoroughly that they disappear entirely before anyone at Apple can get to
look at them.

(Supposedly the forums are getting revamped in a week for WWDC. I don't have
very high hopes, sadly, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.)

------
on_and_off
Strongly agree with most of the points, but not all.

Disagreements :

\- App updates. I think that the subscription model would be pretty good for
apps actually if you could have a micro transaction system. Great quality apps
are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc).
Selling apps for a one time fee does not fit that well in this model. A
nominal fee for app updates kinda solves part of the problem .. you just hope
that your users love the new feature enough to buy it. It feels a lot like for
a lot of apps that would just lead to feature creep instead of good design. I
have been hoping to see a micro-subscription model emerge for a very long
time. Unfortunately I don't think customers want that and Apple/Google don't
seem super interested in pushing it either (Google kinda has that with Google
Play Pass, but in typical Google fashion this is dead on arrival).

\- I don't think the web is in a significantly different than it has been for
the entirety of iOS/Android existences : it has its place but is not going to
replace native anytime soon, especially for the "high quality" apps the author
talks about.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs
> (API, servers, etc).

I stay the hell away from apps that don’t let me manage my own data, which
excludes most apps that have recurring costs. Even so more and more standalone
apps that I use are going subscription because of the lack of another way to
deal with upgrades.

~~~
on_and_off
Even something as simple as a weather app needs to pay recurring costs for its
API, regardless of user data

And thinking about it .. hard to make a good weather app that does not collect
your location. Good is relative here, for me a good weather app will
automatically update to my current location wherever I go.

------
davidajackson
>Lower the cut you take from 30% to 20%

I agree with this. I think there are probably a lot of app ideas where the
margin is small enough that 30% probably prevents them from even being
started.

Also fix app review. It's so arbitrary, it's like playing a game of darts.

------
pjbster
I have been thinking about an alternative pricing model but it only works for
content creation software. It would be enabled by an OpenPGP library which
handles signing of files and micropayments.

What if the app itself was free but it charged a small fee the first time a
new file was saved? The file format doesn't have to be proprietary - a simple
chunk of metadata should be able to identify the creator and the files won't
need to be tracked by a central authority because the mere existence of the
signature in the file would imply that the one-off payment had already been
made.

The canonical example is a rich Markdown editor. You could get the WYSIWYG
conveniences à la Word and the resulting .md file would have a signature
indicating that the app had saved it.

Subsequent edits by the author wouldn't incur a fee as the signature would
match the app instance. But someone else with a copy of the app would incur a
fee if they also used it to make changes of their own and their signature
would be added to the file.

Someone else could edit the file with their favourite text editor. This
wouldn't incur a fee. But the signatures would have to be preserved otherwise
the original author(s) wouldn't be able to re-edit the file without incurring
another payment.

Perhaps I'm being dumb but I think these files could be safely pushed to
Github with the signatures intact. They'd be as secure as any public key.

I can see this working with many file types -- MS Office documents, Adobe
Illustrator et al, 3D model files, PDFs, images, movies. The same file could
be edited with different apps each saving their own signatures. All that's
needed is something which disables the "File/Save" command unless a payment is
made.

Is anyone aware of any software which works like this?

~~~
Dylan16807
How do you define "new file"? Why don't I put all my data into various copies
of the same original file?

~~~
pjbster
A "new" file is simply one which doesn't contain the licensee's signature.

Yes, there would be ways to game this approach by minimising the number of
files saved but the price per new save could be set sufficiently low to make
the inconvenience too uneconomical. And there might be users who need to
create thousands of new files over the course of a year and who might be
better served by a subscription model or a pricing cap.

------
musicale
> Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago

Which was during the coronavirus lockdown and associated unemployment and
economic upheaval.

In addition to Omni group seemed to be on something of a downturn (personally
I recently gave up on Omnigraffle because 1) I was tired of the upgrade
pricing and 2) simultaneous cross-platform multiuser editing is currently more
important to me than a rich feature set and beautiful UI.)

------
musicale
Wil Shipley is an excellent developer and his points are excellent as well.

Agreed completely about ads in the app store - they are basically worthless
and often very annoying and spammy.

I particularly concur with subscription vs. upgrade pricing. I utterly despise
subscriptions, and I want to have the option to pay an incremental fee for an
upgrade _if I want to_ rather than having to purchase a new version of the
app!

------
e40
As a new user to iOS (on Android since the OG Droid), I totally agree. I had
to post on /r/iOS to find a Solitaire game that didn't have ads. I looked and
looked and I couldn't find Solitaire City. It's not even ranked in the top 200
in its category. I tried like 20 Solitaire games and they all sucked or had
ads. Terrible ads.

Honestly, I was shocked. I thought the App store would be better than Google
Play Store, which I didn't think was that great, but I could usually find paid
apps without ads.

Btw, I totally agree with his asks for the App store.

------
schappim
For those who don't know Wil is behind Delicious Library, and prior to that
co-founded and headed The Omni Group in 1991. He's also won 8 design awards!

------
chrisseaton
> I’ve literally never met one person who has enjoyed subscribing to software
> and losing access to it once they stop paying.

You can meet me - I much prefer subscriptions. Pay while I use it, like a
service, rather than pretending to 'buy' it which was never really how it was
anyway. I don't mind losing access if I'm not paying any more. If want to use
it again, I'm happy to pay again.

What's the problem?

~~~
wilshipley
Nice to meet you.

-W

------
linuxlizard
"Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago."

Aw. I love their software. Omnigraffle is my platonic ideal of great software.

~~~
wilshipley
Thanks!

-Wil

------
paulvorobyev
>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are
just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam,
etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the
exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything
it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps
that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But,
again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App
Store’s policies. Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago.

NO! Stop giving Apple more reasons to ruin the web. The browser lock-in on
iOS, poor support for modern browser features, and lack of any native
interfacing is beyond unforgivable. For Apple, the web is a second-class
citizen and it's bordering on lunacy to suggest otherwise.

~~~
flatiron
Genuinely interested how you think their WebKit (which they started from KHTML
back in the day) implementation has “poor support for modern browser features”
I agree with browser lock in though. But I feel that iOS is so successful that
they don’t treat the web as a second class citizen. It’s just WebKit...

~~~
realusername
I'm a web developer, Safari mobile feels honestly on the borderline of being
abandoned, every time I look at their new Safari release, there's a least a
minimum of 6 to 8 years of lagging behind Chrome and Firefox (and that's just
the features we're talking about here, not basic layout, forms & css bugs they
still have...). I generally spend as much time to fix Safari mobile as IE11

~~~
Nextgrid
What kind of features are we talking about though? As a user I don’t see what
I really miss out on by using Safari. If anything, the lack of user-hostile
features such as push notifications is a _good_ thing.

~~~
realusername
You don't see you're missing out because there's people spending hours to
adapt the website to make it work...

For the features, I could mention from what I ran into myself:
input[type="number"] (yes, they still have not fixed their implementation
after all those years...), the full screen api, Media Source Extensions, css
::selection, Intersection Observers, autofocus (yes, even that does not work),
I could add a lot more here.

And that's not mentioning the various bugs you have on this platforms, again
some example of what I ran into:

\- [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18047353/fix-css-
hover-o...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18047353/fix-css-hover-on-
iphone-ipad-ipod) (yes, you read it well, even tapping on an element does not
work as normal)

\- [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11768364/svg-scaling-
iss...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11768364/svg-scaling-issues-in-
safari) (svg rendering issues)

\- [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52826005/workaround-
for-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52826005/workaround-for-
ios-10-12-webkit-safari-chrome-iframe-focus-bug) (iframe focus bug)

There's plenty of weird quirks like this everywhere. It's never completely
broken but it's pretty comparable to the time you spend fixing things on IE11
honestly.

------
LudwigNagasena
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Right now
new versions either have to be made into all-new apps, _or_ we have to give
away all new versions for free. There’s no way to charge an upgrade free. If I
buy a Mac or iPhone from Apple I can trade it in towards a new one when I
upgrade, but users can’t do the same thing for software. All the developers I
know are suffering right now because Apple has prevented us from offering
special upgrade pricing. It’s completely unsustainable to ask developers to
continue supporting their apps but also to forbid them from charging for
upgrades.

I don't understand. Aren't freemium apps allowed on AppStore? There are lots
of apps with in-app purchase upgrades.

~~~
frenchie14
There's a model for going free -> paid. There's no model for going App V1 ->
V2 with payment.

~~~
jonas21
There's nothing stopping you from shipping V2, but keeping the new features
locked behind an in-app purchase.

~~~
greysphere
(1) This is difficult. You have to support multiple versions within the same
executable. So there is an economic barrier.

(2) And sometimes, it is impossible. An example is supporting new iphonex+
aspect ratios. There's no way post-launch to 'go back' to the old scheme or go
forward to the new.

------
tln
> almost 1% of our profits

The article says 1%, his tweet says 1/3... but that seems low! Apple's cut is
30%. To only take 1/3 of profits, costs must only be 10% of revenue... cost of
support, advertising, AND development.

------
ksec
The problem isn't with the 30% Cut. It is the value that it offers. Right now
it is nothing more than rent seeking. Apple doesn't even have to lower the
Cut. They need to provide more values from the Cut.

It could be CDN for your app, where Apple could lower the bandwidth usage for
certain uses, using the Apple EdgeCache. Or additional tools that helps
developer's productivity.

There are lots could be done. And yet Post Steve Jobs Apple hasn't acted on
it.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
CDN for your app sounds like a minority use case, a service that could be sold
separately. Not even relevant for native-only apps. I don't want Apple to try
to justify the 30% with luxury services, I just want them to reduce the cut.

------
elagost
Every year, it becomes more and more obvious that Apple cares far greater for
money and numbers than developers or customers. Any criticism thrown at the
company goes into a void, they don't communicate about any issues or feedback,
and they continue to take away useful features and replace them with either
nothing, or something nobody asked for. I used to really like this company.

~~~
KarlKemp
Every year for 40 years running...

------
CapriciousCptl
All these great things that would reduce Apple’s profits. I’m not even sure
it’s too unfair since developers know the state of things going in. It can
also get a bit worse since so many developers continue to put out high quality
apps despite it all.

------
api
The App Store sharecropping model is bad enough, but it adds insult to injury
that app stores (ALL of them!) are so absolutely horrible. The search
functionality is terrible. Discovery is terrible. The developer experience is
terrible. They're just total amateur hour. For something Apple and others want
to push it really seems like they're not putting any resources into making
them not suck.

------
StillBored
This ad/keywork thing on iOS drove me nuts for the few months I actually was
using a iphone (before switching back to android). If I search for "RDP", I
don't want to see a bunch of proprietary desktop sharing applications, VNC
applications, etc as the top 10-20 hits. I want to see applications that
support the RDP protocol.

------
chadlavi
I agree with all of this, but isn't it possible to charge for updates via an
in app purchase?

~~~
saagarjha
Then you’re shipping every version of the app at once, I guess?

~~~
chadlavi
No. Let's say I'm on version 9 of my app and I release a new major version 10.
I think I could use in-app purchases in a new pushed version 9.1 that allows
all the people who already have the app to purchase the upgrade to 10.
Everyone who buys the app brand new now gets version 10, without that in-app
purchase to upgrade to 10.

~~~
saagarjha
Right, but if someone starts at version 3 they need to always be on version 3
until they pay…

~~~
chadlavi
That's the whole point the linked post makes--they wish it were easier to make
that happen. Updates represent labor. It's fair to ask users to pay for that
labor.

------
mdoms
Why would it change if you keep shoveling money (and dev resources) directly
to Apple? They already know you'll stay regardless of their response.

~~~
wilshipley
They don’t know that, actually, because I haven’t decided I’ll stay in the App
Store.

-Wil

~~~
lapcatsoftware
Other prominent indie devs have left the App Store: Panic, Bare Bones, Rogue
Amoeba. It didn't change the system, and some of them even came back (with
special favors from Apple).

Perhaps leaving is a (temporary) solution for Wil Shipley, but I would agree
with the comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505370)
"The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING. Right now, Apple can do
whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us."

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang
separately. - Ben Franklin

~~~
wilshipley
See, my thinking is if enough of us get “special favors” then the special
favors will become the norm.

------
jayd16
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps.

Can't this be done with a non-consumable in app purchase? Is that against the
TOS?

------
buboard
are there people here making substantial money selling apps (instead of making
them)?

~~~
jamil7
There are quite a few independant developers in the iOS and macOS community
who make a living selling apps. This is one of the points in the tweets. These
people developing specifically for the platform are often the ones building
the highest quality experiences as they're focused in one area and able to
make use of all the OS level integrations and user experiences (think
accessibility, gestures, spotlight search, siri integration). In short these
developers are what make Apple products "Apple". The app store right now is
hurting these people the most, if all we end up with is cross platform ports
on each platform that behave the same then theres no reason to buy an iPhone
in the first place since the experience would be the same anywhere else for
far less money.

------
AtlasBarfed
Why do app developers accept the app store...

It is a amazing programmers organize so well for open source but can't
organize for basic policy like resisting these ridiculous terms.

~~~
qayxc
Serious question: how else would they be able to get their product into the
walled garden that is iOS?

It's basically play by their rules or be left out of the game entirely...

~~~
unnouinceput
So leave them as well. And when enough will do this Apple will wake up, but
will be too late for that.

------
howon92
Interesting points. I disagree with one of the points that argues Apple should
favor the “real apps,” which I assume refer to native iOS apps. Users don’t
care what stack developers use as long as the product does its job and
developers for sure want to reach as many users as possible regardless of what
platform they are on. Also, companies with more resources will be better
positioned than indie developers to make native apps for multiple platforms,
so it wouldn’t benefit the author too. So who really benefits from this?

~~~
fastball
Also worth noting that Steve Jobs' original plan for the iPhone involved
making web-apps first class citizens, with access to system notifications,
etc.

~~~
saagarjha
Push notifications were introduced after the iPhone SDK, weren't they?

~~~
fastball
Yes?

------
znpy
So the author has felt mistreated for a number of years, filler a form for a
number of years and nothing changed?

All I can think of is the following quote:

«Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different
Results».

~~~
_ph_
If a goal is worthy, one should keep persue it. It often takes preserverance
to achieve an abitiuos goal. Don't let people win, just because they are
stalling the discussion.

