> Institutionalized 3p developers should be treated like adversaries
The weird part about your statement here, is that you bring up a statement about 3rd party developers doing bad things, and yet the solutions you gave do nothing except for take extra money from those 3rd parties and gives that money to Apple.
If you actually cared about stopping all these bad actions, why didn't you suggest an action that gives Apple zero dollars, and prevents these bad things from happening?
I am all for both helping customers, and preventing monopoly app stores. How about we solve all of this, by making sure app developers do not have to pay Apple anything, while also ensuring that app developers follow basic user privacy requirements?
As a user, why do I care if apple makes money over 3p devs. They’re all screwing over users in the end anyways.
But historical data shows Apple has been enormously better at strong-arming devs into behaving properly. That’s why I can safely assume that $0 needs to paid to that scummy dev making a flashlight app; I mean, I can safely assume there’s no app on the App Store adding noise by advertising $1 or $10 or whatever for just a flashlight app.
In fact, I’m tech savvy enough to see a scammy app on the App Store. Apple needs to toughen up on 3p even more. I see my girlfriend’s phone or my parents iPhone and notice all these apps for taking a screenshot, saving pdfs etc that trick them into buying subscriptions. Whatever Apple is doing makes me fork over $1000 for a phone. At least I can rely on the fact that using it for calculator or the compass isn’t gonna cost me additional $ — no matter how “reasonably small” that fee is from the developer’s perspective.
> As a user, why do I care if apple makes money over 3p devs.
Well the purpose of anti-trust law, and pro competition laws, is usually to prevent companies from using their market power to artificially give themselves a larger cut of the profits.
That is one of the reasons why these new laws passed.
And all your complaints about security or whatever, ring completely hollow, if you then propose a solution that does nothing to address security, and instead just gives money to Apple.
> they’re all screwing over users in the end anyways.
If you actually cared about this, then you would have proposed a solution that prevents the bad things from happening to users. Instead, you didn't do that. You instead proposed a solution that just gives money to Apple.
> Apple needs to toughen up
The point being, that increasing the amount of money given to apple, does not toughen up the app store. Instead it just gives money to Apple.
If you cared about toughing up on user protections, you could have given a suggestion that actually does that. But you didn't, once again. You instead just thought of a solution that does nothing to protect users, and instead just gives money to Apple.
> Well the purpose of anti-trust law, and pro competition laws
Well, ordinary people don’t give a shot about this:- they just care about user experience. That’s the point, I think, you’re missing. User experience trumps any conversation about profits, market share and money. Im not suggesting that Apple is the vanguard of user experience and that govts don’t care about users at all. I am suggesting that given the precedent of the web & windows era of computing, no govt agency has thought of policing 3p devs in favor of user experience the way Apple has.
You keep complaining that I’m not providing any solutions: I’m not here to do the Govts job. I am here to vocalize my problem so that the Govts and our community can recognize a perspective. Apple’s policing of 3p devs should not be loosened up: that WILL create problems.
Heck, if you want a solution, heck, just codify the laws of the developer program into constitutional legislation. I know, that sounds ridiculous. But that’s my point. 3p devs have to be disincentivized from anti-user, criminal behavior. Not just Apple. Don’t hate on Apple just because they’re able to police them better than anyone else.
> User experience trumps any conversation about profits
Ok, sure, you can have this opinion.
But the point still stands that anyone who claims to care about user experience, and yet only gives a solution that results in Apple getting more money, is giving a bad solution.
> just codify the laws of the developer program
As long as Apple gets a 0% cut of app revenue, I think that a lot of people would be OK with some of these laws.
None of this really matters anymore though. Apple lost. They are now going to lose out on all of these app store fees, for developers that go to a 3rd party app store.
And Apple should have proposed a reason solution, that resulted in them getting 0% and also solving these user privacy issues, much sooner.
But they didn't do that. And now the EU law is going to happen, whether Apple likes it or not.
> 3p devs have to be disincentivized from anti-user
And yet the original solution that you gave did none of this, and only gave Apple more money. Which means that your originally gave a dumb idea.
> You keep complaining that I’m not providing any solutions
You did give a bad solution though. You gave a bad solution that did not help users, and only gave Apple more money.
And because you thought of such a stupid idea that doesn't help users in any way, I am accusing you of not caring about users at all, and having bad ideas.
> anyone who claims to care about user experience, and yet only gives a solution that results in Apple getting more money, is giving a bad solution.
You seem to be getting easily confused or seem to have difficulty grasping the main point. You’re confusing the notion that “anything that puts more money in Apple’s coffers and not developers’ means it’s automatically a stupid idea”.
First, requiring developers to pay or placing any financial gates to developers disincentivizes non-committal, spammy, or even unidentifiable devs. This is a user-friendly policy.
Second, is the need to set up sustainable financial incentives. (This is not _directly_ related to user experience, which is where you’re getting confused and calling the idea dumb or stupid). There’s no way _any_ group of people who work on building the SDKs, Compilers, Tools, Marketing & Distribution, or anything remotely related would ever sustain their operations on 0% revenue. _Requiring_ devs to pay _proportional_ to their revenue is the sustainable process. Epic does that, Unity does that, AWS does that etc. Whether that’s implemented as a fixed price of $5000 per user or whether that’s an annual subscription of $100 (like Jetbrains’) is completely up to the creators of those systems (in the App Store’s case, Apple). I’m the end, it is _indirectly_ user-friendly: more trusted, well intentioned devs implies more trusted apps and a virtuous cycle of more users/customers.
Apple chose to proportionally charge devs based on their revenue. They could’ve chosen a hundred different options, sure. But they chose the method that created a financial incentive to build all development tools for free (practically), and set up systems to distribute, discover, maintain, update apps at per-user level (ie: they need to run servers that users download apps from; 3p devs don’t; nor does a user need to go bittorrent.com or cnet.com or softonic.com or whatever else could’ve been the hosting provider)
My idea on Xcode pricing is meant to emulate those same underlying policies. My idea is not meant to be the “holy grail” of solutions here. I merely use that to illustrate the much deeper, much more passionate point of view: that 3p devs are monstrous, vile, nefarious actors. They _ought_ to taxed! They ought to pay up!
And yes, they ought to pay up particularly to the hardware platform provider! Don’t think it’s fair? Well, go complain to Nokia or Blackberry circa 2007 when you _had_ zero avenues to get your app in front of users without those companies controlling the developer fully.
Or even the web in the 2010s where there’s an ungodly amount of tools, APIs, frameworks upon frameworks that none of them work cohesively well. The fact that web developers had to write custom polyfills or resort to user-hostile behavior such as charging IE users more To disincentivize people from using insecure browsers.
In both those instances developers made a 100% of all their revenue and acted like pure a*holes. Apple put an end to that by demanding devs conform to their platform!
> anything that puts more money in Apple’s coffers and not developers’ means it’s automatically a stupid idea
The reason why it is a stupid idea, is that the recommendation only gives Apple more money, and does nothing else.
> or anything remotely related would ever sustain their operations on 0% revenue
Apple sells iPhones. It can make its money off of that.
Apple is getting more than enough money, from its phone business, such that it will continue doing what it is doing now, even if it loses some revenue from alternative app stores.
So no, I am not convinced by your argument of us having to be worried about a multi-trillion dollar company losing a bit of money.
> is completely up to the creators of those systems (in the App Store’s case, Apple)
It is actually not completely up to Apple anymore. Because now there is a law, and they can either follow the law or leave the EU.
> And yes, they ought to pay up particularly to the hardware platform provider! Don’t think it’s fair? Well, go complain to Nokia or Blackberry
Actually no. Instead of your recommendation, we can instead make laws to force things to change, and this is what just happened. Apple is the one that lost here. You, or them, are the ones who are crying about the current situation.
Apple can either follow the law, or leave the EU market if it doesn't like the law.
You are the one crying here. Everyone else is basking in our victory. You are the one who is going to have to go cry to someone else, to change things.
Apple lost. You lost. The laws are being passed. And none of your arguments are convincing to anybody who is in support of these laws.
A convincing argument would instead be one that results in Apple getting zero money, and also protects users in some way. But you do not seem interested in a better outcome here.
And no, I or these law makers don't have to come up with another solution, because people like me who support this law already won.
Instead, it is Apple, and people like you, the one's who definitively, and completely lost, that are going to have to come up with a solution that convinces everyone else, that actually results in a 0% cut going to Apple, because you are the loser in this political situation.
The winners do not have to change anything, because we are getting our laws passed, and Apple is going to be forced to follow the law or shutdown in the EU, or other countries soon.
There could perhaps be more stringent government regulation around app development and data practices, but I don't believe that's the solution either as it would kill off small time devs entirely.
The current app store model requires giving Apple 15-30%.
That is part of the reason why there is now a law, in the EU, that will force the app ecosystem open.
And people are pretending like they care about things like privacy, and yet the solution that the person I was responding to gave does not solve the privacy issue, and instead just gives Apple money.
The point here, is if you actually care about privacy or data practices, or whatever, then the burden is on you to suggest a solution that both allows everyone to get around the Apple cut, and also solves this problem.
Or don't. The laws are already passed, so it is too late to stop Apple from losing all this money.
You're missing the point too. The App store did have some enforcement of privacy and security, which can't exist in a decentralized system that has now been enforced.
Sure, app developers would have more freedoms, but we're back to the OP's point - this is not a good thing as they too don't have the user's best interest in mind. Looking at the record of data breaches, I see it's Apple or Google who have held a high standard so far, while app developers have been rampantly abusing users for their own interests.
> The App store did have some enforcement of privacy and security
Ok, thats fine. And if this is something that you care about, then presumably you should recommend a way to do that, while also making sure that Apple gets a 0% cut, so that one of the purposes of the DMA is also fulfilled.
> but we're back to the OP's point - this is not a good thing
The OP gave no recommendations that actually helped with privacy and security. Instead, they simply thought of a way to give Apple more money.
If you care about security, or whatever, fine. But the original proposed solution that the OP gave, was that Apple should charge more money to 3rd party developers.
Charging more money to 3rd party developers is not a solution that has much to do with anything related to security. Instead it does not help users, and just gives money to Apple.
The weird part about your statement here, is that you bring up a statement about 3rd party developers doing bad things, and yet the solutions you gave do nothing except for take extra money from those 3rd parties and gives that money to Apple.
If you actually cared about stopping all these bad actions, why didn't you suggest an action that gives Apple zero dollars, and prevents these bad things from happening?
I am all for both helping customers, and preventing monopoly app stores. How about we solve all of this, by making sure app developers do not have to pay Apple anything, while also ensuring that app developers follow basic user privacy requirements?