This also plays to the traditional way of looking at monopolies, that they raise prices. But Amazon (and looks like, now Apple) are using this "but customers pay nothing" excuse to say that their monopolies benefit consumers. But because of the intangible nature of data, the "data prices" and "privacy prices" we all pay, have gone way up. It's just that we don't have good ways of measuring that.
Sure, but it’s unclear whether that’s a problem that traditional antitrust regulations can effectively solve. If Apple’s forced to open up iOS, would your privacy focused App Store really be able to win on the open market? Remember that you can only protect privacy in that context by rejecting apps consumers would otherwise want to install.
Nearly every municipality in the USA has local monopolies on utilities and it hardly causes an issue. Monopolies can't always assumed to be bad for the consumer.
Aren't these monopolies either owned by the municipality or strictly regulated so they can't abuse their monopoly? Monopolies are problematic because it means the usual market mechanisms don't work. If you use regulation to keep prices in check and to ensure quality, monopolies do work for the customer of course.
The EU generally prefers to use regulation to artificially create markets though.
Came here to ask if they're announcing that they're waiving the $99 fee. This makes it sound like they must be... but I haven't seen any other mention of it.
Maybe they jumped the gun a little bit and will announce it on Monday at WWDC?
While the $99 fee is a barrier, I'd argue that the Apple computer you're required to use is the real barrier to entry.
I'd love to get into iOS again, but I have no interest in owning an Apple computer right now. Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, and countless other IDE's run just fine on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
And we know damn well Apple could produce a version of XCode (or a derivative) that could run cross platform. They choose not to, so devs are forced to buy Macs.
Is that $99 fee actually a significant barrier to entry? Is $8.25 per month more expensive than self hosting a CDN to deliver downloads to potentially thousands of people per month? $99 is a bargain if you look at what you actually get. Presumably you are shipping apps to make money. $8.25 per month to handle all of your distribution seems very cheap.
It stopped me from playing around with developing iOS apps entirely. I’m sure others must have felt the same way too. Not everyone will make $99 back in the year end - or wants to!
I am an iOS developer myself and would argue that the 135 (Canadian) they charge is good to prevent every random joe from uploading and submitting their apps. It keeps only the most serious ones from submitting. You can still develop and test apps on your own device without the fee, they just expire after 7 days and need to be rebuilt to work.
Having software developed is expensive, very expensive. Complaining about the $99 developer program fee is like complaining about the price of gas when buying a new Bugatti Veyron. If you can't afford the $99 you certainly can't afford to develop an app.
At least the $99 fee keeps hordes of amateurs from uploading their 'hello world' app and clogging up the review process even more.
It also keeps me from developing some niche app to scratch an itch and share that with the world for free. Sure, I can always just release the code on Github and let people compile it themselves, but unless the app is for developers who own Apple computers, very few are probably going to take advantage of that. I'm certainly not going to pay $99/yr to publish that app, but I might if there were no fee. That said, maybe that app would fall into your "hello world" category and shouldn't be published anyway.
Related: Quite some time ago [Edit: OMG it was 10 years ago!] I had a game on the App Store that I stopped updating and pulled because the $99 fee wasn't covered by the low number of downloads. Many people were still playing the game at the time, but I just couldn't justify the cost.
I pay more than $99 a year for my own personal Resharper license. I can’t think of a single hobby I have or have thought about having that wouldn’t cost more per year.
WHY should one pay any amount to Apple, to develop software? Apple artificially props up obstacles to development, and then "sells" tools to overcome them!
And WHY should Apple even review and approve apps that run on hardware YOU own!! When you buy a fridge, does the manufacturer review and approve your groceries?
Non sequitur! The FDA is a government entity with a mandate to protect citizens, bound by non-fluid law.
Apple is a self-serving private company, not beholden to user's interests (but shareholders), with an extremely fluid, arbitrary set of "laws" (if you can even call them that).
Absurd. If you wish to be a competitive farmer, you need a tractor. If you wish to be a competitive auto mechanic, you need a set of expensive tools and parts. If you want to be a competitive mobile app developer, you need a Mac. Every trade has a cost-of-entry.
EDIT: further, porting Xcode to another platform would be non-trivial. With the addition of Marzipan, you can forget about Xcode being on any third-party platform.
I dont think your analogy holds up. To farm, you can buy any decent tractor. You can install your own tires, have the freedom to repair how you see fit etc.
A better analogy is developing Apple Apps is like trying to farm where BigCo forces you to buy their expensive tractors with no option to use anything else.
Or to use your mechanic example, imagine BMWs can only be worked if you use their proprietary tools that nobody can make.
And mechanics all over the world must buy BMW tools if they want to work on BMWs for people that own BMWs. Nobody is preventing anyone from working on cars, just BMWs. And the reason is that when you get BMW service, you expect BMW standards. Don’t work on BMWs if you don’t want to pay for the tools.
I actually think this is an important point, as highlighted by someone else commenting "I've been programming for a decade and only Apple has this restriction".
No one is forcing developers to make apps for Apple. There are plenty of other platforms anyone can develop for without paying a fee or buying a Mac. Developing for Apple products is a business decision, just like choosing to work on import cars vs domestic cars. Plenty of repair shops only work on domestic cars because they're easier to repair and cost less. That's a business decision. Are you losing out on a particular market? Sure. But that's a business decision. If developing for iPhone will get you more than $XXX, then it's worth it to buy a cheap Mac and pay the developer fee because it will increase your profits more than you will spend. If that's not the case, then just develop for Android which only costs $25.
I don't like paying the $99 fee or having to develop on a Mac just to make iPhone apps, but if it bothered me that much I would just stop making iPhone apps. Tim Cook did not come to my house and force me to make an app for him, I made the decision by myself knowing that the platform had restrictions and everyone on the platform had to abide by them.
As long as everyone is subject to the same rules, everyone has the same decision to make. No one is forcing anyone to make that decision.
This "No one is forcing someone to do X" is not how monopoly rules work. By that logic, no company would ever be a monopoly. You dont like X? Have you consider not doing it?
Microsoft wasnt forcing anyone to buy PCs. It is for people who choose to do that ("the market") that the company is unfairly wielding the power.
Is Apple preventing anyone from buying a competing smartphone? Microsoft paid companies to only sell PCs with Microsoft operating systems, is Apple pushing Samsung to drop Android and use iOS? Microsoft undercut competitors and used their marketshare in the OS space to make their products (Internet Explorer) the dominant product in the space. Is Apple drastically undercutting Android phones on pricing?
Microsoft forced Windows into being basically the only OS on the market in the 90s, and dropped their prices to 'free' in order to destroy competition. They didn't force you to buy a PC, but if you wanted a computer, because of Microsoft's practices, Windows was basically your only option. Conversely, if you don't like Apple products, you're in luck because smartphones are an incredibly competitive market and Apple only reaches the very highest end of that market.
In what way is Apple pushing the market into buying more iPhones and locking out Android from the market? It doesn't matter how monopoly rules work unless the company actually has a monopoly.
> Is Apple preventing anyone from buying a competing smartphone?
Apple prevents everyone from using a competing app store. No, the Play Store does not compete with Apple's store. You cannot substitute either for the other so they're in different markets.
Xbox prevents everyone from using a competing game store. No the Playstation does not compete with Xbox's game store.
Walmart prevents everyone from buying products from competing stores. No, Target does not compete with Walmart, you can't buy Great Value products at Target so they're in different markets.
Hacker News prevents everyone from using a competing site. No, reddit does not compete with Hacker News. If I click the "reply" button it only posts to Hacker News and not reddit so they're in different markets.
I guess by that definition everything is a monopoly. I'm going to sue to get my Coca Cola bottles filled with Pepsi under federal anti-trust laws.
> Xbox prevents everyone from using a competing game store. No the Playstation does not compete with Xbox's game store.
Indeed. You cannot substitute an Xbox game for a Playstation game or vice versa. Xbox games and Playstation games are different markets.
> I'm going to sue to get my Coca Cola bottles filled with Pepsi under federal anti-trust laws.
Having a trademark technically constitutes a monopoly. But there are good reasons to have trademark law anyway.
> Walmart prevents everyone from buying products from competing stores. No, Target does not compete with Walmart, you can't buy Great Value products at Target so they're in different markets.
> Hacker News prevents everyone from using a competing site. No, reddit does not compete with Hacker News. If I click the "reply" button it only posts to Hacker News and not reddit so they're in different markets.
I'll pretend you kept these ridiculous strawmen to yourself. If you have any actual arguments, I'd love to read them.
There are languages,tools etc that can do cross compilation. Ex you can export Linux and Mac Unity games from Windows. For iOS even if you use different tools to generate the application you are still forced to use the Apple dev tools to publish them AFAIK and pay the Apple tax
The hardware is mostly irrelevant for these two OS's. You could install both on any PC. A copy of Windows Pro is $199 (or less if you buy a PC off the shelf).
Apple chains their OS to their computers. There's no reason MacOS can't run on regular PC hardware, aside from the fact they don't want you to. The cheapest, i3 based (which is shit, obviously), 128GB hard drive Mac computer is $799.
Finally, to compare apples to apples: Android Studio runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. XCode could do the same. Even if it was for iOS only. Which, most people would be targeting anyways.
"Need"? Legally, yes, but practically, no. "Hackintoshes" exist. VM's capable of running macOS are a few Google searches away. You are trading time for money going that route though.
I think that’s probably taking a bit far to be honest. If someone really wants to develop for the Apple platform you can pick up a perfectly serviceable used Apple computer either used or refurbished for a reasonable price that is good enough, like a used Mac mini or iMac. It might not be the latest and greatest, but neither is a $400 windows machine either.
“84% of apps are free, and developers pay nothing to Apple.
Like any fair marketplace, developers decide what they want to charge from a set of price tiers. We only collect a commission from developers when a digital good or service is delivered through an app. Here are some of the ways developers commonly make money on the App Store.”
They’re talking about apps, and the second part of that header is referring the subject of that which is apps. They pay nothing because it’s a free app which generates no revenue to Apple (commission-wise).
And ever since the introduction of iPhone, Apple has had additional millions of $99/year from iOS developers, yet the pace of improvement for Xcode, or even its documentation has gone worst, and not better.
I seriously hope they have something to show for in the coming WWDC.
Well, you need to buy an iPhone and a Mac only once every 5 years or so whereas the $99 fee is per annum. So this can be significant for someone who is scraping by on a low budget.
That's just false, every developer has to pay 99 USD per year to be able to publish apps. Even if you only publish free apps.