1) Apple has widely publicized their policy on this.
2) Apple’s ecosystem is designed to create lock in and generate monopolistic profits. This actually is the goal of all businesses until their market becomes mature.
3) At the mature stage, businesses seek to compete on price and everyone’s “economic profits” are lowered to zero.
I don’t know if storage is at the point where it can be offered at breakeven at $20/year, but if it is, congratulations, you at least helped ruin Dropbox’s “greedy monopoly”. That being said, you have little chance at ruining Apple’s monopoly. You can decide to hurt it though by offering your product on Andriod for $20/year, and Apple for $28/year.
You also gain the benefit of targeting the “right customers” in the sense that Andriod customers are more focused on price, where Apple’s customers are more focused on looking cool. (no offence meant for either group, just simplifying for the sake of it).
I’d love to hear how you are able to gain such a huge cost advantage over the other companies in this space.
We actually proposed this idea to the person from Apple who was dealing with us, and although he said he can not "pre-approve" anything, but this seems to be ok, and within Apple's guidelines:
1. Users pay $19.99/year for 100 GB for a plan that does NOT have iOS access. This is a PC/OSX/Android only App, that has nothing to do with iOS.
2. Users pay $29.99/year for "100 GB + iOS Access" plan. The iOS app will have an IAP for the "100 GB + iOS Access" plan, for $29.99/year.
3. We wont offer the IAP for 19.99/year for "100 GB Desktop only" plan, because that subscription can not be used from iOS anyways.
How are we offering such low prices? We have worked very hard to create very efficient storage and compression technologies. We are not using a third party cloud (S3), and have built our own cloud, ground up, which drastically reduces the price. We are not offering much free space. According to our estimates, upto 50% total space on Dropbox is used by free users. Basically, Dropbox is "taxing" its paid users, to cover the charges for free users.
Yes, we are working on this. But being a startup, we will be really hurt by this. No iOS customers are going to use our service. However, we would be happy to lead the change. If this becomes a trend, and more and more companies follow our footsteps, we would be living in a better world a few years down the road :)
Only offer sign-in in the app (with no option to purchase / become a paying member). Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify, etc all do this, it's basically industry standard. Boom, done.
I would have expected this blog post 2 years ago; the fact that you were blindsided by this really doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your company. Anyone who's developed for iOS would have been able to tell you on day one that you're in serious gray-bordering-on-black territory with regards to IAP policy. Yeah, it sucks, and you can't really do anything about it. So suck it up and go with what everyone else is doing. Because so far, you've definitely lost me as a customer.
I'm an iPhone owner and I know that 1)you have no qualm about charging me more for the same service (apple's 30% notwithstanding) 2)you don't know much about iOS development and 3)your dissatisfaction with the platform makes me doubt your commitment to it in the future, and with data backup, I NEED to be confident in my service's future as well as its support of my device.
Well first of all, you are totally wrong. Read my comment below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642321) to know how we are not in the same category as Netflix, Spotify etc.
Second, We are not iOS developers. Our iOS app is just another "portal" for our users to access their files. Hell, we didn't even use Apple's SDK, we used PhoneGap to make the App.
Third, just like you, we were also in the illusion that we were not affected by this policy, and by not linking to an external website we were within the guidelines. Turns out, thats not true. (Read my comment linked above)
So why can't this be worked around the way everyone else does?
Don't link back to your own website from the iOS app, and don't give end-users any way to upgrade their account from the app. Have the app just ask for a username and password to authenticate with your service, and require end-users to go to your website in order to do any account management.
No, that's what we did. But it did not work. If you are thinking about Netflix or Kindle App, 1.14 of the "App Store Review Guidelines" says: "Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the App, as long as there is no button or external link in the App to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the App."
So that applies to only magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video subscription/content services. "Cloud Storage" is not included in the list. This is what was told to us by the Apple guy who we were talking to.
I use apps connected to pay SaaS services (Concur, SalesForce) -- the apps are free with no IAP, but my company pays a lot for them. Yammer has pay services and a free iOS app with no IAP. I think if you look for them, you will see tons of apps like this that are the front-end to a SaaS service (not content) -- why is yours any different?
Well, thats another thing we are exploring. If a third party developer makes an App "ZapDrive Browser" using our API and does not link to the website, that should be ok. Because, technically, they can not offer IAP, since they can't do it in first place. Its like developers using Dropbox API in their Apps, as long as they don't point to Dropbox, they are approved.
Thats a good point you raise. But at the end, there is the ultimate reason that Apple has: "Just because other Apps are doing this, does not mean you can do this too." I think they have put "cloud storage" into a category, that has to offer IAP. Since they made Dropbox and Google Drive offer IAPs already, they expect every new entrant to follow in line. I am sure they will start targeting other SaaS markets as well.
> Its all over the Internet Explorer thing happening again. But with IE at least you could tell your users to download a better browser if they want to use your app. You can not tell your users, "Buy another phone to use our service!"
That's what I take from the article. People got up in arms in a way that was much stronger against Microsoft during IE's early years and whining for Netscape (who lost because they just made a shitty browser, it wasn't 100% because of bundling IE with windows. Netscape Navigator 4 was terrible and slow compared to IE.) much more than people do against Apple, even though we could install an alternative browser, which is something you can't even do on the iPhone and iPad (without a modern JS engine you might as well give up, there isn't a single browser on iOS that is not based on the internal webkit and a JIT-lacking javascript engine. There's the oddball, Opera, that does all the rendering in their server farms, but they don't allow anything that runs locally).
There were even talks of cutting Microsoft into multiple companies, one that makes office, one that makes windows etc. Only people who have been around during those years would know what I'm talking about, but MS was hated to a point you couldn't begin to imagine in 2012, for something that wasn't even a bit as bad as Apple post-iOS.
I can't believe the crap Apple gets away with, they are getting away with so much that even Microsoft is now following their lead, Windows Mobile had far less restrictions compared to Windows Phone and Windows 8 on ARM which are both reactions to iOS rather than something MS thought of doing before the tide that iOS (and Android) did to the smartphone market. Windows Mobile wasn't open source, but the user was as free to install and use apps as they are now with Android. It's not the case anymore, and there won't be anything like Chrome or Firefox or (locally rendering) Opera for Windows 8 tablets on ARM. Only on x86 and only because they know how much of an uproar it'd be with current x86 users, because if they could close everything down and get away with it, they would, which is why we should be as loud as possible to show that we don't want this kind of future for our computing devices.
Apple can get away with this because they aren't a monopoly. Their market share isn't anywhere close to the 90% that Microsoft enjoys.
They temporarily enjoyed a 90% share of tablet sales, but that has since dropped substantially. This is probably a good thing from Apple's perspective, since if it would have stayed at 90% then they probably would have the DOJ on their back for their monopolistic practices.
You can sell your service to people that have iPads.
This is the fundamental question of what an iPad is. Apple would like it to be treated as an extension of their store, and you want it to be like a Windows PC. Any consumer that agrees with you is free to jailbreak -- your problem is that consumers seem to have no problem with Apple's model -- they probably don't understand it, but they haven't perceived an indirect drawback either.
Developers should have their eyes wide open about it by now.
So, the right thing, if your intention is to change their behavior is to not support them. Don't buy it, don't develop for it, encourage others to do the same.
The thing is ... everyone wants one and wants to develop for them.
No, we can not sell our service to people who have iPads without paying a 30% cut to Apple.
Again, as mentioned in the article, we think there is nothing wrong with Apple having an App Store and charging a 30% fee. What's wrong is, Apple forcing everyone to use their App Store for distributing Apps.
"Don't buy it, don't develop for it, encourage others to do the same" - That is the whole point of this article.
MS came under fire, not because it bundled its own browser, but because it was bullying other companies who were bundling Netscape with their PCs. (If I am not wrong, I think MS threatened to stop doing business with HP, if they bundled Netscape with their PCs).
Apple is doing even worse, not only is it not letting any other browser to be installed, its not even letting any other app to be installed without its "Distribution System". Its forcing you to use their "Distribution System" and pay for it.
Can you elaborate on your "100% safe and secure" claim? You appear to have a "reset your password" link, which is a big red flag that indicates to me that any data I store on your service is not private. To me "100% safe and secure" means that if you lose your password you lose your data, because it has been encrypted with the lost password.
Well, this is kind of off-topic for this thread. But anyways, the text you quoted actually says: "No downloads or installation required. 100% safe and secure!" That means, you are not vulnerable to any virus or trojans, as you are not downloading and running some software to use our service.
That's too bad. Storing encrypted volumes on Dropbox is a PITA. I'd readily switch from paying $0 to Dropbox to paying $20 to you if I could stop doing that.
If you can't make your business work on $x * 70%, you can't make your business work.
Every SaaS faces the same issue you have. And they (mostly) still offer IAP. That's because you might lose the 30% on the first sale, but usually renewals happen out of band.
What do you mean that we will lose 30% from only the first sale? If a user subscribes using IAP, their subsequent payments will also be charged a 30% fee by Apple. Won't they?
And its not the question of whether we can do business at $x * 70% or not. We would love to give 30% to someone who actually brings a customer to us (we actually have a 20% recurring commission for our affiliates). The question is how is Apple entitled to that cut?
For IAP can you make it really hard for users to trigger it? For example, "solve this puzzle to access the Pay button or go to mysite.com for fast checkout".
a) we were not developing for just for iOS. Our service is not an iOS only App. Our iOS App is just a tiny part of the whole package.
b) We knew App Store was the only channel, we also knew paid apps have to pay 30%. We, like many other people here, just were not aware that cloud storage apps were required to pay a 30% fee too.
2) Apple’s ecosystem is designed to create lock in and generate monopolistic profits. This actually is the goal of all businesses until their market becomes mature.
3) At the mature stage, businesses seek to compete on price and everyone’s “economic profits” are lowered to zero.
I don’t know if storage is at the point where it can be offered at breakeven at $20/year, but if it is, congratulations, you at least helped ruin Dropbox’s “greedy monopoly”. That being said, you have little chance at ruining Apple’s monopoly. You can decide to hurt it though by offering your product on Andriod for $20/year, and Apple for $28/year.
You also gain the benefit of targeting the “right customers” in the sense that Andriod customers are more focused on price, where Apple’s customers are more focused on looking cool. (no offence meant for either group, just simplifying for the sake of it).
I’d love to hear how you are able to gain such a huge cost advantage over the other companies in this space.