this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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How much would people pay for each of those items if they had a choice?
No IDE is worth 30% of your revenue, neither are all the other services. The only thing of value in that list that even comes close is unblocking the ability of your app to run on people's devices. Ability that is otherwise blocked on purpose.
The free advertising thing is also nonsense - unless an app is already really popular or really niche, nobody is going to find it via App Store search - most likely people will just follow a website link, or learn about the app somewhere else and just search for it directly by name.
But the whole reason why they’d want to run it on their devices is because Apple spent billions to get people to use the phones (and R&D, and writing an OS, and advertising, etc)
This is basically saying “I know you spent years and billions to make iOS become a very profitable place for me to publish an app successfully, but.. I don’t wanna paaaayyyy! Apple is the big meany and they should do it for me because reasons”
So at least we can agree that all the points about how they give you the app store, IDE, push notification service etc. are all bullshit and this is only about not blocking users' access to an app.
Regarding that, it comes down to the long history of general purpose computing - users buy a device, users decide what goes on it. The entirety of today's software ecosystem, and pretty much all of the internet as it is only exists because people were able to run and publish whatever software they chose, host whatever webpages they wanted, without the end user's device's manufacturer having any say in it. Apple likely wouldn't exist today without all the software that was created as a result of that either.
Imagine if they did the same for websites - removed access to the open web and only allowed you to visit approved websites, and also took 30% of each website's advertising and subscription revenue in addition. If they could get away with something like that, they totally would. The only thing that's stopping them is that people wouldn't currently tolerate that.