| A Walmart customer doesn’t invest $1100 for the pleasure to walk through their front door so they also shop at target, Amazon and direct. There is no way to deliver native software to a users iPhone without the App Store…that’s the problem. The judge cited switching cost in the epic v Google case and I slow clapped him by myself in my office like a weirdo…I was just so excited that the judicial system was picking up on where the control lies. And by the way, we can go to google who use scare tactics for sideloading even when we are doing everything right. Last I checked, you could only turn sideloading on or off…you should be able to whitelist sites like chrome does or support code signing like windows does. In part, you’re right. It’s their product and they made the phone, but make no mistake, devs made it successful! We have been moving away from native apps because the hassle just ain’t worth it.
We have more control over our own destiny on the web so that’s where we are investing time. I’ve been saying for years that Apple will regret treating us with such distain in the long run, and here we are where car makers don’t want their software, and devs are saying thanks but no thanks on their headset. If enough devs move to pwa’s, that’s the ball game. May as well bring back the Firefox OS. Here’s the thing that really bothers me about iOS.
I’m forced to distribute through an App Store that doesn’t understand how to upgrade orgs, not individuals, doesn’t understand that org subscriptions don’t belong on an individuals Apple account, will deny updates even when you are completely compliant, sell ads on direct searches of our trademarked name…AND, we get borderline zero organic search traffic from App Store because it’s just not where our customers are looking for a solution.
So, we spend money to send them to the iOS App Store!!! Not the other way around.
With Mac, we quickly ditched the App Store and self distributed cause app review was such a pain. With windows, which is much bigger than Mac for us, we self distribute with code signing. And…if that’s not bad enough, we want to be able to deploy updates immediately when necessary. This is mission critical software for these businesses.
Thankfully, we can roll out on desktop immediately but on phones, there was one time a couple years ago where we had to deny all Android access for 48 hours cause there was a bad bug over a public holiday weekend.
So now, we won’t update the app around holidays.
I will say, app review has gotten better over the years and most of ours go theough within 30 mins these days but every now and again it’ll take a couple days which keeps that spectre in the back of your mind. |