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?

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

The narrative here is amazing, because you're not sympathizing with Epic because they're so big and have so much money... but they're still the little guy compared to Apple. The scale of Apple's monopoly profit makes Epic look like a corner pharmacy in Montana.

Epic is part of TenCent which is close to having a monopoly on games these days.

But separately, the only reason to root for ‘the little guy’ is if the little guy is somehow hard done by.

We dislike the fact that Apple makes some money by charging developers 30% for payment services, software delivery, and operating a storefront that users feel safe to buy from.

We say 30% is too much to change for that, because the margin is way too high. Fair enough.

Epic on the other hand makes its money from selling in game currency to children.

That practice needs to be banned altogether.

Why shouldn't you be able to sell toys to children? Fortnite clearly provides a lot of utility to a lot of people.