> prohibitively expensive

fact checking

Apple Tier 1 mandatory store services:

  0.5€ Core Technology fee per install
  2%   Initial acquisition fee 
  5%   Store service fee   

Compare that to 20-30% that Apple's own AppStore take and its a bargain.

Even with Tier 2 with marketing tools, automatic updates, app recommendations, analytics dashboards, and promotional features the cost is only 10% for small business program members, 15% for others.

The problem with Windows XP was that at the time you plugged it into your modem directly (or the computer contained the modem if it was dialup) with no firewall, and it would get exploited in seconds without any user interaction through some default Microsoft background service. Wifi routers were probably a much larger impact than any operating system changes. Especially anything user facing. It's also why clickbait silliness aside, running windows XP isn't actually that likely to run into issues today.

> It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness [...] but the vast majority does not and should not have that power

But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right? So.. while I can apply for a gun license, I can't apply for an unrestricted computing license, so something is wrong here, don't you think? Unless you believe guns are less dangerous.

And that’s fair. Apple doesn’t have to provide services to businesses

> The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings.

I'm not too sure about that, for non-technical users the warnings before installing an APK on Android are very likely a good thing. There's a lot of malware out there and, similar to running a downloaded Exe on Windows, you should at least explicitly confirm it's execution.

I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad for you.

Happy because you have nobody in your life in a vulnerable position to be taken advantage of the inevitable malware that will be installed on their device as a result of your wish.

Or sad because those people are most likely to be grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles. Perhaps you never even got to know them.

Sure, in theory.

But what really happened is that apple kept a stranglehold on what more and more became a general computing device. And they've done enough anti-compettive maneuvers to have the EU make them open up. I wouldn't be surprised if the US eventually comes to a similar decision.

Apple may not be as blatant about it as the other big tech, but I hope it's not contentious to say that all three big companies needs a round of anti-trust overhaul.

I think the problem is that the app store is perceived as a general computing platform compared to what it was originally birthed from: Built in immutable applications on a mobile phone.

> Counter example to what? Why should they not be able to run both a relatively open ecosystem and a mostly closed one?

> I don’t think Apple is arguing that it is impossible to allow more open ways to install apps on iPhones. I think they’re saying that they don’t want to, and that they shouldn’t have to.

Apple volunteers the position that they couldn't possibly open the iOS ecosystem themselves, not just that they don't want to, making some very amusing claims in the process.[1] They also don't want to, but the more you dig into possible "whys", you get into a lot of troubling realities quickly.

Epic Games, on the other hand, is arguing that they actually should have to, at least to some extent. There are actually a lot of reasons why Apple's App Store practices might violate the law, and to my understanding, Epic Games is alleging that Apple's App Store practices constitute "illegal tying" whereby Apple unlawfully ties its payment processing service with its app distribution. That's far from the only potential legal issue that the App Store could face just based on current, existing law. (Note: I am not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt; but nothing I am saying is too original or groundbreaking.)

And of course, it's always worth remembering that what's legal today can be regulated tomorrow. I don't really believe lawmakers or the general public really have had enough time to take a look at the impact that Apple/Google app stores have had on the software market and decide if these practices should be legal. The EU seems to think they shouldn't, and while I don't agree with the EU on everything, I tend to agree.

[1]: https://observer.com/2021/05/even-craig-federighi-apples-hea...

Luckily corporate greed it not the only thing that matters in this world. If they want to sell in half a billion rich market of EU, they will soon need to start behaving more morally. If not they can fuck off, write off 20-30% of company value and EU will have better products, (almost) everybody wins.

Given how low morally they are, the room for improvement is massive and easy to move into. As you write, they didn't do it so far because they were not forced, and waiting for some good moral behavior 'just because it would be nice from them' is rather dumb.

It's possible they'll allow this on iOS once finer granularity logging of battery usage is pervasive, how fine is anyone's guess, so as to track down what apps, and of whatever provenance, degrade some kpi like user impression of battery life.

I only use my smartphone for the basics. I want the tightly controlled app store hence I buy iPhone. I don’t want apps to be able to roll third party subscription and payment options because they will inevitably abuse it at the cost of less savvy users.

Epic Games is a developer and publisher making billions off tricking children into paying for worthless virtual goods. Fuck ‘em if they can’t make a living with the 30% Apple cut.

There were some comments talking about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002977

I'll just reproduce FatalLogic's last comment here:

""" In the class action case[0], which was allowed to go forward by the court last year, it is claimed that Valve told someone:

"This includes communications from Valve that “‘the price on Steam [must be] competitive with where it’s being sold elsewhere’” and that Valve “‘wouldn’t be OK with selling games on Steam if they are available at better prices on other stores, even if they didn’t use Steam keys.’” Dkt. No. 343 ¶ 158, 160 (quoting emails produced at VALVE_ANT_0598921, 0605087). "

(This is a new case, not the 2021 suit, which was rejected by the court, then amended and refiled, later with an additional plaintiff added)

[0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29... """

So a US court of law has decided that it's at least possible that this isn't true.

We could have had other competitors, but nobody wanted them.

Windows phones had a very enthusiastic but too-tiny following. Blackberry lost the plot with terrible hardware and software for the app era (developing an app for the Storm was enough to convince me to never get one of their phones). Symbian's S60 was too little too late in the US. Ubuntu, Mozilla, and others all tried various flavors of Linux and web based phones to no success.

I don't think you can really blame Google or Apple for any of these failures in the same way Microsoft could be blamed in the 90's for their abuses.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, Google was forced to change how they handle third party app stores. iPhones will likely never be big enough for Apple to be forced to allow other stores in the US.

> Mobile computing IS computing for most people. It's the only computer or internet portal they know. And two companies own it all. The passport to the modern world is owned and taxed by two trillion dollar companies.

Top smartphone brand global market share: Samsung (20%), Apple (17%), Xiaomi (14%), vivo (9%), OPPO (8%).

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smar...

I bet there are quite a few people out there who actually have a phone with a faster single thread perf than their laptop i.e. latest iPhone + a crappy windows laptop

Android also has permission prompts to allow access to files and location and such.

Either way, I would be fine with this, if there were a big, red, and scary button with a warning in iOS to turn the coddling off. I bought a phone, so I own it. If I choose to, there should be a way to let me control the hardware. Even Android phones don't have this, with bootloader unlocking disappearing. To be fair, there's a layer below that where you could also replace the XBL (Xtensible Boot Loader, on Qualcomm devices) if secure boot is off and the efuses aren't blown. But there are even fewere devices that have this.

There are so many garbage apps on the App Store that Apple's claim of vetting them must be a farce to justify the store's existence and supremacy over any potential third party ones.

"Allow access" is pretty orthogonal, I don't know how it all works in mobile OSes, but I assume everything is virtualized there, so you can't just access whatever you want without user granting a permission (e.g. through a file picker system component).

You can also ship sandboxed apps on Desktop without the store (although I am not sure on how hard it is to auto-update them, usually stores handle that part), at least on Windows and macOS.

Stores handle storing the apps themselves and distributing updates, that part of the cost is real, plus they do manually review submissions (to some degree), but 30% is insane for that.

> While in no ways perfect, Apple's walled garden gets rid of a huge amount of the enshittification found on other platforms, and makes it so that downloading a random app is relatively safe and unlikely to nuke your phone, steal your data, etc. Yes all the "allow access to location/photos/etc." are annoying, but at least the user has some level of control and consent.

Better than Android sure, but let's not get too hyperbolic. There's less outright malware, but a ton of questionable crapware with bad practices. Let's not forget that Android phones definitely also do sandboxing and just-in-time permission prompts.

Even among major apps, maybe especially among major apps, the Apple App Store is full of apps that blatantly violate Apple's own policies, often including Apple's own apps too, much like the Google Play store. As a simple example, apps that put crucial notifications in the same category as advertisements are all over the place, despite this being a clear violation of the policies. There is plenty of enshittification on Apple platforms.

Beyond that, I can go onto my iPad and search something that is likely to be popular and find a ton of very questionable apps. For example, search "Grand Theft Auto". Scroll down slightly. That sure looks like a lot of very questionable garbage apps full of questionable advertisements. You can repeat this with tons of popular search terms. Yes, it's one thing to trust the sandbox, but are you really sure you feel safe installing all of those?

And sure, App Store review policies do stop most malware and unwanted tracking software from flowing through, but that doesn't mean you should gamble your life on it either. There are plenty of lapses all the time. Probably at least a few times a year, though obviously we only see the incidents that generate a lot of publicity. Just for fun, here's a few incidents over the years that generated a lot of publicity:

From 2011: [1]

> As a proof of concept, [Charlie Miller] created an application called Instastock that was approved by Apple's App Store. He then informed Apple about the security hole, who promptly expelled him from the App Store.

From 2015: [2]

> XcodeGhost exploits Xcode’s default search paths for system frameworks, and has successfully infected multiple iOS apps created by infected developers. At least two iOS apps were submitted to App Store, successfully passed Apple’s code review, and were published for public download.

From 2025: [3]

> We found Android and iOS apps, some available in Google Play and the App Store, which were embedded with a malicious SDK/framework for stealing recovery phrases for crypto wallets. The infected apps in Google Play had been downloaded more than 242,000 times.

And even if the apps aren't malicious, that doesn't mean you're secure. If the idea is that you feel safe using random app store apps because the apps are neatly sandboxed from the system, well, first of all, that part can be accomplished without an app store or a 30% tax. Second of all though, a lot of people's important information lives inside of the apps anyways. Why compromise the phone to access the data when you can compromise the apps themselves? Consider this from 2017:[4]

> During the testing process, I was able to confirm 76 popular iOS applications allow a silent man-in-the-middle attack to be performed on connections which should be protected by TLS (HTTPS), allowing interception and/or manipulation of data in motion.

Obviously Android has more malware than iOS, but if the idea is that even an idiot can use an iPhone and not have to care about good security practice and just run completely random apps, I firmly believe that's a horrible idea. It definitely reduces risks for the average person, but in practice they definitely should be employing good security practices either way because the app store and all of the sandboxing in the world can not save them from themselves. For power users, it basically doesn't do anything meaningful to the security practices calculus and you may possibly be better off with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS depending on what threats you are most concerned about.

My point, of course, is not to say that Apple iPhone is particularly unsafe, just that these anti-malware measures are very far from foolproof, definitely not something you should trust your Bitcoins with. They do probably screen a lot of obvious attempts at malware, but a lot of subtle attempts definitely find their way in. They don't really at all stop the store from being flooded with shitware that does things that would probably harm the privacy of the average user, like apps for "file format conversion" that silently upload your data to the cloud and have dubious privacy policies, or apps that try to convince you to accidentally subscribe to some expensive subscription. This is the kind of thing the Google Play Store was definitely known for, yet it's actually also completely all over the Apple App Store right now. Apple doesn't really seem to mind too much, they're more concerned about periodically harassing people like the developer of iSH.

What Apple and Google both do have a tendency to do is tie their dystopian anti-consumer garbage in with their security features even when they don't actually have to, for reasons that I don't think anyone needs explained to them.

Personally I think the sky will not fall if iOS allowed people to choose to be able to sideload applications. The fact that this would cause a tension whereby Apple would have some pressure to change App Store policies in order to continue getting a cut of sales and have better ability to mitigate unwanted software is kind of a feature and not a bug. As it is today, Apple has basically no incentives to ever consider changing its policies in any way that wouldn't be beneficial to them somehow.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Miller_(security_resea...

[2]: https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/novel-malware-xcodeghost...

[3]: https://securelist.com/sparkcat-stealer-in-app-store-and-goo...

[4]: https://medium.com/@chronic_9612/76-popular-apps-confirmed-v...

> knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage.

It absolutely is, the only argument is about to what degree.

This is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone.

Giving away free software on the appstore is gonna cost you $100/yr developer license. Sure, the more apps you make dilutes the cost, but it doesn’t seem like that inviting of a space for maintained free apps.

It's a thing that was started by Apple and now everyone is trying to mimic.

The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec.

We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that.

You are really trying to say that for a startup trying to build software, say a productivity app or whatever, they should consider launching their own hardware device? They are very different things and would basically make indie development impossible (or really any software company that can't raise hundreds of millions to billions)

> They can offer a hardware device.

As someone who worked at a company that tried to do this, years ago, that's hilariously laughable, and either you're just incredibly unaware of what that sort of thing takes, or you're arguing in bad faith.

And if you think SPAs or regular websites on mobile Safari can give you the same experience and hardware access as a native app, I'm not sure what to tell you.

> They can make an android app compelling enough to convert users.

Sure, right, now you're just spouting fantasy stories. (And I say this as an Android user.)

Many startups are still losing money at $1M ARR. So getting a bump up to 30% of revenue at $1M can be catastrophic.

Investors don't want large percentages of pre-profit money being siphoned off by Apple.

Generally speaking, an optimized win-win fee would be some percentage of profits, not revenue.

That might be far too difficult to manage, accounting wise. But we can safely say that 30% of revenue, would translate to an extreme percentage of profit. Apple is extorting from many companies.

One sign of anticompetitive behavior is when a company is leveraging things in their favor so hard, it seems quite plausible that they are actually harming themselves. Killing of developers, by charging massive fees even to money losing developers, is not a good long term strategy.

But the power to extract money even from those it causes real pain, is hard to turn down when quarterly numbers keep coming up.

>they can link directly to their website from the App Store thanks to the courts ruling - at least in the US.

In Apple. fashion, they are still pushing back on this despite the court ruling. It only shows more so why Apple needs to be made to open up.

When Y Combinator gives $10,000 for a 7% stake in the company, the company goes from being "worth" $130,000 before the money to being worth $140,000 after, and they have $10,000 more in their bank account. Every dollar the company earns afterwards also increases their bank account by $1.00.

When an app store takes a 30% commission on sales, every dollar the company earns afterwards increases their bank account by $0.70.

The percent doesn't really matter (if YC took 30% ownership or app stores took 7% commission), the comparison doesn't really make sense either way.

Equity ownership doesn't directly effect operating capacity on the same timescale as revenue. (sure investment does but in a positive way, but again not quite the same) Where as revenue does on shorter timescales, and 30% off revenue is an ongoing constraint to operating capacity day to day in a way ownership just isn't.

They don't behave the same way so to make the comparison didn't make any sense.

Note: Edited this a few times because words are hard.

Ownership doesn’t cost the company anything.

30% of revenue cuts off the flow of money immediately even long before the company is profitable.

Ah, the Highlander principle: there can be only one. The complete opposite of a "market", of course, which is why the rest of us are gearing up the non-market mechanisms against it.

This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.

Is one store not just a different game of incentives? One where instead of going off to a different platform, your experience will be as enshittified as it can within the bounds of the one and only?

I wish there were a "the customer is always wrong" way of paying digitally, so that there's almost no fee. Right now the only way is cash.

Okay, why does this all work basically the same in Europe, but interchange fees are capped at 0.3% by law? The reason has nothing to do with fraud or technology.