A lot of the articles and comments I have read, focus on the 30% cut. Which is definitely high, though primarily for those who sell externally licensed and/or non-digital goods.<p>But to me (with my almost decade long iOS developer experience), the bigger problems are:<p>* You cannot install apps on an iPhone (even on a phone that you own) without paying Apple. Without a developer account, an app that you build and self sign works for only 7 days.<p>* If you are an app that exists on other platforms, and/or accepts payments on other platforms, you can't describe that or even link to it, from your iOS app. Your users need to know that the alternative options exist on their own. See the Netflix sign in screen for a nice example, but realize that 99% of apps won't get away with that, only apps the size of Netflix can.<p>* You can only ship apps that Apple's inconsistent review board agrees with. And of course, the rules and their inconsistent application keep changing in favor of Apple's competing apps, which of course have access to internal APIs and don't pay a 30% cut either. Spotify is a good example here, but it's worse for many smaller companies.<p>* And now macOS is adopting the worst of iOS' draconian policies. You won't be able to run non-notarized apps on macOS on Apple Silicon based computers at all.<p>Unfortunately there are many who drink the Apple koolaid about all of this being all about security. There are legitimately good things that Apple does which enhance user security, and I welcome changes like the new IDFA policy of iOS 14, but let's not pretend that Apple does those because they affect Apple's competitors' business and strengthen Apple's (you have to now use Apple's sdk for user tracking).<p>But none of the things I wrote about above are about the user, and some of them are actively worse for Apple's users (eg: not being able to buy a book on the Kindle app easily).
I'd bet that their end goal is to get them broken up, and have the app store separated from the product. That way Epic Payments could swoop in as an alternate gaming-focused app store for mobile devices - they already have relationships with many gaming publishers, thanks to Unreal Engine - and get a piece of that lucrative pie, while not having to pay their 30% commissions anymore.<p>It also wouldn't surprise me if Epic had been in touch with state AGs filing antitrust lawsuits. The timing is pretty suspicious, coming a week after Congressional hearings where Tim Cook said they don't do the exact thing they just did with Epic. You can't launch a new product in a week.
As someone who doesn't play any games on my phone, and doesn't care at all about Epic, I guess the best alternative here for me, is that Apple just allow 3rd party app stores. I guess they could fully sandbox those stores so that those app stores had no device / user data access by default.<p>I'd always have the choice to install them, but I could continue to ignore them and still get the benefit of Apple's walled garden approach.
These articles about the issue were both interesting:<p>Matt Stoller (Journalist specializing in monopoly)
<a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/epic-games-kicks-off-the-civil-war" rel="nofollow">https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/epic-games-kicks-off-the-...</a><p>iA (App developer)
<a href="https://ia.net/topics/monopolies-apple-and-epic" rel="nofollow">https://ia.net/topics/monopolies-apple-and-epic</a>
Three sincere questions for the group:<p>Does anyone disagree that Apple and Google have the right to just go "this app store business is just not worth the headaches, we're gonna shut it all down."<p>When I read hackernews a lot, I get the impression folks think these app stores are some kind of public commons.<p>And my second question:
Who do you think customers will blame when someone uses an alternative payment approach to steal from customers? Google/Apple? The app provider? Themselves?<p>Third question:
What's a customers recourse once they are the victims of fraud or simply want a refund for whatever reason? How easy will it be for them to reason about what to do?
It will have an impact on everything. Richard Stallman predicted the social dangers of locked computing and he turned out to be more right than almost everyone expected.
I agree on the "can't install apps from outside the app store". That's probably the best way to fix this.<p>As long as Apple controls the app store, this will always be an issue, and it doesn't matter precisely what the % cut is. The reality is, very few people would argue that Apple "deserves" some cut of app sales for developers who choose to use the Apple App store. But it's impossible to disentangle this issue from in-app payments. If in-app payments are royalty free, then every app will become "free" with an in-app purchase to make it do anything at all, to game the system. But if Apple gets a cut of in-app purchases, there will always be this grey area of "what if I purchase a subscription using another website" or "what if I use a free app to access my paid Netflix account", and so on.
As a way out of this Apple should create an alternative for people to run alternative app stores, but disable iOS updates and Apple services on those products and offer them at a cost. People discount the fact that apple provides free software updates (that would cost $100s + in the past) for Free. If a user wants out of the apple ecosystem, Apple should enable that and demand a fair price for the services otherwise sustained by the way mobile economics are currently structured.
There are entire cohorts of interested companies and industries that will be looking to benefit from a reduction in Apple's standard pricing policies.<p>Do we know how / if Apple charges SaaS companies who enable adding seats through their App Store apps? I'm thinking the likes of Slack, Trello, Zoom, Notion etc, I haven't heard that they get charged by Apple?
Maybe another way to look at this is, if apple / google decides not to have an app store at all, would anyone find that wrong?<p>iphones will only have apps produced by apple. If any other company, say a game producer wants their game on the phone then you have to license the game to apple for 30% royalties. Apple then makes the game available on the phone. Is this still an issue legally or in terms of fairness?
If this case comes down to who the consumers hate more it has to be Epic games and Fortnite.<p>Sure Apple has a bad timeline but they did what they were allowed to do and Epic Games only attack is the environment it happened in.
Can fortnite run in browser?
Would be nice if they could just do that and show genzoom that they dont need to discover interesting content via an appstore app only.
Is it Fortnite’s battle or Tencent/CCP’s battle? The timing certainly seem to indicate the latter considering Tencent owns 40% of Epic and Epic went out of their way to get themselves banned on purpose.