But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want.
(Ground rules all app stored would have to follow based on technical, security, and legal concerns would be fine too, IMO.)
Of course Apple would never go for that, so we'll end up with whatever mess legal processes can wring out of them.
This the answer. The app store monopoly doesn't really matter, the real tyranny is needing Apple's cryptographic blessing to run software on our own computers. This should be literally illegal. Restore our computer freedom and their app store rent seeking becomes irrelevant.
I think it's been a net positive overall. The percentage of people that want to do and install more with it is small.
The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings.
And apps should no longer have to use first party payment rails, first party authentication/sign in rails, or be forced to jump through review or upgrade hoops.
It’s funny how they are their own counter example. They have no leg to stand on.
I don’t think Apple is arguing that it is impossible to allow more open ways to install apps on iPhones. I think they’re saying that they don’t want to, and that they shouldn’t have to.
I agree with you. But, as devil's advocate, why not suggest that Apple should be allowed to run as crappy a store as they want, while people should be free not to buy Apple?
This duopoly does not truly offer a lot of choice, so any criticism must happen from within the confines of the current reality.
I’m not going to tell a pedestrian who wants safer roads to stop being a participant in traffic, I accept that they have very little real choice.
Having to uncritically accept anything and everything the manufacturer of your device does is not really viable and is a recipe for a worse future.
They do in EU, because they were forced to.
AltStore PAL https://altstore.io/
Buildstore https://builds.io/
Aptoide https://en.aptoide.com
.. and so on
Compared to what?
Also, are we certain that a better alternative would really appear? E.g. I’m aware of f-droid and I’d install a similar ios libre software store, but I’m not aware of any, even in the EU where alt stores are possible.
I have no right to complain that I can't run Apple programs on a Windows computer, and Microsoft shouldn't be compelled to support MacOS software.
seems like you can get it to run on windows via wsl if you want to run apps built for macs on your windows machine
is there a need to complain? windows might not be putting in support for it, but unlike apple in their store, they arent actively preventing you from doing so
But I also, I guess, kinda just have a dumb thought about this whole ordeal. Broadly speaking, we are in a position where we, the general public with the backing of the government, want to change how a private corporation uses it's products that it sold to us. Not for any other reason that would shield us from harm or prevent risk, but rather because the corporation's products are so successful a lot of people use them too much! But wait! That's not actually true because there's enough products on the market that we don't actually need to use this product...but we like it because its incrementally the best and the chat bubbles are blue and applications run better and seem higher quality (which is a selling point of the product we are now actively dismantling but I digress...)
I know its tiring to use food cliches, but imagine if like, I make a business selling apple pies and my apple pies are incredibly successful and everyone eats them all the time and now all of a sudden I need to also guarantee that my business can make cherry pies because my apple pies sell so damn well. But truth is, its not really about the apple pies at all. It's about my baking trays. We actually just want to make sure that the baking trays of my business are now capable of also cooking for cherry pies even though that's got nothing to do with my fucking business. I sell apple pies. I'm so confused
Apple is dictating the behavior of every business operating in the digital market (Apple itself brags that this amounts to over $1 trillion, with a T, in economic activity), with the App Store, which has 70-80% profit margins, and numerous dev horror stories. Rejecting your update over something they previously approved, or something they let all your competitors do. Forcing their IAP system on you. Dictating what links you can put in your app, how you present prices (don't call out the Apple tax), what you can tell consumers in emails. Forcing their direct competitors to have an inferior user experiences (can't subscribe in Spotify, can't buy books in Kindle; oh, and bundling Apple Music/Books/TV with the OS, and advertising them throughout the OS). Threatening retaliation if you complain publicly ("If you run to the press, it never helps.") Blocking VPNs or secure messaging in authoritarian countries, and you can't sideload. Sabotaging the web to keep their monopoly (even trying to kill PWAs recently).
Apple feels entitled to a higher profit margin on your business than your business will ever achieve for itself! That's nuts!
No monopoly required.
All that is required is that they have large marketshare, an important product, and it is difficult for users to change to alternatives, or avoid its uncompetitive behavior.
Choosing a phone involves balancing numerous features of devices. There is no phone market with the thousands of competing devices it would take to really cover what a customer might ideally want. So choices often balance so many things, involve so much practical investment, that they make switching devices over a few things, or even many things, from awfully unpleasant to very difficult.
And, with great market power, comes great responsibility: to not become a barrier to competitive innovation and hard work.
By definition, Apple's strict gatekeeping App Store, a significant feature on a significant general purpose computing platform, is anti-competitive. There is no technical reason why side loading or side-stores couldn't thrive, on such a general purpose device intertwined in all our lives.
Onerous fees and terms and selective limitation (relative to Apple's own offerings) for developers make it even more anticompetitive.
Of course, anyone who likes having fewer options, or just the options they have now, is free to not explore others. For now and forever. Amen.
Yes, because it's "we the people" not "we the corporations".
But that's not where we are. I think it makes sense to treat both Apple and Google as de facto monopolies with respect to the smartphone market, and impose some regulation on what they have to allow and how much they can charge for it.
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/
Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change.
This brought up a fun thought exercise for me. Pretty sure that Y Combinator would argue that giving away 7% of one's company for access to intangible (but beneficial) things like funding, advisors, etc, is completely worth it for a company. Pretty sure that they also fund companies that pay salespeople fairly significant commissions on sales.
Interesting to see them argue that asking a company to give up 30% "commission" on revenue for access to a large market stifles competition and innovation.
Is Y Combinator's forcing companies to give up 7% of their companies for access to advisors and funding stifling innovation and competition? (Spoiler: I don't think so. I think both Y Combinator and apple should be able to capitalize on the access they provide.)
Meanwhile, any subscription I sign up for through another channel, I have to wade through a sea of dark patterns to reach a cancel screen.
This is why I choose to have an iPhone, because the garden is walled and I can relax. If you want freedom to have multiple different app stores, Android is a better option for you.
Folks who care about having any app they want through alternative stores I wish would just opt for Android systems.
But the Injunction requires Apple not to prohibit linking-out period,
full stop. It does not permit Apple to condition the right to
link-out on the payment of a fee.
Similarly, the simplicity of the alternative world of just clicking a button fails to incorporate any additional risks (hence the "scare" screen).
Courts generally permit companies to charge what they want. It may be justifiable to force alternative markets for something close to a monopoly, but it's not clear they can force the alternative to be cheaper.
If you look at the table of authorities, it's basically Epic itself, and some 50+ year-old cases. There's just nothing really in support.
Currently, a tiny, tiny percentage of very large developers make virtually all of the profits from selling Apple apps. Apple's 30% rate has been in place longer than most of them have existed, so there's been no surprise. Price discrimination is legal, and Apple's choice to make larger companies pay more seems supportive of small businesses. So there's not even a compelling argument that Apple's fees are evil; it's just that big, maximalist players see a way to get more profit.
So yes, Apple fees limit profits for Y-combinator startups. The brief would have been more compelling had it listed the startups that were passed on due to the fees (rather than listing the successful ones). That's the only new data point in this argument, and would have been direct evidence of impact to small companies. But because the brief didn't make this argument factually, the court can fairly assume there are no such cases, and the brief may have done more damage than good to its cause.
And a lot of things just aren't available on mobile because of the cut. Most apps which offer movies or books for sale for instance only let you view them on the phone, you have to buy on the web.
The other major players in the App Store haven’t allowed in app purchases for years.
It's not about "having less profit" necessarily, it's about it being a more risky business with a lower potential ceiling making investment less likely and thus: a dearth of Apps.
(reading charitably, of course).
People struggle with this: Stripe and Apple do the same thing wrt to the fees. They get all into a knot trying to explain how 3% of all revenue, successfully capped at 0.3% in Europe, is somehow different than Apple taking 30% of App Store IAP. We already live in the world where nice, red headed LISP brothers and insightful patio furniture guy is wrong. You don’t even need to talk about it or file a brief.
The reason the Epic case is tough is because the fee doesn’t matter. Like what is the right fee? Say a number. Clearly it doesn’t make sense to take a fee at all! Apple is doing something valuable - they are concentrating wealthy, good customers who overwhelming choose iPhones instead of Android phones - and instead of making iPhones more expensive they take from app developers. But if you did the sensible thing - force the platforms to charge the cut they are taking from the end user up front, when they buy the phone - nobody is going to do that.
It’s exactly the same problem as Europe saying Facebook has to be ads free. Nobody chose to pay for a Facebook subscription. The truth is the regulators are in between a rock and a hard place if they try to make changes to one number in the midst of the status quo. In the past, regulators took more drastic steps, they split up the monopolies, and once you understand how weak these regulations that people are litigating are, suddenly you will be much more sympathetic to the idea that the App Store and the iPhone have to be different businesses, or that private digital payments companies shouldn’t exist at all.
This could be good, if it encourages people to re-learn the value of open standards, like Web is supposed to be, rather than helping to perpetuate the proprietary app stores.
Also, I think it's noteworthy that, once a company gets customers locked into a proprietary app store, they show their true extremely greedy, abusive, and indifferent side to third-party developers. No matter how warm and fuzzy a brand they craft for consumers.
Are Bay Area libertarian techbros ironically going to try to rely on government regulation to keep the awful proprietary app stores tolerable, or will they rediscover what industry has known for decades about the value of open standards, and direct their efforts consistent with that?
Though I'm sure then Apple would lock a lot of device access by websites behind a domain allowlist that you have to pay a bunch of money to get on.
Our current governments love monopolies, though. Easier to control.
on the other hand, it wasn’t all that long ago that we had many smart phone markers and operating systems, all with different strategies. It’s possible that the market did decide…
Equally, pretty much no iPhone user (outside of tech circles) cares about the App Store monopoly for iPhone. The policy is well known, and hasn't changed in 15 years.
Indeed many (not all) tech folk who complain about the App Store still went out and bought an iPhone.
The raw truth is that the market did decide. And no we don't need regulation. Apple and Google have different enough policies for there to be choice. In some countries Android has dominant market share.
Why did so many people pick iPhone or Android over their prior competitors? Because the developers wrote software there. Why did the devs write software there? Because people were picking those ecosystems. It was an upward spiral that changed the world a LOT in 18 years, but it was all started with Apple—being a hardware company—selling premium-quality hardware, and then adding their support for third party development.
What about Steam? Can a publisher sell a game for ~$45 in their store and $60 in Steam, or is it against some TOC?
Phones are essential. You can't get a job without one. It's impossible to stay connected or navigate without one. You can't even order food in a restaurant these days without your smartphone. Yet two companies control and tax the entirety of mobile computing.
Scratch that. Mobile computing *IS* computing for most people. It's the only computer or internet portal they know.
And two companies own it all. The passport to the modern world is owned and taxed by two trillion dollar companies.
2000's-era DOJ-litigated antitrust abuser Microsoft dreams that they had this much of a monopoly.
The Halloween papers sounded evil. Mobile computing monopolization is evil.
Here's what needs to be done:
1. Web installs. Both companies need to allow web native installs without scare walls or buried settings flags that need to be enabled. First class apps from the web, with no scaring users about it. We have all the technology to make this work safely: permissions, app scanning, signature blacklisting, etc.
2. Defaults. Both companies need to be prevented from pushing their apps as defaults. No more default browsers, default wallets, default app stores, default photo galleries, default search engine, etc.
3. Taxation and control. Apps cannot be taxed on any transactions. Users must not be forced to "sign in" with the monopoly provider's identity system. Apps must not be forced to use the monopoly payment rails. Apps must not be forced to be human reviewed or update to the latest UI changes / SDK on a whim.
Mobile apps and platforms must work like desktop software.
We need this freedom and flexibility for consumers, and we need competition to oxygenate the tech sector and reward innovation. Capitalism shouldn't be easy - it should be hard to keep your spot at the top. Resting on the laurels of easily defended moats for twenty years while reaping some of the most outsized benefits in the industry has created lethargy and held us back.
What? There are plenty of apps charging more when you buy currency/subscription on iOS compared to when you buy from their website, or in some cases Android app. Patreon is an example that made the loudest noise recently, but it’s been a widespread practice for years. That said Apple doesn’t (didn’t?) allow you to tell users that a cheaper option exists elsewhere.
Of course today, we're getting to the point where governments are going to probably start softly relying on citizens having smartphones that are either Android or iOS. This is terrible and completely the wrong way to go; it would be much better to depend on standards that anyone could implement. Even progressive web apps would be a better outcome than Android/iOS apps. Getting to this point definitely puts both Apple and Google in privileged positions wherein they pretty much do have to be treated like defacto monopolies, but I'm also pretty sure this isn't the outcome we want either.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
I do agree that requiring specific platforms is a problem - we don't want a return to the IE6 or Flash-dominated eras where people who weren't on Windows were treated like sub-humans.
People argue you have Website too. But Website does not provide the same level of experience and is at disadvantage compared to Apps.
I have long argued Apple should have given up this power since 2013 / 2014. And Apple should split Games to Game Store, that keeps their 30% cut and would have kept at least 70 - 80% of their current App Store revenue.
For what ever reason last time I said this in 2018 and 2020 I was devoted to oblivion on HN.
Apple and Google can’t both be monopolists of the smartphone market (or even app stores). By definition, if there’s more than one seller, there is no monopoly.
I suppose you could say Apple is the monopolist if the iPhone market or the iPhone App Store market. You can’t say Google is the monopolist of the Android phone market or the Android App Store market.
But neither one, and certainly not both, can be the monopolist of the smartphone market or the smartphone app store market.
Of course, Apple gets a 30% cut in any scams, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it, and really their policies are what create it, in the first place.
It feels like a social issue.
> Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first, leaving you wondering.
> It’s not that other languages don’t have Unicode-correct APIs at all — most do. For instance, NSString has the enumerateSubstrings method that can be used to walk through a string by grapheme clusters. But defaults matter; Swift’s priority is to do the correct thing by default.
> Strings in Swift are very different than their counterparts in almost all other mainstream programming languages. When you’re used to strings effectively being arrays of code units, it’ll take a while to switch your mindset to Swift’s approach of prioritizing Unicode correctness over simplicity.
> Ultimately, we think Swift makes the right choice. Unicode text is much more complicated than what those other languages pretend it is. In the long run, the time savings from avoided bugs you’d otherwise have written will probably outweigh the time it takes to unlearn integer indexing.
— https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/
I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp_questions/comments/10pvfia/look...
These two examples aren't the same, even just on the basis of market power.
What? They can offer an SPA, or a traditional web page. They can offer a hardware device. They can make an android app compelling enough to convert users.
So different in fact that the comparison doesn't hold water.
On the other hand you trust your bank, for example, so you follow the link on their website and install the App, and the trust came from their own brand.
Of course, I'd also assume most or all the people associated with YC were part of the "fire Lina Khan because our whole business model is actually just taking advantage of FAANG acquihire panic" squad, making them hypocrites (in a slightly different way) for helping to prop up these monopolistic gatekeepers and then acting put upon by the results of that.
Capitalizing, to the detriment of your competition (other paid software services) when you have a monopoly or duopoly on app distribution isn't legal.
If there anyone could make an App Store, then we would have a better idea of what the market rate for app stores should be.
The things is, there's really not.
There's two: Visa and Mastercard.
In the US there's also American Express and Discover (afaik), but those aren't accepted everywhere (to the point that it was a joke in Futurama).
But We’ve actually seen this happen in the United States before. The Durbin Amendment put a cap on debit card transactions of 21 cents plus 0.05% (although an additional 1¢ can be added to the cap if certain security requirements are met). After this Amendment was put into practice we saw two things:
1) Rewards earning debit cards were almost entirely phased out.
2) Prices did not drop as a result.
The reason the EU even capped payment processing fee's was because of this duopoly that was strangling the market. Quite poignant.
And it's 0.2% on debit cards. :)
Roughly speaking, when a transaction needs to be unwound, if the merchant cannot cover the reversal (for example, because it has defaulted), then the payment processor needs to pony up instead. Note that this isn't an edge case, this is something that happens every day.
If the payment processor defaults (gasp!), then the processor's sponsor bank needs to cover it. This is why a sponsor bank will have a lot to say about what a processor can and cannot do.
If the sponsor bank is unable to meet its obligations (argh!), then it's the card Network itself that is on the hook. This is why card networks have a lot to say about what a sponsor bank can and cannot do ;)
The key to understanding payment processing is to realise that the risk is very asymmetrical. The processing party collects only a small fraction of the transaction amount as fees, but is effectively on the hook for the full amount if things go pear shaped.
That is why the cost is typically proportional to the value of the payment.
You'll see fixed/capped fees mostly on payment methods that don't allow reversals (ie: not very consumer friendly), or that take place between highly trusted parties where credit risk can be handled through other ways.
But what really happened is that apple kept a stranglehold on what more and more became a general computing device. And they've done enough anti-compettive maneuvers to have the EU make them open up. I wouldn't be surprised if the US eventually comes to a similar decision.
Apple may not be as blatant about it as the other big tech, but I hope it's not contentious to say that all three big companies needs a round of anti-trust overhaul.
I was on such a project where we cared a lot about these details, and the whole team agreed to throw Swift strings out the window and build our own array-based string replacement where each slot is a symbol. Which is probably what Apple would've done if it weren't for performance overhead.
Didn't help that their API was really unstable. Every major Swift version broke our code in so many places that we started adding extra layers just to protect ourselves.
It's a matter of multiple independent legal decisions at this point that both of these companies have engaged in repeated, sustained, illegal anti-competitive behaviors, so the extent to which there was a "market" that voted is highly arguable.
Sailfish OS does exactly that, but it has a number of limitations and added friction due to legal and technical reasons.
And choosing between two systems is really not much of a "choice". Right now there is a story on the front page about Android app requiring devs to validate their ID, even for side-loaded apps.
Epic Games is a developer and publisher making billions off tricking children into paying for worthless virtual goods. Fuck ‘em if they can’t make a living with the 30% Apple cut.
I'll just reproduce FatalLogic's last comment here:
""" In the class action case[0], which was allowed to go forward by the court last year, it is claimed that Valve told someone:
"This includes communications from Valve that “‘the price on Steam [must be] competitive with where it’s being sold elsewhere’” and that Valve “‘wouldn’t be OK with selling games on Steam if they are available at better prices on other stores, even if they didn’t use Steam keys.’” Dkt. No. 343 ¶ 158, 160 (quoting emails produced at VALVE_ANT_0598921, 0605087). "
(This is a new case, not the 2021 suit, which was rejected by the court, then amended and refiled, later with an additional plaintiff added)
[0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29... """
So a US court of law has decided that it's at least possible that this isn't true.
Their lawyers sure frame it such a friendly and elegant way though: 'We want to make sure our customers are getting the best deal, and we wouldn't want to mislead them into making a poor decision [by promoting the game] if that's not the case.' Undoubtedly the best legal money can buy. I have immense respect for Gabe and I hope he steps in at some point because this sounds like the bean counters are starting to run amuck. Or course it's possible he's complicit to this, but I think he probably deserves the benefit of the doubt, for now.
[1] - https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/washington/...
[2] - https://trellis.law/doc/district/13397794/wolfire-games-llc-...
Windows phones had a very enthusiastic but too-tiny following. Blackberry lost the plot with terrible hardware and software for the app era (developing an app for the Storm was enough to convince me to never get one of their phones). Symbian's S60 was too little too late in the US. Ubuntu, Mozilla, and others all tried various flavors of Linux and web based phones to no success.
I don't think you can really blame Google or Apple for any of these failures in the same way Microsoft could be blamed in the 90's for their abuses.
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, Google was forced to change how they handle third party app stores. iPhones will likely never be big enough for Apple to be forced to allow other stores in the US.
Don't blame individual consumers. Bad things happen at a societal level all the time. Carbon emissions, etc. We're powerless to stop it without governmental intervention.
Your average consumer isn't educated on marketplace behaviors and doesn't understand how a lack of consumer choice leads to increased prices, inflexibility, taxation of smaller marketplace participants, less innovation, less freedom, etc. They simply can't understand the complexities of the case as deep familiarity isn't a part of their daily lives.
The large players that set these rules are squarely to blame.
> I don't think you can really blame Google or Apple for any of these failures in the same way Microsoft could be blamed in the 90's for their abuses.
You can install whatever you want on a Microsoft PC.
People didn't even get a choice. Google bullied Windows Phone out of the market.
People won't switch to a platform without apps. Microsoft tried to fix that, made an HTML5 youtube app. Google threw a fit and blocked it, twice. MS even followed what Google told them to do, and still blocked the app.
Google saw great hardware, and an OS that was gaining media attention (Windows phone at the time had a lot of positive reviews, and the Nokia Lumnia phones were great, and better cameras than any Android at the time) and used their market power to kill it.
Can we get retroactive regulatory enforcement for that?
Sounds like Google needs to no longer have YouTube. They're wielding it like a blunt instrument to destroy trillions in market value.
Top smartphone brand global market share: Samsung (20%), Apple (17%), Xiaomi (14%), vivo (9%), OPPO (8%).
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smar...
I'm a little surprised there isn't an open source non-profit set up to act as an umbrella for open source iOS app development.
The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec.
We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that.
Either way, I would be fine with this, if there were a big, red, and scary button with a warning in iOS to turn the coddling off. I bought a phone, so I own it. If I choose to, there should be a way to let me control the hardware. Even Android phones don't have this, with bootloader unlocking disappearing. To be fair, there's a layer below that where you could also replace the XBL (Xtensible Boot Loader, on Qualcomm devices) if secure boot is off and the efuses aren't blown. But there are even fewere devices that have this.
Why not just accept that iOS has coddling, and that your preferences are better served by the competition? As you said, Android has permission prompts. They have folding phones. Android phones regularly beat iPhones in camera quality measurements, for example.
What does Apple have that you actually want?
For me, I liked the walled garden and I put up with the rest because of it. If you don’t like the walled garden, I can’t understand wanting an iPhone.
You can also ship sandboxed apps on Desktop without the store (although I am not sure on how hard it is to auto-update them, usually stores handle that part), at least on Windows and macOS.
Stores handle storing the apps themselves and distributing updates, that part of the cost is real, plus they do manually review submissions (to some degree), but 30% is insane for that.
You can enforce it by booting misbehaving apps from the app store... but that only works if there’s one app store.
But it is a nuclear option, and it would be a big deal if they did so for something "minor".
Better than Android sure, but let's not get too hyperbolic. There's less outright malware, but a ton of questionable crapware with bad practices. Let's not forget that Android phones definitely also do sandboxing and just-in-time permission prompts.
Even among major apps, maybe especially among major apps, the Apple App Store is full of apps that blatantly violate Apple's own policies, often including Apple's own apps too, much like the Google Play store. As a simple example, apps that put crucial notifications in the same category as advertisements are all over the place, despite this being a clear violation of the policies. There is plenty of enshittification on Apple platforms.
Beyond that, I can go onto my iPad and search something that is likely to be popular and find a ton of very questionable apps. For example, search "Grand Theft Auto". Scroll down slightly. That sure looks like a lot of very questionable garbage apps full of questionable advertisements. You can repeat this with tons of popular search terms. Yes, it's one thing to trust the sandbox, but are you really sure you feel safe installing all of those?
And sure, App Store review policies do stop most malware and unwanted tracking software from flowing through, but that doesn't mean you should gamble your life on it either. There are plenty of lapses all the time. Probably at least a few times a year, though obviously we only see the incidents that generate a lot of publicity. Just for fun, here's a few incidents over the years that generated a lot of publicity:
From 2011: [1]
> As a proof of concept, [Charlie Miller] created an application called Instastock that was approved by Apple's App Store. He then informed Apple about the security hole, who promptly expelled him from the App Store.
From 2015: [2]
> XcodeGhost exploits Xcode’s default search paths for system frameworks, and has successfully infected multiple iOS apps created by infected developers. At least two iOS apps were submitted to App Store, successfully passed Apple’s code review, and were published for public download.
From 2025: [3]
> We found Android and iOS apps, some available in Google Play and the App Store, which were embedded with a malicious SDK/framework for stealing recovery phrases for crypto wallets. The infected apps in Google Play had been downloaded more than 242,000 times.
And even if the apps aren't malicious, that doesn't mean you're secure. If the idea is that you feel safe using random app store apps because the apps are neatly sandboxed from the system, well, first of all, that part can be accomplished without an app store or a 30% tax. Second of all though, a lot of people's important information lives inside of the apps anyways. Why compromise the phone to access the data when you can compromise the apps themselves? Consider this from 2017:[4]
> During the testing process, I was able to confirm 76 popular iOS applications allow a silent man-in-the-middle attack to be performed on connections which should be protected by TLS (HTTPS), allowing interception and/or manipulation of data in motion.
Obviously Android has more malware than iOS, but if the idea is that even an idiot can use an iPhone and not have to care about good security practice and just run completely random apps, I firmly believe that's a horrible idea. It definitely reduces risks for the average person, but in practice they definitely should be employing good security practices either way because the app store and all of the sandboxing in the world can not save them from themselves. For power users, it basically doesn't do anything meaningful to the security practices calculus and you may possibly be better off with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS depending on what threats you are most concerned about.
My point, of course, is not to say that Apple iPhone is particularly unsafe, just that these anti-malware measures are very far from foolproof, definitely not something you should trust your Bitcoins with. They do probably screen a lot of obvious attempts at malware, but a lot of subtle attempts definitely find their way in. They don't really at all stop the store from being flooded with shitware that does things that would probably harm the privacy of the average user, like apps for "file format conversion" that silently upload your data to the cloud and have dubious privacy policies, or apps that try to convince you to accidentally subscribe to some expensive subscription. This is the kind of thing the Google Play Store was definitely known for, yet it's actually also completely all over the Apple App Store right now. Apple doesn't really seem to mind too much, they're more concerned about periodically harassing people like the developer of iSH.
What Apple and Google both do have a tendency to do is tie their dystopian anti-consumer garbage in with their security features even when they don't actually have to, for reasons that I don't think anyone needs explained to them.
Personally I think the sky will not fall if iOS allowed people to choose to be able to sideload applications. The fact that this would cause a tension whereby Apple would have some pressure to change App Store policies in order to continue getting a cut of sales and have better ability to mitigate unwanted software is kind of a feature and not a bug. As it is today, Apple has basically no incentives to ever consider changing its policies in any way that wouldn't be beneficial to them somehow.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Miller_(security_resea...
[2]: https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/novel-malware-xcodeghost...
[3]: https://securelist.com/sparkcat-stealer-in-app-store-and-goo...
[4]: https://medium.com/@chronic_9612/76-popular-apps-confirmed-v...
If they have to allow other stores, then they are not going to be allowed to punish developers for using them.
(Assuming the lowest bar possible in anti-competitive resolution follow through.)
1) A fdroid equivalent pops up, which them becomes a collection of fantastic open source apps, and soon develops a strong user base.
2) Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.
3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.
One may personally not like this world - but imo it's a better world than the one we have - personally for (1) to exist.
Yup, it's then fair and they can keep the banner in their App Store that screams at font size 38 "This Journal App Is Da Best", "No Other Note App Has Been Made Greater Than This One".
But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right? So.. while I can apply for a gun license, I can't apply for an unrestricted computing license, so something is wrong here, don't you think? Unless you believe guns are less dangerous.
It actually is.
Free computers are intolerably subversive. They can literally wipe out entire sectors of the economy just by copying artificially scarce things. They can defeat police, judges, militaries, governments by democratizing access to strong cryprography.
They want to control our computers at all costs. We must resist. Computers are too important for us to allow them to be controlled and limited.
Investors don't want large percentages of pre-profit money being siphoned off by Apple.
Generally speaking, an optimized win-win fee would be some percentage of profits, not revenue.
That might be far too difficult to manage, accounting wise. But we can safely say that 30% of revenue, would translate to an extreme percentage of profit. Apple is extorting from many companies.
One sign of anticompetitive behavior is when a company is leveraging things in their favor so hard, it seems quite plausible that they are actually harming themselves. Killing of developers, by charging massive fees even to money losing developers, is not a good long term strategy.
But the power to extract money even from those it causes real pain, is hard to turn down when quarterly numbers keep coming up.
In Apple. fashion, they are still pushing back on this despite the court ruling. It only shows more so why Apple needs to be made to open up.
fact checking
Apple Tier 1 mandatory store services:
0.5€ Core Technology fee per install
2% Initial acquisition fee
5% Store service fee
Compare that to 20-30% that Apple's own AppStore take and its a bargain.
Even with Tier 2 with marketing tools, automatic updates, app recommendations, analytics dashboards, and promotional features the cost is only 10% for small business program members, 15% for others.
You forgot that just to set up an alternative app store you need this:
--- start quote ---
Provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit in the amount of €1,000,000 from a financial institution that’s at least A-rated or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody’s, and maintain that standby letter of credit as long as your alternative app marketplace is in operation
--- end quote ---
> 0.5€ Core Technology fee per install
per install
So if your app is suddenly popular, you have to pay through the nose.
> This includes app reviews, manual updates, and fraud protection.
Why is Apple involved in app review on alternative app stores?
Why is Apple doing manual updates?
Considering the amount of scam apps on App Store, Apple isn't doing fraud protection in their own store.
> This tier is mandatory for any app that promotes external payment options.
Why? What does Apple have to do with external payment options?
This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.
When I paid 1k-something dollars for an iPhone 16 a few months ago, I did not pay for a general purpose computing device, no, I paid for a device that can take pictures, and has certain apps that I like which I know how much I'm paying for, and I know that with ease I will be able to active/deactivate its subscription with zero struggle. That's what I paid for, a device made by a company whose discretion I trust and support, and I pray it continues being this way.
Because it's better for them and they have that right. If YOU need a safe walled garden, shouldn't YOU be the one who supports the process and incentives for developers?
> I don’t think Apple is arguing that it is impossible to allow more open ways to install apps on iPhones. I think they’re saying that they don’t want to, and that they shouldn’t have to.
Apple volunteers the position that they couldn't possibly open the iOS ecosystem themselves, not just that they don't want to, making some very amusing claims in the process.[1] They also don't want to, but the more you dig into possible "whys", you get into a lot of troubling realities quickly.
Epic Games, on the other hand, is arguing that they actually should have to, at least to some extent. There are actually a lot of reasons why Apple's App Store practices might violate the law, and to my understanding, Epic Games is alleging that Apple's App Store practices constitute "illegal tying" whereby Apple unlawfully ties its payment processing service with its app distribution. That's far from the only potential legal issue that the App Store could face just based on current, existing law. (Note: I am not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt; but nothing I am saying is too original or groundbreaking.)
And of course, it's always worth remembering that what's legal today can be regulated tomorrow. I don't really believe lawmakers or the general public really have had enough time to take a look at the impact that Apple/Google app stores have had on the software market and decide if these practices should be legal. The EU seems to think they shouldn't, and while I don't agree with the EU on everything, I tend to agree.
[1]: https://observer.com/2021/05/even-craig-federighi-apples-hea...
Given how low morally they are, the room for improvement is massive and easy to move into. As you write, they didn't do it so far because they were not forced, and waiting for some good moral behavior 'just because it would be nice from them' is rather dumb.
That said, i was an engineer for several years in Apple and primary internal concerns were battery life and its influence on user experience; the removal of Flash viability, favoring html5, is an example: profiling of Flash apps written in the wild showed code that routinely drained battery with aplomb...inexplicable to end users not also programmers.
When an app store takes a 30% commission on sales, every dollar the company earns afterwards increases their bank account by $0.70.
The percent doesn't really matter (if YC took 30% ownership or app stores took 7% commission), the comparison doesn't really make sense either way.
Wouldn’t this be true also if YC owned 100% of the company? On the other hand from that point on, from every dollar the company is worth YC gets 7%.
You need to know what is (or will be) bigger and more critical for your success, the investment worth 7% of your company, or the 30% Apple takes from your app. Either of these numbers can be millions or $0.
I’m very much for alternative storefronts and letting people choose. Android already proved this works just fine and most people still go for the official store. But I don’t think the argument above paints a clear, unbiased picture.
> The percent doesn't really matter (if YC took 30% ownership or app stores took 7% commission), the comparison doesn't really make sense either way.
They don't behave the same way so to make the comparison didn't make any sense.
Note: Edited this a few times because words are hard.
30% of revenue cuts off the flow of money immediately even long before the company is profitable.
You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it.
Me: ...
And to provide a counterpoint, my dad can barely navigate his iPhone. I literally spent an hour on the phone with him when he was lost and needed directions; it took 20 minutes to guide him to open the messages app so he could read the address I sent. Someone that clueless isn't searching the internet to figure out workarounds for installing anything.
...they reap the consequences of their actions.
A warning lets a person know it is getting deeper. It is up to the person to realise if they are out of their depth.
If a person lacks the self reflection to realise their capabilities then they need a guardian. Children and the elderly routinely have this for other aspects of life. Why not a phone?
Why can't I delegate such authority to others when I become old and infirm?
It absolutely is, the only argument is about to what degree.
I'm not too sure about that, for non-technical users the warnings before installing an APK on Android are very likely a good thing. There's a lot of malware out there and, similar to running a downloaded Exe on Windows, you should at least explicitly confirm it's execution.
Happy because you have nobody in your life in a vulnerable position to be taken advantage of the inevitable malware that will be installed on their device as a result of your wish.
Or sad because those people are most likely to be grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles. Perhaps you never even got to know them.
They did, they got an iPhone.
> my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.
Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?
Did it cryptolock all her files?
Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?
These are things that we need to worry about with random things we download on desktop these days. It's not 2007 any more, I have an entire spare computer for untrusted software.
Why would buy a phone that doesn’t work the way you like when alternatives exist?
2. In EU, while Interchange is regulated, Scheme fees, Acquirer fees, and Processor fees are not. These are usually also expressed as percentage of the transaction value.
3. Because of the more limited avenues to offset risk, access to credit in EU is more difficult than in more dynamic markets like the US (not saying it’s good or bad, just highlighting that there are downstream impacts).
Of course, without price controls, most businesses will charge whatever they can get away with that doesn't cause them to lose too many customers, so...
People always manage to make it the processor’s fault. See the hysteria over people being scammed through Zelle.
I agree, and from that conclude that Apple’s earned their commission/fees.
Apple's deal is still an acceptable business proposition because there aren't any alternatives. Android users don't spend much on apps compared to iPhone users. It's an ok market, but not a great one, and in the US, if you aren't on the iPhone, then you aren't relevant, period.
Maybe if there was an actual competitive market on iOS for app stores, we'd see what app developers actually thought was a good business proposition, not the only take-it-or-leave-it (but if you leave it there's no way to be successful) proposition they have now.
We aren’t talking about indie development though. People like to paint a picture of a small, scrappy startup or beleaguered solo dev being held back by Apple’s crushing 30%, but that isn’t the case.
Unless you are earning more than a million dollars a year through the App Store alone, you don’t pay 30%, you pay 15%. And if you earn more than that, you still only pay 15% for long-term subscribers. And of course, all those SaaS companies where the app is just an interface for the larger service pay 0%.
As soon as you start talking about “Apple’s 30%”, you reduce the scope of the argument to the tiny fraction of developers with millions in revenue.
If you do actually want to talk about indie development, you should be talking about “Apple’s 15%”.
Say you're a team of 3. Your game takes 2 years to develop. You spend on salary for 3x2 years. You've spent ~$600,000 so far. Let's assume you haven't had any other sources of operational costs like software licenses for your art tools (3D modelling, 2D drawing, music production, sound production, game engine), marketing expenditure, development hardware, outside contracting, and a number of other things.
If you pull $800,000 in the first year Apple will take $120,000. Your net profit is $80,000. Apple has taken over half your profit.
If you pull $1,200,000 in the first year Apple will take $210,000. I'm going to assume that Apple still only takes 15% on the first $1million. Your net profit is $390,000. About a third of your profit has gone to Apple now.
The carve-out for small revenues is not some panacea. Fixed cost overheads for small teams will swallow the platitude very fast. Video games is a high risk, hits based industry. Apple's tax adds the most risk to small ventures, the kind of ventures that are going to produce innovative high risk content, making them even more risky adding more difficulty to acquiring finance.
So if we want to talk about Apple's 15% it's actually worse.
As someone who worked at a company that tried to do this, years ago, that's hilariously laughable, and either you're just incredibly unaware of what that sort of thing takes, or you're arguing in bad faith.
And if you think SPAs or regular websites on mobile Safari can give you the same experience and hardware access as a native app, I'm not sure what to tell you.
> They can make an android app compelling enough to convert users.
Sure, right, now you're just spouting fantasy stories. (And I say this as an Android user.)
For example, you can be the administrator on Grandma's device and block access to third-party app stores which cannot be overridden by anyone (including the device manufacturer) without your credentials. Alternatively, you could delegate that authority to a provider you trust. No one is saying you can't keep choosing Apple's walled-garden app store as the only store provider or that you shouldn't be able to block any or even all app stores. Options like that can even be locked by one-time hardware fuses so they can never be changed - even by the owner. The only issue here is Apple forcing a sole monopoly on that control for themselves because it's worth billions of dollars - instead of device owners having a choice.
Err.. Isn’t that exactly what the EU is saying?
Regulators have never ruled that Apple can't have an app store or that the number of enabled App Stores MUST be more than 1 - only that the legal owner of the device have an opportunity to choose. Scenarios like "Oh no, the EU wants to take away Grandma's one safe, simple walled-garden app store so she's left to fend for herself on the dark web" is a disingenuous straw man exaggeration by Apple and their apologists to protect Apple's multi-billion dollar app store monopoly.
Once there's owner choice, even Grandma who chooses Apple as her only app store will pay lower prices and very likely gain other safe options like a full featured Firefox with Ublock Origin ad blocking. Just the existence of competitive choice is beneficial - even to users who choose "no competition". Plus Apple will finally have a real incentive to be more responsive and reasonable with app developers regarding app store prices and policies - which will help solo and small startup app developers.
And I love how the response to shit mobile security is to lock down devices so the people who buy them don't actually own them. Instead of, y'know, actually cleaning up the security posture of these devices.
I also worked in a valley giant with a multi-billion dollar monopoly position being preserved in a similar way. But I was senior enough to see both sides - the divisional all-hands mtgs and (some of) the exec staff mtgs (my boss was an EVP reporting directly to the CEO). The instructive part was observing what happened in the senior staff mtgs when a serious user, product or technical issue emerged which directly conflicted with sustaining the multi-billion dollar monopoly. Even in small mtgs with just the CEO, a couple EVPs and a handful of their direct reports, I never witnessed any explicit collusion or overt manipulation. The reason is surprisingly simple, they don't need to. They can make "the right thing" happen without being so obvious - just by controlling the agenda, attendees and context and then asking the right questions, prioritizing certain concerns and selecting the right working group leader to "come back with options which balance these concerns". These EVPs didn't get to where they are by plainly speaking their mind, although they are masters of appearing to do so when it serves them. At that level, there are degrees of subtlety and multi-dimensional chess that make Machiavelli look like a toddler.
All those years of being "in the room where it happens" fairly frequently and there wasn't one moment where I thought, "Wow, if I leaked a tape recording of the last 60 seconds, somebody very important is losing their job." These people are far to experienced and skilled at this for it to be that simple. Which isn't to say there may not have been some very private conversations between only the CEO and an EVP or two where things were said explicitly - but I'm not even sure that was necessary. Frankly, the euphemistic language and context control is sufficient that it's probably easier for the them to "stay in character" all the time. In fact, I think some of them sort of believe it themselves - or at least prefer to avoid stewing on the more "unpleasant realities" of the job. Most of these people are, in their own minds, still the 'good guy' in the story they tell themselves.
i think the last two sentences you wrote resonate, for sure, though!
I agree and I'm not at all questioning what you experienced. I saw similar things. In the case of Apple, it makes sense the iPhone business would prioritize issues like battery life etc and that the App Store business would prioritize maximizing their multi-billion dollar monopoly revenue stream. Within each business unit they're going to make decisions and allocate resources based on maximizing the metrics their business is judged on.
Where it gets 'interesting' is when two major business units have priorities which directly conflict - like one BU achieving a major objective requires the other BU to not achieve one of their major objectives. When those conflicts are things which directly impact tens of millions or more in revenue and are also high-visibility issues, the conflict gets elevated to the CEO in a small group mtg with both EVPs where they assesses the trade-offs on each side. Ultimately, the CEO is going to pick a 'winner' based on the overall impact to company-wide revenue and the stock price. If the issue is preserving (or losing) the app store monopoly worth billions - we can guess which side is very likely going to win. And maximum motivated reasoning will be deployed to highlight the many reasons that outcome is correct. Many of those reasons will even be legitimate :-).
> If you pull $800,000 in the first year
This is not what people have in mind when you talk about poor little indie devs being unable to cope with 30%. We’re talking about a well-funded operation that can run for years without revenue.
> So if we want to talk about Apple's 15% it's actually worse.
Paying 15% is not worse than paying 30%.
People clearly have other choices here: develop for Android, develop for the web, create a telephony-based or text-response system, operate in bricks-n-mortar format, etc.
Why? They don't do this on Android.
At then end of the day the number of active users would fall if they do this. That's unavoidable. So what incentives do they have to not distribute on the App Store? It's not like (unlike in Epic's case) Apple is requiring Facebook to hand over 30% of its revenue.
fdroid is of course great. Extremely niche and not that significant, though.
> Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.
Amazon tried that on Android. Of course I would expect Google to do much better but that doesn't mean a lot.
So they can fuck their users in ways not currently permitted.
Unless the iOS market is so lucrative it will garner far more interest.
Google Play has fewer restrictions though. Apple doesn't even allow alternative browser engines. Until last year they didn't allow any emulators.
Would note the trade off: this store will be a bastion of tracking, possibly with Meta requiring its bugs be installed for inclusion.
This will rightly push Apple in the right direction - to bring the right OS controls at the operating system level / store API level, and not leave things up to apps. This is a better world, despite short term issues with metaStore.
This will almost certainly be litigated. We also haven’t broached national laws mandating a government-controlled App Store. (Would expect this to emerge in right-wing Europe or India first.)
It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Yeah some people would still climb the fence and touch the power lines but look, can we save them all? Should we? In this world of merciless exploitation, wouldnt it be just fair we stopped pretending it never was about anything else but money?
I'm British by birth, living in Berlin. We definitely think Americans are a bit "funny", in the not-at-all-funny sense of the word, about guns.
> It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places.
Thing is, with computers, we've had decades of watching malware infect, destroy, corrupt, ransom, and blackmail. It's still happening, even.
And we even have a way to get past "baby mode" restrictions: be a developer.
But guess what? Developers also face supply chain attacks, because malware is everywhere.
I do miss the olden days when I didn't need to care. A mac online in 2009 was worry-free.
NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened. You cannot magically conjure up a payment from Apple Pay to <X> without user involvement and confirmation.
>Did it cryptolock all her files?
Apps do not have write access to all your files.
>Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?
Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.
The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.
Google is also getting legal action for monopoly abuse of their app store, so what's possible today on Android is not sufficient to say what's safe or not.
Despite this, they're also already facing legal action for sharing too much data from Google Wallet.
Fail on all directions at the same time.
> Apps do not have write access to all your files.
> Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.
And this can't be circumvented ever, even when private APIs are no longer vetted? And none of the voices describing downloads warnings as "scare screens" aren't making the same demand on this?
> The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.
The disingenuous "force platforms to be open, there's no security risk" position was tiring decades ago when the iPhone was brand new, especially when it was obviously lies even then. Apple obviously isn't magically competent enough to write APIs properly, they had "goto fail" and all the jailbreaks we've seen in so many versions of iOS were specifically some random doc that users could install that included a way to escalate privileges, and even without that evidence we've also got access to the black market prices for zero-day exploits that for a long time showed they're cheaper than Android, and the obvious reason why this prevents "anything" is that "anything" is a massive subset of "everything".
We're asking to rewire the economics and regulatory framework, not change how you personally use your phone.
I don't care how you use your phone. I care how the world works.
I indeed choose not to download software from Facebook and friends, but it’s quite likely others will need to as it will become the only way to get their software. At that point: tracking out the ass.
The better analogy is a forest fire. We're clearing up the overgrowth (ossification, unfair taxation, and unfair control) and creating room for new life to start and flourish.
> I indeed choose not to download software from Facebook and friends, but it’s quite likely others will need to as it will become the only way to get their software. At that point: tracking out the ass.
Don't like a negative externality? Tax and regulate it. It's what Europe does. And it's what we're good at doing in every industry except for the software industry. We need to stretch those muscles and get back into the habit of doing it.
We should pass regulations on giant social media companies as well.
But in a world where we have no software freedoms and where certain software tracks us, having software freedoms is the more important cause and it's where we must start our battle. You don't need to use Facebook, but you need to use a smartphone. New social media apps are started all the time (TikTok, Tea, etc.) but smartphones are trillion dollar moats.
Our smartphones are our gateway to digital life. They need to be liberated from Apple and Google. Mobile computing belongs to all of us.
It's a perfectly valid way to view it. Forest fire might be another valid way to view it, but is different. Both are equally valid, and represent different views of what ideal is.
> Tax and regulate it. It's what Europe does.
I am European. Nice try though.
> We need to stretch those muscles and get back into the habit of doing it.
I don't disagree. Start there then. Make it so that tracking me incurs such a heavy penalty payable to me personally that it is not worthwhile. Then go after the distribution mechanisms that allow someone to live a relatively tracking-free life without having to be an uber-nerd to make it reality.
> Mobile computing belongs to all of us.
There are plenty of platforms. What you are saying is it belongs to the people who want it to be a certain way with particular negative outcomes for many people. I want it to be a different way with negative outcomes that affect me less.