my take for one-on-one video calls is that they're hard because you have to constantly be attentive to the other person, and it seems rude to look away or do anything else, whereas in in-person conversations it's actually more possible to look in other directions and still be present. I'm not sure that applies for larger conferences, though.
thanks! I'm not a non-profit unfortunately, but hopefully that can be helpful for others.
A couple of people have made this Play Store spam-apps comparison but personally I feel like the more relevant differentiator is that Apple seems much more stringent on which apps it accepts (e.g. rejecting "duplicate apps" if someone else has filled the same niche already, which Play doesn't claim to do), rathe rather the $99 charge. That said, I never actually had an issue with spam apps in the Play store -- I'm sure they're out there but my experience as a user is that if I'm looking for X then the top three results are reasonable solutions to X and I'm going to pick one of them, and never get further down in the store. Has your experience been different?
Also, I don't want to sound hokey but... $99 might be low enough for your definition of a "serious developer" but it's not affordable for a hobbyist, a student or someone starting out in a low-income country, for example. I can make, host and distribute a website for $0 because nobody owns that ecosystem, and big companies like Github and Heroku think it's worth their while to offer free hosting and distribution to small developers -- I think Apple would do the same if they were in a competitive market, but they charge monopoly pricing because they're (currently) able to.
> iOS has a 22% market share according to the first result on Google.
that's worldwide, in the U.S. they're at 45%. And it's not a traditional duopoly in that there's huge lock-in -- I can buy Coke one day and switch to Pepsi the next (or whatever), but once a customer is on a particular phone they're locked into that platform's app store. So, yeah, I think they're exercising monopolistic pricing when selling access to their app-store.
Why does a higher market share in the US have any significance in this discussion? According to [1] the US only accounts for about 10% of the global smartphone market. As an Australian, I couldn't care less about their US market share.
And even if we go by 45%, that's still not close to a monopoly. You're not by any means forced to publish apps on their app store.
hmm, ok, I take your point that the US share specifically doesn't really matter so long as Apple is pricing the developer account globally -- it definitely matters to me (in the sense that many of my users are American iPhone owners) but maybe not for the pricing analysis overall. My bad.
I still do think that Apple is employing monopolistic pricing on the app store, though -- they don't have a monopoly on the smartphone market, for sure, and indeed their smartphone prices are (certainly premium but still) constrained by the prices of other competing phones. Once a customer owns an iPhone, though, the Apple app store is the only way to reach them. And Apple's pricing for developer accounts seems to reflect that - I really don't believe $99 is the equilibrium price here, nor that policies like kicking apps out the store as soon as the developer stops paying would survive in a competitive market.
I'm absolutely not forced to publish my apps to Apple, and obviously I'm taking the option not to publish them there now. And please don't get me wrong, my apps are super trivial and nobody will actually miss them when they're gone. But it does seem sad to me that both me and my potential future users will lose out (in whatever small way) because of Apple's non-competitive developer account pricing, even when I would have been very happy to pay the fair market rate for a developer account.
also.. for the record, my main complaint is that they're kicking off apps that they've already approved if the developer doesn't continue to pay $99 every year. I don't see how that's justified by weeding out spammers or their target audience for developers or anything else.
As an end user, I would expect apps to be updated at least as frequently as once a year, given that they release major OS upgrades and new hardware each year. Frankly, if you can't be bothered to update your apps, I'd rather not see them in the store. Apple is optimising for user experience here, and developers who don’t keep their apps up to date for the best user experience clearly isn’t Apple’s top priority.
Sure, if the developer is willing to pay the annual fee and not get their money’s worth, that’s their choice. But the fee will likely discourage such practices. OP is living proof that there are devs who don’t want to pay the fee if they don’t intend to update their apps.
That's interesting, about the pre-Apple days, I didn't know that. Do you know how/why Google manages at $0 per year though (with a $25 one-off fee), while Apple charges $99 per year? It's really hard for me to believe that Apple's price would survive in any kind of competitive market, but I'm willing to be convinced.
Apple has always been a premium brand. And it is reflected in the “Apple tax” (Mac and $99/yr annual developer subscription). If you ever have the opportunity to attend an Apple organized developer event (WWDC usually), you will feel that they truly want to provide the technology, SDKs, and support to enable you and your team to build the best app experiences that you can.
For the equivalent experience that users now demand and expect on Android, it is usually much more difficult and nuanced to achieve.
Google has gotten better at treating developers with love, but it is probably not their main priority.
To be honest my experience developing for Apple has been pretty unambiguously bad. For example, for (at least) 6 months there was a bug where users couldn't submit an App Store review unless they had a "sufficiently distinct username", but instead of notifying the user in any way to change their username the review just wouldn't submit. When I reported to Apple Support that multiple users had told me they were unable to submit reviews, Apple shunted me around from department to department and generally wasted a vast amount of my time with each department claiming it was another department's issue. To my knowledge this bug was never publicly disclosed, even though it affected every app on the store (and especially small apps that rely entirely on reviews to be noticed by new customers). And (at least in my interactions with them) Apple didn't seem to care. It sounds like your experience with them has been different, which is great, but I can't say I felt they were enabling me to build the best app I can.
> Do you know how/why Google manages at $0 per year though (with a $25 one-off fee), while Apple charges $99 per year? It's really hard for me to believe that Apple's price would survive in any kind of competitive market, but I'm willing to be convinced. IIRC, Apple has a majority share in the US smartphone market and strong brand loyalty among it's users
In fairness there is tons of scamware, and general garbage in the play store.
>In fairness there is tons of scamware, and general garbage in the play store.
I've heard this from a few people here, but I'm not convinced that the $99 fee is the relevant differentiator -- Apple already has stricter requirements to get into the store (e.g. apps have to be "original" and can't duplicate functionality of an existing app), and it feels to me like for any particular form of scamware Apple can just ban it directly -- I'm not sure how the $99 per year fee helps, because if anything scammers/spammers are more effective at making money off their apps than most of us so should be more willing to swallow the fee. (Also I'm still annoyed that Apple is kicking out apps that have already paid the fee and been approved/authorised -- no matter what the relevant filter is those apps have already passed it)
BetterExplained is a ridiculously awesome website for intuitive explanations of complicated maths concepts (that most of us pretend to understand but secretly don't). It's a really well-loved site (gets posted to hn every couple of months -- typical top comment: "This site is a hidden gem on the internet. This guy deserves a lot more credit") and is all the work of one guy, Kalid, who writes it as a side project. It's really important to him that the site stays free for anyone to access, but he finally agreed to start a Patreon so that those of us who want to support him can tip a little something in his hat. Personally I'm hoping that if enough of us donate he will eventually quit his day-job and write full-time, but in any case it's nice to be able to show some appreciation for one of the best & friendliest educational resources out there. I don't think he's promoting the Patreon at all so I just wanted to share it here for others who feel the same.
Just saw this come through, thanks man :). I had been shy about publicizing the Patreon (wasn't sure what to offer, was it "worth it" etc.) but I realize just having it out there for people who want to support the site is enough of a start. Thanks for sharing this.
can you say a little more about what these "frequent email reminders" that you receive look like, and how frequent they are? I've just discovered that I was opted in, had no idea I was opted in, and have never received an email saying I was opted in -- I'm genuinely curious what I missed. (Maybe somehow I opted out of the emails without knowing it either...)
The thing I don't get about this argument is that there are many, many, many small companies for every large one. The piece gives several examples of small companies winning against large ones, but (at the same time) there were many more small companies losing against those same big companies.
