Apple's App Store Rule Changes Draw Sharp Rebuke From Critics (daringfireball.net) 55
Apple has updated its long-standing App Store guidelines, giving developers the option to let users make in-app purchases for iOS apps outside of its App Store. But the changes still haven't won over one of the company's longtime critics. From a report: Under the new rules, app developers can provide customers with links to third-party purchase options for their apps, but they must still pay Apple fees of either 12% or 27%. Spotify, one of Apple's biggest critics, isn't a fan of the changes. In a statement, the music streaming service slammed the new rules. "Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly," the company said in a statement. "Their latest move in the US -- imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer's website -- is outrageous and flies in the face of the court's efforts to enable greater competition and user choice." Tech columnist John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Maybe the cynics are right! Let's just concede that they are, and that Apple will only make decisions here that benefit its bottom line. My argument remains that Apple should not be pursuing this plan for complying with the anti-steering injunction by collecting commissions from web sales that initiate in-app. Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company's brand and reputationâ--âthis move reeks of greed and avariceâ--ânor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the "anti-Big-Tech" hunt.
Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).
Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.
Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).
Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.
Re:Why free (Score:4, Informative)
Your argument falls flat.
I can buy Nintendo, XBox, and Playstation games without subscribing to their app stores. Sure, if someone buys something on the Microsoft store, Microsoft taking a cut if fair. But when I buy a game at Walmart, Microsoft gets no cut (they actually do get a cut, but it is tiny)
I can *only* buy iPhone apps via the app store. These companies want nothing at all to do with the App Store, but are being forced to use it.
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You do know that every copy of a game sold for a console, even not on the console stores, pays a licensing/royalty payment, don't you?
(I don't think that has changed has it?)
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Ah nevermind, you did say they take a cut... missed it on first read.
I don't think it's "tiny" though: Best I can find is about $7 per copy. It's roughly 10% of the retail price. Note a retailer's cut is also roughly 20% of the retail price so... wow magic, 30%...
I just don't see what is so onerous about 30%.
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The 30% is fine for most developers. For most, it wouldn't be worth the effort to do their own billing. It's just when you get to the megahits that developers have a problem. This started with Fortnite, which has revenues of several billion dollars a year. At that scale, even a few % is a lot of money.
On the consoles, games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto negotiate unique contracts per game instead of the standard contracts. They generally have different royalty rates and there may be promotional sup
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Re: Why free (Score:2)
Re: Why free (Score:1)
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I think a more analogous fee than the markup would be the retail fee that stores charge for companies to occupy shelf space. The term "top shelf" partically comes the fact that customers will naturally be drawn to items up higher around eye level than down low so as I understand it places like groceries charge more for products to be displayed higher up.
To complete this though I think the case with Apple might be if you live in a town where the only place you could buy from was Walmart and you want to be a
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Re: Why free (Score:1)
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But when I buy a game at Walmart, Microsoft gets no cut (they actually do get a cut, but it is tiny)
And how big of a cut does Walmart get? Hint: Industry average retail margin is 30% for physical video games. Plus 15% to the console maker in licenses and royalties.
Re: Why free (Score:2)
No, not even. Walmart actually takes very little margins, and game developers don't typically deal with them anyways, their publisher does. Their publisher takes a big cut, usually around 50%, but they also do a LOT more work than Apple does.
Apple just puts your app on their store. That's it. And just for that, they charge 30%. You want apple to promote your app? It's going to cost you even more just to get higher priority search placement. Need to advertise your game outside of the app store? That cost is
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Their publisher takes a big cut, usually around 50%, but they also do a LOT more work than Apple does.
Oh really? Like run the notification service for billions of notifications? Quality checks? Distribution I'll believe.
You want apple to promote your app? It's going to cost you even more just to get higher priority search placement.
App Store search results are organic. There are a few Ads on them, but other than that, it's just like Google or DuckDuckGo.
Need to advertise your game outside of the app store? That cost is all on you, buddy.
Apple charges you to advertise outside of the App Store? Since when? (Entitled brat).
Re: Why free (Score:2)
Oh really? Like run the notification service for billions of notifications? Quality checks? Distribution I'll believe.
Yes for all of the above. Though it's funny you think Apple does anything in the way of quality checks. Sure, they pretend to, but what they're really looking for is whether you do anything that might disrupt their business model in some way.
App Store search results are organic. There are a few Ads on them, but other than that, it's just like Google or DuckDuckGo.
https://www.storemaven.com/app... [storemaven.com]
Apple charges you to advertise outside of the App Store? Since when? (Entitled brat).
Reading comprehension fail on your part. Apple doesn't do this for you, a publisher will however as part of their com
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No, not even. Walmart actually takes very little margins
Bullshit. Physical game prices are pretty standard across the retail market. If Walmart was taking "very little margins" then the industry averages would be much lower as they are one of, if not the, top seller for physical games in the US.
and game developers don't typically deal with them anyways, their publisher does.
Doesn't matter, Walmart is still taking around 30% of the retail revenue.
If you go through a publisher though, they do a lot of the heavy lifting, and will even generally get better deals on most platforms, including steam.
Except they don't get better deals on most platforms, including Sony and Microsoft who charge 30% no matter who you are.
One developer estimates that by the time he gets done with all of that on Apple shit, he takes in about 25 cents on the dollar, whereas with traditional publishing it's more like half, though some bigger developers will bring in upwards of 70 cents on the dollar, and they do a lot more work (again, such as marketing) than Apple does.
This is the quote from your own link:
Earlier in the year, Melbourne-based Ring of Pain developer Simon Boxer provided a general example on Twitter of how much game developers make, including rough figures for publisher arrangements and the Australian business tax rate of 30%. Although every situation is different, his calculations indicated that for every dollar of revenue, developers receive as much as $0.49 for self-published games, and as little as $0.245 for games published by a third party.
That includes all of their costs, no
Re: Why free (Score:2)
First, before you call bullshit, you're the one making all of these claims without providing any evidence at all. Second, you should read that article again. For PC sales, MS and Epic take 12%.
You Appletologists sure love to rage every time somebody paints your religion in a bad light.
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That's a great idea. Microsoft can point to Apple for monopolistic behavior in the Appstore and Apple can point to Microsoft for monopolistic behavior on xbox and then nobody has to ever change!
It's very simple. App makers complained that they have no way to publish a mobile app without paying the Apple (and Google) tax. Authorities and courts looked at it and decided the appmakers were correct. Whether your local lemonade stand, Disney, Microsoft, Comcast or whatever other irrelevant nonsense comparison al
Re:Why free (Score:5, Insightful)
A better example is Mac
Apple has an app store for Mac, and if you put an app in there, Apple will do the heavy lifting of running a payment system for you as well as a bunch of other stuff that is not free for Apple to do. Consequently, they take a cut of the profits from the sale of the app.
But a developer making an app for Mac can choose to do all of the marketing and handle the payment system and everything else themselves and Apple doesn't get a dime for that.
That is a model that has worked just fine for a long time and Apple continues to be regarded as the most secure desktop OS you can run.
Yet, now, all of a sudden, people are doing mental gymnastics to justify Apple's shitty rent-seeking behavior as though Apple is just trying to protect us.
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Re: Why free (Score:1)
Re:Why free (Score:4, Informative)
These companies don't want to use the App Store at all, so your argument falls entirely flat.
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Re: Why free (Score:1)
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OK fanboy!
(Only a fanboy would think this is a good argument.)
Re: Why free (Score:1)
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Very well, I will answer your actual post.
*No one* is suggesting that Apple should distribute your app for free. You are the only one who suggested that.
The issue at hand is that Apple thinks it should get a 15% cut of everything you (an app developer) charge your customers for, even if that thing you are selling your customers has nothing to do with Apple's App Store, and even if you don't use Apple's payment processing services. That's not OK.
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When they are already operating their own payment systems for literally every other platform, why should they have to pay Apple for redundant systems they don't want?
How is that not anticompetitive?
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Why is it different for Mac than it is for iPhone / iPad?
They're both app stores that both do content delivery, payment processing, and ad delivery. But for some reason, a developer is forced to pay Apple or fuck off on one platform, while they can do exactly as they wish on the other.
Somehow you don't find a problem with this irrational and completely arbitrary difference that just so happens to skew heavily in favor of Apple's balance sheet.
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As regards technical infrastructure, not sure what great value that provides since all of it is constructed with the intention of locking the app into their ecosystem (e.g. iCloud data, Apple signon etc etc).
Apple could promote open source industry standard API's at much
Re: Why free (Score:1)
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Nice strawman, nobody mentioned the word free except you
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Wow and again you argue against something nobody said.
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I'm sure that's a response to something, but it's absolutely not a response to what you actually replied to.
Nobody except you ever inferred that Apple had to remove all costs from the app store. And then when you're called on it, you replied with all the nuance and intellectualism of "no u".
Re: Why free (Score:1)
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You just won't give this up, will you?
Here, let me see if I can make this easier for you: there are developers out there that DO NOT WANT TO USE THE APP STORE AT ALL, in favor of being able to self-distribute, and use their own payment processing that they already use on other platforms.
So why would it cost Apple anything to not host something?
In addition, there are developers that may want to use the app store as a content delivery network, but that's it. Why would they need to pay as much as someone who
Re:Why free (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple has spent and spends a lot of money developing snd maintaining the App store and providing a market for developers.
No one asked them to do that. At first, it might have been a concession to AT&T, which didn't want to allow arbitrary code running on devices that are on their network, but once they started allowing tethering, that reason went out the window. So after the first two years, the App Store became useless as a means of protecting the network, and served only to limit competition in how people can sell and distribute software.
The fee for any profits made from developers selling an App accounts for providing the technical infrastructure and a marketplace and advertising for the App. Therefore, it seems unfair to provide all this for free and allow the developer to benefit and make a profit without payment for Apple services.
If there were competition, then yes. But Apple deliberately put in technical countermeasures to ensure that app developers cannot distribute apps for iOS devices in any other way except through their store. It is, in fact, unfair for Apple to metaphorically provide all of that at gunpoint and then demand a fee. In effect, it's a protection racket that's little different from the mob-run speakeasies during prohibition. "That's a nice little app you have there. It would be a shame if users couldn't run or update it anymore."
Additionally, Apple doesn't promote anything except in rare cases. Apps on their store aren't really even discoverable, or at least not nearly to the extent that they would be if apps were individually distributed through separate websites from other companies. The App Store app is miserable for finding anything, and the website isn't much better, to such a degree that most developers I've known say that nearly all of their discovery occurs either through external referrals (e.g. paid advertising or word-of-mouth advertising on social media) or through ads running in other apps. What's left happens through somebody searching for the exact name of the app on the App Store.
Only maybe the top dozen or so apps in a category actually benefit from the App Store over independent distribution. Everybody else likely has lower discoverability as a result of Apple's model.
Finally, even if Apple didn't make a penny off the App Store, they would still profit enormously from having a vibrant ecosystem of software for iOS. That is, after all, the only reason that people buy phones. When the App Store came out originally, Apple said that they didn't intend to profit from it. History has shown that this was a lie.
We need to roll Apple back to a time when the company as a whole had actual morals and values.
It starts by fixing these abusive new rules by replacing them with nothing at all. Remove the prohibition on external payment systems outright. No commissions, no fees, no nonsense. Just one prohibition on using external payment systems to enable major app functionality, to ensure that developers don't put out free apps that are useless until paid for externally, and make a broad exception for apps whose only functionality is providing a better experience for web-based services (e.g. Netflix, dating apps, etc.).
Then, start providing Developer ID signing certificates for iOS so that developers who want to distribute apps outside the store can do so freely.
Those two changes would put Apple back on the moral, ethical, and legal high ground. Anything short of that is, at this point, thumbing their noses at the law, and a huge slap in the face to pretty much everyone involved.
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Apple did spend a lot of time and money developing its app store, yes. They did NOT spend a lot of time and money developing and advertising its payment processing service. They just demand that developers use it, or else they can't distribute their apps.
You are taking a very Apple-centric view of things. Those app developers also spent their own capital building a user base that isn't focused on Apple products at all. Apple wants to take all the profits from these businesses, even if those profits have not
Bribery is legal in USA (Score:2)
It's "okay" when you can bribe them to STFU by handing out campaign donations to those above them.
Trillon Dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
The system is so corrupt that a trillion dollar company can do anything it wants.
Remember when they were going to break up Microsoft and separate Office from Windows?
Instead OEM's "got to" install Netscape.
Then they were going to break up Google.
Now people will call for breaking up Apple.
Instead, the Big Ask will be diminished and they'll buy Disney.
Remember, Rockefeller helped write the Shernan Act and used it to leverege Standard Oil into ten (more) profitable companies.
Nice oligarchy you've got there.
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The system is so corrupt that a trillion dollar company can do anything it wants.
Remember when they were going to break up Microsoft and separate Office from Windows?
Instead OEM's "got to" install Netscape.
IIRC that antitrust trial was about Internet Explorer, and indeed the market is no longer dominated by that browser. I would warrant that by many measures, MS Office is no longer the dominant office suite.
I don't know if that antitrust action was responsible for the rise of Firefox and later Chrome, but there's a fair chance that it helped.
Regulators do a lot of stuff wrong -- and in particular, they will do unpredictable things -- and it is wise to make choices that don't give them the urge to mess around
What are devs to do? (Score:2)
Court case (Score:3)
The judge decided that apple must allow apps to link to an external website to buy things there. But the judge also decided that apple can continue charging a commission for such purchases, minus a small percentage. So Epics plan failed.
And Apple implements exactly what the judge decided. You can link to your own site, but you have to pay a commission for purchases. Critics may not like that, but thatâ(TM)s what the judge said.
Now since you could always let users find your website themselves, and keep all the money they pay, I donâ(TM)t see much value in this for developers. But Apples obligation is to conform with the law, nothing else.
Spotify (Score:2)