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.

the whole point of antitrust regulations is that

> 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.

actually isn't always true - especially when it hurts consumers. of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does. remember that private doesn't mean unregulated.

Just look at what Apple has accomplished in the meteoric rise of the iPhone. This is strong evidence of a company that is competing like hell to keep and grow its customers base.

“Hurting consumers” would be an almost Orwellian characterization of the smartphone technology revolution driven predominantly by the competition between Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei, etc.

> a company that is competing like hell

The problem is when by "competing like hell", you compete so hard that you suppress your competition. The issue that anti-competition laws seek to redress is the suppression of other competition.

Except the competition isn’t suppressed, and there’s no actual monopoly here.

What we have is a pretty clear case of a minuscule minority of users bitterly complaining that a company isn’t making its products exactly the way they want them to.

A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores.

It just so happens that Apple’s customers absolutely love its products, and that Apple’s products are absolute technological leaders in their space.

Apple didn’t get there, e.g. like Facebook by buying up the competition any time it started to emerge as a threat. They got there through decades of focused development and investment.

> A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores.

A store is allowed to block you from using any other store? These aren't natural continuations or logical extensions of meatspace, stop pretending they are.

This is literally not what’s happening. The iPhone is their product. If you don’t want to use their products and their store you do not have to. Buy a different device. There are plenty.

Apple doesn’t get to tell Google, Samsung, Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Fairphone, etc. how to build their devices.

The one device they do get to decide how it works is the iPhone. Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.

Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not. Overwhelmingly, they decide that they do.

You're making normative claims as if they are "the way things are."

Maybe the above is how you think things ought to be (I disagree), but anti-trust jurisprudence does not agree with your pseudo-libertarian worldview.

Maybe we can both at least agree the normative claims I’m making are true absent a monopoly finding.

Anti-trust only applies if there’s a finding that Apple is a monopoly. The jury, so to speak, is still out.

If Apple was found to be a monopoly, then there may need to be some restrictions placed on how they operate.

But I think controlling how your own product works is the presumed default, even if that product is wildly successful, as long as that success is through actual product merit, and not done deceptively or through illegal collusion.

> Anti-trust only applies if there’s a finding that Apple is a monopoly. The jury, so to speak, is still out.

Wrong again, you can violate anti-competition law without being a monopoly. You're correct that it hasn't been decided in a court of law.

I'm saying that I think they are engaging in anti-competitive behavior, you are saying "actually it is okay because they haven't been judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior in a court of law", which does not seem contrary to my claim, which is that I think they should be judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior.