Apple owes Brit iOS app devs millions from excessively high commission, lawsuit claims Apple is facing a legal challenge over the "creator tax," or the commission it charges developers who write the apps that populate its digital walled garden. Sean Ennis, professor of competition policy who has worked as an economist at the OECD, US Department of Justice and the European Commission, claims Apple has engineered …
Not to mention developer tools, libraries, operating system updates.
There’s a prevailing attitude (possibly because so much software *is* free at the point of access) that it must cost nothing to provide it.
Which is ironic when application developers are complaining about sharing any of their income with the app store providers.
I would expect to see any “third-party” app stores being obliged to pay royalties to the platform developers/owners, or else the app developers having to agree financial terms with same. Be careful what you wish for, etc.
All these companies that have set themselves up as market gateways are at it. Google charges this too, and if you've ever wanted to put a book on Amazon you'd discover that Google and Apple are actually generous by only taking 30%.
They're *all* royally taking the mick - because they can.
Amazon takes either 70% or 30%. Most authors I know suck up and go for the 70% to AMZN and 30% to the author who then probably has to pay income tax at 20% (or thereabouts) on that.
If Apple is ripping devs off then Amazon are raping authors which is why I refuse to put my work on Kindle.
With Google, and Amazon, you can go elsewhere.
Google, you can use, Amazon, your phone makers marketplace, and the likes of F-Droid.
Books, we'll take your pick
Apple! Good luck.
I'm not defending their marketing tactics and abuse of power, but at least you have some choice.
You don't even have to use an alternative market place - nothing stopping you sticking your APK on your website (or even email it to your users).
They might have to click through a couple of warnings - but absolutely no reason you'd have to pay anybody else to distribute your Android app.
Similar to PC where you might choose to give Valve a heft % for them to host it on Steam and enable you to use their services - but entirely optional.
Just yesterday I was trying to install f-droid on a Samsmug Galaxy Tab A7 Lite for someone, and despite doing the usual stuff (allowing install-from, &etc), it (or rather google play protect, iirc) refused anyway. So at least in one case, it has been made unsimple.
Doh!
Simply because 99.9999% of us are not phone/tablet app developers.
I spent almost all my working life writing software (started 51 years ago with Fortran) and have packaged up software for many different OS's in my time but I have never had the slightest interest in writing a phone app.
"Apple and Google have practically identical side-loading features."
Let me guess. When you say "side-loading", you're referring to taking the app you just wrote and installing it on your phone from XCode or Android Studio? Yes, those are similarly easy. That is also irrelevant to the discussion and to basically everybody. Developers can figure out how to load their test version.
The side-loading that others are talking about is when you've finished developing your app and someone who doesn't have the code wants to install it. On Android, you can get a file containing the app and install it on any device, with two to five security screens in your way. For an iPhone, you can ... well you can get a device-specific package by collecting an identifier the device tries to hide from you, individually made by the developer. Or you could get a corporate profile installed on your phone, assuming you don't already have one which will make it difficult to add others, and that also has to be maintained by the developers and will break should they shut any part of it down. So the part that we're talking about is not identical in any way.
Sure, why not? There are both legal and economic facets to competition, and it's something that students might focus on if they're looking to work at a regulator, a company that either is or looks like a monopolist, or a place that wants to fight against monopolists. Is it that different from a professor of cryptography, even though they'd be organized under the mathematics or computer science areas, or a professor of copyright law?
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