[mellis]

Doesn't Gatekeeper allow you to sign apps that aren't distributed through the Mac app store and avoid the warning mentioned in the article? That makes it a feature that's explicitly intended to improve the security of the Mac _without_ requiring that all apps be bought through the Mac app store (i.e. the opposite of the EFF's argument).

Also, there's more to the iOS story than the small amount of money that Apple makes from the app store. Apple has over $20 _billion_ in revenue per quarter from the iPhone [1], making Cydia's $10 million / year about a hundredth of a percent of Apple's revenue. Tim Bray has an interesting estimate [2] of how a small a fraction of iPhone revenue goes to software developers - $12 vs. $350 for the hardware - making Apple's cut an even smaller ~$5. I would argue that user experience and control are a much larger part of the motivation for locking down iOS than the additional revenue.

There's a good argument to made about the problems with closed platforms but, by being misleading about Apple's technology and motivation, the EFF does a poor job of making it here.

[1] http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q2fy12datasum.pdf [2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/03/04/Mobile-Mon...

[saurik]

As the guy who runs Cydia, your analysis of the money involved (or really, money not involved ;P) is spot on, but can be made even stronger: it isn't as if these things distributed by Cydia are things Apple would distribute in the first place, so even if that "lost" revenue were a meaningful amount, Apple has no mechanism to get it anyway.

(Honestly, if you could distribute something in the App Store, and are coming to Cydia instead, you are going to get some funny looks on my end. Cydia is not about accepting the App Store's rejects, nor is it about competing with the App Store. It is a way to distribute things fundamentally unlike the things in the App Store: extensions, not apps.)

Frankly, every time anyone--the EFF included--makes the argument that this somehow comes down to sales numbers and revenue competition, it just undermines the cause. :( That really sucks, as I think this is a serious issue and there really are good arguments to be made, but instead everyone just latches on to this simple-but-wrong direct revenue idea.

(For those who then ask "ok, what are some of those arguments?", I will direct you to the comments I sent to the copyright office for this year's round of exemption requests. I focus on things like cross-market control and the stifling of non-app innovation. You can also, however, make arguments about consumer control, purchase longevity, and security.)

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2012/comments/Jay_Freeman.pdf

[zatara]

Hi saurik, I just would like to thank you for the wonderful job you did (and do) with Cydia. Jailbreaking and Cydia access is my first priority on any iOS device I buy, and I could never imagine myself buying another iPad/iPhone if Cydia stopped existing. IMHO you are not competing with Apple, but rather augmenting their ecosystem and keeping users like myself from drifting towards Android.

[onedev]

Hey Jay! Thanks for everything man, just wanted to take this chance to say that. I've had so much fun thanks to Cydia and it's been really useful.

[mark_integerdsv]

Just joining the chorus: great work on Cydia. I have had hours of fun and I am yet to use an iOS device unjailbroken by choice for more than an hour or two.

[fpgeek]

All of the developer certificates are ultimately signed by Apple. Outside of the Mac App Store they don't restrict your non-App Store API usage and they don't inspect each release of your application. Nevertheless, if Apple decides Mozilla doesn't get a certificate, that's that - installing Firefox with a warning becomes the best-case scenario (more or less).

[sipefree]

The same goes for if an SSL provider stops providing mozilla.com with a cert.

[glogla]

There are two key differences there: 1) There are many CAs you go to. 2) The CA has no financial interest in rejecting you. Neither goes for Apple.

[CountSessine]

Does Apple really have a financial interest in rejecting Firefox?

I bought several iOS devices understanding that the app market is an exclusive, curated, walled garden, with all of the advantages and shortcomings that that implies.

I'm a long time Mac user too, and an exclusive, curated, walled garden is most certainly not in line with my expectations on that platform. I'm happy to have the option of a curated marketplace, but if it's exclusive, I can tell you that I'm going to stop buying Macs - probably in favour of linux laptops. And I'm sure that I'm not alone.

That hardly seems to be in Apple's interest.

[glogla]

I know.

But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS, they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle, and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.

So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.

[CountSessine]

But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS

Have they actually rejected alternative browsers? I know you can't execute mmap() on iOS to do javascript jitting, but have they actually rejected them for some other reason? Opera Mini is available, after all.

they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle

Well, I disagree with abuse. Remember that 99% of the programming guidelines that get apps rejected are to prevent egregious abuse of the end-user, like uploading the users whole address book to a server, logging IMEIs, or using trickery, obfuscation, and confusion to upsell iPhone users into cloud storage data plans.

If you're a 'rockstar programmer', and the only thing that matters is you and your fans, then iOS might not be the platform for you.

and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.

It's $100 for the OSX developer program license, unless this has changed from when I last heard. And you don't need it anyways - just install with a warning. Why shouldn't the user get a warning when they're asking to install a program from an unknown and untrusted source?

So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.

I've been using Linux Mint 12 for some work tasks lately, and it's awesome. It's not OSX, but I know now that there's a viable alternative to OSX if Apple really messes things up.

[fpgeek]

3) (mostly Mozilla-specific) CAs need Mozilla far more than Mozilla needs CAs. Mozilla can always ensure that at least one major browser trusts their certificate, after all.

[sipefree]

The real point is that in any security architecture, at some point you end up trusting someone.

[ajross]

No one is complaining about signed/certified binaries from a security perspective. It's the process behind the signatures and certification that is at issue.

[ChrisLTD]

Apple is pushing people to the App Store to create a better user experience, but they also have made decisions that protect their 30% cut at the expense of that same experience (for recent examples, see the Dropbox API rejection and the inability to buy a book through the Kindle app). If the money wasn't at all important to them, they'd drop their cut down to a level closer to a payment processor.

[saurik]

No: these examples are much better explained by control over their competition (or even "user experience", which is arguable in both fact and morality), something which is much more easily evident when you stop using the irritatingly misleading term "their 30% cut".

Remember: Apple has costs in terms of payment processing, handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages): they are left with a fraction of "their 30% cut", which is quite clear from their public financial reports.

So, to Apple, the amount of money they can make off of companies like Dropbox is effectively zero. Even their entire App Store ecosystem (representing tens of billions of dollars in revenue) nets them a profit but a few percent what they make off their hardware sales.

(Also, btw, as much as I disagree with Apple's decisions with respect to their platform, you are wrong about the experience issue: normal users would much rather have a single billing and support channel for all of their payments, and they get horribly confused when some of their purchases are direct to a developer and some aren't. It does not harm the experience of using an iPhone to have Dropbox bill through their App Store; it may harm Dropbox's experience, but that is irrelevant to Apple, as to them Dropbox's insistence to support multiple platforms is itself a mistake that will lead to poor customer experience of Dropbox.)

[mikeash]

Does Apple deal with substantially more than other payment processors do, who charge far, far less than 30% for their services?

[saurik]

I will copy/paste the paragraph from my comment that you seem to have ignored :( where I already explicitly listed the things that Apple does which, for example, PayPal does not:

"handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages)"

The App Store is a retail store: you hand them product and give them a general price point, and they handle the rest. All you need to do is develop your product and (hopefully) handle support directly related to the product itself. Otherwise, your abstraction is you are just sent a check every month.

If you choose to sell a product yourself, I hope you have a good grounding in sales tax law. For an example, did you realize that you cannot legally sell digital products to the EU, no matter what country you are a resident of, without registering for and collecting VAT?

You also will be dealing with a drastically different kind of support request, as there will be people claiming that you stole money from their credit card, that they didn't intend to make purchases, that they thought the price was different, that they made a payment to you with one credit card but now wish they had used a different one... some of these people are lying, some of them had their credit card number stolen, some of them don't realize that a member of their family uses their PayPal account to make purchases online, and all of them are much angrier than your normal support request. You can build systems that make these issues come up less often, but honestly then you end up spending much more of your time on payment processing than your application, so you should just pay someone else to take care of it for you.

[nikster]

+1

Awesome explanation. Can we stop with the outrage over the "30% cut" now?

[st3fan]

You think they are just a payment processor? How about all the services that you have access to when you put your app on the store? Distribution, in-app purchases, notifications, game center, iCloud sync and storage.

[ChrisLTD]

If the argument is that they need the 30% to recoup costs, then fine, I can agree with that. But that means the 30% isn't just about protecting the user experience, which is my point.

[deelowe]

For Apple, UX includes standardizing things such as payment processing, distribution, and icloud as well as the standard UI bits. It's about the whole package. I agree with everyone else here. This is about Apple keeping control of the ecosystem to provide a well polished and consistent user experience so that their products stand out in comparison.

Apple has always considered itself an appliance company. They push physical products. That is where they want to generate revenue. Everything else is a means to that end. Debating over how much they make off the app store or iTunes is kinda missing the point.

[pgeorgi]

It seems like Apple doesn't trust its ecosystem to let it stand freely.

Otherwise "auto updates, in-app purchases, and iCloud" (etc.) should be a compelling package to keep developers in line. Not to mention visibility in the store (if they'd bother to provide a useful UI and search, that is).

Apple's antics are well-known, otherwise the situation could be interpreted as some lack of confidence in their own services.

[Someone]

I doubt it. Apple's stance is that _all_ developers must stay in line, not most. What they think would happen is that _some_ developers will supply their own store, cloud implementation and slightly different UI, separate update method, because they think they can improve upon Apple's offering (maybe rightly so), it is cheaper for them, easier to integrate, more inline with their ideals, or whatever. End result would be that users will go from "I know how to update my stuff/control who see my data/manage hi-score/etc" to "you have to be a nerd to do that" mode.

I think they are right; some developers wouuse noose to be different. For example, Adobe would try and use something AIR-based and there would probalby be more than one Linux package-manager-like thing that allows you to get a 'special-for-you compiled executable with exactly the features you want')

[deelowe]

Just like how your microwave maker doesn't support running different software on it. Apple is an appliance company hell bent on putting the user experience above all else. If this means 100% complete and total control over every instruction ran on the device, so be it.

That said, the motivation isn't malevolence, it's obsession.

[batista]

>If the argument is that they need the 30% to recoup costs, then fine, I can agree with that. But that means the 30% isn't just about protecting the user experience, which is my point.

All of those costs are related to the user experience. It's not like their store is some webpage with a Paypal link.

[throwaway64]

they are happy to provide this without your app supporting in app purchases, and they get no extra money at all.

[st3fan]

Yes it is a very socialist setup. The free apps are subsidized with the non-free ones. Pretty awesome, no?

[taligent]

Know any payment processors that will also make your app available (and in some cases promote) to 300+ million people ?

[ChrisLTD]

I didn't say they were just a payment processor. I understand the value they provide.

[nikster]

Thanks I was going to say the same thing. I am an active EFF supporter and while most of the crystal prison article is more balanced than the title would imply, the money motivation is simply idiotic.

The Apple App store never was about making money - every quarterly report shows it performs just a little better than breaking even. They take a 30% cut but you have to consider than they're serving probably 100 times more free apps than paid for apps- somebody has to pay for that.

[st3fan]

Yes that is exactly how it works.