
You’re Paying into a Broken System Whenever You Buy Something on iOS - quark33
https://onezero.medium.com/youre-paying-into-a-broken-system-whenever-you-buy-something-on-ios-3f3aa88ecf8c
======
nerdjon
>On no other platform would we accept a scenario where the owner of that
platform dictated not only the tools developers can use, but restricted the
ways they talk about their products and pricing. We would call it unfair,
monopolistic, and overbearing. But on our smartphones, it’s just a fact of
life.

I am pretty sure game consoles have been doing this basically since their
existence. None of them allow you to make 'A' rated games for example.
(Considering the topic of the article, it should be obvious I am referring to
"restricted the ways they talk about their products and pricing" here)

Retail stores keep some amount of control over signage, I doubt Walmart would
be particularly happy if a sign said you could buy X device cheaper directly
from the manufacturer.

In reality Apple is continuing a trend that is normal for store fronts,
digital or physical.

However, the "walled garden" of Apple is largely why I stick with iOS. I don't
want to be forced to trust every company with my credit card information (a
developer implementing their own payment system will be an immediate delete
for me, with very few exception... like Amazon for obvious reasons).

Also lets not forget that we keep seeing reports that iOS users are more
likely to spend money than Android users. I would argue that the increased
income from users makes up for the 30% cut.

~~~
vbezhenar
> I don't want to be forced to trust every company with my credit card
> information

This problem is solved with Paypal.

~~~
693471
Why would anyone trust PayPal? They still owe me $900 from 2005 when I was the
victim of a reverse scam. (Buyer claimed i scammed and never sent it; they
refused to investigate or accept my tracking info as proof)

~~~
pathartl
To me this just verifies that diversity is better than uniformity in these
scenarios. That's fine if you don't trust PayPal because of your own
experiences, but why should we be forced to use Apple Pay?

~~~
y_molodtsov
Nobody forces you to use Apple Pay.

------
fhood
As an end user I approve of the walled garden. I don't mind the limitations on
other forms of payment. I think it helps prevent fraud and insecure
transactions, and I like the freedom and ease of use that comes with knowing
that apps on the ios store went through a fairly substantial review process.

As a developer (though it has been a few years since I wrote code for mobile)
Apple's tools, documentation and libraries were so much better than Google's,
though that may say more about Google than Apple. And I approve of app store
revenue supporting those tools.

But 30% is really, really high. I don't work for Apple, or Google for that
matter, so I have no insight into what portion of the money goes to the
services mentioned above, but it seems to me that even 20% would be pretty
hard to swallow, and 30% seems unreasonable.

I would love to hear from someone with actual knowledge of this how much of
that app store revenue is profit.

~~~
swebs
>But 30% is really, really high

Interestingly, that's about the average income tax rate. I wonder if Apple and
Uncle Sam both independently came to the same conclusion that that's the
highest amount that they can get away with without hitting the tipping point.

~~~
lancesells
It's not Apple it's everyone. Sell an eBook on Amazon - 35 to 70% royalty. I'm
sure there are some outliers but most are right in that range. I think
physical products seem to be less than digital ones: Ebay ~10%, Etsy ~5%.

~~~
ramses0
30/30/30 splits are extremely common across all industries.

[https://www.nuvonium.com/blog/view/how-to-price-your-
product...](https://www.nuvonium.com/blog/view/how-to-price-your-product-for-
retail-distributor-and-direct-to-consumer-sal)

Basically a $10 product had better cost $3 to make, $6 for wholesale, and $10
MSRP. If you're outsourcing manufacture, then you're likely adding another
layer in there for a 30/30/30 split.

------
Wowfunhappy
> Here’s the thing: If you’re a developer for iOS or macOS and want to charge
> customers money, the Apple-provided payment tools, which demand a 30% cut,
> are the only ones you’re allowed to use. It’s not even a discussion.

Why does macOS keep getting offhandedly roped into these discussions? Not only
is the Mac App Store not a requirement, it's rarely used.

Maybe Apple intends to change that some day, but that's speculation, not
reality. And frankly, from where I sit, people have been predicting the demise
of macOS sideloading for nearly a decade now, and they're still waiting.

~~~
nothis
>Maybe Apple intends to change that some day, but that's speculation, not
reality.

I'd say it's pretty obvious that this is a desired outcome on Apple's part.
You can either wait until it's too late or bring it up before it's happening.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Based on what? Have Apple executives said anything on the matter? Even vague
warnings? You're relying on your own interpretations of their intentions.

Over the years, Mac's _defaults_ have changed to protect inexperienced users
via restrictions like Gatekeeper and SIP. Apple has _never_ attempted to make
any of these systems mandatory. All it takes is a few terminal commands to
gain complete kernel-level access to my system.

~~~
Crinus
> Have Apple executives said anything on the matter? Even vague warnings?

Because companies never lie or say that "we're not going to do XYZ" until next
week/month/year where they go "XYZ is the new awesome". Expecting companies to
be honest is like placing a cat near a canary and expecting them to be BFFs,
especially when the topic is something that people have negative concerns
about.

It is _MUCH_ better to be explicit and loud about what you do not want to see
_before_ it happens, than try to reverse a situation after it has already
happened. You lose nothing by doing the former, even if there were never plans
to do what you fear might happen.

~~~
edmundsauto
I tend to look at things from the lens of social capital. If I'm always
yelling about something, it desensitizes them when something bad actually
happens. The "boy who cried wolf" is the downside, and being explicit and loud
about something that hasn't even happened and (to most people's eyes) isn't in
the works... It marginalizes you. A lot.

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Disagree. Every system has problems. Look at what happened with Zoom —
unrestricted access to your entire user account on MacOS, for them to do
whatever they want. Normal people should not have to even think about a virus
or malware scanner on their system.

I like where Apple is going and I like the iOS model. Most of all, I know that
people like my parents will be better protected from malware and spyware and
crypto extortion.

~~~
yepthatsreality
Except this ignores the fact that there has been spyware and malware on
Apple's store. Which perhaps gets removed eventually, but what about services
that sell your data to the highest bidder without Apple's knowledge? Apple's
offered security is relative to their definition of security. All it takes is
your parents to install a malicious app that passed the app review. Deferring
to Apple as some sort of security baby-sitter is just lazy and blind to the
truth.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Like I said, no system is perfect. But let’s be real — which OS model is
likely to better secure them and limit the damage? It’s objectively clear it’s
iOS. iCloud backups make recovering from the damage much easier too. Backing
up MacOS or Windows is still not easy.

Even if they installed a malicious app on iOS, the damage is still limited
because of the security model of iOS.

I definitely understand the concern of centralizing everything around one
provider, but I’m just pointing out that these systems win because, on the
whole, they are a better experience for users. It’s why Facebook wins, and
it’s why closed systems continue to crush open ones.

~~~
yepthatsreality
> It’s why Facebook wins, and it’s why closed systems continue to crush open
> ones.

There's a bit too much going on in your response, so...I greatly disagree on
many levels and I feel this statement is a good lead as to why.

------
jmuguy
I know its snarky but complaining about Apple's walled garden via a post on
Medium makes me chuckle.

~~~
ctrl-j
It's especially funny to me, since I apparently have exceeded my monthly
premium medium article limit - and would need to pay to actually read this.

~~~
collyw
Does "open in a private window" work?

~~~
tasuki
Yes, but, why should I have to do that? I'm not even angry at Medium, business
do what business have to do. But why do people willingly post their content on
Medium where it gets walled? To begin with, there's WordPress - and countless
other alternatives.

~~~
aocenas
I think you need to opt in for your article to be behind paywall and if you do
that you get some share from that. So it is basically people wanting to make
money from what they write.

~~~
tasuki
Ah ok, so everyone is being rational - that's awesome to hear, thanks! :)

------
gchokov
I am happy buying stuff from the iOS store. It's convenient, quick and easy.
No objection as an end user.

~~~
crazygringo
Wouldn't you be happier if prices were 25% lower?

Maybe you're not objecting because you don't know how much better the
alternative could be?

~~~
hprotagonist
if the alternative is a malware-infested google play store where every second
app phones home 900 times a day or whatever, i think i'll pass.

I'm making my iOS walled garden choice with open eyes.

I'm happy to sideload apps if they're worth it; so far the only one i found
that I cared enough about to do this with was Blink, and i wound up buying it
on the app store afterwards so the developers could get their cut.

------
blub
The mobile app markets are operating at such scales, that there's a literal
avalanche of scammers and assholes waiting to take advantage of you.

There is zero chance that I would send personal info or payment data to some
no-name app and even most of the other well known apps.

~~~
hindsightbias
Correlation may not be causation, but I have a four year old CC that is just
used for online subscriptins and purchases (netflix, hbo, apple, amazon,
intuit, airlines, phone).

Friday AM, I threw caution to the wind and used it at a smaller retailer site
and software vendor. Within an hour I had a notice from my bank that my cc
information had been exposed and a new card was being sent to me.

I don’t like a world where I have to be paranoid and minimize the vendors who
get my sacred numbers/business, but from the headlines and experience not many
others are willing to be paranoid enough about security for me.

------
dangus
I had a while ago calculated the actual download cost with S3's pricing on
what each ~100MB Spotify update would cost if it was self hosted. Assuming
each paid and free Spotify customer on the iOS platform updated the app was
something to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars depending on how you
estimate the marketshare of iOS for Spotify versus their other platforms.

What the App Store provides is not valueless, quite the opposite in fact. It's
an entire system of distribution management.

Is it monopolistic? By definition, no, because Android is the #1 smartphone
platform in the world.

Is it great that Apple has provided no alternative way of downloading software
to the iPhone and iPad? No, that's not great either, but users knew that from
day one (when the iPhone had no App Store at all).

In reality, iOS is no different than a game console like the PlayStation 4 or
Xbox One, and yet we consider those closed marketplaces completely functional
and normal.

If Apple was the only company making smartphones or if they even made a
plurality of them, perhaps this would be a problem.

~~~
mattnewton
> Is it monopolistic? By definition, no, because Android is the #1 smartphone
> platform in the world.

This depends on how you describe the market. Is the market smartphone users or
is it iOS apps? If you are in the market to buy an iOS app, you must go
through apple, which would suggest it is a monopoly. IANAL but this has
precedence - think of the “windows browser market” that Microsoft was raked
over the coals about. The fact that you could buy a Mac or run Linux didn’t
appease the courts IIRC.

I find a lot of value in the iOS App Store and think it is just like a game
console, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be viewed as a monopoly _for iOS apps_

~~~
dangus
Microsoft was raked over the coals because they actually possessed a pure
monopoly.

In 2002 Internet Explorer had a 96.6% browser marketshare. [1]

In 1999 Microsoft Windows made up around 95% of desktop operating systems in
use. [2]

In terms of antitrust law, IANAL but, I think you'd have a harder time
convincing a court that the App Store is a monopoly of any sort. I don't think
you can just break down markets into sections like that and claim they have a
monopoly on that section.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#On...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#OneStat.com_\(April_2002_to_March_2009\))

[2]
[https://money.cnn.com/1999/01/19/technology/microsoft/](https://money.cnn.com/1999/01/19/technology/microsoft/)

------
zxcvbn4038
Even if Apple takes 30%, that’s still 70% that the app developer wouldn’t have
if the App store didn’t exist. Without the App Store we would still depend on
publishers to put us into stores, ask any author how that worked out for them.

------
docker_up
Sorry, but the blog post is a hard sell. It's obviously from an app developer
that would prefer not to jump through the hoops of the App Store, but as a
customer, I like it.

It's not perfect but it appears to be much, much better than Google version.

What I don't like is the limited app discovery, and the bad rules in terms of
apps just taking names and causing a lot of confusion so that I'm not sure if
that's the app I really want to install.

------
Brendinooo
It's worth going back to the App Store reveal video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8)

30% might be high, and there's certainly a case to be made for conflict of
interest in the Netflix/Spotify arena, but the App Store is solving a lot of
problems: it's a single, universal way to get an app out to every iThing, it
manages updates, and there's no nickel-and-diming in terms of processing fees
or hosting or anything like that.

I thought it was in that keynote but maybe not: I remember someone comparing a
30% cut to the costs associated with getting a physical copy onto retail
shelf, and if I recall correctly it was in the same universe.

------
mikl
> Posting article ranting against walled gardens on Medium

The irony here is palpable ಠ_ಠ

------
endorphone
App Store cash is often significantly discounted. You can often buy $100
iTunes cards for $83 at Costco, for instance. This spurs on a lot of spend on
the platform given that it becomes a staple gift choice for a lot of younger
relatives.

Further this is all very hand-wavy about abuse without mentioning the benefits
that very same platform provides. It makes the whole discussion around it
completely specious because it's inventing a victimization.

------
talkingtab
"For each card processed, a developer will pay an average processing fee of
around 2% to 3%"

My understanding is that credit card processors, Stripe for example, charge
$0.30 + 2.9% of the transaction amount. So for an $0.99 purchase that is
roughly 33 cents. On large purchases your statement is true, but in-app
purchases average $0.99.

~~~
patio11
This is one reason why microtransactions are often aggregated by either pre-
selling a pseudocurrency or credit or by having the seller essentially extend
you credit and capture payment after several microtransactions have gone by.
You can see this on iTunes and the App Store; if you buy a song, you are
unlikely to get billed for the song immediately. Apple will quietly keep a tab
open for a few hours (or days!) and then wrap all purchases into a single
transaction, which is much more economic for them.

------
_ph_
There are many facets to this. First of all, the App Store performs a range of
services. Payment processing, the app review, hosting. For the user it is a
trusted platform, where credit card numbers are not transmitted to arbitrary
locations on the web, the app review and the ability to withdraw malicious
applications do offer quite some protection.

From this side, the App Store fee can be justified. Whether it is reasonable
or to high depends on many parameters. A fair solution would be to have the
fee start at 30% and decline with sales numbers, as the review process doesn't
increase. Of course, large commercial entities, who do have their own
servers/payment processors and don't need a trusted site to host their apps
are less happy with the policies.

But beyond the discussion about the fee, there is the aspect that Apple
prevents all software installations from outside the app store. This is
something which has to change as Apple isn't only protecting against malware,
but also limits a lot of benign applications from being available on iOS. The
first thing coming to my mind is Termux, which would instantly make an iPad
much more usable. And extending that, a whole range of development tools could
run way better on the iPad than it is allowed on the App Store. Just imagine a
Linux VM running on the iPad...

Apple should (or should be forced by regulators) to offer a Gatekeeper-like
solution on the iPad/iPhone which gives the users a reasonable amount of
control about their devices.

And there is of course the content question. Apple tries to enforce their idea
of "morale" onto the users. This is fine for their storefront, so to say, but
there should be a section in the App Store for adult content. Especially the
safe payment process would make this a very attractive service. If Apple wants
to keep the "service" story alive for the App Store, they should craft their
services according to the user demands, not to their ideas of what users
should consume and install.

------
securityfreak
I believe Apple users choose the Apple ecosystem specifically because they
value the protection the App Store provides. I can't even imagine the
nightmare if every app was allowed to redirect me to their website, register
there and enter payment information before I can start using their app. This
system would be abused as hell. The in-app purchases are transparent (I can
review all my transaction in one single place) and I can approve my child's
purchases remotely.

Also I am sure if the roles were switched, Spotify would no way in hell allow
Apple Music to be priced the same way on their App Store for their ecosystem
users. It's hypocrisy.

I agree 30% might be too much, but it's their App Store, their users, their
infrastructure, their public trust at stake, their rules.

------
klauslovgreen
The restrictions and policy applied by Apple and to some extend Google makes
it very hard to get traction, particularly for smaller developers.

It feels extremely risky to develop high-budget new apps in this environment
as there is a real chance the app will be rejected in order to comply with
hard to understand limitations or end up not being allowed to be published at
all.

------
sharno
Apple's ecosystem is one of the best out there actually, pretty seamless
experience with little flaws here and there that are ok to live with or they
get fixed slowly.

Compare that to the alternatives and you'll find it marginally better

------
bigend
You could replace iOS with Android, altough it is even more broken though.
Just in worse ways. Hello arbitary dev account bans with no human to answer.
Byebye privacy.

------
josefrichter
"monopolistic"? doesn't Apple have around 10% market share?

------
PascLeRasc
I noticed that the author published this on a website that implements a
paywall, doesn't allow much control over the look of their column, and tries
to make you log into an official Medium account to read. I wonder why that is,
if they're championing the open ecosystem so much?

------
grandridge
all this whining about things not being fair. they created it, you use it.
stop whining. I dont like it, I dont use it, simple.

It didn't exist before, it doesn't need to exist, and its purpose of existence
is not to be fair to you.

this country is turning into a bunch of bitches

------
CameronBanga
Is anyone familiar enough with Medium to know why someone would publish their
blog on the platform, and lock users behind a paywall in order to read their
blogposts?

Do they get a cut? I'm not even sure of price, but just see a screen that lets
me know I've hit the end of my "Member Preview".

------
ericls
I pay taxes

------
ChristianBundy
Non-paywall link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190729173504/https://onezero.m...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190729173504/https://onezero.medium.com/youre-
paying-into-a-broken-system-whenever-you-buy-something-on-ios-3f3aa88ecf8c)

------
jeksus
He is complaining about payments in Apple Store using annoyingly paywalled
medium.

As an iOS Developer I think that's 30% cut is fair and it works. Just look at
sales numbers on iOS vs Android. Most of sales comes from iOS. As a user I
hate then devs decide to skip MacOS store. For me it means I have to use some
3rd party payment and license management solution so they can save some money.

------
JustSomeNobody
"Solution"

Something something "... should..." something something "... should..."

That's not a solution. That's not even hope. That's dreaming.

