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 along the same lines of what Microsoft did when they were being investigated as a monopoly: throw a bone to smaller developers (or in Microsoft's case, kids in school) which actually just grows their market share (in Microsoft's case, kids learn to use Microsoft products and take that to work, in Apple's case, more devs see profitability in the Mac garden).

> Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here

No. They both built a distribution channel on which developers build, but they're not open markets. Those app stores are the property of their respective creators (this is a flaw of the app store paradigm in general, at least for those who want full control over their software).

Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute. It's the same as traditional book publishers writing their contracts with authors they publish. Which is why open platforms and device jailbreaking remain valuable for those of us who believe in personal ownership of our software.

Should that work in that way on desktop also? With Microsoft/Apple being free to restrict apps to their store only, and taking a cut of every transaction made outside the browser?

If not, what's the difference with phones/tablets?

I think they should be allowed to do it. If we let them get away with it because the alternatives are worse then that's our own fault.

Hard to fault a business for realizing that they have a stupid amount of leverage because people have made themselves dependent on you and charging more.