[OleksiiA]

HarmonyOS will not support Android apps accordingly to the latest news. So, know you have to "only" build thousands of apps to be on par with iOS and Android. I'm pretty sure there will be at least major China apps like TikTok and WeChat. Will there be Google Maps? Messenger? Probably not in the nearest time. Might end up in the same place as BadaOS, webOS, Windows Phone OS and others.

[foooorsyth]

You don’t need thousands of apps. People don’t use thousands of apps day to day. They use the core system apps plus a few top social media apps and perhaps some banking stuff. It’s not 2010 anymore when all of the earnings calls for $AAPL and $GOOG were all about the number of apps on their respective app stores. The web has been highly consolidated since then and the average user only visits a handful of websites/apps. China also has the super app culture — their entire life is on WeChat so that’s really all they need.

[gscott]

In China they only use a few apps and inside of those apps are the rest of them. They are like super-apps.

[Osiris]

This is exactly the problem Windows Phone had. Many reviewers said they liked the operating system but that there just weren't any apps for it.

[danpalmer]

HN: Building an OS is the easy part, it's building the ecosystem that is the hard part.

Also HN: Apple want to charge HOW MUCH for building an ecosystem?!

[jchw]

I hate comments like these. I assume it gives some people who are Apple-loyal some smug satisfaction, but it's incredibly easy to win a bad faith argument against yourself.

There are so many things you could unpack, like for example, the fact that building an ecosystem costs so much now literally because you have to compete with Apple and Google, or, for example, that I don't actually think the issue at hand is how much Apple "deserves" to be able to charge for building an ecosystem, though I'm sure if it came down to it, "30% of nearly all monetary transactions for literally forever on most phones in the U.S." is not the value most people would come to.

I know there's going to be some temptation to argue about that, but sincerely, please don't. It's just not the point. My point really is, why? This thread didn't even have anything to do with this other than being about app distribution.

[danpalmer]

Hey I appreciate the dislike of comments like this, thanks for engaging with points rather than snark.

FWIW I'm not trying to take either side, it's a complex, nuanced topic. But, HN isn't very good at nuance, and I was intending to make a comment on the conflicting viewpoints that many seem to hold, which is a far more interesting situation to me than the specifics of this situation.

You're right that part of the cost of building an ecosystem now is competing with the incumbents, although I'm sure you could make this argument throughout history with different incumbents, if at a smaller scale.

[fyrn_]

Apple were a first mover, Not the same thing at all

[danpalmer]

A first mover in what exactly? I think Palm and Symbian would argue they were earlier movers in the space and tried to build ecosystems.

To be clear, I don't really lean to one side or the other on this, I just find it interesting that both of these are common views to hold.

[pjmlp]

Only on US Apple's world, maybe.

Windows CE/Pocket PC, Symbian, Epoch, J2ME, BREW, Blackberry predated iPhone for a decade, with app stores provided by phone operators.

[dylan604]

how does that affect the fact that Apple invented the entire ecosystem for you to try to monetize your clone of candy crush?

[jchw]

There is an incredible amount of trivialization packed into the phrase "monetize your clone of candy crush" when referring to the App Store which has tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year.

But it's worse, because it impacts you even if you're not an app developer. Even when you think you're paying other people, Google and Apple often assert that it has a right to the cut, like joining a YouTube membership. When apps are pushed to use IAPs with a cut, you wind up paying more and having less of it go to the intended recipient, and because apps are limited on what they're allowed to communicate, they can't really adequately warn you that this is going to happen. Some smaller apps wherein the IAP cut seriously doesn't make sense, more along the lines of banking, wind up having to just give up altogether on accepting payments, because they simply don't have the power to fight Apple and Google when they get wrongly rejected.

App stores that don't even let you tell people they're being ripped off by app store policies feel like things that people in "hacker" culture would not be apt to defend as good even if they believe it is completely legal, and I sincerely wonder how this became the norm for a lot of people.

[dylan604]

I think people making apps with infinite IAP are the scourge of modern society. People here on HN complain about SaaS software and the eternal renter mentality, but the IAP is not thought of in the same manner strikes me as odd. So with that said, we'll probably never see eye to eye on this topic.

[jchw]

I'm not really sure how that applies to the examples I gave, of which the main ones are basically the same idea as Patreon and have nothing to do with those IAP practices.

I'm also not sure why some of these transactions potentially being scummy makes it any better the way Apple and Google control the markets. If anything, they're profiting hand-over-fist from it and absolutely encouraging it.