
“This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread” - mortenjorck
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/19/swisher-app-store-hey
======
welearnednothng
The CEO of Basecamp posted a response to all of this on they Hey website that
I found to be an interesting take that I hadn't seen talked about elsewhere.

An all too brief summary is that customers coming in through the App Store are
not your customers - they're Apple's, and you lose the ability to support
them. That falls on Apple, and Apple will inevitably fall short of
expectations.

Most recently, I spent several years at a subscription-based company. The size
of their customer support dwarfed technology, operations (the company ships
physical goods), and even sales. And without the 1,000+ hours/week of work by
customer support, the company would have seen so much churn to have long ago
been out of business. Yes, it would be great to have a situation where
everything works perfectly, no customer ever has a problem (even when those
problems are well outside of your control), and are 110% happy... but that's
just not a reality for many companies.

[https://hey.com/apple/iap/](https://hey.com/apple/iap/)

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks for your comment and the link. If I understand correctly Hey tried
_not_ to include IAP in their app, so customers would need to make all
transactions on their website, right? If that’s the case the rules are beyond
arbitrary, since e.g. Amazon’s Kindle app doesn’t allow you to buy books
through IAP (I’m assuming to avoid that 30% cut), and still Apple approved the
app. Am I missing something?

~~~
Terretta
“Reader” apps (consume content) versus utility/creator apps.

Apple concedes not taking a cut of your content subscription (Netflix, Kindle,
magazine readers, etc.), but if someone is subscribing to your app as a tool
(not to the content), Apple feels justified in charging for the tool’s
ecosystem.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks for your clarification, I didn't know that.

------
lukestevens
The App Store has always struck me as an example of Joel's 'commoditize your
complements' strategy.[0]

 _Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements
decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get
the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically
sustainable price would be the “commodity price” — the price that arises when
you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods._

Thus: $0.99 apps.

If you're feeling resentment, it's because you've been thoroughly commoditized
to increase the perceived value of Apple's hardware.

(Of course it's somewhat false "value" \- infinite shovelware is worth about
what it costs.)

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
letter-v/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

~~~
Metus
What surprises me is that Apple does not make a distinction between commercial
developers and open source developers, or any others that make only free apps.
Both need to pay almost 100 bucks a year just to have the opportunity of
publishing on the app store.

It seems to me that in the vein of 'commoditize your complements', developers
that only publish zero cost apps shouldn't pay an annual fee for the privilege
of making Apple's ecosystem more valuable.

------
stephc_int13
"the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous
amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all
the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s
peers or near-peers."

Exactly on point. It is time for change.

~~~
m463
I will say this is a surprisingly powerful comment from gruber, who has
generally been extremely forgiving of apple.

~~~
coldtea
Perhaps there are fractions at Apple wanting to change this, and Gruber has
sided with them...

------
jrumbut
I get a lot of requests for small, quick apps from researchers who want to
display a little content, maybe a form submission, sometimes a QR reader or
something.

I am always stuck saying "we can have the Android version out in $days, and
the iOS app sometime between a week later and never."

It's an upsetting thing to say but there's just too much risk dealing with
them for projects with tight timelines/budgets.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Related question: Why are people making entire apps for things which sound
like they should be webpages? Only the QR reader sounds like something that
needs to be an app, and there are 100s of QR reader apps already, and some
phones have it integrated natively in their OS.

~~~
jrumbut
You're not wrong, and beyond web pages some of these things could be PDFs or
text files even.

My perspective is, if I'm not doing anything evil, why do I have to clear a
complexity bar to publish an app? There are also some advantages for simple
apps, one is making it really easy to use offline with a nice shortcut on the
home screen. The other thing is making it full screen and no address bar
helping to decrease distraction.

These are not amazing reasons, but they matter for some people.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
I am definitely not blaming you. It just feels that we have reached this
bizarre state of affairs where we create so much useless cruft for vaguely
articulated reasons which are often not even true or borne in strong data, but
are rather some abstract intuition of some marketing folks somewhere who are
probably cargo-culting what they heard from another bunch of marketing folks.

------
dmlorenzetti
_acknowledgement of all the undeniably great things about the App Store from
the perspective of users and developers_

As a user, I shudder anytime I have to interact with the App Store. Even when
it works flawlessly, there is nothing interesting or pleasing about it. And
most of my interactions with it leave me with a mild feeling of having being
bullied about.

I had much rather install software via Homebrew than the App Store.

~~~
RikNieu
What specific interactions make you feel this way?

~~~
askjdlkasdjsd
I'm a software developer myself. For me, its more like a disengagement from
the whole thing.

Do you remember when android/ios were new and there were all new and fun games
coming out like angry birds and such? Everyone was into it for a couple years.

Now, if you look at those same games (or even apps from the same era), every
single thing about them is made to suck money out of you. It just does
something to you, and I've noticed this in most people I know too, it just
makes you sick.

Rather than constantly worrying about how not to be a sucker when searching
for a new app, I now frequently decide that whatever it was that I wanted to
do, I could do some other way or not do at all rather than be subjected to the
constant victimization by aggressive monetization everywhere you look.

The hard truth that we, the tech industry, are currently not accepting, is
that the value of a lot of the software out there, is actually zero or close
to it. The industry has matured. Commoditization is imminent.

Software will be like auto, energy, medicine. Just another industry. Software
developers will be like plumbers, advertisers, electricians - It'll be just
another trade, but the past gold rush and the remaining few nuggets still out
there will blind us all to this fact for the next decade at least.

~~~
Rotten194
Some anecdata on this point; I've tried two times to find a decent solitaire
app on the app store. I don't play solitaire that often, it helps to pass the
time occasionally, so I don't need something particularly complex or
featureful.

Every app I could find had some dark pattern or an overflow of ads or both.
Some kind of streak system where you were encouraged / nagged to play every
day or else lose your "coins" (aka preying on loss aversion to try and addict
players), fullscreen interstitial ad pages that try to trick you into clicking
them when you're moving cards? Animated banners that distract you from the
game?

I ended up giving up and just using a web version. It's not perfect, it's made
for desktop and the cards are really small on my iphone 6 and the UI is hard
to use, but it's clearly someone's labor of love and a lot pf care has been
put into it. I'd happily pay a few dollars for it, if it wasn't free.

There's not many apps like that on the App Store nowadays. And with Apple's
predatory rent-seeking practices, requirements of owning a $2000 computer to
develop for their platform, and high developer fees, they aren't helping the
situation.

~~~
forgotmypw17
I haven't dug deep on this, but I bet the following URL will offer some
helpful ideas:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=ios%20solitaire%20reddit](https://www.google.com/search?q=ios%20solitaire%20reddit)

Here is the best looking one from the first thread Google returned for me:

[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solitaire-decked-out-ad-
free/i...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solitaire-decked-out-ad-
free/id1153389718)

~~~
Rotten194
Thanks, it's ok, no ads, but it has coins and lootboxes and daily rewards, so
still far from ideal. I understand developers gotta eat but it's still
frustrating.

------
benologist
> I think if Apple measured developer satisfaction scores on the App Store,
> the results would be jarring.

I think their ARM Macbooks have the opportunity to be a real tipping point if
they make macOS as restrictive as iOS. Who'd sign up for another decade of
this? The only argument I've seen for them to not do that is a wide range of
developer tooling won't work, but perhaps they're OK with developers
exclusively using their own languages. They actually did ban apps made in
Flash (the IDE), Unity3d and other cross-compiling technologies from iOS for a
while even though they were producing native apps, and more recently they
banned apps using Electron too.

[https://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_fla...](https://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler)

[https://venturebeat.com/2010/09/09/apple-loses-game-of-
chick...](https://venturebeat.com/2010/09/09/apple-loses-game-of-chicken-
allows-flash-and-other-conversion-tools-for-ios-apps/)

[https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/04/electron-app-
rejections/](https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/04/electron-app-rejections/)

~~~
mortenjorck
I think it’s safe to say the CPU architecture of the Mac is orthogonal to
future restrictions Apple may put in place on MacOS (other than at the EFI
level). Not to say that they _won’t_ make the mistake of locking down MacOS to
an iOS level in the future, but x86 has never inhibited nor does ARM
specifically enable such a move for the OS.

~~~
dmix
Plus moving desktops/laptops to ARM would require a giant effort of developer
opt-in and monetary investment industry wide. I don't think company experience
with mobile/tablets via the App Store is a sufficient example of buy-in to say
it will be a viable choice.

There's a ton of random MacOS software that would need to be ported, upgraded,
or virtualized which could take a full decade to really cover the full ~99%,
with the last 1%+ mostly dying off.

Apple usually doesn't like running two product lines with arm/x86 options, so
it would probably be some weird transition thing.

~~~
Godel_unicode
> ...would require a giant effort of developer opt-in...

I'm not sure how true that is, there are a ton of workflows that can run
solely on iPads. The problem is largely physical form factor and a little bit
of UX smoothing for desktop computing on bigger screens.

I don't see it as a forgone conclusion that ARM Macs need to bring over the
legacy software, why can't they just use what's present in iOS? If I want to
design a form, I care less about the name on the app than I do about how well
it works.

I think a lot of desktop MacOS developers are in for a very rude awakening
about how irreplaceable their apps really are.

------
cjfd
Once upon a time the idea of a computer was that it is a universal machine
that can do any computation for you. As soon as the people producing the
computer are the same people controlling what software can run on it this idea
is out of the window. An app store is an evil idea right from the start.
Unless you actually don't want to own a computer but just want to buy a toy,
of course. Which is the bigger part of the market. It is the task of us
software developers who should be able to understand this to push hard against
the whole idea of an app store.

~~~
Godel_unicode
This line of thinking is as selfish as it is revisionist. Computers were not
intended to be a playground for the high priesthood of initiates with Very
Important Computations, they were intended to be tools to accomplish tasks. I
think it's insane to throw out the incredible democratizing effect app stores
have for the overwhelming majority of society in the name of you having
perfect control.

App Stores have done a huge good for society in bringing capability to the
general public. If a few startups have to suffer for it, oh well, that's their
job. It's not an accident the degree to which smartphone sales outstrip
feature phone and traditional computer sales.

This leaves out the discoverability argument, good luck getting people on the
internet to find and install your random app. Then there's the security
argument. Would you feel safer downloading a random script from the internet
and piping it to bash, or a random ipa from the app store?

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Computers started as million dollar machines back when Coke was 10 cents, that
only very smart people who could think in machine code were allowed to touch.

Perhaps at the minicomputer level did they start to enter the realm of more
basic tools rather than being massively expensive infrastructure. You could
call the massive caterpillar that moved the Saturn V to the launchpad a "tool"
technically, but not really.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I never said basic, you added that to change the meaning to what you want it
to be. CNC routers are often described as "the right tool for the job" by
machinists, and they can run into the millions.

These magic boxes were always designed to solve specific problems. That's the
generally used English meaning of tool. In my experience, people largely
object to the word tool because they don't think it sounds important enough.
Too bad for those people that it fits so well.

------
zby
The question now is what are the functions of App Store. Search and purchase
convenience? I guess so - but that is easy to replace and substitute. The real
one is security vetting. We see more and more problems in this area (with back
doors injected in Open Source libraries, which maybe was just the visible
part, because similar attacks would be much more stealthy in closed source).
So it is more and more important. Can it be replaced? I don't have much
expertise in this - but it seems to be very deeply intertwined with the
operating system.

I like to use the Christensen/Ben Thompson framework of integrated and
modularized systems: [https://stratechery.com/2020/chips-and-
geopolitics/](https://stratechery.com/2020/chips-and-geopolitics/). But how
that appliess here? Phone is a 'good enough' product now - so it should be
modularized. But how can you do security in modularized way, how security
could be separated from the OS? Maybe we need more vm based sandboxes ala
QubesOS?

------
cja
Microsoft attract developers who attract users.

Apple attract users who attract developers.

~~~
divbzero
There is truth to this and it runs deep in the DNA of the two companies.

On stage years ago [1] [2] Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were asked what they wish
they had learned sooner that the other guy did first. Gates ventured that he
would give a lot to have Steve’s taste. Jobs responded that he wish he were as
good as Bill at partnering with others.

These were more than off-the-cuff compliments. They speak to Apple’s DNA as a
design company focused on UX, and Microsoft’s DNA as a platforms company.

[1]: [https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-
at-d5-fu...](https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-at-d5-full-
session/60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052.html)

[2]: [http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-
transcript/](http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/)

------
VadimPR
I definitely concur. We've been making an open-source MUD client for a decade,
all for free, on our time. We have to pay $99USD for the privilege of giving
it away for free to macOS users. It's ridiculous.

We get no value in return for that $99USD - absolutely zero.

------
tln
> they fear speaking out publicly

Are there cases where Apple has retaliated against developers that do speak
out publicly? Or is the reticence to go public because they know that any
chance of special treatment is worth keeping silent?

edit: publicly not privately

~~~
smnrchrds
> _Are there cases where Apple has retaliated against developers that do speak
> out privately?_

Do you mean publicly?

How would you determine if a developer was retaliated because they spoke out?
I don't think Apple would ever issue a press release saying "yeah, we banned
developer X from our platform because we didn't like his New York Times
interview."

The thing with Apple is, app store rules are vague and arbitrary, and Apple is
the judge, jury, and executioner. They interpret and apply the rules
inconsistently. They have utmost plausible deniability. How would you prove
that you were removed, not for violating a vague rule that thousands of other
apps violate in the same way, but for speaking out?

Even if someone thinks about raising a stink after getting banned, they
probably won't go through with it. As we have seen on HN, Apple is so well
loved that when a developer speaks out against Apple, most people side with
Apple and attribute the developers complaints to not following rules, sour
grapes, greed, hating users, etc.

~~~
tln
(Right, publicly)

I suppose developers are most likely to speak up when Apple has applied the
rejection. And that is when you want a lifeline the most -- public shaming
doesn't necessarily help your friendly HN-reading Apple employee to reach out
and make a case.

The App store rules don't seem that vague -- just draconian. Sure, 30% of a
paid app. IAP through a nice end-to-end Apple experience, where consumers
don't have to enter any new information, are 30%? Make sense.

Can't offer IAP yourself? I can go either way, but to me this is the line
where Apple is turning the screws. Boy do they turn them. Can't offer
subscriptions outside the app. Can't link to other options for payment. Can't
have a front end to a SaaS app that is primarily used on other platforms.
Can't even mention the fact that Apple is taking a cut.

The app store rules do seem somewhat arbitrarily enforced. Ok, your 1.0 goes
in but a critical bugfix? Now we shake you down.

If I were affected by this, especially for a subscription app I'd be
contacting other affected parties and trying to educate the public on exactly
why their subscriptions cost $14.28 instead of $9.99

Through Google SEO, of course, instead of inside the app, because Apple
restricts what you say in the app about app store pricing.

~~~
Rotten194
the rules aren't so much vague as inconsistently applied: for example, the
Fastmail app works exactly the same as Hey, and hasn't been removed (yet, at
least). More:
[https://youdownloadtheappanditdoesntwork.com/](https://youdownloadtheappanditdoesntwork.com/)

------
Animats
This is the sort of thing which suggests to antitrust enforcers what to cut
out of a company to reduce its monopoly power. Apple could be forced to sell
off their "app store".

------
sriram_sun
So what is preventing some other company to build and manage an app store for
Apple software?

If Apple is preventing competing app stores, isn't that anti-competitive?

~~~
underwater
The argument is that iOS is not a monopoly because there are other smartphone
ecosystems.

I'm of the opinion that Android and iPhone are not interchangeable. They have
different experiences, and there are things that are mutually exclusive by
design (iMessage, Notes, etc.)

~~~
zaroth
The economic concept of substitutes does not required the products to be
indistinguishable. They are clearly competing devices under any definition.

------
m463
I think customers and developers deserve more from apple.

what happened to the firewall apps? One by one they were banned. (As a
customer, I would LOVE to install a firewall like Little Snitch or better)

even better would be to run my own icloud. That would be better from a privacy
standpoint (its a right!) Keep your kids safe, keep their data at home!

~~~
lstamour
Not just banned exactly. As I follow it, APIs used to create network plugins
were restricted to the point where it wasn’t clear how Apple wanted such apps
to work. Or rather, it was clear Apple felt their built-in tools would be
enough. For some, sure. And yes, reducing functionality is a legitimate way to
make a system more secure. But— it also does, you know, reduce
functionality...

~~~
m463
I still run an old not-updated version of Adblock
([https://adblockios.com](https://adblockios.com)) that created a vpn at
127.0.0.1 and would block specific traffic.

Then apple changed the rules and now it appears to be a crippled safari
"content blocker".

------
hurricaneSlider
Seen a lot of comments to the effect that 30% is not a lot.

But what about corporate taxes, what about things like the game engine getting
a cut (often an additional 5%), etc?

Apple Developers end up getting a slice of a slice.

That 30% is large enough to make whole business models unviable. You need 30%
more sales or raise prices commensurately. That's a lot.

You'll probably have to spend more on customer acquisition to achieve those
numbers as well as you start to eat into the long tail of customers. This eats
into profits.

The cut probably also impacts the quality of experience, particularly for
things like freemium games, as you need to monetize more aggressively to make
up for the Apple tax.

------
smitty1e
There is a need for servant-leader(s) who can build upon the example of RMS,
and spearhead a parallel organization to the FSF that can

\- square the circle of using Free Software with

\- the gnarly aspects of running a business and

\- deliver competent, secure products for the modern day.

Maybe there are some ethical vendors out there, but they haven't got the
advertising budgets of the Fat Cats, so help my ignorance in the replies,
please.

~~~
whitehouse3
Did you mean to post on a different thread?

~~~
mjevans
The best parts of the life work of RMS are related to the understanding that
Liberty can only be achieved if the means of discourse and use of language
generally are free and open to all. Without free general computers and the
free access to learn from and build upon the works created by those who came
before us, we have no collective shoulders of giants to stand upon and
continue the advancement and change of society.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read)

~~~
Godel_unicode
And yet a truly stupendous amount of meaningful, useful work is done using
evil, proprietary, closed-source Windows every day. How can this be??

This story does a great job of fear mongering, but that's about all it's good
for.

~~~
ReptileMan
Because on windows you are close enough to free. Raging twitter mob cannot
force microsoft to prevent windows from working on your PC, you can install
any app without microsoft approval etc etc ...

------
nullc
> I think if Apple measured developer satisfaction scores on the App Store,
> the results would be jarring.

Why wouldn't the same fear of retaliation prevent developers from being candid
in that measurement?

------
ilaksh
We have distributed protocols that make app stores obsolete. We just need to
start using those technologies.

------
alexashka
> This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread.

Stunning? :) Right.

Daring Fireball conveniently neglects to mention one crucial bit: _he_ is
afraid to speak his mind, because he's made a career out of being 'impartial'
when Apple is in the wrong, and the biggest fanboy when they get anything
right. ()

> Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong

Wrong according to Daring Fireball is anything that exposes Gruber as an Apple
shill and hurts his ability to continue making a living this way. Right is
everything that strengthens Gruber's position of being the #1 Apple shill in
the world and his ability to make a living.

It's hard to justify begrudging someone who is amoral and just wants to make a
living by doing the least amount of work possible. I am just so filled with
contempt - a personal failure on my behalf to feel this way.

\---

Somewhat related, to help people understand the 'stunning' resentment towards
Apple, the aura of aimlessness and cynicism in America and Western culture:

We live in a corporatocracy [0] (a word that doesn't exist according to
dictionary.com and Google's spell check). Almost all of us are wage slaves [1]
and those who have a chance at freedom, enjoy their private dinner parties too
much to ever speak up for the wage slaves. Why ruffle the feathers of your
fellow Aristocrat friends when you're hoping to join or have already joined
them?

Don't you know the many perks of being a wage slave master, even if you remain
a wage slave yourself?

Oh and those who have become Aristocrat rich? Never have to worry about money
rich? Your kids are now part of the Aristocrat family - they'll go to private
school, live in gated communities and attend 'elite' universities. You don't
need to worry about them wage slaves anymore, they're not as good as you, you
were brave and talented in pursuing greed at all costs, you're one of us now,
you're not one of them.

Resentment towards the ruling class is centuries old. For a thorough treatment
on this topic, there's a masterpiece that spelled this out in a powerful way
almost 150 years ago - On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche [2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality)

~~~
simonw
I've been reading Daring Fireball for more than 15 years now precisely because
I trust John Gruber to call out Apple when they need to be called out.

I'm always surprised to see people who think he's a biased shill - see you
reading the same site that I am?

------
fierarul
> To say that “many developers do not want to speak out for fear of falling
> afoul of Apple” is an understatement. Almost none do. And one thing I’ve
> learned this week — mostly via private communication, because, again, they
> fear speaking out publicly — is that there are a lot of them.

Seems to me the US has a lot of deep things they can't pronounce lest there's
retaliation.

Reminds me of communist Romania honestly.

Of course, we've all read
[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

~~~
leadingthenet
The US has been moving towards more authoritarianism, just like communist
Romania did when the system started failing at the seams in the 70’s.

Of course, when living inside the bubble, it’s not that obvious to people,
hence your downvotes.

------
ykevinator
You can't march into a private company and say the rules don't apply to me.

------
chvid
“This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread”

I am going to offer an alternative here.

The reason why the resentment runs deep and is widespread is that we are
beyond "peak App Store". While Apple's revenue on services and the App Store
is probably still growing it is because there are still more and more
developers piling on.

For the average developer, the golden days of the App Store are long gone. The
revenue has been declining for a long time and competition is still getting
stiffer. That creates resentment.

Being able to receive a micro-payment of just one dollar and being listing in
a potentially powerful marketing channel - the App Store - is a huge bon and
something the web cannot offer. Paying 30% for that is reasonable, even cheap.

Should Apple offer discounts for big businesses such as Facebook, Google,
Basecamp? Let them have a fee of less than 30%? Maybe. But that will not make
Apple more popular amongst average developers.

Mr. dhh is a smart guy and a master nerd manipulator. He knows that the app
offering of his new product is not that important and things are ripe for a
smackdown of Apple. Also a little conflict helps getting attention on his new
product. So he brings this up now even though Basecamp has had stuff in the
App Store for years.

