Back in the 1990s, when Epic initially agreed to distribute games from other developers, it collected a 60 percent commission. According to Apple's documents, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said at the time that the 60 percent fee Epic collected was a "fairly favorable royalty," as most distributors at that time charged 70 percent commissions.
And now “back in 2021s” 30% fee is pretty much the norm and 15% being quite the favorable royalty in all things related to distribution of digital content, from the iOS and Android stores to the PSN/Nintendo/Xbox/Steam/etc stores.
I don’t think either they woke up one morning and said “we are going to pay less to creators as of today, bwahaha”... in fact, Apple Music pays the most to the musicians amongst all the major streaming services, where are the lawsuits against the others? ah right, they will wait for them to become richer to then pick the pockets, it was just business and parties agreed to that.
That it would be better for devs if it was 15 or 10% always? Sure, as long as it stays sustainable for the ecosystem as a whole I won’t deny that it would be not a detrimental outcome, at least short term.
Based on this information provided by Apple:
“Apple believes sideloading iOS apps would create "unacceptable vulnerabilities" that would risk exposing customers to viruses and malware.”
Which also applies to macOS devices!
Same SoC, Kernel, frameworks, libraries, just a different UI.
Apple should immediately stop selling macOS devices, or completely block their access to iCloud, and immediately lock-in macOS by disallowing side loading, just like iOS - to make sure their customer data and privacy stays safe.
Specially because macOS has access to the same data pool that is provided and shared over iCloud by iOS/iPadOS to the “unacceptable vulnerable” macOS.
But no, they prefer to spread fud and security through obscurity.
Of all the devices and computers I own, the Macs happen to be the only ones that tend to hang up, have an activity process hoard all of the CPUs (pkd anyone?), etc... more often than not I have to go check the activity monitor and see which app is being a horrible citizen, some of them I can’t work around and have to use an app called “AppTamer”. For example, Discord, a freaking chatting app which should run on fine on a Penguin 133MHz, hoards tons of cpu in a couple of active processes (one of them some GPU Renderer Helper).
While iPadOS and iOS are pretty much smooth 99.9% of the time, provided there isn’t an underlying hardware/battery issue. The main difference is that there’s a single entry point for all applications and they are properly sandboxed.
The only real issue I have had was with RunKeeper on the Apple Watch which would somehow enter in a background mode of sorts without my knowledge and drain the whole battery in about 3 hours (I noticed because the phone would suddenly show location activity and it would open RunKeeper)... took it off the watch and back to normal.
Imagine then all the things if the floodgates were to be open, in fact, I would argue that some more stringent rules should be put in place... if I were Apple I would reject an app that drains a rated 2-days-on device in a few hours by doing absolutely nothing useful... or put a disclaimer for those that do: “this app does nothing while using all your battery at the same time”.
On MacOS, I would also reject any app that behaves as a plug-in but wreaks havok on the rest of the system by being a CPU hoarder while doing nothing in return.
