This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, I tend to have a generally unfavorable view of apple. I don't like closed systems, oversimplified to the point of missing critical settings UX, etc.
That said, I really don't understand the issue with their cut, or insisting on handling payments. In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
If the arguments were "these restrictions are so burdensome I can't be in the app store!", that's a different conversation. But they tend to be "I can access such an irresistible amount of customers via apple, I just wish I could take those benefits à la carte.
It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.
Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market. I'm not sure we're there on this one, but the patience can't be infinite.
> That said, I really don't understand the issue with their cut, or insisting on handling payments. In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
Windows users aren’t viewed as Microsoft’s customers from the point of view of third party software. Same with MacOS. Apple has pushed this paradigm in iOS because it’s ludicrously profitable.
Controlling the evolution of a ubiquitous computing platform gives a company a huge amount of power. Add to that the power to control any commercial transaction performed on that platform is simply too much concentration of power.
"Windows" didn't sell them a computer. Microsoft sold an OS to - for example - Dell, who then sold a computer to the user. So they are Dell's customers. And Dell, for sure, earned a lot of money selling placement on the Home Screen (or pre-installation) to 3P app developers. (Of course, there are also computers such as the Microsoft Surface, but these represent a tiny fraction of the universe of Windows computers ever sold...)
Whereas Apple sold the user a phone, so the users are clearly Apple's customers. There is an argument that they are also the 3P app developer's customers, but there should be no debate about the fact that they are Apple's customers, using a platform developed by Apple. If 3P app developers want to access Apple's customers on a platform developed by Apple, then they should expect to play by Apple's rules...
(And no, I never worked for Apple. In fact, I have worked both for Google and for multiple 3P app developers who were subject to the so-called Apple Tax.)
> That said, I really don't understand the issue with their cut, or insisting on handling payments. In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
This is not true at all. Netflix customers are Netflix customers, not Apple; the same goes for Amazon Kindle, Spotify, etc. Netflix literally cannot include a link to netflix.com in their app, otherwise Apple would pull the app from the store.
The smaller the app, the more those users are Apple's customers. But obviously we don't want a world where we penalise small developers more than large ones, so that's not a solution either.
I think the trouble is that all of the above are true, but not universally true. The issue can be framed from multiple perspectives depending on which aspect of market dynamics are most impactful to a given app/service/situation.
Some developers build for the Apple ecosystem because the ecosystem is large and enticing and provides better opportunities than the alternatives.
Some developers are big enough that they don’t need the App Store to gain customers.
If a new app gains popularity primarily because of Apple, and eventually gets big enough that its origins are now immaterial to the ongoing success of the company, whose customers are they? There isn’t a clear answer to this question. Arguably both Apple’s and the app maker’s, and there’s an intrinsic codependency that can’t be easily separated.
I agree with your point about small devs. The question is: at what point does it become penalizing? Once the app reaches some threshold?
The hard thing about this conversation is that I can see the merits of Apple’s position while also agreeing that at times, the outcome feels “wrong”, i.e. an existing product with an existing customer base seems like it shouldn’t be so limited.
But is it possible to provide a platform that enables this kind of developer ecosystem and app diversity combined with a consistent user experience without the at-face-value “wrong” outcomes? I don’t know.
This gets even murkier when apps rely heavily on Apple services for data storage, syncing, security, etc. It seems very fair to charge for “we’ve solved a lot of hard problems for you”.
It’s an interesting situation that is often painted in terms that are far too simplistic.
It is absolutely true. Apple doesn't take a cut from any of your examples EXCEPT if they make that payment through the app on their phone. If they redirect you to a website to subscribe, apple sees nothing. If your customers use the rails that apple has greased up FOR YOU then they take a cut.
> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
This is problematic argument, that imo we should not accept in _any_ commercial context.
* Are people browsing the web on an iPhone Apple's customers, and therefore 30% of web sales should be collected too?
* If you use Comcast to access the internet, are you Comcast's customer? They're giving the retailer access to your traffic, so they should take a cut of every online purchase?
* Should your headphones take a cut of all music streaming revenue, and refuse to play non-compliant music?
* Should your TV take a cut from every video stream provider they allow to show video to their customers?
There is significant value to society in general-purpose devices & services, where the user pays for something concrete, and can then use it with any 3rd party provider in any way they like.
That principle has been a key driver of digital innovation for decades, and allowing it to disappear would be a Very Bad Thing.
> * Should your headphones take a cut of all music streaming revenue, and refuse to play non-compliant music?
The RIIA Speakers, they only work with certified music software and automatically redirect a proportional a cut of your subscription payment to labels. /s
> These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
Insane take imo. I'm baffled how people can write this out with a straight face.
Just one counter example to the relationship you described: In Europe, if my app does not deliver as advertised, it is the customer that can sue me. Directly. They don't sue Apple because my app is in their app store, they obviously sue me, because I am the service provider.
> Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.
Watch us and learn.
Apart from that, I think this is blowing things out of proportion: Apple hasn't offered any calculation at how they arrive at the 0.50c installation fee, but I'm sure were going to get some insight once the first lawsuits at the CJEU roll in.
>In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
Unless I am misreading somehow, this is an unusual position. Software developers don't sell their software to Apple. They sell to the end users. Unless an intermediary rebrands the software and takes ownership of customer acquisition and support, software users are the customers of the software developers.
> software users are the customers of the software developers
Yes, but the users are also customers of the owner of the software platform that the developers are developing for. And the owner of the platform gets to set the platform's rules. Microsoft's standard practice for many years was to watch for which third party Windows applications were becoming popular, and build those features into one of their own products, thus cutting the market out from under the third party developer. I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't done more of that.
as an EU developer, I'll offer you two points to help you see why developers are not happy (euphemism).
- I was working on an app for both healthcare professionals (paying customers) and their patients (the app was free for them). At the same time we could not have sign up for the doctors - Apple would like 30% of the subscription fee for the honor of hosting the client and its updates on their servers, but also Apple insisted vehemently that everybody should be able to sign up for the service, even if we insisted that we needed to check on their credentials (i.e. if they had a degree in medicine). We had to explain this multiple times to app review people as they kept on coming back to the same points. On the patient side, we were able to add payments to the doctors as luckily an exception had just been granted for use cases like that - up until then, Apple would have required 30% of the doctor's payment as well. We were still VERY on our toes, because the whole process felt like Apple at any time could change the rules and put us in the situation of paying a lot of money, drastically change our business model, or just shut down/lose tons of customer. While this might be technically legal, is not exactly a great business partnership.
- These rules have giant exceptions for big companies who pay a lot less or are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as smaller app makers. This feels incredibly unfair.
Very interesting example, and solid motivation for a regulatory framework. It makes sense for doctors and patients to be able to communicate through apps, and it makes sense for some aspects (even payments) to be conducted through them.
I really don't know what the right solution is overall, but I am sure that having large numbers of one-off negotiations is not the right way to solve it.
> These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
What would happen if this had been the standard applied to Windows?
> If the arguments were "these restrictions are so burdensome I can't be in the app store!", that's a different conversation. But they tend to be "I can access such an irresistible amount of customers via apple, I just wish I could take those benefits à la carte.
For some developers, they are. The ones that are complaining about it are the ones still trying to be in the app store despite the burden.
> What would happen if this had been the standard applied to Windows?
Microsoft had no problem taking features from popular third party Windows applications and building them into their own products, basically stealing the third party developers' markets. That looks worse to me than what Apple is doing.
1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.
2) taxes, is you want to line apples 30% up with those, are just part of business. No, you cant write off the 30%, but if you want to keep adding 250million new phones to your potential customer base every year.... wtf, pay up and be happy? To be fair, taxes arent the same - taxes take money out of an economic system usually based on economic activity to make currency actually worth something. But they kind of are the same in that they keep the infrastructure that lets you reach customers going.
I guess we can move to the windows model and place the burden on the customers, pay your $99/yr for updates or whatever, but then youd have ... like no one buy the phone.
Apples stance is - if you generate economic activity on the phone, you should have to pay to upkeep the roads that keep the phone working. I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.
The difference is taxes are set and disbursed democratically. Apple taxes are whatever they want them to be and are disbursed according to their board.
Heck they could introduce a tax on Amazon deliveries when Amazon is installed through the Apple App Store and nobody would be able to do anything about it. Except the EU that is.
> I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.
Charging third party app developers never worked on the desktop, but Microsoft had a lot of success with building the key features of popular third party Windows applications into their own products, thus taking away the third party developers' markets. Which is worse for the third party developer than just having to pay a fee or a percentage.
> 1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.
Do you just assume that? Because in the article, two decidedly small businesses are mentioned as leading the charge: Tuta and Proton. Not exactly friends of big business either.
I very much agree, especially about the last part. These terms may seem like a “slap in the face”, but when you think a bit more about it: The EU themselves are 100% about “protecting consumers”. For example, the EU has made it illegal for my broker to let me buy US ETFs, because the prospectus is not available in Swedish(!). From that standpoint, how can you argue that it’s wrong for Apple to show a warning before letting a consumer send off their credit card details to a third party? And apparently that warning sign will cost most app developers more than the Apple tax (as they lose 50% of potential customers). Seems like a fair tax then.
But I think it’s also fair to note that there are app developers to whom these arguments do not apply. For example I was a Spotify customer long before I installed the Spotify app on my phone, and I don’t mind them having my credit card details.
It's not an exact match to Apple's situation, though; that's why there was a need for the DMA in the first place.
> [...] I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market. I'm not sure we're there on this one, but the patience can't be infinite.
What is Apple going to do? Stop selling iPhones in the EU, the third largest economy in the world? That would only make sense if iPhones and iPads indeed were loss leaders for the App Store.
Apple is a corporation, and corporations don't throw irrational tantrums. They do sometimes try to hold their customers hostage, but that type of behavior has a mixed track record at best.
> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
I have the exact opposite point of view, they are my customers and Apple is simply a middleware which is blocking access to them.
They only get their cut through very questionable and borderline illegal practices as seen in the EU.
Maybe if they had to actually justify their cut in a real market, they would improve the sad state of their dev tools, that could start to somehow justify the cuts.
Notice that they forbid any display of the Apple tax anywhere, that could be a marketing issue if Apple customers start to understand what's going on.
> These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
Absolutely not.
Let me give you a hypothetical example - I pay for Jetbrain Ultimate. I use it in the MacBook for work. If OSX was as closed as iOS, I would magically turn into Apple's customer?
They are just the OS I am using (not even my own choice).
It is actually the ISPs who give Apple access to their customers. ISPs should charge Apple a 30% fee on every transaction their customer makes on the app store.
I see more symmetry in the relationship between Apple and developers. It's true the platform was created out of thin air, but without the apps in the app store, it's fair to say the iPhone would not have been nearly as successful. All the dedication and work that developers put into their platform has resulted in millions of applications available on their store - that's what gives it it's value. Obviously there's no "right" number, but I think 30% is way too steep.
If this is true, why does Android not set their pricing at 5-10% or less, get more developers and outcompete apple?
Google would then pay apple less in search default fees to boot.
Android has been losing market share to apple globally for nearly a decade, in particular amongst the richest, most valuable customers.
Developers are very valuable to apple but the field isn’t obviously unbalanced. The apple App Store is an incredibly profitable distribution system for developers.
“The Cut” is analogous to a cable package with 500 channels when all you want to do is watch 3 or 4 channels.
I’d like to see Apple unbundle their take such that the maximum cut is 30% for devs who use all of the iCloud, dev, payment, and store for their apps. It’s debatable, but I think this is reasonable for this type of dev.
The problem is when I have an existing SaaS business with all that infrastructure already built—I don’t need all of Apple’s infra, so why should I have to pay for it? I’d have no problem paying Apple a % for listing and distributing through their App Store and processing payments.
Unfortunately Apple is being very short sighted about this and consequently are being forced to unbundle by the EU and it’s likely other countries will follow. That puts us in a situation where regulators are making these decisions instead of Apple, which is why I think we’re going to be in for some very janky user experiences that Apple will try to pin on regulators.
The cut is too universal and not neuanced. If it was a 30% cut on profits, that would make sense, and everyone would grin but deal with it.
But if you sell something for a 10% markup, having to give that + 20% to apple is bad. And now people ask "why do I have to pay more for your service on apple vs android". And now you're in a fun PR battle.
In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved. Not to mention dev costs. In cases of say music, there's licensing you pay. If you order food, you are already working in the margins.
This makes competition vs big boys even harder. How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
The list goes on.
The point is, it isn't just a grin and move on problem :(
> In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved.
They are selling digital coins, there is zero cost to "minting" these. It's not up to Apple to make your margins work. F2P works because some people pay and others don't, the ones who pay cover server costs for those who don't. I can promise you Fortnight was bringing in a ton of _profit_ even with Apple's 30% cut. Also "think of the people running digital casinos for kids" (re: lootboxes and the like) isn't a winning argument. In fact I think hosting all that crap is a blacker stain on Apple than taking 30%.
> In cases of say music, there's licensing you pay.
Totally fair, see also: ebooks/audiobooks/tv/movies.
> If you order food, you are already working in the margins.
Apple doesn't take a 30% cut here.
> How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
Valid when it comes to Google who seem to have struck a number of deals with places like Spotify (see EPIC vs Google suit, and why Google lost) and while there were some backroom deals with Apple I believe it was only for the 15% which Apple eventually rolled out for all subscriptions in the second year.
> And now people ask "why do I have to pay more for your service on apple vs android". And now you're in a fun PR battle.
Why do you pay more for coffee on a square in Paris than in an alleyway a few hundred meters from there? Because it’s a place people want to be.
> This makes competition vs big boys even harder. How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
“12. The gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores, online search engines and online social networking services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9).”
I think that means they could still give quantity discounts, but at least, you’d know you would get the same discounts Netflix gets, _if_ you manage to grow to their size. That’s not a promise you had before.
> In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved. Not to mention dev costs.
In Fortnite, anyone can develop their own maps ("islands") and sell them, while Epic will pay them 40% of the revenue. Now could you please explain how the platform charging 60% platform fee are the good guys in their fight against the greedy platform charging 30% platform fee?
> In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
This is just such a radically different way thinking about platforms than the way that I think about them. It's like saying that I owe Facebook for the privilege of talking to my college friends because "they're not my friends, they're Facebook's users and I've been given access to them."
It's hard for me to debate something like this because it's just so fundamentally incompatible with my basic axioms about how interactions work online. The idea that platforms own their users is just not how I see the world.
> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.
If every single developer jumped ship off of iOS, iOS would stop existing. We only have to look at Windows Phone to understand what the difference is between a platform with developer support and a platform without developer support.
The reality is that Apple and developers have a mutually beneficial relationship and they are more like partners than customers. If Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, etc all stopped working on iOS, iOS users would jump to Android. Heck, look at the most recent Vision Pro launch, in which I saw users complaining that Apple even gave iPad developers the choice at all of whether or not their apps would be supported on the new device. The users want the apps.
So this is something that users care about, and users pay Apple handsomely for the privilege of accessing developers on iOS. That doesn't mean developers should pay literally nothing, but this is a relationship. The argument that developers are just customers always strikes me as vaguely Comcast-y -- saying that Net Neutrality is unfair and that websites are leeches if they don't pay for network access. No, your customers are there because of us. Customers are paying for access to a service that allows them to access the stuff that they actually care about -- apps, movies, books, the ability to talk to their friends, the ability to transact online, the ability to browse websites. And this gets back to the disagreement on axioms above, but to treat those customers primarily as if they're just resources to be locked down and resold for even more profit -- I just don't think it's a healthy place for a platform to be in.
> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air
Funnily enough, iOS launched without an app store entirely on the promise of using web apps for all of its functionality. We weren't using the term PWA back then, but it's notable how different iOS's approach to application development is today than what it was when iOS launched. And notable for Apple's continued direction as the company appears to be actively reducing PWA functionality in Europe in response to increased browser access.
What we have on the web is effectively what Apple hates -- a completely Open, device-agnostic ecosystem of apps that is much more difficult for any one company to lock down or extract rent from. But Apple didn't always hate that principle, when iOS originally launched they were all for it; and in fact Apple looked at the web as a key strategy in differentiating their devices -- by offering developers a way to target their devices without development kits, exhaustive agreements, or commissions.
Over time that became less valuable to Apple, and it became increasingly important for Apple to distinguish between web capabilities and native capabilities.
Is that change fair, are they entitled to do it? I don't know, but it's not the direction I want the computing industry to go. How we deal with Apple's increasingly hostile approach to Open Standards, user freedoms, and market competition is an open question, but it seems clear to me that we should be trying to deal with it at the point where Apple is threatening to go backwards on web standards in response to regulation that opens them up to browser and ecosystem competition.
(I honestly wish I could so clearly order my thoughts in writing like you have done here)
That it is mutually beneficial is sort of my point. If every developer jumped ship, iOS would be in trouble. But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. So I'm not the only one viewing the platform users as an asset. So is everyone clamoring to reach them.
It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Android exists today. It doesn't have anywhere near the access to the people who spend money. Apple spent decades cultivating that access, and they're in an extremely strong position because of it.
I hate the app store, it's a lazy mess. I hate Apple's deliberate crippling of the open web to stifle competition. That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do.
> That said, I really don't understand the issue with their cut, or insisting on handling payments. In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
This looks like a very interesting argument. When you retain full control on access to a specifically defined set of customers (or relevant market), we call it monopoly. You should never have such a single powerful entity in a properly regulated, successful free market.
> Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.
This makes no sense. If you were right there would be no android phones sold in europe because the conditions are so bad for the manufacturer. That, however, doesn't seem to match with reality at all.
> You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.
Apple would offer an app store in some form even if they were statutorily prevented from making any revenue from it because if they turned off the ability to install apps people would abandon iPhones in droves.
Why would anyone downvote this? Would love an explanation. Why not let Apple keep building their wall higher and higher but also let other's emulate and create interoperable alternatives. The best of all worlds.
The main thrust of his argument seems to be that developers should be able to engage in price discrimination. That's cool and all, but it seems anti-competitive to me as a customer. I don't want to pay more just because I don't have time to write each developer and beg for a discount. Remember, Amazon famously had to back down from advertising different prices to Americans in urban and rural areas due to customer backlash.
While I partially sympathize with the ostensible desire to be able to offer great customer service under the guise of refunds for unexpected downtime in SaaS apps, it's hard to see how this won't be abused by developers: Won't every app just offer App Store refunds to convert customers to 3rd party payment?
I suspect that's the actual reason these things are wanted. I completely understand that many people think 30% is too high (and maybe it is!), but it's hard to see how 0% isn't too low.
What would be his reaction if Apple enabled all these customer service options he supposedly wants, but at a cost to the developer? For example, a code for first-responders to download the app for free, but the developer still pays 20% of the store price. Or a customer refund, where Apple keeps 20% instead of 30%. After all, it's not about the money, but actually about offering great customer service. So he'd go for that, right?
> You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.
What? Of course they can. That someone will then just leave the market, or maybe change their product more. But there is absolutely no reason why they can't.
Yeah, I meant that to be the implication of the sentence, at some point folks take their ball and go home, and we have to see weeks of trending hashtags about the injustice done to Europe
I think there's a lot of nuance in this situation.
First: the most vocal developers really do not care about Apple's "ecosystem invented out of thin air". They just need to be where their customers are, wherever their customers are. The Spotify's, the Google's, the Netflix's, etc. The users who leverage the iPhone to access their Spotify subscription are Spotify customers, not only Apple customers. My relationship with Spotify pre-dates my relationship with Apple. I signed up for Paramount Plus due to a Superbowl Ad, not due to some contorted funnel which Apple, believing themselves to be the center of the universe, have inserted themselves into.
If I could download these applications directly from the suppliers: I would. And, in fact, I do so, on Windows, on Linux, and even on Apple's own MacOS.
The cognitive dissonance I can't reconcile among advocates for Apple's side is: simultaneously saying "Apple built this ecosystem, they deserve to tax it however they will" and "If you don't like it just go to Android". Ignoring the obvious problem that a duopoly is only marginally better than a monopoly: one of these has to be a weird argument, right? Either the ecosystems are not so-fungible as to be interchangeable for the purposes of marketplace competition; or, what Apple created isn't unique, it is fungible, and they shouldn't get as much credit as they have.
I trend toward the latter; I don't believe what Apple has created is all that special. I think their App Review does vanishingly little to improve the functional security of their end-users. Their software technology is almost universally crappy, especially when speaking on anything developers have to interface with. The next few years will prove even their hardware to be un-special, if it isn't already. They've built what they've built on the shoulders of giants. AT&T built a nationwide fiber network "out of thin air". Verizon built a nationwide 5G UWB network "out of thin air". TSMC builds state-of-the-art chips "out of thin air". The open source community built FreeBSD "out of thin air". Slack and Spotify built their application experiences "out of thin air". If even one of these entities didn't exist, or made the decision to stop dealing with Apple's unique ecosystem, Apple would face an existential risk. If Slack wasn't on the iPhone: I wouldn't buy an iPhone. If iPhones did not work with Verizon: I would not buy an iPhone. The list goes on.
Just think on that for a second: should AT&T have the right to say "our fiber backbone won't carry traffic generated by iPhone endpoint devices"? "Ultimately Apple is gaining unfairly access to our customers". "They represent a security threat to our customers". That would be insane! If its even possible, it would literally overnight destroy Apple as a company. So then it becomes, where do you draw the line? Why is it "obviously not ok" for AT&T to do that to Apple, but "eh its complicated" for Apple to do that to Epic Games?
Your argument is that this is an Ayn Randian situation where Apple put in the work to win over these customers, and now devs want a free lunch. I get that. My argument is: Apple would not exist today without the giants shoulders they stand on, Spotify (as an example) is a material reason why they're so successful, to whatever degree, and their insolence in admitting this isn't just morally wrong; its psychotically egotistical. This is, generally, the argument against all Ayn Randian philosophy; its not new ground, this is why Ayn Rand isn't really respected as an philosopher, and why her arguments also don't work in Apple's case.
There is this incoherence regarding some appeals to Ayn Rand.
She would have supported Apple charging whatever it wanted for its proprietary “steel”.
She would not have supported Apple limiting what others could do with it, such as stopping others from competing with its other products and services, or requiring cuts of downstream revenues only tangentially or unrelated to the use of its particular steel.
That would have been the “takers” in Apple, riding on the back and warping a previously moral business.
A huge problem is the DMA falls short in addressing a significant violation of property rights concerning the hardware.
At the core of property ownership lies the right of exclusion – the ability to exclude or include something on one's personal property. This right is quite important and can even be used to derive most other property rights; please see the linked paper at the bottom. However, Apple's policies with iDevices violate this fundamental right by controlling what software can run on the device, even before someones does anything with their device they bought. They do this not via legal means but by using cryptography to reserve the right of exclusion for themselves (they claim its for your security though...). Part of the problem is when someone sells something that in most cases that means a complete transfer of all property rights to the buyer, but Apple is preventing that via extralegal means.
Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone with the intention of not even using iOS and installing something like Linux. However, Apple's control over the boot-ROM prevents the hardware from booting any unsigned code without even opening the box. This gives Apple the ability to exclude or allow software to run on a device they no longer own. The thing is, Apple legally does not have the right of exclusion, but only reserves it via cryptography. This effectively restricts the exercise of your own property rights since you no longer can fully choose what to include or exclude from execution on that ARM processor you own. The fact that this control persists post-sale demonstrates a blatant infringement on individual property rights from Apple.
In summary, Apple is intruding upon individuals' personal property rights, notably the right of exclusion. Through the use of cryptography after purchase, Apple retains the right of exclusion which lets them determine which software can and can not operate on a device they no longer own.
For a more in-depth exploration of the right of exclusion, I highly recommend reading the paper titled "Property and the Right to Exclude" [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33139498.pdf].
Yeah, this is the fundamental issue at play here. I don't care what fees or rules Apple puts in place for developer access to its app store. I care that I'm digitally restricted from running anything other than software approved by Apple on my device. If that problem was solved and Apple had to compete with other app stores on a level playing field, that would naturally resolve any issues with their rules or fee structure.
The DMA (seemingly) didn't target root of the problem, so Apple was able to easily just sidestep the legislation by saying "okay, you can use alternative app stores now, but the app stores and all software on them still has to be reviewed and approved by us, and we're going to continue to impose conditions (including payment) on that approval". If they had been completely stripped of the ability to exclude software from my device, then they wouldn't have the leverage to impose these new rules in the first place.
This is a problem, agreed, but I’m not sure if it’s the problem with iOS devices.
I doubt that being able to install Linux on their iPhones would address many of the complaints against Apple: Many people do like using iOS, after all, just not Apple’s tight control over (sandboxes!) application-layer software running on it.
For example, I use a Mac, and I’d be furious if Apple were to prevent sideloading of unsigned binaries there on macOS, even though I could always run Asahi Linux (using an officially blessed bootloader signature path).
Also worth mentioning are the numerous intellectual property rights that companies like Apple enjoy and skillfully use to stave off competition. If Apple wants lawmakers to drop market regulations like the DMA, then maybe we should consider cutting IP protections. Only then can we have a conversation about free markets and government intervention.
You can enshrine a company's right to define its market or the price for its products, hold those rights sacrosact and still punish apple.
The issue at the core is not a company's right to X. Instead, it is: Has this company thru dominance of their market have achieved a monopolistic power ? If so, that's the avenue you take to undo their abuse. If the abuse cannot be rectified by market actors or new entrants, they you slap the anticompetitive monopoly with restrictions of what they can or cannot do.
EDIT: I personally think that there should be straightforward threshold criteria to be defined as a monopoly automatically, such as (numbers made up) exceeding:
- 0.1% of revenue in aggregate political donations, or
- 0.5% of profits in aggregate political donations, or
> If the abuse cannot be rectified by market actors or new entrants, they you slap the anticompetitive monopoly with restrictions of what they can or cannot do.
That's pretty clear in the Google / Apple case, the only change of tariffs ever made was made as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied over.
Wouldn't the best way to look at this to be that the phone is Apple's property, and therefore they have the right to do anything with it? Including not selling to you all the property rights, and reserving some for themselves?
For me, the central contradiction of this kind of rights-based argument is this--the stronger you make property rights, the more justified actions like Apples seems to be, because, after all, they are the ones who really own the phone.
I really don't think a property rights argument has any suasion here at all.
> Including not selling to you all the property rights, and reserving some for themselves?
They could do that, but they don't. I don't recall having to sign a rental agreement stating that I don't actually own the phone and I'm only allowed to purchase Apple-approved applications in order to get an iPhone. If Apple was forced make their customers go through that process then the downsides and anti-trust problems associated with such restrictions would be far more explicit.
Well, if they really own the phone, you had better make a strong argument on why I should pay for it.
If users were renting the phone for less than it cost to make, I guess you could have an argument about the device just being a necessary tool to access a service, including the app store (just like the alm-in-one modem/routers of telcos in EU).
But that is hardly the case, users pay for iPhones, and quite a lot of money at that, in fact much more in average than buyers of other brands.
So now you REALLY need to explain how they can sell the phone for such a large amount of money and still retain ownership because the way I see it one of these statements cannot be right or it would be both illegal and something users really wouldn't agree to if it were presented like that to them.
The reality is that Apple is abusing its power over a device they already transferred ownership to someone else, because they already got money for it. Any other arguments are a mischaracterization of the situation and the only reason Apple got away with so much control so far is because we collectively (as a society) didn't completely understand what it meant.
But now we are trying to fix and bad faith argument like yours do not help at all...
"Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone with the intention of no even using iOS and installing something like Linux."
Instead of a hardware compatibility list, it's a software compatibility list and every entry must be Apple-approved.
How did they ever pull this off. No one ever questioned it.
For decades, I have wanted option to remove the Apple OS and use non-Apple operating system. Seemed like no one else ever wanted to do that. People have been content to multi-boot, leaving the Apple OS installed.
I would say most people don't realize that some of their property rights are being violated. How many people let alone common people would even try run code without an OS on an iDevice which is what you need to be able to do to run an other OS. They don't realize at a base level some their rights for property they bought have been locked down behind cryptography, and thus instead under control of apple.
The thing is the boot rom does not need to shipped like this. Apple does have such devices that even they loan out to security researchers https://security.apple.com/research-device/.
The only difference between that device and one they sell is some eFuses on the chip have not been blown yet (oh and some software to make poking around easier, but that's besides the point here). What I find crazy is apple only loans such devices out because they don't want to sell any hardware where they don't effectively reserve the right of exclusion.
In theory it should, but most common people probably would never try anyways. Also on lot those devices if you open them up there are probably some JTAG pins somewhere that can let you do a lot and even change things if you wanted. Not a lot a devices are locked down to the extent of iDevice.
The chips Apple makes has fuses they blow inside the chip that prevent it booting/running unsigned code. You can't load your own keys or anything unless you have apples private key or get them somehow to sign some software for you.
A lot micros do have fuses that are similar to prevent firmware from being dumped to protect IP, but when you talk to such devices via like JTAG you can often still tell it load code from external memory and such and not from ROM. This of course depends on the chip, but in my experience most the time it's not as insanely locked down as apple does.
You can see two pictures of some netgear products that have JTAG pins that you can connect to that then let you take control of the device with. This how you have to some times load alternative firmware on some Routers and such. If people didn't do this projects like OpenWrt would not exist. Although, for a lot routers you don't have to connect to jtag pins directly.
Assuming the backlash carries through further EU responses (which regardless of opinions on what it should do, will need to do if it wants to remain credible on this issue):
1. Apple knows this. It knows it will be asked to do more.
2. In the short term, they will drag their feet to maintain benefits of the status quo as long as possible.
3. But more importantly longer term, they expect the final result to be more in their favor as a result of the foot dragging.
Negotiating 101. Fight a losing battle hard. So your adversary can claim and perceive eventual victory, with much less to show for it than if you had simply complied.
Also to protect other areas from pushback, always be difficult. Don’t encourage further incursions.
And there is always the chance your adversary will succumb or be distracted in the meantime.
Any fine would have to be at least tens of billions of dollars to hurt Apple. In a few years, at least $100 billion. Not a likely first or second response.
So for now, Apple hasn’t lost anything. Their crafted half hearted “compliance” helps them more than it hurts them.
Yes, any governmental group taking action against Apple, especially systemic action, could be viewed as their "enemy", if you don't take the word too seriously.
This is a rather misleading headline. The vast majority of developers are not in “open revolt” – just a handful of developers are making a lot of noise about it, while continuing to ship software (ie, not in revolt at all).
Further, those developers making great noise are often close to “platform” designation themselves, making their appeal less righteous than a superficial reading might have you believe. It’s a struggle over power – not a struggle over quality nor safety nor human liberty.
Most developers are pleased with the current paradigm. I am.
> Most developers are pleased with the current paradigm. I am.
I’m also a developer that is very happy and who’s sick and tired of corporate devs acting like they speak for me, followed by outlets who echo everything they say like it’s gospel.
Apple's seeking to comply with the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law in order to maintain their ability to extract rents from the App Store. It's user-hostile (particularly given that they've now hobbled PWAs) but not surprising. Their behavior won't change without additional regulatory action.
In the US, laws are taken as very literal, and any technicality that can be exploited usually will be. In Europe, they’re far more focused on the spirit of the law and don’t put up with games.
On one hand it seems like Apple is trying to take a US style approach, but on the other they must have European lawyers on staff explaining how that won’t work.
One might conclude that it’s a calculated risk, or a stalling tactic to extract a few more years of revenue from the current model while waiting for things to play out in the courts.
> In the US, laws are taken as very literal, and any technicality that can be exploited usually will be. In Europe, they’re far more focused on the spirit of the law and don’t put up with games.
I was looking to confirm or deny that statement and came across a fun detour in the form of an article entitled "What's So Special About American Law?". It doesn't address the point about spirit vs. detail at all, but is an amusing and informative read.
> As I said, this fact seems to me a deep and fundamental point of
difference. The American legal system, to a greater extent than any other
Western legal system, encourages the direct injection of democratic values
into the legal process. Our legal system, like our society, places great
emphasis on the value of equality. We do not fully trust professional elites.
I find it far fetched that Apple would either hire terrible lawyers that lead them astray or competent lawyers that they then ignore. I agree that they are probably hoping to go to court.
Maybe I’m just too American to understand but the idea of “the spirit” of the law seems ridiculous. If you want the law to force Apple to allow slide loading then pass a law that says that. If you want a law that forces Apple to allow any developer to make and distribute software on their platform then pass a law that says that. It certainly seems that they were able to achieve that level of clarity with the USB-C rule. Why isn’t this law like that one? Relying on, “C’mon, we all know what the law really means,” is at best sloppy legislating.
The US allows for a lot of interpretation on intent and context by judges. In the EU this is far more restricted and the black letter law is way more important.
That said, in the EU there’s more of a tradition in civil law cases to deviate from the law and agreements for “the sake of equity” (i.e., civil law judges love to split the baby and have everyone be a little unhappy).
This is of course not civil law but administrative law, which in the US isn’t really a thing. In the US non-criminal cases involving the government are adjudicated according to civil law v (for the most part).
Source: before getting into software engineering I practiced law in the EU, during my last years in law school I focused on comparative law, now living in the US and married to a lawyer who went to law school in the US
Or you know, just trust me bro, because I’m just a stranger in the internet.
> Apple's seeking to comply with the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law in order to maintain their ability to extract rents from the App Store.
Yes, because we can have a functional, productive society based on a legal system where the foundational principal is, “We’ll write laws so vague that we can just say they mean whatever we want them to mean after people and companies try to follow them”.
I don’t think the text of the law says anything remotely about Apple’s margins for access to their users being too high. How then can that be in the spirit of the law?
This particular legislation gives relatively broad enforcement power to the EU commission. IANAL, but it's possible, and in my primitive understanding quite likely, that they can take action without additional legislation because it's a stark violation of the obligations.
They wouldn't introduce anything that would definitely lead to a fine, but I don't see why they wouldn't introduce something that really pushes the boundaries and will result in a court case that they have some chance of winning.
It won't lead to a fine directly but it might result in enforcement action to bring them closer to what the law intended.
I seriously doubt that their ultimate approach was "cleared" with regulators because it's quite blatantly against the intention of the DMA. The fact that he met with EU people says precisely nothing.
Apple's actions are anti-competitive. Spotify is a very good example. Instead of making a better product, Apple is acting to appropriate other businesses. Although the object of Apple's action is companies that try to make money that Apple wants, it is the users, the customers who pay. Apple is an anti-user platform. They are not alone in this of course.
How do we change this? I, as a user, am aggrieved that Apple sells (not lends) me a product and then takes actions that make product less useful and more costly. Maybe Spotify and companies should simply set up a website so it is easy for me to take Apple to small claims court? The facts of Apple's anti-competitive practices are certainly clearly laid out in the EU's action, so that should not be hard.
The whole reason companies like Spotify are making a fuss about this is because Apple is making better products. If it wasn't the case Spotify would dominate the market all to itself.
But Spotify has 30% market share, Apple Music 15%. And it's because for example Apple has lossless audio, Dolby Atmos etc. Not because of any unfair competition.
I just don't agree that it's an anti-user platform. I have my own opinions on this, but really just talk to some apple users they're all happy with their platform
Why do you have to change it? As a user if you don't like walled gardens or restrictions just buy another phone? why do you insist on shitting up my walled garden just go use android!
I've been selling softare on Mac (and Windows) for nearly 2 decades. I've never bothered with the Mac App Store. I just couldn't be bothered to jump through the hoops and I didn't want Apple getting between me and my customer. I guess that isn't a realistic option for iOS apps though.
This is a great way to encourage developers to build the app that will show an essential use case for the Vision Pro.
It’s not like Vision Pro is a solution in need of a problem, desperately waiting for a killer app, or that apps built the iPhone ecosystem into the juggernaut it is now.
I can't even understand your point here. People aren't developing for apple hardware to be nice to apple or help out the ecosystem, they're doing it for money. As long as Apple is creating a platform that people love, adopt and trust people will develop for it (while complaining the whole time no doubt)
By the amount of bitching on this issue, it really sounds like developers need Apple not the other way around. If this was really about user freedom and shit like that developers would just boycott the platform and move to android. This is just about money and developers wanting to have their cake (distribute their app in a high trust environment) and eat it too (put whatever stupid shit they want in their app with no checks or controls)
People are developing for money, yes, money that Apple intends to take a large cut of for no good reason, hence why they would avoid developing for it because they would not make enough money.
Developers do not need Apple because there are other viable platforms. Users that are locked to an iPhone for whatever reason (iCloud being impossible to export, costs are prohibitive, family uses it, etc) would like to be able to sideload or generally run whatever they want on their own device. People aren't complaining just to complain and they're definitely not being entitled, that's just the expectation when you buy a computing device and Apple is failing to uphold their end of it. I do not touch the Apple ecosystem but would like to see their behavior squashed before it can spread to any devices that I do use.
Readit News
That said, I really don't understand the issue with their cut, or insisting on handling payments. In the vast majority of cases, these are not your customers. These are apple's customers they have given you access to.
If the arguments were "these restrictions are so burdensome I can't be in the app store!", that's a different conversation. But they tend to be "I can access such an irresistible amount of customers via apple, I just wish I could take those benefits à la carte.
It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.
Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market. I'm not sure we're there on this one, but the patience can't be infinite.
Windows users aren’t viewed as Microsoft’s customers from the point of view of third party software. Same with MacOS. Apple has pushed this paradigm in iOS because it’s ludicrously profitable.
Controlling the evolution of a ubiquitous computing platform gives a company a huge amount of power. Add to that the power to control any commercial transaction performed on that platform is simply too much concentration of power.
Whereas Apple sold the user a phone, so the users are clearly Apple's customers. There is an argument that they are also the 3P app developer's customers, but there should be no debate about the fact that they are Apple's customers, using a platform developed by Apple. If 3P app developers want to access Apple's customers on a platform developed by Apple, then they should expect to play by Apple's rules...
(And no, I never worked for Apple. In fact, I have worked both for Google and for multiple 3P app developers who were subject to the so-called Apple Tax.)
This would suggest the "Apple tax" on devs is less than the Steam tax on devs, despite Gog or whatever existing.
This is not true at all. Netflix customers are Netflix customers, not Apple; the same goes for Amazon Kindle, Spotify, etc. Netflix literally cannot include a link to netflix.com in their app, otherwise Apple would pull the app from the store.
The smaller the app, the more those users are Apple's customers. But obviously we don't want a world where we penalise small developers more than large ones, so that's not a solution either.
I think the trouble is that all of the above are true, but not universally true. The issue can be framed from multiple perspectives depending on which aspect of market dynamics are most impactful to a given app/service/situation.
Some developers build for the Apple ecosystem because the ecosystem is large and enticing and provides better opportunities than the alternatives.
Some developers are big enough that they don’t need the App Store to gain customers.
If a new app gains popularity primarily because of Apple, and eventually gets big enough that its origins are now immaterial to the ongoing success of the company, whose customers are they? There isn’t a clear answer to this question. Arguably both Apple’s and the app maker’s, and there’s an intrinsic codependency that can’t be easily separated.
I agree with your point about small devs. The question is: at what point does it become penalizing? Once the app reaches some threshold?
The hard thing about this conversation is that I can see the merits of Apple’s position while also agreeing that at times, the outcome feels “wrong”, i.e. an existing product with an existing customer base seems like it shouldn’t be so limited.
But is it possible to provide a platform that enables this kind of developer ecosystem and app diversity combined with a consistent user experience without the at-face-value “wrong” outcomes? I don’t know.
This gets even murkier when apps rely heavily on Apple services for data storage, syncing, security, etc. It seems very fair to charge for “we’ve solved a lot of hard problems for you”.
It’s an interesting situation that is often painted in terms that are far too simplistic.
The debate is around people who are Apple customers but not Netflix customers, and who download the Netflix app through the App Store.
Deleted Comment
This is problematic argument, that imo we should not accept in _any_ commercial context.
* Are people browsing the web on an iPhone Apple's customers, and therefore 30% of web sales should be collected too?
* If you use Comcast to access the internet, are you Comcast's customer? They're giving the retailer access to your traffic, so they should take a cut of every online purchase?
* Should your headphones take a cut of all music streaming revenue, and refuse to play non-compliant music?
* Should your TV take a cut from every video stream provider they allow to show video to their customers?
There is significant value to society in general-purpose devices & services, where the user pays for something concrete, and can then use it with any 3rd party provider in any way they like.
That principle has been a key driver of digital innovation for decades, and allowing it to disappear would be a Very Bad Thing.
The RIIA Speakers, they only work with certified music software and automatically redirect a proportional a cut of your subscription payment to labels. /s
Insane take imo. I'm baffled how people can write this out with a straight face.
Just one counter example to the relationship you described: In Europe, if my app does not deliver as advertised, it is the customer that can sue me. Directly. They don't sue Apple because my app is in their app store, they obviously sue me, because I am the service provider.
> Also, I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market.
Watch us and learn.
Apart from that, I think this is blowing things out of proportion: Apple hasn't offered any calculation at how they arrive at the 0.50c installation fee, but I'm sure were going to get some insight once the first lawsuits at the CJEU roll in.
I would 100% buy an iPhone with no appstore, it would still be better as a smartphone than my Samsung with F-Droid and Google Play Store.
Unless I am misreading somehow, this is an unusual position. Software developers don't sell their software to Apple. They sell to the end users. Unless an intermediary rebrands the software and takes ownership of customer acquisition and support, software users are the customers of the software developers.
The reader goes to ExamplePrint and buys the book.
ExamplePrint prints a softcover copy of the book on the spot and ships it out to the reader.
The user pays ExamplePrint, who pays the author some fraction of the user's money.
The reader is a customer of ExamplePrint and reading the author's book.
This is the analogy Apple would like to use for their app store. Apple's print time is almost instantaneous and the marginal costs are closer to zero.
Yes, but the users are also customers of the owner of the software platform that the developers are developing for. And the owner of the platform gets to set the platform's rules. Microsoft's standard practice for many years was to watch for which third party Windows applications were becoming popular, and build those features into one of their own products, thus cutting the market out from under the third party developer. I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't done more of that.
- I was working on an app for both healthcare professionals (paying customers) and their patients (the app was free for them). At the same time we could not have sign up for the doctors - Apple would like 30% of the subscription fee for the honor of hosting the client and its updates on their servers, but also Apple insisted vehemently that everybody should be able to sign up for the service, even if we insisted that we needed to check on their credentials (i.e. if they had a degree in medicine). We had to explain this multiple times to app review people as they kept on coming back to the same points. On the patient side, we were able to add payments to the doctors as luckily an exception had just been granted for use cases like that - up until then, Apple would have required 30% of the doctor's payment as well. We were still VERY on our toes, because the whole process felt like Apple at any time could change the rules and put us in the situation of paying a lot of money, drastically change our business model, or just shut down/lose tons of customer. While this might be technically legal, is not exactly a great business partnership.
- These rules have giant exceptions for big companies who pay a lot less or are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as smaller app makers. This feels incredibly unfair.
I really don't know what the right solution is overall, but I am sure that having large numbers of one-off negotiations is not the right way to solve it.
What would happen if this had been the standard applied to Windows?
> If the arguments were "these restrictions are so burdensome I can't be in the app store!", that's a different conversation. But they tend to be "I can access such an irresistible amount of customers via apple, I just wish I could take those benefits à la carte.
For some developers, they are. The ones that are complaining about it are the ones still trying to be in the app store despite the burden.
Microsoft had no problem taking features from popular third party Windows applications and building them into their own products, basically stealing the third party developers' markets. That looks worse to me than what Apple is doing.
To me, theres two issues:
1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.
2) taxes, is you want to line apples 30% up with those, are just part of business. No, you cant write off the 30%, but if you want to keep adding 250million new phones to your potential customer base every year.... wtf, pay up and be happy? To be fair, taxes arent the same - taxes take money out of an economic system usually based on economic activity to make currency actually worth something. But they kind of are the same in that they keep the infrastructure that lets you reach customers going.
I guess we can move to the windows model and place the burden on the customers, pay your $99/yr for updates or whatever, but then youd have ... like no one buy the phone.
Apples stance is - if you generate economic activity on the phone, you should have to pay to upkeep the roads that keep the phone working. I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.
Heck they could introduce a tax on Amazon deliveries when Amazon is installed through the Apple App Store and nobody would be able to do anything about it. Except the EU that is.
Charging third party app developers never worked on the desktop, but Microsoft had a lot of success with building the key features of popular third party Windows applications into their own products, thus taking away the third party developers' markets. Which is worse for the third party developer than just having to pay a fee or a percentage.
Do you just assume that? Because in the article, two decidedly small businesses are mentioned as leading the charge: Tuta and Proton. Not exactly friends of big business either.
But I think it’s also fair to note that there are app developers to whom these arguments do not apply. For example I was a Spotify customer long before I installed the Spotify app on my phone, and I don’t mind them having my credit card details.
EDIT: For clarity.
Yes, that's called "unbundling", and it's the bread and butter of antitrust regulation: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
It's not an exact match to Apple's situation, though; that's why there was a need for the DMA in the first place.
> [...] I do wonder if EU flies a little close to the sun with this stuff. You can't legislate that someone lose more money than they gain with access to your market. I'm not sure we're there on this one, but the patience can't be infinite.
What is Apple going to do? Stop selling iPhones in the EU, the third largest economy in the world? That would only make sense if iPhones and iPads indeed were loss leaders for the App Store.
Apple is a corporation, and corporations don't throw irrational tantrums. They do sometimes try to hold their customers hostage, but that type of behavior has a mixed track record at best.
I have the exact opposite point of view, they are my customers and Apple is simply a middleware which is blocking access to them.
They only get their cut through very questionable and borderline illegal practices as seen in the EU.
Maybe if they had to actually justify their cut in a real market, they would improve the sad state of their dev tools, that could start to somehow justify the cuts.
Notice that they forbid any display of the Apple tax anywhere, that could be a marketing issue if Apple customers start to understand what's going on.
More like Apple's hostages if Apple gets to dictate who does and does not have access to them.
Absolutely not.
Let me give you a hypothetical example - I pay for Jetbrain Ultimate. I use it in the MacBook for work. If OSX was as closed as iOS, I would magically turn into Apple's customer?
They are just the OS I am using (not even my own choice).
Google would then pay apple less in search default fees to boot.
Android has been losing market share to apple globally for nearly a decade, in particular amongst the richest, most valuable customers.
Developers are very valuable to apple but the field isn’t obviously unbalanced. The apple App Store is an incredibly profitable distribution system for developers.
I’d like to see Apple unbundle their take such that the maximum cut is 30% for devs who use all of the iCloud, dev, payment, and store for their apps. It’s debatable, but I think this is reasonable for this type of dev.
The problem is when I have an existing SaaS business with all that infrastructure already built—I don’t need all of Apple’s infra, so why should I have to pay for it? I’d have no problem paying Apple a % for listing and distributing through their App Store and processing payments.
Unfortunately Apple is being very short sighted about this and consequently are being forced to unbundle by the EU and it’s likely other countries will follow. That puts us in a situation where regulators are making these decisions instead of Apple, which is why I think we’re going to be in for some very janky user experiences that Apple will try to pin on regulators.
I wish the cut was more like 50%, to benefit my stocks, while I'm using exclusively FOSS and pay nothing.
These devices are so shiny and great status symbol. I recommend everyone should be in Apple ecosystem and develop applications for it.
But if you sell something for a 10% markup, having to give that + 20% to apple is bad. And now people ask "why do I have to pay more for your service on apple vs android". And now you're in a fun PR battle.
In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved. Not to mention dev costs. In cases of say music, there's licensing you pay. If you order food, you are already working in the margins.
This makes competition vs big boys even harder. How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
The list goes on.
The point is, it isn't just a grin and move on problem :(
> In cases of say fortnight, there are real server costs involved.
They are selling digital coins, there is zero cost to "minting" these. It's not up to Apple to make your margins work. F2P works because some people pay and others don't, the ones who pay cover server costs for those who don't. I can promise you Fortnight was bringing in a ton of _profit_ even with Apple's 30% cut. Also "think of the people running digital casinos for kids" (re: lootboxes and the like) isn't a winning argument. In fact I think hosting all that crap is a blacker stain on Apple than taking 30%.
> In cases of say music, there's licensing you pay.
Totally fair, see also: ebooks/audiobooks/tv/movies.
> If you order food, you are already working in the margins.
Apple doesn't take a 30% cut here.
> How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
Valid when it comes to Google who seem to have struck a number of deals with places like Spotify (see EPIC vs Google suit, and why Google lost) and while there were some backroom deals with Apple I believe it was only for the 15% which Apple eventually rolled out for all subscriptions in the second year.
Why do you pay more for coffee on a square in Paris than in an alleyway a few hundred meters from there? Because it’s a place people want to be.
> This makes competition vs big boys even harder. How can I compete vs netflix if any streaming service I make who doesn't have netflix's negotiation power has to pay 30% of every payment. I can't get close to netflix's price.
It would be of little help because you need scale to compete with Netflix, but if anything, I would think the DMA helps with that. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/legislation_en, article 6.12:
“12. The gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores, online search engines and online social networking services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9).”
I think that means they could still give quantity discounts, but at least, you’d know you would get the same discounts Netflix gets, _if_ you manage to grow to their size. That’s not a promise you had before.
In Fortnite, anyone can develop their own maps ("islands") and sell them, while Epic will pay them 40% of the revenue. Now could you please explain how the platform charging 60% platform fee are the good guys in their fight against the greedy platform charging 30% platform fee?
This is just such a radically different way thinking about platforms than the way that I think about them. It's like saying that I owe Facebook for the privilege of talking to my college friends because "they're not my friends, they're Facebook's users and I've been given access to them."
It's hard for me to debate something like this because it's just so fundamentally incompatible with my basic axioms about how interactions work online. The idea that platforms own their users is just not how I see the world.
> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air, clearly benefiting enough to experience what you're complaining about, and wishing the deal were more beneficial to you _after the work has been done_.
If every single developer jumped ship off of iOS, iOS would stop existing. We only have to look at Windows Phone to understand what the difference is between a platform with developer support and a platform without developer support.
The reality is that Apple and developers have a mutually beneficial relationship and they are more like partners than customers. If Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, etc all stopped working on iOS, iOS users would jump to Android. Heck, look at the most recent Vision Pro launch, in which I saw users complaining that Apple even gave iPad developers the choice at all of whether or not their apps would be supported on the new device. The users want the apps.
So this is something that users care about, and users pay Apple handsomely for the privilege of accessing developers on iOS. That doesn't mean developers should pay literally nothing, but this is a relationship. The argument that developers are just customers always strikes me as vaguely Comcast-y -- saying that Net Neutrality is unfair and that websites are leeches if they don't pay for network access. No, your customers are there because of us. Customers are paying for access to a service that allows them to access the stuff that they actually care about -- apps, movies, books, the ability to talk to their friends, the ability to transact online, the ability to browse websites. And this gets back to the disagreement on axioms above, but to treat those customers primarily as if they're just resources to be locked down and resold for even more profit -- I just don't think it's a healthy place for a platform to be in.
> It sucks, but you're living in an ecosystem they made appear out of thin air
Funnily enough, iOS launched without an app store entirely on the promise of using web apps for all of its functionality. We weren't using the term PWA back then, but it's notable how different iOS's approach to application development is today than what it was when iOS launched. And notable for Apple's continued direction as the company appears to be actively reducing PWA functionality in Europe in response to increased browser access.
What we have on the web is effectively what Apple hates -- a completely Open, device-agnostic ecosystem of apps that is much more difficult for any one company to lock down or extract rent from. But Apple didn't always hate that principle, when iOS originally launched they were all for it; and in fact Apple looked at the web as a key strategy in differentiating their devices -- by offering developers a way to target their devices without development kits, exhaustive agreements, or commissions.
Over time that became less valuable to Apple, and it became increasingly important for Apple to distinguish between web capabilities and native capabilities.
Is that change fair, are they entitled to do it? I don't know, but it's not the direction I want the computing industry to go. How we deal with Apple's increasingly hostile approach to Open Standards, user freedoms, and market competition is an open question, but it seems clear to me that we should be trying to deal with it at the point where Apple is threatening to go backwards on web standards in response to regulation that opens them up to browser and ecosystem competition.
That it is mutually beneficial is sort of my point. If every developer jumped ship, iOS would be in trouble. But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. So I'm not the only one viewing the platform users as an asset. So is everyone clamoring to reach them.
It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Android exists today. It doesn't have anywhere near the access to the people who spend money. Apple spent decades cultivating that access, and they're in an extremely strong position because of it.
I hate the app store, it's a lazy mess. I hate Apple's deliberate crippling of the open web to stifle competition. That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do.
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This looks like a very interesting argument. When you retain full control on access to a specifically defined set of customers (or relevant market), we call it monopoly. You should never have such a single powerful entity in a properly regulated, successful free market.
This makes no sense. If you were right there would be no android phones sold in europe because the conditions are so bad for the manufacturer. That, however, doesn't seem to match with reality at all.
Apple would offer an app store in some form even if they were statutorily prevented from making any revenue from it because if they turned off the ability to install apps people would abandon iPhones in droves.
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https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1743421673871929723
While I partially sympathize with the ostensible desire to be able to offer great customer service under the guise of refunds for unexpected downtime in SaaS apps, it's hard to see how this won't be abused by developers: Won't every app just offer App Store refunds to convert customers to 3rd party payment?
I suspect that's the actual reason these things are wanted. I completely understand that many people think 30% is too high (and maybe it is!), but it's hard to see how 0% isn't too low.
What would be his reaction if Apple enabled all these customer service options he supposedly wants, but at a cost to the developer? For example, a code for first-responders to download the app for free, but the developer still pays 20% of the store price. Or a customer refund, where Apple keeps 20% instead of 30%. After all, it's not about the money, but actually about offering great customer service. So he'd go for that, right?
What? Of course they can. That someone will then just leave the market, or maybe change their product more. But there is absolutely no reason why they can't.
First: the most vocal developers really do not care about Apple's "ecosystem invented out of thin air". They just need to be where their customers are, wherever their customers are. The Spotify's, the Google's, the Netflix's, etc. The users who leverage the iPhone to access their Spotify subscription are Spotify customers, not only Apple customers. My relationship with Spotify pre-dates my relationship with Apple. I signed up for Paramount Plus due to a Superbowl Ad, not due to some contorted funnel which Apple, believing themselves to be the center of the universe, have inserted themselves into.
If I could download these applications directly from the suppliers: I would. And, in fact, I do so, on Windows, on Linux, and even on Apple's own MacOS.
The cognitive dissonance I can't reconcile among advocates for Apple's side is: simultaneously saying "Apple built this ecosystem, they deserve to tax it however they will" and "If you don't like it just go to Android". Ignoring the obvious problem that a duopoly is only marginally better than a monopoly: one of these has to be a weird argument, right? Either the ecosystems are not so-fungible as to be interchangeable for the purposes of marketplace competition; or, what Apple created isn't unique, it is fungible, and they shouldn't get as much credit as they have.
I trend toward the latter; I don't believe what Apple has created is all that special. I think their App Review does vanishingly little to improve the functional security of their end-users. Their software technology is almost universally crappy, especially when speaking on anything developers have to interface with. The next few years will prove even their hardware to be un-special, if it isn't already. They've built what they've built on the shoulders of giants. AT&T built a nationwide fiber network "out of thin air". Verizon built a nationwide 5G UWB network "out of thin air". TSMC builds state-of-the-art chips "out of thin air". The open source community built FreeBSD "out of thin air". Slack and Spotify built their application experiences "out of thin air". If even one of these entities didn't exist, or made the decision to stop dealing with Apple's unique ecosystem, Apple would face an existential risk. If Slack wasn't on the iPhone: I wouldn't buy an iPhone. If iPhones did not work with Verizon: I would not buy an iPhone. The list goes on.
Just think on that for a second: should AT&T have the right to say "our fiber backbone won't carry traffic generated by iPhone endpoint devices"? "Ultimately Apple is gaining unfairly access to our customers". "They represent a security threat to our customers". That would be insane! If its even possible, it would literally overnight destroy Apple as a company. So then it becomes, where do you draw the line? Why is it "obviously not ok" for AT&T to do that to Apple, but "eh its complicated" for Apple to do that to Epic Games?
Your argument is that this is an Ayn Randian situation where Apple put in the work to win over these customers, and now devs want a free lunch. I get that. My argument is: Apple would not exist today without the giants shoulders they stand on, Spotify (as an example) is a material reason why they're so successful, to whatever degree, and their insolence in admitting this isn't just morally wrong; its psychotically egotistical. This is, generally, the argument against all Ayn Randian philosophy; its not new ground, this is why Ayn Rand isn't really respected as an philosopher, and why her arguments also don't work in Apple's case.
She would have supported Apple charging whatever it wanted for its proprietary “steel”.
She would not have supported Apple limiting what others could do with it, such as stopping others from competing with its other products and services, or requiring cuts of downstream revenues only tangentially or unrelated to the use of its particular steel.
That would have been the “takers” in Apple, riding on the back and warping a previously moral business.
At the core of property ownership lies the right of exclusion – the ability to exclude or include something on one's personal property. This right is quite important and can even be used to derive most other property rights; please see the linked paper at the bottom. However, Apple's policies with iDevices violate this fundamental right by controlling what software can run on the device, even before someones does anything with their device they bought. They do this not via legal means but by using cryptography to reserve the right of exclusion for themselves (they claim its for your security though...). Part of the problem is when someone sells something that in most cases that means a complete transfer of all property rights to the buyer, but Apple is preventing that via extralegal means.
Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone with the intention of not even using iOS and installing something like Linux. However, Apple's control over the boot-ROM prevents the hardware from booting any unsigned code without even opening the box. This gives Apple the ability to exclude or allow software to run on a device they no longer own. The thing is, Apple legally does not have the right of exclusion, but only reserves it via cryptography. This effectively restricts the exercise of your own property rights since you no longer can fully choose what to include or exclude from execution on that ARM processor you own. The fact that this control persists post-sale demonstrates a blatant infringement on individual property rights from Apple.
In summary, Apple is intruding upon individuals' personal property rights, notably the right of exclusion. Through the use of cryptography after purchase, Apple retains the right of exclusion which lets them determine which software can and can not operate on a device they no longer own.
For a more in-depth exploration of the right of exclusion, I highly recommend reading the paper titled "Property and the Right to Exclude" [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33139498.pdf].
The DMA (seemingly) didn't target root of the problem, so Apple was able to easily just sidestep the legislation by saying "okay, you can use alternative app stores now, but the app stores and all software on them still has to be reviewed and approved by us, and we're going to continue to impose conditions (including payment) on that approval". If they had been completely stripped of the ability to exclude software from my device, then they wouldn't have the leverage to impose these new rules in the first place.
I doubt that being able to install Linux on their iPhones would address many of the complaints against Apple: Many people do like using iOS, after all, just not Apple’s tight control over (sandboxes!) application-layer software running on it.
For example, I use a Mac, and I’d be furious if Apple were to prevent sideloading of unsigned binaries there on macOS, even though I could always run Asahi Linux (using an officially blessed bootloader signature path).
You can enshrine a company's right to define its market or the price for its products, hold those rights sacrosact and still punish apple.
The issue at the core is not a company's right to X. Instead, it is: Has this company thru dominance of their market have achieved a monopolistic power ? If so, that's the avenue you take to undo their abuse. If the abuse cannot be rectified by market actors or new entrants, they you slap the anticompetitive monopoly with restrictions of what they can or cannot do.
EDIT: I personally think that there should be straightforward threshold criteria to be defined as a monopoly automatically, such as (numbers made up) exceeding:
- 0.1% of revenue in aggregate political donations, or
- 0.5% of profits in aggregate political donations, or
- Annual Revenue > US per capita x 100,000, or
- Annual profits > US per capita x 10,000
- Etc.
That's pretty clear in the Google / Apple case, the only change of tariffs ever made was made as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied over.
There’s is a reason it’s more subjective.
For me, the central contradiction of this kind of rights-based argument is this--the stronger you make property rights, the more justified actions like Apples seems to be, because, after all, they are the ones who really own the phone.
I really don't think a property rights argument has any suasion here at all.
They could do that, but they don't. I don't recall having to sign a rental agreement stating that I don't actually own the phone and I'm only allowed to purchase Apple-approved applications in order to get an iPhone. If Apple was forced make their customers go through that process then the downsides and anti-trust problems associated with such restrictions would be far more explicit.
If users were renting the phone for less than it cost to make, I guess you could have an argument about the device just being a necessary tool to access a service, including the app store (just like the alm-in-one modem/routers of telcos in EU).
But that is hardly the case, users pay for iPhones, and quite a lot of money at that, in fact much more in average than buyers of other brands. So now you REALLY need to explain how they can sell the phone for such a large amount of money and still retain ownership because the way I see it one of these statements cannot be right or it would be both illegal and something users really wouldn't agree to if it were presented like that to them.
The reality is that Apple is abusing its power over a device they already transferred ownership to someone else, because they already got money for it. Any other arguments are a mischaracterization of the situation and the only reason Apple got away with so much control so far is because we collectively (as a society) didn't completely understand what it meant.
But now we are trying to fix and bad faith argument like yours do not help at all...
So it doesn’t, in fact, own it.
Instead of a hardware compatibility list, it's a software compatibility list and every entry must be Apple-approved.
How did they ever pull this off. No one ever questioned it.
For decades, I have wanted option to remove the Apple OS and use non-Apple operating system. Seemed like no one else ever wanted to do that. People have been content to multi-boot, leaving the Apple OS installed.
The thing is the boot rom does not need to shipped like this. Apple does have such devices that even they loan out to security researchers https://security.apple.com/research-device/.
The only difference between that device and one they sell is some eFuses on the chip have not been blown yet (oh and some software to make poking around easier, but that's besides the point here). What I find crazy is apple only loans such devices out because they don't want to sell any hardware where they don't effectively reserve the right of exclusion.
Can you run your own software on your television, car, smart fridge, etc?
The default expectation seems to be no, you can't.
The chips Apple makes has fuses they blow inside the chip that prevent it booting/running unsigned code. You can't load your own keys or anything unless you have apples private key or get them somehow to sign some software for you.
A lot micros do have fuses that are similar to prevent firmware from being dumped to protect IP, but when you talk to such devices via like JTAG you can often still tell it load code from external memory and such and not from ROM. This of course depends on the chip, but in my experience most the time it's not as insanely locked down as apple does.
--EDIT-- Like if you look here on this wiki article on JTAG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTAG#Connectors
You can see two pictures of some netgear products that have JTAG pins that you can connect to that then let you take control of the device with. This how you have to some times load alternative firmware on some Routers and such. If people didn't do this projects like OpenWrt would not exist. Although, for a lot routers you don't have to connect to jtag pins directly.
1. Apple knows this. It knows it will be asked to do more.
2. In the short term, they will drag their feet to maintain benefits of the status quo as long as possible.
3. But more importantly longer term, they expect the final result to be more in their favor as a result of the foot dragging.
Negotiating 101. Fight a losing battle hard. So your adversary can claim and perceive eventual victory, with much less to show for it than if you had simply complied.
Also to protect other areas from pushback, always be difficult. Don’t encourage further incursions.
And there is always the chance your adversary will succumb or be distracted in the meantime.
Any fine would have to be at least tens of billions of dollars to hurt Apple. In a few years, at least $100 billion. Not a likely first or second response.
So for now, Apple hasn’t lost anything. Their crafted half hearted “compliance” helps them more than it hurts them.
Nobody at Apple is losing any sleep.
"Opposition" might be a better word.
Further, those developers making great noise are often close to “platform” designation themselves, making their appeal less righteous than a superficial reading might have you believe. It’s a struggle over power – not a struggle over quality nor safety nor human liberty.
Most developers are pleased with the current paradigm. I am.
I’m also a developer that is very happy and who’s sick and tired of corporate devs acting like they speak for me, followed by outlets who echo everything they say like it’s gospel.
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On one hand it seems like Apple is trying to take a US style approach, but on the other they must have European lawyers on staff explaining how that won’t work.
One might conclude that it’s a calculated risk, or a stalling tactic to extract a few more years of revenue from the current model while waiting for things to play out in the courts.
I was looking to confirm or deny that statement and came across a fun detour in the form of an article entitled "What's So Special About American Law?". It doesn't address the point about spirit vs. detail at all, but is an amusing and informative read.
> As I said, this fact seems to me a deep and fundamental point of difference. The American legal system, to a greater extent than any other Western legal system, encourages the direct injection of democratic values into the legal process. Our legal system, like our society, places great emphasis on the value of equality. We do not fully trust professional elites.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Maybe I’m just too American to understand but the idea of “the spirit” of the law seems ridiculous. If you want the law to force Apple to allow slide loading then pass a law that says that. If you want a law that forces Apple to allow any developer to make and distribute software on their platform then pass a law that says that. It certainly seems that they were able to achieve that level of clarity with the USB-C rule. Why isn’t this law like that one? Relying on, “C’mon, we all know what the law really means,” is at best sloppy legislating.
The US allows for a lot of interpretation on intent and context by judges. In the EU this is far more restricted and the black letter law is way more important.
That said, in the EU there’s more of a tradition in civil law cases to deviate from the law and agreements for “the sake of equity” (i.e., civil law judges love to split the baby and have everyone be a little unhappy).
This is of course not civil law but administrative law, which in the US isn’t really a thing. In the US non-criminal cases involving the government are adjudicated according to civil law v (for the most part).
Source: before getting into software engineering I practiced law in the EU, during my last years in law school I focused on comparative law, now living in the US and married to a lawyer who went to law school in the US Or you know, just trust me bro, because I’m just a stranger in the internet.
Yes, because we can have a functional, productive society based on a legal system where the foundational principal is, “We’ll write laws so vague that we can just say they mean whatever we want them to mean after people and companies try to follow them”.
If you disagree, educate me.
Tim Cook met personally with EU regulators before their changes were introduced.
I doubt they would knowingly introduce something that would result in a punitive fine.
I seriously doubt that their ultimate approach was "cleared" with regulators because it's quite blatantly against the intention of the DMA. The fact that he met with EU people says precisely nothing.
How do we change this? I, as a user, am aggrieved that Apple sells (not lends) me a product and then takes actions that make product less useful and more costly. Maybe Spotify and companies should simply set up a website so it is easy for me to take Apple to small claims court? The facts of Apple's anti-competitive practices are certainly clearly laid out in the EU's action, so that should not be hard.
I would sign up.
But Spotify has 30% market share, Apple Music 15%. And it's because for example Apple has lossless audio, Dolby Atmos etc. Not because of any unfair competition.
Why do you have to change it? As a user if you don't like walled gardens or restrictions just buy another phone? why do you insist on shitting up my walled garden just go use android!
It’s not like Vision Pro is a solution in need of a problem, desperately waiting for a killer app, or that apps built the iPhone ecosystem into the juggernaut it is now.
Apple doesn’t need developers, right? Right?
By the amount of bitching on this issue, it really sounds like developers need Apple not the other way around. If this was really about user freedom and shit like that developers would just boycott the platform and move to android. This is just about money and developers wanting to have their cake (distribute their app in a high trust environment) and eat it too (put whatever stupid shit they want in their app with no checks or controls)
Developers do not need Apple because there are other viable platforms. Users that are locked to an iPhone for whatever reason (iCloud being impossible to export, costs are prohibitive, family uses it, etc) would like to be able to sideload or generally run whatever they want on their own device. People aren't complaining just to complain and they're definitely not being entitled, that's just the expectation when you buy a computing device and Apple is failing to uphold their end of it. I do not touch the Apple ecosystem but would like to see their behavior squashed before it can spread to any devices that I do use.