The original source is here: <a href="https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312</a>
Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious.<p>Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam).<p>It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.<p>The other suggestions are also really good, I'd love to be able to pay for big updates (though I personally don't really mind subscriptions for apps I regularly use).<p>I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.
The only way we effect change is by ORGANIZING.<p>Right now, Apple can do whatever they want because they pick us off one by one, and ignore us. Google does exactly the same thing. If we organize as a large enough group, they have to listen. I firmly believe what Apple does is anti-competitive and they need to be regulated firmly by the government. I also think Google and Facebook need to be firmly regulated by the government as well.<p>Apple needs to allow other people to create their own App Store or they should be regulated by the government. We need to organize as a group of software developers and sue Apple and lobby our politicians, because that seems to be the only way Apple will listen.<p>I also agree that subscriptions are NOT the way to go, and having paid upgrades are the best way to go. Driving down the costs such that things are freemium has ruined our industry as far as I'm concerned. I want to pay good money for a good piece of software, but even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days. This needs to stop otherwise iOS app development will become the sweatshop of the 2020s.
I'm not an app developer, but I am equally frustrated as a user on several of Wil Shipley's key points:<p>1. Ads for competitors. Sure, show me ads. But don't replace my exact match with an ad that takes up the whole screen. As a user who searches for apps, I find this outrageous. If the App Store was solely an advertising network I would understand. But Apple takes a 30% commission! Get out of my way and let me find what I'm looking for, then take your commission.<p>2. Upgrade pricing. I'm tired of abandoned apps, especially those I paid for initially. I don't expect developers to work for free (nor do I want to have 100+ subscriptions). Let me upgrade to major new versions.<p>3. Subscriptions for everything. Ugh. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to buy something outright and use it for its useful life. There are many apps I never use because I don't want yet another subscription, but I would have happily purchased.<p>4. Trials. Not on Wil Shipley's list, but how on earth do we not get trials? I don't want in-app purchases to "unlock" the app. I just want to try it out for a couple weeks before I buy. I have foregone many possibly great apps because I couldn't be confident they would work for me. And I've wasted money on apps that looked like they would work for me, but didn't.<p>EDIT: I see trials have been possible for 2 years! I had no idea. I guess I haven't encountered any, which seems odd.<p>As a user, I feel that Apple has created a race to the bottom and they've made the app ecosystem way less valuable to me. I would be happier if upgrades and trials allowed me to spend more money to get more valuable iOS apps. Instead I regret some purchases, avoid some purchases, can't tell how much apps actually cost, have to find new apps when old ones are abandoned, and don't trust that I'm able to discover and buy the best apps.
People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation.<p>The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Basically what I'm saying is, we need to nip this in the bud, or indie development is over.
I was curious about the arguments for not including upgrade pricing on the App Store. Apple maintains that upgrade pricing is a relic of shrink wrapped software and subscriptions are better.<p>I lean softly towards Apple on this one. A few reasons I can think of for why subscriptions are preferred over upgrade pricing:<p>- The app developer can keep making money over a longer period of time.<p>- Generally means somebody can try out software first before committing, whereas upgrade pricing implies you either have to commit before trying it or nothing -- there are no demos on the App Store.<p>- Subscriptions also mean a developer does not hold out new features or bug fixes for customers unless they upgrade -- it incentivizes developers to keep working on an app and maintain a relationship with customers. This is especially true as the app needs to be updated to be compatible with new devices and OS versions.<p>- Potentially lets customers choose feature sets in the app. This is a good thing as it means developers can broaden their market to customers who want to pay less for fewer features or more for more features. It doesn't lump everybody into the same bucket.
One nit to pick, Slack on iOS is apparently fully native: <a href="https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459</a><p>I think this shows, in my opinion, how little native vs. web/electron actually matters to overall quality. You can generally make a smooth, fast, bug-free app on any platform. Or not...<p>I used to use the Android version and I was never quite sure whether it was native or not. I couldn't think of a way to tell.
I buy an app on my iPhone once every couple months. I simply cannot find anything. I cannot buy.<p>The 'freemium' games hide.<p>I want:<p>- games that offer a single purchase, or a one time upgrade for full features without ads. Yes, some people will buy the 'bucket of coffee beans' upgrade. I won't. I don't want to search through twenty games that offer it.<p>- productivity tools that do something useful. My phone is stuck in 2001. Universal menu ordering? Teach me in two minutes? Manage my contacts to call people I haven't talked to in a while? Anything?<p>- privacy. Why does the Peet's Application in the background still get updated location services, draining my battery? When is the microphone on? Who is really calling me?<p>Seriously. A business model based on "the other players aren't doing well either" seems excessively fragile.
One day it'll dawn on people that we should provide infrastructure that guarantees safety and freedom, not walled gardens that provide safety and freedom only if it also happens to be profitable for somebody.<p>There seem to be enough people who don't see this as self evident and are motivated to try and create their own walled gardens in the hopes of becoming the next rent seeker overlord.<p>These types of posts never end - it's as if people refuse to let go of their naive belief that Apple or some other entity is fundamentally good, but just needs to be pleaded with a little more, to begin to act righteously. It reminds me of children who beg their parents into buying them a toy they want. It makes me sad for both the child to be stooping to such a level but even more so for the parent, for letting the child end up in such a situation in the first place.<p>I don't know, is begging trillion dollar companies to provide basic functionality not in conflict with having an iota of dignity?
A great list.<p>Also: Capping in-app payments (I’m targeting games here) at a certain multiple of cost price, or a fixed amount for free apps, would fix the absurd gaming mechanisms aimed only at extracting more money rather than great gameplay.
I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian or OpenBSD.<p>Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going, they will support and then drop some technology on an apparent whim. I've had serious issues when they dropped WebObjects, Java as a first class Cocoa development language, and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple. The promise of ZFS on OS X made me buy a Mac Pro, and then several months later they just dropped all mention of ZFS on OS X.<p>I'm not going to stick with a company which is so secretive about what they are going to do, failing to even publish roadmaps for their customers and developers. Mindshare among the tech geeks is how OS X took off. Now they're losing it - many developers I know are moving away from the platform too.
The survey was great, because it hits basically everything that developers hate about Apple:<p>* Search Ads<p>* Documentation<p>* App Store Review Guidelines<p>* Codesigning<p>* Apple Developer Forums<p>* App Store Review<p>The only thing missing is bug reporting, and I stuck my response for that in it anyways when they asked what was wrong with their developer tools ("Respond to our feedback!"). Sadly, I think the results of this survey are anonymized so thoroughly that they disappear entirely before anyone at Apple can get to look at them.<p>(Supposedly the forums are getting revamped in a week for WWDC. I don't have very high hopes, sadly, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.)
Strongly agree with most of the points, but not all.<p>Disagreements :<p>- App updates. I think that the subscription model would be pretty good for apps actually if you could have a micro transaction system. Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). Selling apps for a one time fee does not fit that well in this model. A nominal fee for app updates kinda solves part of the problem .. you just hope that your users love the new feature enough to buy it. It feels a lot like for a lot of apps that would just lead to feature creep instead of good design. I have been hoping to see a micro-subscription model emerge for a very long time. Unfortunately I don't think customers want that and Apple/Google don't seem super interested in pushing it either (Google kinda has that with Google Play Pass, but in typical Google fashion this is dead on arrival).<p>- I don't think the web is in a significantly different than it has been for the entirety of iOS/Android existences : it has its place but is not going to replace native anytime soon, especially for the "high quality" apps the author talks about.
>Lower the cut you take from 30% to 20%<p>I agree with this. I think there are probably a lot of app ideas where the margin is small enough that 30% probably prevents them from even being started.<p>Also fix app review. It's so arbitrary, it's like playing a game of darts.
I have been thinking about an alternative pricing model but it only works for content creation software. It would be enabled by an OpenPGP library which handles signing of files and micropayments.<p>What if the app itself was free but it charged a small fee the first time a new file was saved? The file format doesn't have to be proprietary - a simple chunk of metadata should be able to identify the creator and the files won't need to be tracked by a central authority because the mere existence of the signature in the file would imply that the one-off payment had already been made.<p>The canonical example is a rich Markdown editor. You could get the WYSIWYG conveniences à la Word and the resulting .md file would have a signature indicating that the app had saved it.<p>Subsequent edits by the author wouldn't incur a fee as the signature would match the app instance. But someone else with a copy of the app would incur a fee if they also used it to make changes of their own and their signature would be added to the file.<p>Someone else could edit the file with their favourite text editor. This wouldn't incur a fee. But the signatures would have to be preserved otherwise the original author(s) wouldn't be able to re-edit the file without incurring another payment.<p>Perhaps I'm being dumb but I think these files could be safely pushed to Github with the signatures intact. They'd be as secure as any public key.<p>I can see this working with many file types -- MS Office documents, Adobe Illustrator et al, 3D model files, PDFs, images, movies. The same file could be edited with different apps each saving their own signatures. All that's needed is something which disables the "File/Save" command unless a payment is made.<p>Is anyone aware of any software which works like this?
> Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago<p>Which was during the coronavirus lockdown and associated unemployment and economic upheaval.<p>In addition to Omni group seemed to be on something of a downturn (personally I recently gave up on Omnigraffle because 1) I was tired of the upgrade pricing and 2) simultaneous cross-platform multiuser editing is currently more important to me than a rich feature set and beautiful UI.)
Wil Shipley is an excellent developer and his points are excellent as well.<p>Agreed completely about ads in the app store - they are basically worthless and often very annoying and spammy.<p>I particularly concur with subscription vs. upgrade pricing. I utterly despise subscriptions, and I want to have the option to pay an incremental fee for an upgrade <i>if I want to</i> rather than having to purchase a new version of the app!
As a new user to iOS (on Android since the OG Droid), I totally agree. I had to post on /r/iOS to find a Solitaire game that didn't have ads. I looked and looked and I couldn't find Solitaire City. It's not even ranked in the top 200 in its category. I tried like 20 Solitaire games and they all sucked or had ads. Terrible ads.<p>Honestly, I was shocked. I thought the App store would be better than Google Play Store, which I didn't think was that great, but I could usually find paid apps without ads.<p>Btw, I totally agree with his asks for the App store.
For those who don't know Wil is behind Delicious Library, and prior to that co-founded and headed The Omni Group in 1991. He's also won 8 design awards!
> I’ve literally never met one person who has enjoyed subscribing to software and losing access to it once they stop paying.<p>You can meet me - I much prefer subscriptions. Pay while I use it, like a service, rather than pretending to 'buy' it which was never really how it was anyway. I don't mind losing access if I'm not paying any more. If want to use it again, I'm happy to pay again.<p>What's the problem?
>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam, etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But, again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App Store’s policies. Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago.<p>NO! Stop giving Apple more reasons to ruin the web. The browser lock-in on iOS, poor support for modern browser features, and lack of any native interfacing is beyond unforgivable. For Apple, the web is a second-class citizen and it's bordering on lunacy to suggest otherwise.
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps. Right now new versions either have to be made into all-new apps, <i>or</i> we have to give away all new versions for free. There’s no way to charge an upgrade free. If I buy a Mac or iPhone from Apple I can trade it in towards a new one when I upgrade, but users can’t do the same thing for software. All the developers I know are suffering right now because Apple has prevented us from offering special upgrade pricing. It’s completely unsustainable to ask developers to continue supporting their apps but also to forbid them from charging for upgrades.<p>I don't understand. Aren't freemium apps allowed on AppStore? There are lots of apps with in-app purchase upgrades.
> almost 1% of our profits<p>The article says 1%, his tweet says 1/3... but that seems low!
Apple's cut is 30%. To only take 1/3 of profits, costs must only be 10% of revenue... cost of support, advertising, AND development.
The problem isn't with the 30% Cut. It is the value that it offers. Right now it is nothing more than rent seeking. Apple doesn't even have to lower the Cut. They need to provide more values from the Cut.<p>It could be CDN for your app, where Apple could lower the bandwidth usage for certain uses, using the Apple EdgeCache. Or additional tools that helps developer's productivity.<p>There are lots could be done. And yet Post Steve Jobs Apple hasn't acted on it.
Every year, it becomes more and more obvious that Apple cares far greater for money and numbers than developers or customers. Any criticism thrown at the company goes into a void, they don't communicate about any issues or feedback, and they continue to take away useful features and replace them with either nothing, or something nobody asked for. I used to really like this company.
All these great things that would reduce Apple’s profits. I’m not even sure it’s too unfair since developers know the state of things going in. It can also get a bit worse since so many developers continue to put out high quality apps despite it all.
The App Store sharecropping model is bad enough, but it adds insult to injury that app stores (ALL of them!) are so absolutely horrible. The search functionality is terrible. Discovery is terrible. The developer experience is terrible. They're just total amateur hour. For something Apple and others want to push it really seems like they're not putting any resources into making them not suck.
This ad/keywork thing on iOS drove me nuts for the few months I actually was using a iphone (before switching back to android). If I search for "RDP", I don't want to see a bunch of proprietary desktop sharing applications, VNC applications, etc as the top 10-20 hits. I want to see applications that support the RDP protocol.
Why would it change if you keep shoveling money (and dev resources) directly to Apple? They already know you'll stay regardless of their response.
>Allow us to charge a nominal fee to for major upgrades to our apps.<p>Can't this be done with a non-consumable in app purchase? Is that against the TOS?
Why do app developers accept the app store...<p>It is a amazing programmers organize so well for open source but can't organize for basic policy like resisting these ridiculous terms.
Interesting points. I disagree with one of the points that argues Apple should favor the “real apps,” which I assume refer to native iOS apps. Users don’t care what stack developers use as long as the product does its job and developers for sure want to reach as many users as possible regardless of what platform they are on. Also, companies with more resources will be better positioned than indie developers to make native apps for multiple platforms, so it wouldn’t benefit the author too. So who really benefits from this?
So the author has felt mistreated for a number of years, filler a form for a number of years and nothing changed?<p>All I can think of is the following quote:<p>«Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results».