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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.719s | source
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pja ◴[18 Nov 20 12:43 UTC] No.25136113[source]▶
I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part.

They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.

Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.

Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.

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1. coward8675309 ◴[18 Nov 20 12:59 UTC] No.25136229[source]▶
And/or are you cynically interpreting this as a piece of PR to rake in the karma? Nearly every act by every person or institution can be interpreted as a cynical attempt to curry favor. Who gets the benefit of a doubt and who gets condemned?
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2. Dahoon ◴[18 Nov 20 13:25 UTC] No.25136453[source]▶
At least condemn those that have a history of malice. Innocent as default does not work for businesses PR. Especially not for FAANG.
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3. IshKebab ◴[18 Nov 20 13:33 UTC] No.25136501[source]▶
This is clearly a direct result of Epic's lawsuit. I wouldn't consider it a cynical attempt to curry favour if they had done it a year ago.
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4. coward8675309 ◴[18 Nov 20 13:40 UTC] No.25136558[source]▶
So had Apple done this but told no one it wouldn’t be PR — and you’d be praising them right now? Would they be allowed to tell the affected developers?

The FAANG are random assortment of companies that share little in common aside from being large. Facebook and Google monetize eyeballs but in very different ways. Amazon is a logistics and retail and PaaS powerhouse. Netflix streams movies. Apple sells hardware and services and, in stark contrast to Facebook and Google, temperamentally despises performance advertising. Google and Apple (and Microsoft and Salesforce and Nintendo and…) have walled garden marketplaces.

Apropos a dubious assertion the grandparent made, Google and Apple are also the driving forces behind the two most feature-filled web browsers that enable ever more sophisticated web apps to run on smartphones outside of their walled gardens at no charge.

So, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions to make a company a FAANG, aside for assisting with the construction of a snappy acronym, and what are the conclusions that flow from those conditions that justify your assuming every one of their acts is best assumed to have been done in bad faith?

5. coward8675309 ◴[18 Nov 20 13:43 UTC] No.25136593[source]▶
Or clearly a result of Covid. Or clearly a result of Republicans’s and Democrats’s newfound love of using tech companies as punching bags. So many single, all-encompassing theories that clearly fully account for every act.