> Real shame Apple more or less got away with it with its ransom bekng to stay inside the walled garden.
Given with how much Apple got away for years, I am not surprised. Either many people don’t have particularly much insight or a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
What bothers me the most is apples double dipping. You as the consumer basically pay a fee for apples technology. And then they expect the developers to pay the same fee, which will ultimately be paid by the consumer as well. Also ignoring the fact that Apples platform would be completely worthless if it weren’t for the developers building the apps the users want
That's what infuriates me about this discourse. "Do you want Apple to continue to develop stuff and just provide it to developers for free?".
iPhone sales alone are 3x Apple's entire R&D spend. And developers pay more than fair share of that because they need at least two devices (an iPhone and a Mac) if they want to develop anything, and a yearly fee.
Apple doesn't just double dip. It triple dips, and wants to quadruple and quantuple dip.
Why can’t a business be built solely without giving Apple a dime? The web is free — as in freedom and as in gratis. It has a developer tools system funded by hundreds of companies, developers and community members.
Because Apple limits the viability of non-native apps on its mobile devices? Same reason it refused to allow Flash. It wants you to stay in the walled garden with the expensive fees.
> Android has been the dominant mobile OS for over a decade.
worldwide, and not by a large margin. I believe it's 60/40 last I checked.
Among US and a few other first world countries, it's nearly 50/50, with a very small advantadge to Apple. Slashing your consumer base in the biggest markets isn't an attractive proposition.
>Where is the multitude of amazing native-like web apps that we keep hearing about?
well Apple made PWA's harder to do in the EU, so ask them... They're doing what they did to Flash long ago, with much less justification this time around.
Reading the comments is convincing enough to believe there is no viable business to be built on the mobile web. It's great technology, sure; but not a great business. Mobile web apps won't pay the bills for people who build them. It seems worth everyone's time to have those mobile web devs instead build native apps. Ergo, Apple's "dips" are justified costs of doing business.
> Why doesn’t the web compete away Apple’s “dips”?
Because the web sucks at building apps? Because the web can barely render a few lines of text and several images without lag and jank? Because the web lacks useful and powerful primitives and controls to build anything but the most primitive UIs? Because...
The web is more than good enough. There's just a lot of people drinking the kool-aid and believing big tech's subtle and not so subtle messages about the web being shite. Of course the web is shite on devices from companies that compete with the web. They actively undermine it.
For content delivery, yes. For deeply-interactive apps, not in my experience: every vendor that went web-only that wasn’t just serving up text, in the end, forced me to a competitor.
In my experience, the only people drinking kool-aid are those claiming that the web is good enough, and failing to deliver web apps that can do anything beyond the absolutely primitive stuff.
With very few notable exceptions which are notable precisely because they are so few.
The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps. I was playing Quake Live in the browser on a thermally throttled dual core laptop 15 years ago, but the hive mind here at HN will have you believe that the generic social media apps that dominate the charts all need to be "close to the metal": https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/top-free-apps/36
Just because you played Quake doesn't mean the web is good for "vast majority of apps".
The web can barely display simple text and images without jank because that is inherent limitation of the DOM that you cannot escape (that, and the absolute dearth of useful controls and utilities in the browser).
You could of course build stuff with canvas/WebGPL/WebGPU, but then you have to reinvent the whole world from scratch because those are low-level (and in case of Canvas quite limited) APIs
the web isn't shit per se. But it's horrible in the one way it matters to business; it is very hard to monetize web content compared to apps. That's a small part of why flash games quickly gave way to mobile.
But it's hard to deny there are quite a few technical shortcomings. Shortcomings only just now starting to dimish as WebASM/WebGPU gain traction.
Unity got raked over the coals for *retroactively* changing the licensing fees for developers in a way that negatively impacted a common existing business model amongst their customers.
It’s fair to not like the Apple fees but the scenario isn’t equivalent.
One was a rug pull. If they did that all along it wouldn’t have been as big an issue.
I'd say it's still equivalent. I just think apple was smart knowing most people are comfy in the walled garden and won't throw up a fuss.
Similar to Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most. But unlike Unity, the bigger players aren't joining the protest. I guess I was just foolish thinking businesses would at least think in the middle-term of "what if we want our own storefront one day ". I guess the EU might pick up that ball, but the Apathy from other devs is a bit disenheartening. The same Apathy that let these companies enshittify the net and turn into trillionaires as punishment
> Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most
I don’t think that’s true. A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected but Unity was just complete garbage at communicating the changes (not trying to downplay the retroactive bit, no excuse for that). Most people just didn’t bother reading the fine print or calculating the actual fees themselves and just looked at the published headlines.
>A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected
I don't think it was a small portion. The main point was that the lowest cost plan was horrible and a ploy to get you to buy Unity Pro. If you weren't a free (as in freedom) app, it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.
IIRC you weren’t affected if your revenue was under $100k and you couldn’t use the free version before the change anyway if it was over that. I might be wrong but I’m almost sure that that proportion was close to zero.
> it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.
With the changes if you didn’t get pro after surpassing the revenue it would have gotten price but that wasn’t even an option previously.
I think it was actually a significant improvement for some people in that position:
- the cap was now per game/project instead of company
- you could still surpass the previous cap a bit and save some money by paying for install instead of immediately being required to get pro.
Everybody just seem to ignore that/ didn’t notice it because Unity did such a garbage job explaining the changes.
(I’m not really defending them, they only had to introduce this few because they almost literally burnt billions between by pointlessly buying random companies and going on some deranged hiring spree for no reason..)
How are they equivalent other than a fee existing at all, and how is that different than a revenue share that Epic do? Apple hasn’t added a new fee to existing devs. The reason you see apathy is that this doesn’t negatively change the status quo.
It provides new options. Granted they might not like the terms of the new options , as you clearly don’t. But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.
Unity tried to change the terms from under people which changed their livelihood prospective negatively.
If the only equivalence is that there’s a fee, then that applies to a lot more to the point it’s meaningless. Epic do a revenue share. Unity should have done a revenue share but did something more trackable without requiring regular audits.
Ultimately it wasn’t Unity’s actual fee that was the problem, had it been a new tier. But it retroactively changed things for people.
If you had any plans at all to maybe think of an alternative app store, it's equivalent. You have an expectation from a competitor who allows this and IOS instead will charge you despite not using their own store. Pricing that is worse than staying in the walled garden.
If you were apathetic/supportive of Apple and would stay on the App Store anyway, nothing changes. And I suppose a lot of businesses are in this group.
>But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.
Yes, that's my core problem. But the last two years should have taught me thst companies aren't looking in the long term these days. Epic is, sort of. if only because they have no option given their whole kerfuffle.
It's kind of crazy, because all of the super high numbers and companies that said they'd go bankrupt were looking at the Personal tier, which basically acted as a sales funnel towards the Pro tier, where the prices would not be as outrageous, even in the original version of the Runtime Fee: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at... (under "How bad is it, really?")
Of course, they since revised it so my article isn't relevant anymore, but if you look at the platform fee cost per install, then it becomes quite obvious and the initial pushback didn't seem to take this into account: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...
Aside from that, though, I guess companies will always try to take a part of the profits that anything offered through their platforms generates (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Valve's Steam etc.). It's good to see things improving at least somewhat, though, since we can't express a lot of progress overnight.
Given with how much Apple got away for years, I am not surprised. Either many people don’t have particularly much insight or a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
What bothers me the most is apples double dipping. You as the consumer basically pay a fee for apples technology. And then they expect the developers to pay the same fee, which will ultimately be paid by the consumer as well. Also ignoring the fact that Apples platform would be completely worthless if it weren’t for the developers building the apps the users want