Hookers and pimps work the same way. 70/30. I don't know what people are complaining about. /s
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Comments on 'Hey' App Controversy and Apple's App Store Policies
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Hookers and pimps work the same way. 70/30. I don't know what people are complaining about. /s
I'm not sure, whether allowing only one way to install software for a platform can be called a monopoly from the legal point of view. I'm not a lawyer or a developer.
As a user though I feel it extremely annoying that I can not enjoy even an open source and free application compiled by myself from source code for longer than 1 week - that is exactly the time the "free" certificate is valid. I had this experience, thanks Apple.
Things like SSH client, basic network utilities etc. which are free and open on any other computing platform cost money in Apple's "paradise" just because developers have to pay for the access to the store.
Some things, like WiFi scanners I need for work and others may need to properly set up their home networks, check for radio interference etc. are just unavailable - because Apple decided so (even their own AirPort is getting deprecated).
Besides, it is like with sales tax - while it may be developers who are unhappy with 30% fee, it is the user who pays all the costs at the end.
As a user of mobile/pocket devices I find myself in an extreme disadvantage having a "choice" between Android from the advertisement company which I cannot entrust with my personal data and iOS where my freedom is very limited.
No matter whether Apple will be forced to decrease their AppStore fees or not, I think it will not change the situation principally.
As a user though I feel it extremely annoying that I can not enjoy even an open source and free application compiled by myself from source code for longer than 1 week - that is exactly the time the "free" certificate is valid. I had this experience, thanks Apple.
Things like SSH client, basic network utilities etc. which are free and open on any other computing platform cost money in Apple's "paradise" just because developers have to pay for the access to the store.
Some things, like WiFi scanners I need for work and others may need to properly set up their home networks, check for radio interference etc. are just unavailable - because Apple decided so (even their own AirPort is getting deprecated).
Besides, it is like with sales tax - while it may be developers who are unhappy with 30% fee, it is the user who pays all the costs at the end.
As a user of mobile/pocket devices I find myself in an extreme disadvantage having a "choice" between Android from the advertisement company which I cannot entrust with my personal data and iOS where my freedom is very limited.
No matter whether Apple will be forced to decrease their AppStore fees or not, I think it will not change the situation principally.
Considering the tools that fee gets developers access too, it’s great value for money. It’s pretty much all someone needs to create an app.
When you consider some other creative industries and the $600/year cost of an Adobe subscription... it’s insane value for money!
"I would also say that the 15 or 30 percent is for lots of different services, compilers, programming languages, APIs, etc"
And the taxes pay security, roads and employees education! So maybe Apple could pay taxes and not mount some fakes entities to avoid as much as possible to pay these taxes!
And the taxes pay security, roads and employees education! So maybe Apple could pay taxes and not mount some fakes entities to avoid as much as possible to pay these taxes!
No, they wouldn’t owe a percentage of their revenue’s to Intel and AMD. That’s precisely why anyone who comes up with an app that cures cancer should not target an Apple mobile device if they want to retain the greatest amount of profits! There’s nothing super special unique about an iOS device, it’s just a collection of parts that compute... just like a LOT of things.
You know... if someone signed the dotted line on the contract when the house was built that those are the terms of the contract, then, unfortunately, yeah. You do.
I get the feeling that a lot of people don’t look up the definition of “monopoly” before using it.
Not zero, but close to negligible because the money is used for developing the SDKs, developing macOS and iOS, moderating and maintaining the App Store, and subsidising and investing in other divisions that have very high R&D budgets. After those costs and whatever taxes are paid, the 15-30% doesn’t make much.
Imagine how much is being invested in Apple Silicon chip design and helping developers with that transition.
Imagine how much is being invested in Apple Silicon chip design and helping developers with that transition.
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Yeah... the law makers on Capitol Hill are also trying to figure if Apple is a monopoly right now. Tim and people with arguments similar to yours believe it is not. There are a bunch of people like me who do...When it comes to apps on iOS, Apple is a monopoly.
Your argument on maybe not releasing an app on the platform also does not fly. Hey app also faced the same dilemma. You have to go where the people are and unfortunately, it us on iOS and Android.
Re the contract, yup. That is exactly what is being debated right now. Whether the contract terms are fair. If there were only two builders in the whole country, with the same terms, and If the entry barrier to build your own home was to high, people would have no choice but to accept Apple like contracts.
Sure. The App Store is Apple’s business. They can burn it to the ground if they want to. But if they want to play, they need to play by the rules and they need to play fair. This is the role of the government and I hope they do a good job out of it and don’t end up convinced by arguments similar to yours
It would help if all publicly traded companies had to publish income break outs that covered all income. If Apple did not intentionally hide income information rather than break it out completely everyone would know the significance of the "App Store Income". Maybe Apple stock holders who are not sheep should force this accounting change on Apple from within.
Personally, I don't think Apple is a monopoly in the conventional sense of the word, but then again, I feel the word is pretty outdated and not as applicable to modern-day business as it should be.
It used to be that a monopoly was clearly bad for the user in that it tend to result in higher prices and worse quality, because the user typically had no alternative. An example would be having only a single internet service provider in your city, meaning you had no choice but to sign up with them, however high the price or however crappy the service may be.
However, Apple enjoys the success it does today not by being the only choice in town, but by offering a superior experience that users are willing to pay a premium for. Moreso than android or windows phone or blackberry.
The other problem is that US antitrust laws to my understanding focus on whether the consumer has been harmed or not, and developers are not the customers in this context. Yeah, maybe the terms do suck for them, and that's really beyond the scope of this investigation. If anything, a case could probably be made that one of the reasons behind the great user experience enjoyed by consumers is precisely because of the onerous terms and conditions that Apple subjects third-party app developers to.
Rather, the more appropriate term appears to be aggregator. Again, through the iPhone, Apple has aggregated the best spenders, which in turn means that the apple platform is an extremely lucrative market that everyone wants a slice of. And because Apple owns the best customers, third parties will jump through whatever hoops Apple tells them to in order to access us, the end user, because that's where the money is.
And in the case of an aggregator like the iOS App Store or Amazon or even Uber, the reason why they even grew to be so big in the first place is because they offered a superior user experience over the then-incumbent, which means that users actively sought them out, rather than be forced to use them for lack of a better alternative. So it is possible that regulating an aggregator would actually result in the end users being worse off, even if the end goal is to be more "fair" to all parties involved.
The solution, I feel, is that if you want Apple to be held "accountable", the existing laws have to be revised and updated to make sense in the current business context, rather than trying to twist and contort existing legislation to try and make Apple guilty of something they are not.
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It would help some, but I feel it gets tricky when coming to a company like Apple where some divisions are profit-makers while others are clearly subsidised.
For example, while the iOS App Store is clearly and undeniably profitable (though we don't know to what extent), there are also many services that Apple also offers for free, such as Siri, iMessage and apps. They earn no money on their own, but it doesn't make sense to charge for them because they form the core of the Apple experience.
What's to stop Apple from saying something like "Yeah, we make X amount on the iOS App Store, but we also lose money on Maps, and we use the profits from one segment to offset the other?"
Does it even make sense to look at the iOS App Store in a vacuum? And who gets to decide what a reasonable margin for it is even?
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Soooo, Apple should have not been allowed to create products in the first place? Because, even BEFORE the App Store, when it comes to iPhones, Apple is a monopoly. No other company can make one. The problem with Nokia, Blackberry, Palm and others, then, is apparently that they were not allowed to make iPhones. If they all could have made iPhones, then they’d still be in business with their own App Stores.
Apple’s problem is that they stayed in the phone business while all other phone makers went out of business. Darn to them I say!
You’re right that monopoly isn’t the word.
I think the only way for Apple to be held accountable is the same ways that Nokia, Blackberry and Palm were held accountable. If you’re not making a thing that people want, that developers think is worthy of developing for, then you go out of business. If you find that special set of conditions (by accident or because you were trying to) that makes people desire your product, then you prosper. When I try to consider “solutions” to this particular problem, they all point to “just don’t be too successful”.
This was a good read: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/29/tim-cooks-app-store-testimony/
Telegram founder’s notes were also pretty spot on: https://telegra.ph/7-Myths-Apple-Is-Using-to-Justify-Their-30-Tax-on-Apps-07-27
This Yale study argues that Apple is a monopoly: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3606073
Interesting reads
Telegram founder’s notes were also pretty spot on: https://telegra.ph/7-Myths-Apple-Is-Using-to-Justify-Their-30-Tax-on-Apps-07-27
This Yale study argues that Apple is a monopoly: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3606073
Interesting reads
People that are upset about the 30% are really just doing harm to the actual anti-competitive behavior and arguments.
Telegram just feels like another company that’s not well known (Like I didn’t know the email company or the yoga company before their complaint) that wants to use this time as a marketing opportunity. Just like Apple, Telegram is in business to make money, so getting your name out there, by tying it to this, is how they’re doing business. We’ll likely see more companies using the same playbook because “Apple’s App Store is unfair” will get you trending even if the person reading it doesn’t need a whatever-telegram-does app. Even Yale folks are riding the bandwagon!
Is that a Yale commissioned study or just a paper folks associated with Yale wrote? Either way, it just shows there are many creative ways to avoid referring to the definition of monopoly.
I searched through the document to see if they’d even have the expected “while not technically a monopoly” kind of statement. There wasn’t one. When describing Microsoft, it’s appropriately PC operating systems. No brand names, no trademarks, just an industry. When describing Apple, understanding that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly, they have to creatively slice up the smartphone industry into small enough pieces that allow them to make a monopoly claim. Like, they indicate that Apple has a “screen-time-app-on-iOS monopoly! (Can’t wait to read their paper on the monopoly McDonald’s has on Chicken McNuggets) I mean, if this paper is taken seriously, there is very little that any company can do to avoid being a monopoly.
$99/year is super reasonable for development tools, maintenance/support, etc. If that's a major detriment to some there's always google.
I know, right? I as a developer have a several hundred dollar computer, a place to plug it in that provides power and internet for access to upload apps to the App Store. HOWEVER, I can’t be profitable on the App Store because I’ll never clear that $99 a year hurdle. If I charge 99 cents and take into account Apple’s cut, I’d have to sell at least 143 copies of my app just to break even! 143?!
To make a living, you'll have to sell 30% more apps. You'll need 90000 apps to get 60000$. Let say you want to offer a subscription and want to rely on another payment server, because you already pay 5000$ per year for the android version. So you could save by having a single system.... NO, Apple says absolutely NO, even if you just send the user via link to safari to login on your website to pay for a subscription on your website. You don't have the right from your app (for which you already paid apple 30000$) to send your user to your website to user your payment server.
Maybe Apple tomorrow will say your app duplicates one of its own app (because they did a copy) and will forbid your app. Bye. Or maybe, they device that your business is suddenly not desired on the App Store, or just because they suddenly change they mind, or because they suddenly change the rules.
Apple want its right to put anyone out of business out of the blue. It's like a mafia. They don't like you for any good or bad reason and they kill you.
I was a developer in the 90s, when we wrote software, shipped it on cd to shops. We were lucky to get 20% of the retail price, we lost 80% in other words.
I remember developing Symbian apps and games for Nokia phones before iPhone came out. The costs were similarly much higher than now for not just devleopers but also consumers.
I was quickly shocked with the impact of the Apple app store.
Software that would previously have cost £3 was now free.
Software that used to cost £10 was now only 59p
Apple drastically lowered the price of software for hand-held computing devices worldwide by removing barriers to entry for developers. They vastly increased competition for software by doing so.
Google had no choice but to offer similar on their competing platform. If google had carried on charging the prices that had been prevalent on Symbian they would have died quickly.
How has dramatically lowering prices for software hurt consumers?
Everyone owes Apple a great debt of gratitude in my opinion.
I remember developing Symbian apps and games for Nokia phones before iPhone came out. The costs were similarly much higher than now for not just devleopers but also consumers.
I was quickly shocked with the impact of the Apple app store.
Software that would previously have cost £3 was now free.
Software that used to cost £10 was now only 59p
Apple drastically lowered the price of software for hand-held computing devices worldwide by removing barriers to entry for developers. They vastly increased competition for software by doing so.
Google had no choice but to offer similar on their competing platform. If google had carried on charging the prices that had been prevalent on Symbian they would have died quickly.
How has dramatically lowering prices for software hurt consumers?
Everyone owes Apple a great debt of gratitude in my opinion.
Seems like you just want access to Apples' IOS customer base bypassing the hard work that Apple put into their ecosystem. Hard work the provides a distribution platform, payment processor, metrics, management and as safe as can be environment.
I got to love Tim Cook for lying under oath to the house judiciary committee on two counts:
1.) that apple is "okay" with competition from Samsung, Lg, Huawei, and Google.
However, it was Steve Jobs who said that "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong” “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Hence the plethora of lawsuits against Samsung and Google.
2.) "We don't have any dominant share in any market or any product category where we do business."
Apple dominates the smartwatch market with Apple Watch with over 47.9% share in Q3 2019.
www.strategyanalytics.com
(1) "Tim Cook Statement 1"
(2) "Tim Cook Statement 2"
1.) that apple is "okay" with competition from Samsung, Lg, Huawei, and Google.
However, it was Steve Jobs who said that "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong” “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Hence the plethora of lawsuits against Samsung and Google.
2.) "We don't have any dominant share in any market or any product category where we do business."
Apple dominates the smartwatch market with Apple Watch with over 47.9% share in Q3 2019.
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(1) "Tim Cook Statement 1"
1) Apple now versus Apple 10 years ago under diferent leadership. Competitiors should compete without theft though.
2) 47.9% is not “dominant” in my opinion it’s not even majority. An Apple Watch needs an iPhone too! Many competing watches are not as encumbered.
2) 47.9% is not “dominant” in my opinion it’s not even majority. An Apple Watch needs an iPhone too! Many competing watches are not as encumbered.
Someone clearly drank Tim's Apple juice... You think Apple (or any company) would fess up and say that they're a dominant player in an antitrust hearing?
47.9% is dominant, if Apple makes up the single largest category. I created a Pie Chart to visually depict the marketshare.
This hearing is a joke, it's really a formality to wash the hands of the large tech companies.
47.9% is dominant, if Apple makes up the single largest category. I created a Pie Chart to visually depict the marketshare.
This hearing is a joke, it's really a formality to wash the hands of the large tech companies.
