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Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups
- bentocorp 1y agoI recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change.
- dlcarrier 1y agoA family member of mine has an Apple phone, and the lack of availability of not just open source software but even freeware or freemium software astounds me. They make it so difficult to distribute anything, that it's not worth it unless you are getting significant revenue. This means that often the only option is something extremely scammy that charges monthly for the most trivial capabilities. Of course, Apple gets a 30% cut in any scams, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it, and really their policies are what create it, in the first place.
- furyofantares 1y agoIs that an Apple thing? People trying to monetize anything they make seem to vastly outnumber those of us who just want to make stuff for other people to enjoy. When I turn off an adblocker I'm shocked how many hobby projects spam ads at their users to try to make a few pennies. It feels like a social issue.
- nickthegreek 1y agoGiving away free software on the appstore is gonna cost you $100/yr developer license. Sure, the more apps you make dilutes the cost, but it doesn’t seem like that inviting of a space for maintained free apps.
- hu3 1y agoYou'll also need a Mac computer for the happy path so it's more than $100/year.
- Aloisius 1y agoFree for non-profits though. I'm a little surprised there isn't an open source non-profit set up to act as an umbrella for open source iOS app development.
- oefrha 1y agoThen one bad app and the whole account is nuked. Not a great setup unless with explicit blessing from Apple, which they won’t give.
- esalman 1y agoIt's a thing that was started by Apple and now everyone is trying to mimic. The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec. We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that.
- foobarian 1y agoYou know how we got here? It used to be a free-for-all where grandma could download any software off the Internet on her Windows computer. You know how the rest went. I honestly don't mind it. It's so easy to recommend an iPhone to non-technical users, knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage. (Sure it requires a bit of expectation attenuation but the Android app stores are worse yet).
- johnecheck 1y agoThis is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone.
- ryandrake 1y agoWhen a normal user is highly motivated to install software, there is no such distinction from a "technical user". He wants to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app. The operating system disallows it. Then he just does a search for how to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app on iOS, and finds 20 tutorials walking him through the steps to ungate the install. You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it.
- foobarian 1y agoGrandma: Help me, Joey! After the neighborhood kid helped me install the coupon code app (he said something about expert mode, he is very smart!) my phone runs slow and crashes. :-( Me: ...
- kelnos 1y agoI love how the threat of Grandma installing malware on her phone is the new "think of the children!" And I love how the response to shit mobile security is to lock down devices so the people who buy them don't actually own them. Instead of, y'know, actually cleaning up the security posture of these devices.
- 1123581321 1y agoHow did you conclude the lack of freeware? Both the Apple and Google app stores have a couple million apps, and most of them (about 95% in the App Store’s case) are free.
- frollogaston 1y agoI know this isn't the biggest thing, but it's funny how even simple questions have complicated answers in Swift, ex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string-substring-work-in-swift https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string...
- JimDabell 1y agoStrings and Unicode are a lot more complicated than they first appear. I like the way this article puts it: > Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first, leaving you wondering. > It’s not that other languages don’t have Unicode-correct APIs at all — most do. For instance, NSString has the enumerateSubstrings method that can be used to walk through a string by grapheme clusters. But defaults matter; Swift’s priority is to do the correct thing by default. > Strings in Swift are very different than their counterparts in almost all other mainstream programming languages. When you’re used to strings effectively being arrays of code units, it’ll take a while to switch your mindset to Swift’s approach of prioritizing Unicode correctness over simplicity. > Ultimately, we think Swift makes the right choice. Unicode text is much more complicated than what those other languages pretend it is. In the long run, the time savings from avoided bugs you’d otherwise have written will probably outweigh the time it takes to unlearn integer indexing. — https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple.
- frollogaston 1y agoI'm well aware of all of this. Swift strings aren't random-access. There are reasons no other language did it Apple's way. Even in the rare situations when you do care about the edge cases with these multi-code point symbols (basically just emojis), Swift strings still make that a nightmare, while in other languages you have easy ways to deal with it. I was on such a project where we cared a lot about these details, and the whole team agreed to throw Swift strings out the window and build our own array-based string replacement where each slot is a symbol. Which is probably what Apple would've done if it weren't for performance overhead. Didn't help that their API was really unstable. Every major Swift version broke our code in so many places that we started adding extra layers just to protect ourselves.
- lloyddobbler 1y ago“A 30% revenue share can easily be the difference between a company that can afford to scale, hire new employees, and reinvest in its product, and one that is perpetually struggling to stay afloat.” This brought up a fun thought exercise for me. Pretty sure that Y Combinator would argue that giving away 7% of one's company for access to intangible (but beneficial) things like funding, advisors, etc, is completely worth it for a company. Pretty sure that they also fund companies that pay salespeople fairly significant commissions on sales. Interesting to see them argue that asking a company to give up 30% "commission" on revenue for access to a large market stifles competition and innovation. Is Y Combinator's forcing companies to give up 7% of their companies for access to advisors and funding stifling innovation and competition? (Spoiler: I don't think so. I think both Y Combinator and apple should be able to capitalize on the access they provide.)
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- georgemcbay 1y agoFar be it from me to defend Y Combinator or VCs in general but IMO the situation is a bit different because of the monopoly (or at least duopoly) power that Apple and Google hold as gatekeepers over the only practical way to sell to iOS and Android device users. Of course, I'd also assume most or all the people associated with YC were part of the "fire Lina Khan because our whole business model is actually just taking advantage of FAANG acquihire panic" squad, making them hypocrites (in a slightly different way) for helping to prop up these monopolistic gatekeepers and then acting put upon by the results of that.
- ensignavenger 1y agoIf there were competition for App Stores, we could discover what the correct market price for App Stores is, but Apple doesn't want that.
- tpdly 1y agoThis is a very good argument. We would also learn what features of an App Store add marketable value, and what features are trivial. I imagine the front end isn't very important, but some kind of build certification/verification is. That requires branding, infrastructure and labor. Maybe its easier than I imagine to verify that apps aren't lying about what they do, but as far as I can tell that could well account for some 5% at cost. On the other hand you trust your bank, for example, so you follow the link on their website and install the App, and the trust came from their own brand.
- Spivak 1y agoTime to see what the next move for Apple will be if they lose the appeal. Because I doubt Apple will be content to lose money on the ruling and will look to collect the fees elsewhere. Without the ability for developers ship iOS apps with no business relationship to Apple you're still pitching your tent on someone else's land.
- politelemon 1y agoIf there is one thing I've seen Apple do reliably over the past 20 years, it's being able to comply with rulings in the most malicious and hindering way possible. They'll be just fine with no difference to their bottom line.
- sonofhans 1y ago[flagged]
- darepublic 1y agoPeak app store was doodle jump. It's been all downhill from there
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- radley 1y ago> if the App Store had never existed? ...even though it lays golden eggs Why is the general rebuttal always binary? Be grateful that it exists at all! It lays golden eggs! No, they're just eggs. A few of us are lucky to sell a lot of eggs. That doesn't make them golden. The true gold eggs are grown despite the store (Netflix, YouTube, OpenAI). Imagine an App Store that only lets you make black and white apps, but the store itself can produce full-color apps. Further, if your black and white app is actually successful, they'll copy it and release their version in color. That's what's hindering us today.
- frollogaston 1y agoApple invested so much in their platform because of the expectation that they'd get to run it the way they want, including taking a cut
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Apple invested so much in their platform because of the expectation that they'd get to run it the way they want, including taking a cut Source? Jobs’ original vision included no App Store. Web apps would suffice. They sucked, and continue to suck, so he built an App Store to flesh out the iPhone’s feature set.
- neilv 1y ago> “Y Combinator — and the larger venture capital community — have long been hesitant to back app-based businesses that were poor investments due to the Apple Tax,” This could be good, if it encourages people to re-learn the value of open standards, like Web is supposed to be, rather than helping to perpetuate the proprietary app stores. Also, I think it's noteworthy that, once a company gets customers locked into a proprietary app store, they show their true extremely greedy, abusive, and indifferent side to third-party developers. No matter how warm and fuzzy a brand they craft for consumers. Are Bay Area libertarian techbros ironically going to try to rely on government regulation to keep the awful proprietary app stores tolerable, or will they rediscover what industry has known for decades about the value of open standards, and direct their efforts consistent with that?
- kelnos 1y agoSeriously. If Apple put even half of the effort into open web standards that they've put into building their mobile SDKs and the App Store ecosystem, we'd have webapps that would be just as capable, performant, and secure as native apps can be. Though I'm sure then Apple would lock a lot of device access by websites behind a domain allowlist that you have to pay a bunch of money to get on.
- neilv 1y agoWhen I was doing fancy things with HTML5 Offline, Apple seemed to be actively breaking even that (e.g., storage), like other browsers weren't. Sigh.
- effortment 1y ago[flagged]
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- epolanski 1y ago30% fees are mental. Most of my clients don't even bother/care and their competition doesn't bother/care either.
- effortment 1y agoThen why bother arguing?
- epolanski 1y ago[flagged]
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoThe fees are 15% as part of the small business program.
- epolanski 1y agoThe fees are not the only barrier.
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoI agree, the review process can be painful where your app gets rejected for guidelines that aren’t necessary for other platforms like web.
- qwytw 1y agoYes, however it was a great deal back in 2008.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoI don’t know. You could just as well say, “A 3% merchant fee can easily be [… ruinous to a bunch of companies]”, and I’d be talking about Stripe, a Y Combinator company. In Europe they manage to cap interchange fees at 10x less, and there’s no less “payments innovation” or more “fraud” or whatever some nice red headed LISP brothers or some insightful patio furniture guy will say is eating into the 3% merchant fees. People struggle with this: Stripe and Apple do the same thing wrt to the fees. They get all into a knot trying to explain how 3% of all revenue, successfully capped at 0.3% in Europe, is somehow different than Apple taking 30% of App Store IAP. We already live in the world where nice, red headed LISP brothers and insightful patio furniture guy is wrong. You don’t even need to talk about it or file a brief. The reason the Epic case is tough is because the fee doesn’t matter. Like what is the right fee? Say a number. Clearly it doesn’t make sense to take a fee at all! Apple is doing something valuable - they are concentrating wealthy, good customers who overwhelming choose iPhones instead of Android phones - and instead of making iPhones more expensive they take from app developers. But if you did the sensible thing - force the platforms to charge the cut they are taking from the end user up front, when they buy the phone - nobody is going to do that. It’s exactly the same problem as Europe saying Facebook has to be ads free. Nobody chose to pay for a Facebook subscription. The truth is the regulators are in between a rock and a hard place if they try to make changes to one number in the midst of the status quo. In the past, regulators took more drastic steps, they split up the monopolies, and once you understand how weak these regulations that people are litigating are, suddenly you will be much more sympathetic to the idea that the App Store and the iPhone have to be different businesses, or that private digital payments companies shouldn’t exist at all.
- wmf 1y agoNote that Stripe isn't really the problem with payments. AFAIK Stripe pays ~2.5% (mostly to banks) and they charge ~3%.
- ensignavenger 1y agoIf you think 3% is too much, there are plenty of other payment processors... the thing is, most of that 3% is not set by the processor (or kept by them) but is set by the card networks. It is the card networks that should be targeted by antitrust laws. If there anyone could make an App Store, then we would have a better idea of what the market rate for app stores should be.
- bumbledraven 1y ago[flagged]
- nickthegreek 1y agoit’s also incorrect. The barrier to entry tax is 15% of sales and a developers license. 30% is more of a barrier to scale after you take off.
- Hammershaft 1y agoIf your biz model doesn't work at a ~1/3 cut, there's no reason to start at a %15 cut.
- NoPicklez 1y agoI guess you could argue that the Apple tax is also a barrier to prevent AI slop apps
- moomoo11 1y ago[flagged]
- general1726 1y agoMore like inconsistent policies, cronyst carve outs for big tech companies while app store is full of spam and scam apps.
- jmull 1y agoI think Apple should mostly be allowed to run as crappy an App Store as they want. But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want. (Ground rules all app stored would have to follow based on technical, security, and legal concerns would be fine too, IMO.) Of course Apple would never go for that, so we'll end up with whatever mess legal processes can wring out of them.
- dangus 1y agoYou say “they would never go for this” but they do it on the Mac. It’s funny how they are their own counter example. They have no leg to stand on.
- epohs 1y agoCounter example to what? Why should they not be able to run both a relatively open ecosystem and a mostly closed one? I don’t think Apple is arguing that it is impossible to allow more open ways to install apps on iPhones. I think they’re saying that they don’t want to, and that they shouldn’t have to.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoIt's possible they'll allow this on iOS once finer granularity logging of battery usage is pervasive, how fine is anyone's guess, so as to track down what apps, and of whatever provenance, degrade some kpi like user impression of battery life.
- mrandish 1y agoThis is about money not battery life. Apple makes billions of dollars in highly profitable revenue by cryptographically blocking users from controlling their own devices.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoYou could be right. That said, i was an engineer for several years in Apple and primary internal concerns were battery life and its influence on user experience; the removal of Flash viability, favoring html5, is an example: profiling of Flash apps written in the wild showed code that routinely drained battery with aplomb...inexplicable to end users not also programmers.
- rootusrootus 1y agoIf there was more than a duopoly in smartphones, I'd say Apple should be able to have whatever horrible app policy they want, so long as it is clearly communicated to everyone including customers. Let the market decide. But that's not where we are. I think it makes sense to treat both Apple and Google as de facto monopolies with respect to the smartphone market, and impose some regulation on what they have to allow and how much they can charge for it.
- bloomca 1y agoIs it allowed to charge more in storefronts which take these cuts? Why nobody does that? What about Steam? Can a publisher sell a game for ~$45 in their store and $60 in Steam, or is it against some TOC?
- pkaye 1y agoFor Steam, I believe the price parity requirement for Steam only applies to Steam Keys. Publishers can sell at a lower prices on other store front as long as it doesn't involve Steam infrastructure.
- AndrewPGameDev 1y agoThere were some comments talking about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002977 I'll just reproduce FatalLogic's last comment here: """ In the class action case[0], which was allowed to go forward by the court last year, it is claimed that Valve told someone: "This includes communications from Valve that “‘the price on Steam [must be] competitive with where it’s being sold elsewhere’” and that Valve “‘wouldn’t be OK with selling games on Steam if they are available at better prices on other stores, even if they didn’t use Steam keys.’” Dkt. No. 343 ¶ 158, 160 (quoting emails produced at VALVE_ANT_0598921, 0605087). " (This is a new case, not the 2021 suit, which was rejected by the court, then amended and refiled, later with an additional plaintiff added) [0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29... """ So a US court of law has decided that it's at least possible that this isn't true.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoI don’t care that developers have to pay 30%, it makes no difference to me. If that fee went away… it would just give them 30% more profit.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoIn a lot of cases prices would go down, that extra 30% makes app development often pretty unprofitable if you aren't the store. And a lot of things just aren't available on mobile because of the cut. Most apps which offer movies or books for sale for instance only let you view them on the phone, you have to buy on the web.
- JustExAWS 1y ago90% of in app purchases on the App Store come from pay to win games. I don’t think the cost of loot boxes and coins would go down. The 90% number came from the Epic Trial. The other major players in the App Store haven’t allowed in app purchases for years.
- knifie_spoonie 1y agoDevelopers getting paid better is a good thing, surely?
- dijit 1y agoI think the argument here is that there's less good apps because it's a difficult market and your profits are being garnished too aggressively for it to be a viable option when seeking investment for novel ideas. It's not about "having less profit" necessarily, it's about it being a more risky business with a lower potential ceiling making investment less likely and thus: a dearth of Apps. (reading charitably, of course).
- Hammershaft 1y agoGrocery stores on average make ~1-4% profit on revenue. Hungary has a sales tax of 27%. Do you think that if Hungary eliminated the sales tax that Hungarian grocery stores would make 28-31% profits?
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- samdoesnothing 1y ago[flagged]
- exabrial 1y agoFFS, break up the monopolies and stop approval new mergers. This isn't this hard.
- globular-toast 1y agoStop monopolies doing any acquisitions IMO. Our current governments love monopolies, though. Easier to control.
- pen2l 1y agoPeople here miss the value of a tightly moderated walled garden: I don't have to worry about downloading things that are misleading or are chock full of dark patterns, because it has been vetted by an App Store that I trust. And when I download an app with a subscription through App Store, I can see any time how much it costs, I can cancel it any time no fuss: https://www.iphonelife.com/sites/iphonelife.com/files/styles/2023_iphone14pro_642_2x/public/tap_the_subscription_you_want_to_cancel_in_app_store.png https://www.iphonelife.com/sites/iphonelife.com/files/styles... Meanwhile, any subscription I sign up for through another channel, I have to wade through a sea of dark patterns to reach a cancel screen. This is why I choose to have an iPhone, because the garden is walled and I can relax. If you want freedom to have multiple different app stores, Android is a better option for you.
- whatsupdog 1y agoEverybody should have a choice. You have a choice to go through Apple. The developer should have a choice to bypass Apple.
- pjc50 1y agoIf an alternative app store existed, you could just .. not install it? Does the mere existence of an alternative harm you if you never use it?
- pen2l 1y agoI'd rather another one not exist, because then it would become a game of incentives... app owners might only make their apps available on THAT App Store, resulting in App Store's value being diminished. I would like that the one App Store be the one and the only one in a KISS principle. Apple so far hasn't failed me, and so I continue to trust it and its judicious management and curation of apps. Folks who care about having any app they want through alternative stores I wish would just opt for Android systems.
- pjc50 1y agoAh, the Highlander principle: there can be only one. The complete opposite of a "market", of course, which is why the rest of us are gearing up the non-market mechanisms against it. This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.
- w10-1 1y agoThe brief is not particularly compelling; it mostly assumes what it is trying to prove. It says: But the Injunction requires Apple not to prohibit linking-out period, full stop. It does not permit Apple to condition the right to link-out on the payment of a fee. In fact, the injunction is silent on the matter of fees for linking out. Similarly, the simplicity of the alternative world of just clicking a button fails to incorporate any additional risks (hence the "scare" screen). Courts generally permit companies to charge what they want. It may be justifiable to force alternative markets for something close to a monopoly, but it's not clear they can force the alternative to be cheaper. If you look at the table of authorities, it's basically Epic itself, and some 50+ year-old cases. There's just nothing really in support. Currently, a tiny, tiny percentage of very large developers make virtually all of the profits from selling Apple apps. Apple's 30% rate has been in place longer than most of them have existed, so there's been no surprise. Price discrimination is legal, and Apple's choice to make larger companies pay more seems supportive of small businesses. So there's not even a compelling argument that Apple's fees are evil; it's just that big, maximalist players see a way to get more profit. So yes, Apple fees limit profits for Y-combinator startups. The brief would have been more compelling had it listed the startups that were passed on due to the fees (rather than listing the successful ones). That's the only new data point in this argument, and would have been direct evidence of impact to small companies. But because the brief didn't make this argument factually, the court can fairly assume there are no such cases, and the brief may have done more damage than good to its cause.
- musicale 1y agoEpic's argument is very understandable: they don't want to pay the same kind of platform fees to Apple for having Fortnite in the App Store that they are paying Nintendo for having Fortnite in the eShop, etc. Makes a lot of sense.