Are we? Seems it’s mostly a few companies (epic, Spotify, Hey, Tile) who want more power on iOS than Apple is willing to give them. If consumers really were so unhappy with the state of the iPhone, you would think more would have fled to android, and the iOS App Store would be a barren wasteland by now.
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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Calls Apple's App Store a 'Disservice to Developers'
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Are we? Seems it’s mostly a few companies (epic, Spotify, Hey, Tile) who want more power on iOS than Apple is willing to give them. If consumers really were so unhappy with the state of the iPhone, you would think more would have fled to android, and the iOS App Store would be a barren wasteland by now.
Correct. They should have scrutiny. These laws are being made because they haven't been found to guilty of anti-competitive behavior overall.
That’s because Sweeney is being propped up by Tencent who’s dying to take a crack at Apple.
Well it’s the best platform for gaming. And not apple or epic have produced a meaningful competitor
Best is subjective. I personally don't like it. It's like saying the iphone is the best phone out there.
What laws are "being made"? It seems to be more like trying to apply existing laws to new or changing technologies, business practices, etc. and letting the courts decide.
Considering they give away Unreal Engine 5 for free, provide cross compatible games, even pay some money for timed exclusives and guaranteed revenue AND allow them to use a separate IAP mechanism and keep 100% of the revenue, they do a lot.
And the fact you can use Unreal Engine 5 make a game for another platform and not pay anything until the first 1million is earned.
Well when look on the objective fact of available features. Mac AppStore/epic/GoG etc are incredibly barebones
If you are talking about the proposed legislation/bill in congress, yes I am aware. This is essentially what I meant by applying or adapting laws to new or changing technologies, business practices, etc. The root is still in antitrust or anticompetitive regulations.
Well luckily you can do both if you want. Epic store, steam and apples AppStore. Maximize your reach, unfortunately apple’s the one with the hardest restriction for how your games can work.
Epic pays for this as well. And it’s free to publish it, it’s free to use UE5 and A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.
Epic Games enticed developers and publishers to the service by offering them time-exclusivity agreements to publish on the storefront, in exchange for assured minimum revenue, even if Epic made a loss on under-performing games.
If Spotify god fee storage by apple then you might have a point.
Up to this point, they have not been found guilty of having an illegal monopoly in the ios app store.
The point was Epic is giving developers a bunch of stuff for free if they use their own billing systems, or charging 12% to use Epic's billing system, the difference is basically only credit card fees, hence that's a rip-off.
And Spotify has no god fee storage, whatever that is. But you can look up the cost of petabytes of transfer bandwidth on AWS and Spotify monthly downloads and you'll see very clearly Apple incurs tens of millions a year in transfer costs for hosting Spotify apps/updates.
You don’t need to take care of billing, refunds, quality insurance, consumer contact etc etc. it’s not a ripoff considering apple wanted to take a 27% fee, forcing you to do a bunch of work.
I meant, apple doesn’t provide free storage. And Spotify being free. Or when it payed a 30% fee to apple and still pay billions of their revenue to host their own servers.
Please link these costs. Would be interesting to see.
We live in 2022, not 2007, and not the age of snail mail DVDs. Apple has intentionally kneecapped web apps on iPhones so any serious app-related business needs a native iOS app subject to Apple's cut and rules. There's no technical need for it, it's just lock-in. While Apple deserves credit for inventing smartphones as we know them, that was over 10 years ago, and at this point they're just holding up progress with half the US market. In 2010 I'd surely say 3P native iOS apps and the App Store were a net positive; not anymore.
Apple should be able to do what they want since it's their own platform (lawyers and EU are far bigger bullies), but that doesn't mean I like it. I've been an iOS developer before too.
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Epic Games Store is a meaningful competitor in terms of userbase, even if you and I hate it. There's also Nintendo.
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Some subscription services give a discount if you sign up outside the app, like Spotify at least at some point. In theory this makes sense. For comparison, many stores (esp gas stations) give a discount if you use cash instead of credit.
The App Store's cut is honestly not bad for the service it provides to some devs. Big issue is there's no other choice. For security reasons, I don't even think sideloading should be possible, but the best technical solution is for Apple to genuinely support mobile web apps. Instead, Apple deliberately limits them. They know what they're doing.
Btw, I don't care about Epic. Apple's most egregious abuse was banning American Civil War games for portraying the flag of the Confederate side in a historical context.
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Yes I also remember what it was like to pay $100 (in back-then money) for a disc, like many people here. It says a lot that you're defending Apple's stance by comparing it to the state of consumer tech ~30 years ago. I don't know what that guy wants, but I want progress, and that means embracing open standards.
The iPhone is set up carefully to prevent that future: Just enough support for basic webapps to work, but a set of crown jewel features like push notifications that only native apps will support, which in turn can only be distributed through the App Store. Some devs would prefer making native apps, following Apple's rules, and paying the cut, but the majority are only doing that cause it's a prerequisite to doing business. Musk is right about it being a de-facto internet tax. Steve Jobs actually wanted the iPhone to be web-first, but they found the more lucrative option.
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It is. When people say it's just about preferences, they're only being polite.
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I agree, and epic is getting better, I don’t hate ether of them and will use the service that gives me the best value. If epic with its user base will make steam improve then I still win in the end.
You don't know what AWS is? If you don't you don't understand this business and I can't explain it to you.
If you can find your way to AWS you'll find their pricing and realize that every app downloaded to every iPhone uses bandwidth to do so, and when you get to Spotify scale the bandwidth for those downloads costs millions of dollars per month.
LOL at "just enough support for basic webapps to work"
Web apps work nearly as well on the iphone as they do on Google Chrome on desktop, meaning terribly. Web apps are the lowest common denominator trash and can never offer a great user experience, anywhere.