As an iPhone user I am willing (and believe I am) paying Apple a premium for a well curated and reviewed App Store (vs android). I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.
When the iPhone App Store first launched, Steve Jobs claimed[0] the 30% was to cover the cost of certifying software as functional, well-designed, and nonmalicious. Part of it was an ego thing too: he didn't want people fucking up apps and making his pet project look bad, so early App Review focused on a lot of UI polish things in order to make people think iPhone software was just inherently better than Android.
Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.
I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).
At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.
[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.
To add more evidence to your point: SJ loved wall gardens and consistently fought against extensibility. The Apple II only got extension slots because the other Steve insisted. All of the compact Macs have very limited to no extensibility.
It's so ironic that Apple was pushing the (open) Web apps in the early days of the iPhone (out of necessity of course).
Jobs loved excellent user experiences, and, rightly or wrongly, saw walled gardens as an important part of providing them. Sometimes.
The counterexample is the iPod, with its advertising slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn.". The first iPod used Firewire and was Mac-only, every edition since then used entirely industry-standard technology, USB and MP3. The value proposition was, as the slogan illustrates, easily taking your CDs and putting the music on the iPod. That too was in pursuit of an excellent user experience.
Later, Jobs fought the entire music industry for the right to buy digital music, not just rent it. And won.
> There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case.
Do you have actual evidence for this claim? Because it's pretty widely accepted that the App Store has higher standards and quality, and you just cited a single case.
Are you seriously implying Apple catching 17 malware apps in 2022 means the App Store isn’t safer than being able to download whatever you want from the internet?
No, I just provided more examples as requested in an attempt to reduce confusion over which parts of the ecosystem are actually providing security. Apple app store is plagued by malicious apps as much as any other place on the internet, but what's making the difference - why these malicious apps are primarily engaging in ad fraud rather than stealing all of your personal data, is OS-level security.
All Apple can do is revoke app certificates and pull the app from the store after someone else discovers their malicious nature. That's a very low bar that can be met by nearly every app store in existence and it would be a reasonable security requirement for anyone who's operating an alternative app store on iOS.
The rest of it is just theater as there's no security-focused special sauce that Apple is providing in this area, despite prevailing beliefs. This is further demonstrated by their acceptance of an obvious impersonator like "LassPass".
It's always easy to show that something isn't perfect: just find a counterexample.
It's also easy to multiply that tactic by insinuating that this means that it isn't good, or isn't better than the competition. Which is what you're doing here.
You should be allowed to stay inside Apple's walled garden while the rest of users should be allowed to leave it whenever they want (at the very minimum at their own risk).
Completely hamstringed? SMS is the standard, and yes it sucks horribly. Elevating the experience with additional software features and cloud services on one platform does not immediately entitle all smartphone users on the globe to the same experience. Google made a push for RCS, botched it, service providers either didn’t adopt it or only partially implemented it. That was upsetting to me. Do we sue Google and service providers as well?
I do agree that losing app licenses is upsetting. But this is no different than the licensing model for many softwares in the desktop market (e.g. per-user and per-install licenses).
Emails from apple executives have made clear that iMessage is purposefully used as a lock in tool. whether thats legal or not idk, what I do know is that it prevents me from switching to android and I would like the government to make apple stop.
It quite literally does not. Step one: walk into any store and buy an Android. Step two: have your phone service transferred to that Android. Step three: there is no step three.
People do this every day. Hundreds of them, at least. Every day.
Apple is using their market power to degrade their competitors product. Of course I could switch to android, but I dont want to, solely because texting iPhone users would become a much worse experience
> Of course I could switch to android, but I dont want to, solely because texting iPhone users would become a much worse experience
It's 99% the same experience - except for iMessage users your texts become green instead of blue.
On top of that, you can use many other services for texts, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Beyond that, I don't see why it's Apple's problem that Google and/or other carriers can't make a decent texting experience without Apple making theirs less secure or a shittier experience in the process.
If you want Fortnite then you need the Tencent...sorry the Epic Game Store. That comes with all of the PII leaks[0]. Because their game store will require permissions/privileges to install system wide apps, it won't be constrained on what data it can leak about users or what it can decide to install in the background. I for one can't wait for a dozen app stores to pop up all installing Sony root kits or Denuvo malware on people's phones.
The problem with this is that going outside of Apple's walled garden benefits 3rd parties who would prefer to do whatever they want so to use the same apps as before, everyone will have to submit to that risk. Apple's walled garden is a type of regulation.
But I thought all of Apple's users were extremely rational actors who freely chose for their experience to be restricted because they knew it was better. Surely if the alternative app stores were so inferior and dangerous all of these discerning users would reject them, and paying the 30% tax would be well worth the competitive advantage of offering your product at the only marketplace that notoriously lucrative cohort would accept. You're not insinuating that Apple's userbase isn't that sophisticated and doesn't make purchasing choices based on factors other than social vibes?
Let me explain again since it went over your head the first time.
Companies, all else being equal, will choose less regulation over more regulation. If TikTok could release outside of the App Store where no one can inspect what they do, they would only release it there. Users addicted to the app wouldn’t suddenly stop using it but now they would be exposed to whatever TikTok feels like doing. They will choose the path of least resistance, not all the paths. It’s not that hard to understand.
So what. If iOS doesn't suck, their apps won't be able to do anything malicious so no added risk. If a kid in China with an iPad testing the app for 3-4 minutes is a real security benefit, I'm Tim Cook.
As long as I have to pay Apple a yearly developer fee so that I can load my own software (that no one else will use) on to 'my' phone, it does not belong me. Yes I know you can reload it every week. Not my phone.
I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.
It's understood that you can install random APKs from anywhere. As a hobbyist developer, I want to be able to set up a GitHub pipeline and then just download my APKs from that without fighting Apple or paying for an Apple developer account.
I'm actually open to buying an iPhone as well, iPhones are much better when it comes to music production, by understand I have to abide by Apple's rules and not be able to install my own software.
It's a pity really. The phones were quite good. But they failed for the exact issue under discussion: app store compatibility! They didn't have access to either Android or iOS apps.
That used to be my stance as well, but the App Store has gotten so bad in recent years. These days if there’s an app I want to install, it’s much easier to find the app store link on the developers page than to search in the App Store. At this point the “user experience” argument isn’t really there beyond easy payments and subscription management.
