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Tim Cook Says App Store Would Become a 'Flea Market' if Third-Party Payment Systems Were Allowed
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Exactly.
In the physical world... same rules apply. You sell your products at wholesale and the store marks it up. You're never guaranteed the full sticker price.
And shopping malls charge rent. You can't open a store in a mall without first paying for the privilege of having that space.
Basically... the stores always get their cut. Period. And it's been like that forever.
So I don't see how it is unreasonable in the digital world.
I’m really torn how I feel about third-party payments, but I feel like something is missing here: Apple is still the gatekeeper for the entire store. All of those “fleas” would still have to be approved by Apple. It seems like Tim Cook’s statement implies that the app approval process alone is not enough to keep scams out of the store, which is not exactly a compliment.
I’m also not sure I agree with the converse implication, “The app approval process and payment restrictions together are sufficient to keep scams out of the App Store.”
I’m also not sure I agree with the converse implication, “The app approval process and payment restrictions together are sufficient to keep scams out of the App Store.”
It's based in the belief that people are paying for apps because they "trust" Apple with their payment methods. If consumers had to deal with a separate payment processor for each app purchase, not only would the experience be far less "Apple-like", but Apple could not protect users from shady merchants. If a consumer than needs to dispute a payment, where do they go to? Apple? The developer? The third-party payment processor? It gets messy very quickly.
And through all of this, how would Apple be paid for their part of the process? Now the developers need to send payments to Apple, and what if they refuse or forget to? Now Apple is chasing down payments owed to them.
Messy, very fast.
It's not only about EPIC, search the Internet for Apps that Apple kicked out, blocked, what ever.
Imagine, you as a dev starts to develop a great idea, want to keep it secret, invest 1-2 years of development into your App/Game, then comes Apple and say no Mr. your App crosses "our" interest, you won't sell it here.
That Apple runs over death corpses they beautifully showed at the beginning of this fight, they were about to kick out every Unreal based App, without caring for their devs at all. This would have affected many many good games based in Unreal - Oceanhorn,PubG, etc. just to name a few. Good the court intervened this insane behaviour. Building sole for Apple is a risky thing, that's a single point fo failure.
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I mean... sure. That's certainly a possibility.
But considering there are MILLIONS of apps and developers that are part of Apple App Store ecosystem... I wouldn't be that worried about it.
Visa and Mastercard are not:
- Building and maintaining data centers that run iCloud, the App Store, backing up data and synchronizing our devices seamlessly.
- Showcasing and reviewing apps for developers at no additional cost.
- Continually investing into a better user experience, year after year after year.
Remember, users get these OS updates for FREE. And each release has new features for developers to leverage, at no extra cost to them.
Apple is not abusing their position. VISA and MasterCard simply process payments. That's it. They are not on the hook for anything else beyond that. It's a highly profitable business for them. Apple must pay a fortune to keep their business running as well as they do.
Further imagine your glee in publishing the app in an alternative App Store. Somebody copies your app except it’s malware and the price is less. People download the malware app, stuff happens and now apple and the original developer gets blamed by social media.
Oh please. Being able to load apps directly without the App Store wouldn’t hurt anyone but Apple’s bottom line.
I don’t understand why we can’t have both: the App Store for a “secure, simple solution,” and a the ability to install directly from websites so long as we agree to the potential risks doing so comes with.
Or basically EXACTLY how it currently works with MacOS, which last I checked seems to be doing just fine.
Something neither Tim nor Apple seems able to explain is why iOS is any different than MacOS in this regard, especially when they try so hard to convince us that the iPad is a computer.
I don’t understand why we can’t have both: the App Store for a “secure, simple solution,” and a the ability to install directly from websites so long as we agree to the potential risks doing so comes with.
Or basically EXACTLY how it currently works with MacOS, which last I checked seems to be doing just fine.
Something neither Tim nor Apple seems able to explain is why iOS is any different than MacOS in this regard, especially when they try so hard to convince us that the iPad is a computer.
There is not just one Mall and there is not just Wholesale, and if you want to sell your rejected product elsewhere in some other "physical" Mall/Store, you don't have re-develop your product (maybe even from scratch) for another store/platform and try to sell there. You miss all the platform tied development(apis,frameworks,languages,testing) that also goes into the App/Game.
If you don't build up on multi platform based technologies, you're f***ed.
Yeah, but I admit, for the plain user it's hard to recognise that interlocking system Apple built.
1) Developers don’t need Apple to do this. Believe it or not, other servers do exist that could handle this functionality just fine. Of all the software currently installed on my MacBook, maybe two came from the App Store. The rest I downloaded directly from the devs website.
2) Yeah we don’t need this either. The App Store doesn’t make apps popular, actual word of mouth and social media make apps popular. The only thing the App Store needs is a good search feature.
3) it’s funny you mention this, because I was just having a conversation the other day with a colleague about how much worse the App Store is now compared to just a few years ago. It’s convoluted, full of ads and weirdly cherry picks the apps it wants you to see first instead of ranking by popularity or review scores. Furthermore it is much harder to manually update and get at things like purchase history because it seems like Apple has buried advanced things like this in deeper and deeper menu options instead of keeping them at the top where they used to be.
Never been to a SoCal or Bay Area flea market, have you? Good luck trying to park between all the Tesla’s and Priuses.
Sorry but thats a issue that exists since computer exists.
We even copied or swapped 5½" disks when we were kids, and there are many modern ways to avoid this.
Just keep your content alive updating and streamed, server based, if it's a Game just e.g. Clash of Clans.
If an App is that easy to copy, and keep it fooling people like that, it probably does not worth the money at all.
An App won't keep your business running for ever, it's the continuous development and upcoming ideas/features that will. Customers that care for your App will come and pay, the ones who copy wouldn't buy it anyway.
Furthermore the internet is full of scams like this, for macOS,Windows,Linux. even non App/Game related scams like this exist. It's a new digital age, and this includes taking care when browsing the internet, visiting save reliable sources. My Parents with 70y+ manage this, too. And this even on Android,Windows...
I wonder how?!
Thats real Apple mentality, stamping their user base with "plain stupid - needs parenting", instead of teaching them how to survive out there.
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Far more sensitive user information is to be found smartphones vs a traditional computer these days. Most of my family members do little other than surf the net, or play games on their computers. But the rest of their life is stored on their phones.
What happens when a Bank of America iPhone App that's appearing as the #1 result in Google from a shady download site ? Blame the customer for not being tech savvy enough?
Apple isn’t just a payment processor though. Apple provide a number of services through the App Store that need paying for and their commission helps cover these costs.
In bringing “equity“ to the App Store, those that earn the most money help pay for those that don’t. Free apps pay nothing and small developers pay less. Yes, I agree that when you’re a large successful developer, you’d be a little annoyed at paying more than somebody else but what is the alternative?
The alternative is every developer regardless of their financial status paying for every service and asset that they use.….
Release your app worldwide and that‘s a hosting fee for every single download and update, and you’ll also need to pay for bandwidth.
That’s a licence fee for every API used….want to use Airplay in your App, that’s a fee? HomeKit is a fee, HealthKit has a fee, Siri - yes, another fee.
You want users able to review your app? Sure, that’ll cost you. You want priority placement? Yep, that’s extra.
You want analytics? Yep, there’s a fee for that.
Marketing is now an extra fee, as is business guidance.
Want to distribute in volume outside of the App Store? Ohhh, yeah, that’s gonna cost you.
The problem with this model is it will price out those smaller developers who have a good idea. It will stifle innovation and reduce growth and amazingly, reduce the competition to that of only big developers like Epic…but that’s what they want right?
Features - App Store - Apple Developer
Explore the features and comprehensive benefits of App Store distribution on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.
I would not use the App Store if developers could pick and choose who to take payments through. That means the safety of knowing Apple is the only company that has my credit card is lost and I’m out. Currently when companies try to get me to enter my card when I used to be able to use Apple Pay I start looking somewhere else. Walgreens did so with their curbside pickup service and a just canceled the order and went somewhere else.
Don’t you know that you can’t have a competitive advantage nowadays without it being an Antitrust issue?
Having superior products and services or better business acumen needs regulating. Everybody should be the same.
/sarcasm for those that can’t detect sarcasm.
Apple actually pays the credit card fees as well as all of the other expenses. The bottom line is these companies can create their own platform and have an app to access it, but they need Apple’s development tools, marketing, and customer trust to make it. They want it for free and that Is not cool at all.Apple isn’t just a payment processor though. Apple provide a number of services through the App Store that need paying for and their commission helps cover these costs.
In bringing “equity“ to the App Store, those that earn the most money help pay for those that don’t. Free apps pay nothing and small developers pay less. Yes, I agree that when you’re a large successful developer, you’d be a little annoyed at paying more than somebody else but what is the alternative?
The alternative is every developer regardless of their financial status paying for every service and asset that they use.….
Release your app worldwide and that‘s a hosting fee for every single download and update, and you’ll also need to pay for bandwidth.
That’s a licence fee for every API used….want to use Airplay in your App, that’s a fee? HomeKit is a fee, HealthKit has a fee, Siri - yes, another fee.
You want users able to review your app? Sure, that’ll cost you. You want priority placement? Yep, that’s extra.
You want analytics? Yep, there’s a fee for that.
Marketing is now an extra fee, as is business guidance.
Want to distribute in volume outside of the App Store? Ohhh, yeah, that’s gonna cost you.
The problem with this model is it will price out those smaller developers who have a good idea. It will stifle innovation and reduce growth and amazingly, reduce the competition to that of only big developers like Epic…but that’s what they want right?
Features - App Store - Apple Developer
Explore the features and comprehensive benefits of App Store distribution on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.developer.apple.com
And it cost developers billions though the years. One of the reasons software prices have been driven down in many cases is due to the lack of piracy on the platform.
Not every app requires an update every couple of months for it to be valuable to the user for long periods of time, not every app requires it to be server based. In many cases they don't make any sense to be server based.
Many users of phones and tablets are plain stupid. Many are blissfully ignorant of what goes on behind the scenes to keep them from doing anything stupid.
What should Apple do ? Provide a an hour long un-skippable video on the ins and outs of internet security that needs to be watched upon activation.
Or
Simply accept that most people don't have the head for that and instead provide a secure platform and marketplace where it's highly unlikely they'll screw anything up.
To put things in their proper perspective, Apple does more for developers than just process payments.
From MacRumors forum member farewelwilliams:
- we developers get up to 1 petabyte of user storage via CloudKit 100% free. Bear notes app does this and they manage 0 servers for their subscription-paid users.
- we could submit 1000 app and app updates in a year which translates to Apple paying about 1000 man-hours worth of paychecks at about $30/hr or ~$30k for app review
- we have free access to using Apple Maps instead of paying Google tons of money to use their mapping API keys (for those high volume users). this saves Yelp and Facebook a ton of money as well as small developers.
- we get many more new features every single year via the SDK compared to Android (like ARKit, Core ML, SwiftUI, Vision, etc... just to name a few).
- we get global distribution for free (including China, you know, where Google Play doesn't exist. also developers generally have to setup their own servers in China because of the great firewall, but if you used CloudKit, it just works without any extra setup).
- we get app store curated editorial with a chance to reach front page in front of 500 million customers a week.
- we have no credit card fees or international taxes to worry about
- Apple provides support to customers asking for refund for an app and app store support in general
- Testflight service is free (for public and private testing)
- app store automatically creates many different binaries of our app and distributes device-optimized versions to each customer. a 1 gigabyte app with many different permutations of versions across hundreds of servers around the world means Apple is hosting about several terabytes in the cloud for us from one single app
- push notifications/push notification sandbox servers
- Web SDK version of cloudkit/mapkit so that you can use it for a web version of your app
- Apple sign in
- Mac notarization service which improves trust by the user for downloading an app from the web
- yearly major releases of Xcode with new features
- analytics dashboard and crash reporting
- and the list goes on and on.
And that's why Apple charges 15% or 30% on every sale.
Apple is more than just a payment processor or web storage facility.