←back to thread

Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(33): >>25136142 #>>25136180 #>>25136192 #>>25136194 #>>25136229 #>>25136254 #>>25136310 #>>25136326 #>>25136369 #>>25136392 #>>25136896 #>>25136921 #>>25136932 #>>25136947 #>>25137067 #>>25137364 #>>25137458 #>>25137537 #>>25137558 #>>25137578 #>>25137627 #>>25137982 #>>25138093 #>>25138809 #>>25139232 #>>25139847 #>>25140155 #>>25140160 #>>25140313 #>>25140614 #>>25140958 #>>25141658 #>>25141813 #
grishka ◴[18 Nov 20 14:13 UTC] No.25136921[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>25137122 #>>25137160 #
phn ◴[18 Nov 20 14:33 UTC] No.25137160[source]▶
Making it hard for the regular joe to pirate apps is a big part of apple's allure me as a developer.

Your app/game won't be 24h on the play store without the apk popping up on some random site, ready to be downloaded.

I don't see a way to do proper sideloading without opening this avenue. Maybe a mac os style notarization scheme, but apple gets a lot of flack for that too.

replies(1): >>25137264 #
grishka ◴[18 Nov 20 14:43 UTC] No.25137264[source]▶
You can't have it both ways. Either it's as closed as iOS and apps can't be pirated, or it's as open as Android and it's possible to pirate apps. Restrictions on what can be installed and user's ultimate control of their own device are mutually exclusive.

That said, I'd choose to have control, even as an app developer. Piracy is a fact of life.

replies(1): >>25139362 #
1. draugadrotten ◴[18 Nov 20 17:12 UTC] No.25139362[source]▶
There many benefits of the closed model:

One benefit is that if an app is successful but expensive, it opens up for competitors to undercut by price. With piracy, many users would rather pirate the expensive #1 game than to run the lower cost #1938 game. With such a closed system, users will choose cheaper applications and it will help #1938 to rise to #45.This is very good for indie developers.

Another benefit is for the consumers. When developers overprice their software, and users can pirate - they might. Then the developer blames lack of sales on piracy. However, when piracy is impossible, the developer can't blame piracy and must seek the true cause of poor sales, be it a high price or lack of quality.

There's a lot of coverage already on the negatives with a closed store.

replies(1): >>25141244 #
2. grishka ◴[18 Nov 20 19:28 UTC] No.25141244[source]▶
In practice, I don't think the discovery aspect of app stores matters that much for anything but utility apps where you would search stuff like "docx viewer". It does matter for all kinds of apps when they feature something, and that's about it. Almost all developers have their own ways to drive traffic to their apps.

I mean, I've been making Android apps since 2011, and I think that the role of app stores themselves is vastly overrated too. They have their place and they're nice to have, sure, but it's silly that OS vendors are allowed to have their own ones and either demote or outright ban anything that doesn't go through them. The transition to "always-online" was supposed to be more empowering, not more limiting.

"But people would install malware..."

It's okay for new technology to require education before one can make use of it. It's about time we get over it and stop treating users like children.