Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

Google literally has multiple alternative app stores currently active.

We've barely been able to get people to stop referring to all Android devices as "Droids". The average person doesn't even know about alternate app stores, yet alone have the will to seek them out, install them, search for an app, and then pay for it (likely having to enter payment info this time). You might as well tell developers to release their apps on the dark web.

I'm sure you can release niche apps on these stores, but the general market isn't moving away from the Play Store any time soon, and that's where the money is.

And how many of those are installed on the average US Android phone exactly?

What happens to a phone manufacturer who ships a phone with an alternate App store?

I'm publishing the same (paid) app on Google Play and on Amazon's store, which is AFAICT the most widely used alternative (outside of markets where Google is not active).

My Amazon income is less than 2% of the Google income.

Well, there is Amazon Appstore for Android, where you can buy digital goods (apps and games as well) on an Android device. Idk if the Amazon Appstore is available for IOS with the same terms. Can you buy IOS apps via Amazon Appstore on an IOS device?

Like which ones? Even the Amazon Appstore, the largest alternative store is so negligible we might as well pretend it does not exist.

How many of them have > 1% market share?

Which just goes to show how Google’s and Apple’s investment of tens of billions of dollars building out their respective ecosystem presents a tremendous opportunity to developers.

Amazon made a half-hearted effort to compete in the space and the result is “less than 2%” in your case.

Should this make a difference? Just because users don't actually use alternative app stores doesn't mean the alternatives don't exist. It's not like Bed Bath & Beyond gets to complain that they don't get as many customers as Target. It has to be okay for a company to find themselves with naturally large marketshare simply because they do good business. If Google is doing something unkosher to get/keep their marketshare (and they are) then that's what you have to go after.

> What happens to a phone manufacturer who ships a phone with an alternate App store?

You get to be the best selling Android phone every year. Are we all forgetting that Samsung ships their own app store? Nobody uses it because it's garbage but that's not Google Play's fault.

> tens of billions of dollars building out their respective ecosystem presents a tremendous opportunity to developers

That's... one way to look at it.

Another way is that they'd be spending even more if there were more healthy competition in the alternative app store market.

Amazon is incentived to run an Android app store now, in the same way Microsoft was incentivized to maintain an ARM build of Windows: it's not a corporate priority, because it doesn't make business sense for it to be until the playing field changes.

Amazon made a bunch of poorly performing and uncompetitive Android phones, and then bailed before doing the hard work of actually differentiating their product. The results are totally expected and if anything demonstrate the market is competitive, not anti-competitive.

Users don’t want an “alternative App Store market”. They want a place where they know the apps they download won’t steal their data or crash their device, where the billing policies are clear and predictable, where you can set parental controls and get refunds on accidental purchases.

Apple doesn’t have customers because they are the only one who you can buy water, electricity, or internet from at your home address. Apple has customers because people willingly and happily shovel their hard-earned money at them because their products are freaking amazing.

In no universe can anyone say that the progression / advancement of smartphones and smartphone applications indicates a stagnant market or one in need of forced government intervention.

From what I can see iPhone 1 with its 400MHz Samsung CPU and 320x480 display and its half dozen apps -> iPhone 12 with its 8 core 3GHz A14, 2532x1170 display, and millions of apps demonstrates conclusively that consumers are winning out tremendously over the last 13 years due to a highly competitive market driving truly massive R&D investment in this space.

I think the problem that people actually have with Apple is that they are so far ahead of the pack, and people don’t see where the inevitable disruption is going to come from just yet.

What would be the hypothetical characteristics of an anti-competitive app store market, to you?

I.e. what would you look at and say "That's anti-competitive"?

Absolutely. Anti-competitive laws aren't intended to prevent current market share, but rather level competition for future market share.

If Google has 99% current market share for mobile OS, props to them. They deserve it for working like heck, delivering something amazing, and finding a model that allows them to distribute for free.

If Google has 99% market share, and ensures it keeps 99% market share in the future by setting up licensing deals to tie Google Apps + App Store together... that deserves a lot more scrutiny.

There's almost a infinite number of things they could do that would be illegal that you might also call 'anti-competitive'.

IMO, as long as there are viable competitors to Apple, and as long as Apple is not colluding with its competitors, Apple should be able to implement any lawful policy on its own device that it chooses.

Apple can't violate its existing contracts with its customers or developers (e.g. threatening to kick off all Unreal Engine apps, e.g. lock customer data unless a ransom is paid). Apple can't use App Store policy to commit crimes, like extortion (e.g. offering to buy an app developer, and saying they will ban them from the store or increase their commissions to 50% if they don't accept the buyout).

As long as their policies have a justifiable and legal business purpose (whether you personally agree with the policy is irrelevant) that's applied consistently (within human limits of consistency) they should be free to make their own product however they want, and charge what they want for it.

You haven't answered the question and I was interested in the answer too.

What would one or both of these stores need to do, to qualify as 'anti-competitive' to you?

> Another way is that they'd be spending even more if there were more healthy competition in the alternative app store market.

This simply isn't true. Android is much more open yet app spend is way lower compared to the smaller marketshare iPhone.

An open app market means a flood of free apps which means less money spent. Good Devs will absolutely lose in this scenario. Outsourced sweatshop devs will do everything cheaper.

If there was competition in the App Store market, I’d have to deal with the overhead of dealing with publishing companies.

My apps would have to be designed to comply with all of the rules of all of the stores.

No thanks.

You can't implement background installation of apps, automatic upgrading, or batch installation or upgrades of apps on Android outside of the Play Store. The competition is intentionally hobbled.

If we look at market share for mobile app distribution, the vast, vast majority of it goes to the App Store and the Play Store. The competition isn't even a blip on the radar.

Was referring to they = Google, spend = Google's funding of Play Store development and infrastructure (in context to parent's comment)

Decouple payments/subscriptions from distribution (AppStore). Allow us to pay using Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or any of a host of other payment processors: the developer can choose his own payment platform, just like in the rest of the world outside of the iPhone.

That's a good first step towards competition that would allow Apple to keep the AppStore exclusivity -- for now.

Apple does not allow third party app stores on iOS. There's at least one third party store that you can side-load using developer tools but it's definitely not something the average user is aware of.

At the very least, they would need to decouple the payment processor in a way that still provides the user all of the following;

  1) No need to re-enter billing information across apps
  2) A centralized UI for the user to manage all their
     subscriptions, enforce consistent billing policies,
     request refunds, etc. 
  3) Enforce parental controls and family approval 
     policies which may be configured on the account
  4) Prevent any surprise billings or unauthorized charges
  5) Ability for Apple to force a refund even if the app dev won't

And probably many more technical measures. Otherwise, you are directly damaging a key value proposition provided by Apple and demanded by their users.

In the end, the payment processor is a red herring. Apple isn't charging 30% for the payment processing -- they probably pay less to run the charge than Stripe does. For example, for $0.99 charges, the app developer pays Apple less for their entire fee than Stripe would charge them just to run charge.

The 30% fee is Apple's share for creating the entire ecosystem. Everything from the programming language, the platform, the API's, the security framework / secure enclave, the app review, the distribution model, the billing system, the cloud services for software delivery/push notifications/updates/shared storage, all the way up to Apple's customer support lines. Actually running the payment gateway is perhaps the very least of it.

> In the end, the payment processor is a red herring.

Not in the context of introducing competition.