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.

>to it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part.

Oh please.

Has it ever occurred in the history of the world that the selfish motives of two different parties aligned? i.e. Apple gets good press for helping smaller developers and the smaller developers get increased revenues. It happens all the times, and it's called "good business".

You can keep waiting for Apple's App Store executives to cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes and repent of their terrible policies. Let me know how that works out.

If Apple didn't fear either Epic's lawsuit or Congressional action, or both, they'd never reduce their app store cut, for anyone, ever.

This announcement means Apple knows that neither public opinion nor the law is on their side and they're about to lose really, really big. And they're hoping if they can flip this around a bit and get control of the narrative, they can convince regulators they will self-regulate... while continuing to get a third of the revenue from all the most lucrative developers.

Google's new Gmail privacy settings fall in the same boat: They'd rather lose data from a small portion of their users if it might deter the government from taking away all of it.

> they can convince regulators they will self-regulate... while continuing to get a third of the revenue from all the most lucrative developers.

So what?

Seriously, who cares if Epic earns 14 bzillionty dollars this month, or 20 bzillionty dollars?

At that scale, the 30% is such a terrible thorn in your side?

Come on. Cry me a damn river.

The 'narrative' here is Epic pretending they care about anyone except themselves and that this ridiculous song and dance is about it being 'good for everyone'.

Let's try something positive instead:

What should they have done then to make you happy?

Seriously; if this is such a cynical, terrible move, what should they have done?

Provide an officially-sanctioned way to install alternative software sources.

macOS has that; Apple will even certify third party developers so that the system can still validate software outside of the Mac App Store. That kind of security model would be perfect for iOS and would moot pretty much all the substantive parts of Epic's complaint.

Just because it is something YOU want doesn't mean we ALL want it. I appreciate Apple's review of apps and their store policies. While no human endeavor is perfect it is at least an attempt to keep their platform more secure, safer for kids, higher quality, and more trustworthy.

Opening up the platform to other app stores means they have less control over the experience on their platform it opens more avenues for malware.

If you want a more open platform use Android.