Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

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.

It's not even the 30% cut itself. It's the inevitable necessity to go through Apple if you want any presence on iOS. The only solution I see here is to allow proper sideloading.

Apple keeps trying to spin the app store as a way for users to discover apps, when in reality, the reason developers publish their apps there is that it's the only way onto the millions of iOS devices worldwide.

Personally, I think the iOS App Store would still maintain it's market positioning even without iOS's technical lockout. Most people stay on the first app store they see and hate having to switch to new ones. First mover advantage is everything; look at the relative uptake rates of Steam vs. Origin or Epic Games Store.