I want Apple Music and Spotify to compete on the merits of their streaming software and services. I think that's a good thing for consumers. I don't want Apple to win because they also run the hardware and OS platform that the streaming services run on.
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Apple Reinstates Epic Games EU Developer Account, Paving the Way for Alternative App Store
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Other areas like....podcasting? Guess that didn't work out so well 🤷🏻♂️
What percentage of their subscribers were still on Apple billing ya think? Did they ever tell us?
Look, I have nothing against Spotify...just the whining. I hope they are able to right the ship and do well.
Just stop trying to blame Apple for their own mistakes.
If you don't like government interfering with businesses, we should probably get rid of patent law and the DMCA as well.
More like I don't like the obvious selective interference – when laws are written to obviously target specific companies. Not true for patents and the DMCA.
So 5 years later, probably a fraction of that – not gonna make a real difference to Spotify's bottom line.
Android market share is at about 72% to Apple’s 28%.
I don’t think Apple is going to win due to undue influence. In fact Spotify has a huge lead with double the user base of Apple.
Spotify is at 30% of stream listeners with Apple and Amazon at about 15% each.
Will Apple *outlast* Spotify due to it being a poorly run business?
Likely.
I’m not 100% following what you want from the App Store.
Maybe a clear bullet list of how you think it should work for all developers with a $ value attached.
Maybe comparing a small/indie to a big boy will make it all clear.
I’m interested 🤔
On a side note, I think subscriptions are fine. They connect app usage/love with payments that *can* keep app development moving forward.
Of course, not all devs will keep updating their subscription apps, but users will notice an outdated/broken app and not subscribe.
Well why don’t they take a cut? Why don’t they take 17/27% fee as they do with other who now suddenly can use their own payment system? Why are some applications excluded while others aren’t?
The complaint of the fee have always been there for it being excessive. Is it not a good thing if developers can keep as close to 100% of their revenue as possible instead of Apple?
As a developer would you not want to offer your games on the steam store? Or use Apple Pay for In app purchases (keeping 99.9% or so) instead of the IAP fee with 15-30% revenue cut? Or have more features available to you or/ and users? Just compare the Mac AppStore with the steam store, or the windows store.
What if users want to purchase your app and give Apple as little as possible in order to support you with better margins? Offering trials isn’t exclusive to iOS sales store.
You don’t think developers will use alternatives stores if they can pay 0% commission? Use alternative SDKs that isn’t Xcode? Develop apps on non Mac hardware? To have less limitations of what APIs to use ? To have the ability to provide CDkeys to anyone?
To have a store users can browse on the computer with better contros, filtersl and navigation capabilities to find apps?
What happens with video streaming? One jacks their prices and suddenly others do too.
If Spotify upped theirs by a dollar what do you think would happen? Perhaps they should do some market research with their customers and see what they will bear.
Every time Netflix does it people scream they will cancel. How many do?
Apple Music and Spotify do compete now. Both prices the same. One you pay for in app the other outside.
The one paid outside has more customers.
So explain again what lack of competition there is?
Who is going to write all the wonderful tools you say others can do to avoid Apples tools? And do it for free because no one wants to pay and to keep 99.99% of the price charges for the app or service.
Hmmm.
Have you ever run a business?
Aversion implies I have a strong dislike of something. Like cats with water.
I used to be diehard android in my younger years and avid user of xda. I used to be anti iPhones mainly for the same reasons ppl here complain about iOS. It wasn’t until I won an iPhone 6 from T-Mobile that I actually realized how ridiculous I was. I started seeing just how good iOS was. It was less of me being annoyed what it couldn’t do and realizing what it did while growing aggravated with having to tweak this or disable that. Or download this app. Oh will I get this update?
I finally started being able to enjoy my phone with windows phone and later iPhones without a constant need to tweak something with android.
Android is overrated and a mid at best os. It has many features but does almost none of them that well But at least they can say they had it. Android is a jack of all trades and master of none. Android/google ecosystem is terrible honestly.
I still use android partly because of a few apps. But also I do like to be able to be up to date on tech.
I also have an uncanny talent of winning phones and I won a surface duo, Moto razr and most recently a z flip 4 so I do still use them.
That being said you will never see me use one as a Daliy driver ever again. I’d rather walk barefoot on broken glass the rest of my days.
But for when my iPhone is charging and I don’t want my iPad it’s tolerable.
App Store fees have always only applied to digital goods or experiences provided in app.
Not sure why you’d expect Apple to take a cut of non-digital Amazon items or hotel bookings — they never have and they don’t plan to try as far as I know 🤷🏻♂️
Not sure why you mentioned the Mac App Store vs Steam and Windows. We already know the Mac App Store isn’t well represented as long time Mac devs already had their own distribution setup before it ever existed. We’re talking about the iOS App Store, where the apps are!
As for your dream of alternate App Stores, there may be a place for game specific stores since gamers tend to be more tech savvy and already use multiple game stores.
I’m not a game developer, so that really doesn’t interest me, but who knows — maybe there’s a big enough iOS game market to make one viable?
I don’t think the non-gamer, everyday iOS user will bother, nor do I think non-game devs will give up the iOS App Store and the features it provides.
So why is Apple fighting it so fiercely, when 15% are such a great deal? When they could instead just shut up, comply unambiguously, provide their superior, more frictionless solution and be done with it?
Big contradiction there!
Uber has basically zero marginal costs. They (usually) don’t employ drivers and don’t maintain fleets of cars. They just maintain an intermediary service - just like the App Store between consumers and developers. Or like booking.com - which just notified its potential gatekeeper status to the EU.
Also note that Amazon does not have marginal costs when users buy ebooks - they pay royalties to the author/publisher as a percentage of the purchase price. Delivering one sold ebook to a customers does not have low to zero marginal costs. Except the “delivery” of it, i.e, storing it on their server and transmitting it to a user’s device.
Since it’s not about users actually using the alternatives, iOS has been an open mobile (app) system for about the last 10 years. Because support for alternatives was put in years ago.
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I think you and I have different understandings of what marginal costs entail.
Take amazon for example. Let's say someone purchases a $100 backpack online. It would not be feasible for Apple to take a 15% or 30% cut (or any cut) because that is coming from the retailer, not from Amazon's earnings directly. Nor is the retailer able to benefit from economies of scale because each bag sold this way incurs a variable cost (ie: you need to purchase 100 bags in order to sell 100 bags). It's not a situation where the more you sell, the cheaper each bag is by comparison.
You may be right in that Amazon is an intermediary service, but it is also a service that Apple is not able to bill directly, because there is no part of its costs structure that uses iTunes for billing, and iTunes is really the only way Apple can reliably calculate how much money any one developer is making through their platform, so again, it makes sense to bill developers a percentage of money paid through it.
Same for Uber. Apple would be billing the drivers, not the parent company itself. This is what I mean when I say these companies have high marginal costs - each transaction or trip is literally one car and one driver, and the costs associated with each trip scales in line with the number of trips being made.
With regards to ebooks, I am assuming that the author of the ebook owns the rights, and therefore gets to keep 100% of ebook sales, minus whatever Amazon's cut is. Let's say I have spent 1 month to write a book. That is a sunk cost, in that the book has been written regardless of whether I decide to market it or not. If I sell one book online for $5, I earn $5 (minus amazon's cut), at zero cost (remember, the book has already been written). If I sell 100 copies online, I earn $500 (minus Amazon's cut), at still zero cost (no need to print additional copies or keep them in stock). If I sell 1 million copies online... (you get the drift).
And assuming I leave the book up indefinitely, it would theoretically go on to generate an endless stream of revenue for me without me having to do anything (people could still be buying my ebook 10 years from now and I don't even have to worry about keeping it in stock or the pages turning yellow or dealing with shipping / printing costs).
This is why it makes sense (to me at least) to charge a fee for selling of digital copies of books but not physical copies, because of the cost structure involved. This also extends to say, digital media vs physical discs. Or to put it simply, something that is consumed on your device vs something that is delivered to your house. Which is what Apple has chosen to do here.
This is in contrast with a company like say, Netflix. The content has already been filmed (a fixed / sunk cost). The hosting and server costs are pennies compared to this. Because marginal costs are practically zero, each subscription sold is pure profit. Netflix's job is therefore to calculate how much to charge so as to arrive as the optimal, profit-maximising point. We can argue about whether Apple deserves a cut of subscriptions made via iTunes, but in the very least, it makes sense that Apple would bill them over say, a backpack sold via amazon because the former has zero marginal costs of production (and therefore can afford it) while the latter doesn't.
I guess Spotify is in a bit of a unique position because while it deals with digital goods, it has a cost structure that scales with subscriber count, meaning it is not able to benefit from zero distribution costs the same way a company like Netflix can. Perhaps it should be an exception to Apple's billing rules, or perhaps it's just evidence that music streaming is not a sustainable business model. Bear in mind that Apple isn't really collecting any money from Spotify (they migrated everyone off iTunes a few years ago), and pay Google nothing. So if after all this, Spotify still can't make a profit, I don't see how being able to bill customers directly in-app would help them even if Apple didn't charge them 15/30%. This is the part of Spotify's criticism of Apple that has always struck me as incongruous. Like yeah, Spotify's technically not wrong, but it also hasn't really applied to their business model in ages.
So yeah, tell me that my basic finance degree from 2 decades ago still means something? 😛
An irrelevant experience reported on the current versions of the two operating systems. It reminds me of a guy(also a supposed huge android fan in the past) that justified his hate of Android with the experience if using some 12 years old 120$ LG smartphone.
Regrading updates the situation is way different than the iphone 6 days, now when you buy an android smartphone you know with certainty how many Android versions it will get, for how long it will get security updates and so on. Although Android has also evolved in the direction of being more modular when in comes to updates and support, so even if let's say your phone doesn't get any new Android versions it still receives Google System Updates, so the core system services are kept up to date with improvements, optimizations and new features.
Yeah, you can get the same with Android as well. This idea is pushed as a negative against Android for no logical reason: "oh you have more options on Android because you absolutely need to tweak the phone, or else it wouldn't work" or something.
The same can be said about iOS, even more so.
This just a nonsense take. What core Android features don't work well? Well you said none of them, but still can you give a few example of relevant features at least?
A cliché that in reality does not apply at all.
Anyway it's obvious by your generalizations that you have no basic understanding of Google's ecosystem. Here, read a little:
Google Ecosystem: Over for Apple Ecosystem? A comprehensive guide
The Google ecosystem is a vast collection of interconnected digital tools and services that have become an integral part of our daily…
Really? it doesn't look like it.
There it is, that blind illogical bias.
I remember an apple fan wrote: I would rather die than use an Android phone. Like that doesn't make sense and not something an intelligent person would say🤣
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- I am running a private firm
- These tools already exist
- Have you never met the developer community in the open source sector?
- Have you met the jailbreaking community?
Heck even unreal engine only takes 5% flat royalties above 1 million, Grot is free developer tool, stripe who is a payment system taking care of everything from refunds, recites, sales tax etc takes a 1.8 % +20cents on transactions , swish takes 20cents per transaction
The point is to have options beyond 1.
Apples fees only applying to digital goods is legally speaking arbitrary when the costs incurred on Apple is equal and the services provided are the same, making the argument to enforce discriminatory payment policies for the same services provided questionable.
I expect Apple to take a fee on 100% of transactions made in apps or 0% no exceptions.
I mentions the Windows store and steam store for their fee structure compared to the iOS and Mac AppStore are one and the same store with the same horrible services provided. The Mac AppStore is a failure because it’s terrible, and steam is successful because it’s exemplary good quality service compared to the competitors.
It absolutely is, considering the mobile game market is many times bigger than the computer game market.
Why do you think anyone would need to give up anything? Games are available on GOG, Steam, humble bundle, itch.io, Epic store etc because they can offer the same game anywhere, no arbitrary limitations on functionality offered in the game, no API limitations to be allowed in the store, no modding/ adding limitations that prevents the game from being provided, very few games are available in the Mac AppStore because they need to make it in a specific way and some features are not allowed.
Developing and launching a program is millions of times easier for the windows store than the Mac/iOs appstore
This forces developers to make one game for everyone else and one specific for the Apple AppStore’s.
Well as you well know, it’s the big names that grab the headlines and the big names that are able to start the ball rolling. Focussing on Spotify and Epic being the only people complaining and just because they’re big is absolute folly. It’s just that they grab the headlines.
Well I live in a country where we understand that hot coffee burns you, so don’t tar everyone else with that brush.Apple often does things, like many companies do, react to legal advice.
It's not a case of Apple not LIKING something. Business exposure to legal action, as has happened many times of the years, makes companies wary. McDonalds have to tell you that hot coffee might be hot!
The US started the nanny state litigation process and scared everyone.
"None of your business"... well thanks for helping us understand what crucial functions Apple is depriving you.
You said it. I gave you a chance to explain it. Clearly you dont want to.
As for giving me a chance to explain it (😂), thanks. I did explain it. I explained that the app I once downloaded and used for several years got removed from my iPhone after that catagory of apps was deemed unsuitable for the AppStore.
If you think it’s ok for Apple to arbitrarily remove items remotely from a phone, then I don’t know what to say to you. I assume you also don’t mind what they put on your phone without telling you?
If you want to know why or how I use a particular app, then as I said, it’s off topic and none of your business.
IIRC Apple's iOS AppStore is only pulling a profit because they get money from iOS Games. There is no world in which Apple lets go of that money stream without a fight (remember how folks here love to spout that iOS is the largest gaming market by revenue).
Honest question, why doesn't Apple take a cut of financial transactions like buying stock through Robinhood or Stash? Or money transfers from Cashapp, Venmo, Paypal?
The honest question I would then throw back to you is - why should Apple, based on my rather lengthy and exhaustive explanation above?
I don't think it was a big secret which entities were targeted by the law since the first proposals in 2020. The reasoning is clearly laid out in the preamble of the DMA and numerous other supporting documents.
I figure it is just a digital good and not a physical one. Wasn't that the demarcation line we've agreed Apple has drawn?
I think they would demand a cut, if they could get away with it. But doing so would show even to the most disinterested how absurd Apple's demands are in relation to digital goods.
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Even with Netflix it isn't that simple. Streaming services often have to pay residuals. Some streaming services have even taken down content they own so they don't have to pay residuals. And I don't know how video streaming services purchase 3rd party content for a limited amount of time and how much it depends on subscriber count.