Apple Says App Store 'Welcomes Competition' Following Criticism From Spotify and Others

truthertech said:
That case doesn't have anything to do with this issue. That case involved activity by Apple and the major book publishers where they got together agreed to a model that controlled prices for ebooks. Such anti-trust activity has been illegal anti-trust activity for decades since the passage of the Sherman anti-trust act.
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It also meant that Amazon had a lot more power to pressure publishers to accept whatever Amazon gives them.
 
BootsWalking said:
$10/month for a website, and a single downloadable package file containing my app, just like is available via APKs on Android.
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$10 a month for a website? Sounds like you have no experience setting up a commerce site. Curious, who's going to pay for all the bandwidth you use (assuming your App is successful)? Or do you think a GoDaddy site that offers "unlimited bandwidth" will actually let your run a business that uses up huge amounts of data every month (like an App Store would) and they'll be content to let you keep paying $10 a month without forcing you into a commercial plan.

Someone should tell Apple about this. They could save billions on their website hosting. /s
 
darkcompass said:
Am I right in saying, with Spotify, if you set up the subscription within the app, apple takes 30%/10% or whatever.

But,
If you login into spotify.com, use a web browser on a desktop computer, set up the subscription there, they don't.
You then just log into spotify on your apple device, and it's all good, Apple doesn't take the percentage, as the subscription is not through the app store.
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If you use a web browser on your iPhone, that's exactly the same. Spotify can just use Netflix' method: No subscription through the app, just through your browser, and Apple gets not a penny from Netflix.
 
realtuner said:
Many are 100% free to download, which means Apple makes literally ZERO on these Apps, and actually loses money because they have to pay for the bandwidth of who knows how many petabytes of data to support these Apps.
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Netflix charges about $100 a year and they can have infrastructure that can handle over half of the internets bandwidth usage. Remember Netflix has other costs besides infrastructure.

3rd party iOS devs pay apple a yearly dev fee of $100. That should be easily take care of the measly megabyte free apps apple hosts.

Hosting and bandwidth is not a huge money cost like you are trying to make it as.
 
Jsameds said:
Please feel free to set up and maintain an end to end worldwide distribution model in over 100 languages and 100 countries, for both hardware and software - then we can talk about your 30%
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Some developers can do just that. Spotify for example. Let them use their own system in-app just like Uber does.

Other developers will be too small to justify the expense. Those will be the ones that choose to let Apple handle everything from end-to-end and pay the 30% fee.

Choose is the operative word though. Why should Apple prohibit a specific subset of developers from using their own payment processing while allowing others to do so?
 
Tovenaar said:
Every once in a while I think this store really is becoming a monopoly, then I go to help my wife with her Samsung and get hit with a big fat reality check. It's really incredible what apple have done with the app store. The fact that we rarely have to worry about the quality of apps on there is incredible.
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LOL. Apple does NOT screen apps for quality. At best check for non-public APIs only, and even then apps slip through. They don’t even check that apps aren’t sending info in the background as we just found out. Keep living in your fantasy world.
 
oneMadRssn said:
The problem is that Apple both (1) owns the platform for third-parties to distribute their apps and (2) competes with those third-parties on that same platform.

Either one alone isn't a problem at all. But doing both simultaneously is inherently rife with conflict and thus anti-competitive.
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The big problem is not that Apple competes with those third-parties on that same platform but Apple's apps don't have to pay the 30% fee that other developers do.
 
truthertech said:
It's not that complicated. When Apple built their store, they built their model around charging a commission for the sale of digital goods. It would have been unworkable, not financially feasible and insane to think that they anyone would be able to build a model where they charged a commission for every good or service that anyone used an app for. Steve Jobs wasn't insane.

You are free to build such an business and market it to companies. Good luck.

You are also free to argue to companies around the world that they can't sell their own products in their own stores because they have an advantage. Legally, at least in America, we don't prevent such common sense activity by businesses, and I'm sure Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Starbucks, Target, Google, etc., would find your suggestion that they not use their platforms to benefit their own products and services an interesting idea.
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So you agree it’s arbitrary. And by limiting the commission to digital goods it’s being limited to areas where Apple also competes. Sure I can go to Target or Walmart and buy their brand of something. But more often than not it’s a cheaper quality. And for the benefit of those who can’t afford higher quality name brand items.

So what happens if project titan turns into Apple getting into the ride sharing business? Do they start charging Uber and Lyft a commission? Or do those services get lucky because they didn’t exist when the App Store commission was first introduced?
 
outskirtsofinfinity said:
Ummmm, of course they do! Bad code (not necessarily malicious) poses security risks, possibly allowing e.g., race condition attacks.
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No they don't look at actual code (iOS apps are written in Objective-C or Swift). When Apple gets an app from developer, all they get is the binary (0s and 1s).

What they do have are binary parsing algorithms that identify the APIs that are present in the binary.
 
realtuner said:
$10 a month for a website? Sounds like you have no experience setting up a commerce site. Curious, who's going to pay for all the bandwidth you use (assuming your App is successful)? Or do you think a GoDaddy site that offers "unlimited bandwidth" will actually let your run a business that uses up huge amounts of data every month (like an App Store would) and they'll be content to let you keep paying $10 a month without forcing you into a commercial plan.

Someone should tell Apple about this. They could save billions on their website hosting. /s
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250GB/day download bandwidth from Dropbox for $9.99/month.
 
gnasher729 said:
I'm sure that made you soooo happy.
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Who says they don't? It's just that integrating your app with Siri is _work_.
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There is no way for Spotify to access Siri. Apple hasn’t created a domain/intent for it. Hence why Apple Music on Sonos can’t be controlled by Siri but can be controlled by Alexa.
 
realtuner said:
Pedantic. I'm obviously talking about Apps that are 100% free, as in no further in-App purchases. I even listed several for you. Does Google Maps have in-App purchases? Gmail? Chrome? What about FaceBook? Twitter? Firefox? Opera?
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Google, Facebook and Twitter can afford free apps due to their huge market positions - how many independent quality app developers do you think could survive in the Apple ecosystem charging $0 for their app with zero in-app purchases? If that's your defense of Apple's monopoly then you're right about the pedantic part.
 
smulji said:
The big problem is not that Apple competes with those third-parties on that same platform but Apple's apps don't have to pay the 30% fee that other developers do.
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I guess Apple would point to Walmart or Target that have their own brands they sell. Except usually those brands are of a cheaper quality and price than name brands.
 
How do they welcome competition when they suspend non-Apple apps?
Can I have automatic camera upload (don't tell me about GPS access trick), can I have a song download automatically to spotify when I add it to a playlist on a PC, can I have Plex automatically sync when I click sync from my PC?
No - I need to open the applications first so that they wake up.

So - no they don't welcome competition. They want to sell their own services - which is OK and acceptable but they should be transparent on what they offer.
 
Having an alternative to download apps would be so great for iPad Pro users like me who would like to code on their iPad!
 
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