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.

Unfortunately — because I am a longtime Apple user & developer — I have to agree that this is a cynical gesture designed to deflect regulatory scrutiny.

Moreover, I expect that this announcement is mostly paving the way for Apple to force all Mac OS apps to be distributed via the Mac App Store (as they do on iOS).

The optimist in me doesn't want to believe it. But this is probably consistent with Apple's economic incentives. Especially because the major role of Macs in the world is to provide a platform for developing iOS apps.

This week I ordered an M1 Macbook Air. Not because I really need it, but because a couple years from now I will be happy I have a machine that can run Big Sur, which will be remembered as the least restrictive OS of the Apple Silicon era.

Apple is the biggest corporation in the world. We can like their products, but we shouldn't give them more credit than, say, ExxonMobil or Foxconn or Goldman Sachs. They will make choices based on what creates the most profit, nothing more. That's not cynicism; it's why corporations exist at all.

I disagree with the assumption that restricting Macs to the MAS would be profit-maximizing for Apple. The context and expectations are different, and such restrictions -- hobbling many uses of macOS -- would drive developers away from Macs to competing platforms. I'm not even sure what those restrictions would look like; can I not execute arbitrary Python code? Can I not install Python packages from PyPI? (And how are they going to stop me, exactly?) Can I not use clang to compile a C project? To what extent can MacOS really be locked down in a way that doesn't drive away any developer who's not making iOS apps?

And if the Mac software scene stagnates, Apple eventually loses their core constituency.