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Apple To Developers: Fuck You
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How so, exactly?
Other companies are free to develop cheaper apps and undercut competitors selling similar products.
The competition you're describing is the competition between distributors, not developers. Personally, I don't give two shits what happens to third-party distributors. They don't develop a thing. The App Store skips the chintziest and most irrelevant part of the supply chain: the end-market middleman.
And you know what? Fuck those guys. If a developer can't make a product at a market-viable price, that's their problem. But when a product's success is left to the business model of a third party?
Bah.
I was responding more to "if you want to use their store" which implied to me that there is a way to not use their store.
Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding what people are saying?
Price competition FOR THE SAME APP, you goose.
What you have now is defacto price fixing.
the end market middleman is an INCREDIBLY important piece of the supply chain for the consumers. he is the guy who doesn't have any sort of emotional attatment to the product, he just wants o get it in to as many users hands as he can. this is ften done through price lowering
on android, you can buy the file anywhere and install it, not just the marketplace
Of course sadly I know the answer: they break it because AT&T compels them to since the jailbreak has been used to unlock the carrier-lock on the phone.
But what get's me is this: eventually every OS is rejailbroken, and the baseband hacked as well. Has it occurred to them that if they made the jailbreak really really easy, or officially supported it or something, that it would vastly reduce the interest and commitment of people in going on to hack the baseband?
Price fixing is the practice of multi-party collusion to artificially equalize prices across points of competition, typically when dealing in non-proprietary goods or services. For example, oil can be price fixed, because oil is a natural resource, and the acquisition and refinement of it are very equilateral costs between each competing company.
A proprietary product whose price is determined by the developer cannot be accused of price fixing since no one else makes an equal product. Two companies might both be selling a GPS application, but each company has a different application. Proprietary products are basically legal monopolies, since a company can't be forced to publicize its patents.
Or to make a different argument, you're basically arguing that Nintendo should remove their development restrictions so I can play WiiWare on my Playstation.
Except it still has to be licensced by MS before it can go to market.
Not to mention XBLA. Or WiiWare. or PSN.
Why do Nintendo and Sony do their damndest to break homebrew on the Wii and PSP with every firmware update?
Except in this case price competition is utterly unnecessary since the vast majority of apps on the Apple Store are either free, or cost 99 cents.
This will be even more true when iAds come out, since they will provide an additional revenue stream for developers and push prices down even more.
They actually don't. Lots of jailbreaks have been directly portable from one firmware to the next. Typically they look at how the jailbreak was done and close the security hole that allowed it because to not do so would be neglectful. You don't want viruses doing the same shit.
My phone is jailbroken. Skype alerts me every time I update it that performance might not be perfect because my phone is running a "modified OS". So obviously, Apple could detect that too if they wanted and refuse to let stuff run. They could be a lot worse. So far they seem to be doing just the bare minimum, sealing up the security flaws used to as attack vectors for the jailbreak.
To Lanz's point: the iPhone's market model doesn't depend on people buying software for it. The device is fully paid for and profitable just by virtue of being sold.
Except that perhaps those 99 cent apps would cost 79 cents instead. Or go on sale for 69 cents. What is Apple's cut of app sales? Would another competing storefront be willing to accept a smaller margin?
I agree with your arguement, but the fact is that we're talking about personal consumption options that have a varying value of literally no more than $.99. I don't know how much the Apple licensing agreement takes as a cut, but I had a hard time imagining a company could do as well selling their product through a third party at a 30-40% reduction.
Maybe they could, maybe I'm wrong. The makers of Doodle Jump, Apple's most-downloaded paid app, sell their app for 99 cents, have sold nearly 2 million downloads, and are claiming a revenue of $2.7 million dollars. As long as that figure is accurate, it doesn't appear that Apple is taking too big of a piece of the pie.
That same Googling shows that Apple owns over 99% of the app market as of the start of Q1 2010.
So yes, developers could go elsewhere, but why would they?
Exposure. It's a common complaint that unless you somehow get your app onto those Top 25 lists, you're not going to make any money.
Shit, even if you are LOOKING for a certain app it's hard to find unless it's on one of the Top whatever Lists.
My GF just bought an iPod Touch and we went looking for apps. The App Store is horribly set up for finding anything.
As the owner of a iPod Touch myself, I have to agree. The iTunes store for Windows or OSX is capable enough, but you have to be very specific in your search criteria to get what you're looking for otherwise.
Um...who's to say that Apple would own over 99% of the app market if they didn't exclude all others from selling iPhone (and iPod Touch) apps?
There's a reason I used the qualifier "defacto"
And no, what I'm arguing is that Nintendo should allow you buy wiiware games from multiple sources, not just the wiiware shop.
I've seen apps that are much more expensive than 99 cents. It might be the average, but it isn't the rule.
And a savvy consumer shouldn't balk at saving 30 cents. Cents add up to dollars.
The transaction cost on those 60 cent sales would not be worth it. I think part of the value the App store is that all the sales overhead is covered by Apple. I don't know what the cut off for making it worth your time would be for hosting your own sales- $10, $15?
That's a problem with the app store interface, which results in the inability to find things unless you are very specific about the keyword search you use.
transaction cost is pretty minimal on the web.
I'm not saying that you are going to see large scale competition to the app store. What you will see are specialty niches. Small developers teaming up and just selling their combined apps through a website, in order to gain better exposure. That sort of thing.
As I said, it already exists on android.
Guess what? Google charges 30% too.
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=112622
So do the other smartphone makers. So do Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
So... why is it bad that Apple's doing it?
Where did ANYONE complain about profit margins?
I'm talking about allowing instalation of apps from external sources?
You did, a few minutes ago on this page.
It's fine to bitch about licensing fees, but if you do you should complain about EVERYONE, not just Apple.
Reading comprehension much?
I'm not complaining that Apple takes too large a cut. I'm pointing out that the prices are set in a way that the free market has very little potential for input.
Competition is GOOD for the health of a market. Monopolistic price fixing is bad.
...how is setting the EXACT same price as Android "monopolistic price fixing?"
monopoly is a VERY relative term. in terms of apps on non-jailbroken iphones, the app store DOES hold a monopoly.
I'm not using the term judgmentally, I'm using it in the economic sense.
It's an intra-brand monopoly. Just like Wal-Mart has an intra-brand monopoly on sales of Sam's Choice.
They are however not an inter-brand monopoly, like the USPS or Microsoft. It's inter-brand monopolies that are dangerous. Nobody gives a goose about intra-brand monopolies. Otherwise we should argue that Wal-Mart should be forced to sell Sam's Choice through all retailers, not just their own.
I don't think that's a very accurate analogy.
Frankly, I can't think of a very good analogy that doesn't actually make the App Store (or Android Market, or PSN, or XBOX Arcade, or etc etc) look completely ridiculous when I don't think it is. After all, Apple is selling third party components, here.
Furthermore, the only reason it works at all, is because Apple can control distribution to phones. (Although, there's also restriction via the SDK, but that's more a theoretical legal restriction rather than a practical one.)
They're banning Apps that are compiled from other tools because Apple is planning to switch architectures soon. If cross compilers became popular it would mean that once this switch occurred developers who compiled apps through other programs like the Flash-to-iPhone compiler would be screwed, as they would now have to wait for flaky companies like Adobe to write a new cross compiler for their apps to be compiled for the new architecture. If you have an Xcode project though then compiling to another architecture is pretty much a matter of just selecting it from a drop down list.
See, they do care after all.
Moral: Just fucking use Xcode to compile.
(Well, according to Apple its not, but it uses XCode to compile C#.)
Then again a summer iPhone hardware update has been as predictable as the sun rising.
And compiling to multiple architectures is not that simple, especially when you're talking mobile devices, where you have to code closer to the metal.