I mean, there’s a point to be made about how much monopoly power Apple holds, and it’s now clear these questions weren’t asked until now because lawmakers were really sweet on the maker of their shiny iPhone - but this letter ain’t it.
The author is grovelling to the point of it being honestly pitiful. The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
It’s transparently from an author who built their entire business on the shoulders of a single third party and is now horrified in realising it’s been taken away.
If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.
This in itself isn’t news. Dropbox got flat out told by Steve Jobs to sell immediately for whatever he felt generous enough to give them or he’d crush them with a competitor. There was a podcast recently wherein someone who sold to Apple (I’m sorry I can’t remember who it was, will try to dig it out and update) got his deal reduced by 25% or so by Steve Jobs in person - after accepting it and flying out to Cupertino just because Jobs could and he wanted to make a point.
This isn’t new information or a new policy, although maybe it’ll be a fairer playing field now that the hornet’s nest has received a good kicking.
> the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
This point is made frequently, and it's generally true. But, at the same time, every business is built on top of some kind of opportunity and there is no guarantee in life that opportunities are perpetual.
The mine runs out of ore. People stop buying records. The fish stop biting. The tax code changes. A foreign competitor appears with access to better resources. An invention instantly makes yours out of date. People stop eating out.
I don't think the answer is to avoid all possible opportunities that may not last forever. Instead, you just have to factor that into your business plan. That can mean diversifying, pivoting, or simply acknowledging that that particular business has run its course.
Generally, the solution presented is to get a contract ensuring your access. That's usually because people are building on some open API for free which then changes or stops working altogether.
The App Store isn't a contract, but it is (or should be) quite a bit better than building your app on top of some open API that you have no assurances on, as the rules are published.
The problem is that there's no real introspection as to how the rules are applied, and not way to really appeal a decision and expect to influence the result, so the closest thing to a contract in this case is completely one sided.
Part of me wonders if the fact they charge for developer accounts means they might be liable in some way (although I'm sure this approach has been explored in the past), but Apple has deep enough pockets they could probably just refund every Developer the $99 and not bat an eye. If it affected the revenues they collected as their cut though... going after that money could really make a big dent if it was a class action (again, not sure this is even feasible under the law).
I think the larger point of the post above is that building an app for an in-vogue platform should be seen as a business opportunity. It is important to know it won't last forever, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't build apps for one of the most lucrative marketplaces of the moment.
You do need to realize that this can change fairly quickly, so you should either use this as a springboard to something else, or just accept that it's a temporary business and not something that will stick around.
The concept still applies even if the problem isn't about being kicked out (which a contract could maybe solve), but simply about the market fading for one reason or another. One common thing that can happen is that the platform provider may decide to compete with you, which is often very hard to come back from - they usually have access to the platform in ways you can't replicate.
I agree -- for everyone complaining about sharecropping there's someone else making money from the platform. One just has to be aware of the risk and more people are getting aware of that risk every day.
Perhaps this risk is not justified but that's a moral and legal issue not a business one.
I guess I was groveling. This was my livelihood and I was employing 20+ people. I did not want to give up on this and have to tell the team our work and their jobs were over. I tried to be honest and explain the situation, because I believed if Tim Cook understood what happened, he would make it right.
Pretty much. Site still up, but only one part time publisher making very little to keep it afloat. Site is now loaded with Google ads (we used to have no ads on the site). I'm kind of embarrassed to show the site in its current form. It's 99% old content, and no maintenance is several years. It was the best time of my life in its heyday.
The founders and dev team started a new company unrelated to apps. I tried my best to place our reviewers / curation team at other outlets. I had some success here, but it still pains me knowing that some of my previous team are still looking for something after all this time.
Seeing your response here has me appreciating your position in a way I didn’t above - given the circumstances and that you ultimately had to lay off your people I’m sorry for any offence caused. This must have been a rough time to work through.
The point I was making, and which I think is valid in any case, is that it’s simply not safe to build a business that’s reliant upon the whims of another company that has shown time and again that it’s policies will change with the wind.
Also, the web is still a wonderful platform with a bright future. Not least as PWAs aren’t subject to 30% taxes and subjective reviews!
FWIW, I don't think you were groveling. I think you were justly concerned with the livelihoods of your employees.
The GP just didn't want to put in the effort to empathize with your struggle, so he tried to paint you as pathetic and stupid and therefore deserving of suffering.
>there’s a point to be made about how much monopoly power Apple holds
>If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
The problem is that these two ideas shouldn't coexist. If Apple does have monopoly powers then mobile app developers have no choice but to base their business's survival on the whims of Apple. Once a company reaches a near monopoly, both the laws and obligations regarding how that company must operate change.
> The author is grovelling to the point of it being honestly pitiful. The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
This is standard behavior when talking to Apple. Since they're so incredibly editorial about what they permit on their platform, it behooves you to suck up as much as possible.
Source: have personally represented my previous tiny startup and Dropbox at Apple HQ. Have been pissing off Apple executives with my creations for more than a decade.
> The author is grovelling to the point of it being honestly pitiful. The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
Honestly, I interpreted it differently, I saw someone passionate about something, respectfully addressing someone who’s extremely hard to get the attention, and succeeding at it!
The problem being discussed is genuine, but I had a good feeling seeing Tim Cook asking his top executives to ponder about it.
Also, I assume some of it is playing to your audience. That doesn't necessarily mean making stuff up, but sometimes it means emphasizing and de-emphasizing different things (play up love of Apple and dislike of Android usability, etc). It doesn't have to even be fake at all, I imagine writing this letter was emotional, and how you feel in that state and how you feel at your most rational may be quite far apart.
tl;dr: Only haters and lovers write you. Everyone else is indifferent. You don't care about the haters, only the lovers.
Well, that's what makes his letter interesting. There are a hundred and one people who don't like your product. There are all the undecided people and non-promoter users who won't write you about things about your product. And then there are the super-fans.
You can win over the undecided and the non-promoter users, you have the super-fans, and it'll take a lot of work to get the people who don't like you to like you, so you spend your time on the first two categories.
Given that only the last two write you, and you don't care about the last, it makes sense for the super-fans to make it clear that they're super-fans. And if a super-fan is telling you you're making things hard for them, you care.
It really makes me wonder about why this letter, out of the presumably many about App Store review, is the one that Tim Cook would read and forward. From where I’m standing it looks like you’d have to come off as an otherwise huge fan to have your criticism taken into account.
I used to be the person in that letter, for years, and suffice it to say you're correct - the Apple community, at least on Twitter, is divided into those who Get It and understand that what Apple is doing is better for humanity, and those that don't.
Only the people that find their way to the 'right' arguments are consistently welcomed - more than a few famous people in the community had to backpedal into saying Epic is just as bad because they want to make money off app sellers too, and not only that, they _entrapped_ Apple.
Daring Fireball plays a key role in what exactly 'Get It' means - ex. the nauseating amount of people saying all this is cool because something something Epic is a big corporation too.
> If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
> To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.
And in a world without antitrust regulation, a monopoly or cartel can use its market power to make massive profits and squash any and all competitors. Your "lesson" is one that takes the status quo as a given (in this case, the anti-competitive power of platforms), even when that status quo should be changed.
It's also far too extreme to be reasonable, since practically every small to medium business that depends on non-commodity inputs fails the test (for instance, pretty much every consumer software company, ever). I think the real lesson is that no business is every truly independent of others, and the platforms have discovered new classes of anti-competitive control that need to be legislated against.
I’m wondering if the solution is forcing the platform vendors to allow the device owners to “bless” an App Store in the way that they can permit individual sideloaded apps.
> If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
But this means it's nearly impossible to build a software business that's "your business". Do you really not see the problem with that?
The major platforms are iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and the web. Of those, the web is theoretically open, except that the browsers are made by Apple and Google, and both of them drive change to the platforms based on their business strategy (Apple hobbling PWAs, for example.) Firefox exists, but with single-digit market share, and with a substantial portion of their budget evidently coming from Google, it's not clear how much of a force they really are.
This is why I think even though these platform are not technically monopolies, some kind of regulation or oversight is warranted. The economic value of the software world is too great to leave entirely to the whims of private companies.
> To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.
It's only a question of when, not if, app stores will get regulated. And given very cocky attitude from Apple, regulations will be likely pretty strong.
Like with all new technology, laws take some time to catch up with specific of it, but the spirt of regulation is very well known. Giving too much power and tight grip over the competition, in increasingly important part of the economy is not something government will allow for single entity to posses. Apple, and few other tech companies, are on a highway to be new Standard Oil.
Your point, that nobody should make iOS apps as a business because that puts them in a lousy situation, is fair but not actionable. Sure, it's a risky proposition, but there are something like 20 million registered iOS app developers out there, and so we've moved well beyond whether this was a good decision on their part. Now we have to figure out how to make society work well for these 20 million people.
To clarify what I meant, I think devs should absolutely build for iOS. I just think they should consider the future very carefully before building exclusively for iOS.
many sources estimate there are ~25 million developers worldwide - majority of them are neither iOS nor Mac developers. Apple maybe have 20 million registered developers but some of them might in inactive, dedicated companies accounts for publishing or many journalists, fans who want to test beta versions before releasing to the public.
I'm iOS developer myself but currently making more investment to learn other tech stack (flutter, reactnative, qt).
iOS is definitely a huge market especially the biggest regarding revenue, but globally their marker share is being slowly eaten by android. If WeChat will get banned globally from app store their market share will fell drastically. Apple not gonna disappear anytime soon but worth to ask yourself how the future might look in 10 years. Especially if you are indie or small shop and cannot afford supporting multiple platforms natively.
> really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
What? I think the motivation behind the letter is pretty transparent -- trying to get the app back in the app store. Groveling is pretty consistent with that.
Were you thinking the motivation was something else? What motivation are you questioning?
> If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
Cool, but some of the world's largest companies evidently care enough about the platform to develop for it anyways–or feel the need to do so. When you have a party that controls access to such a large market, then telling people who develop for that platform that it's their fault that they decided to do that is basically victim-blaming.
The companies running it have their own stake in it as well - especially Apple since curation is part of their business model. There is no entitlement to a business model nor market - as tempting as a given juicy market may be.
The alternative to ownership is an absurdity like gmail can't block spam because "antitrust".
> The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
A lot of people and developers feel the same way about these technologies as the author. They are just opinions, and yours is obviously different, but I wouldn't say it is pitiful.
>got his deal reduced by 25% or so by Steve Jobs in person - after accepting it and flying out to Cupertino just because Jobs could and he wanted to make a point.
make a point... to whom? The guy selling? He's already selling. He gave in. What more do you want?
A lot of people don't understand your point about your business not being yours. You stated that they solely depended on apple, and that is the point. That is why many are multiplatform. The function of the apps are also different, you want enough functionality to be different but not to rule breaking, or a sandbox environment. Lots of games are multiplatform now, software may not be but they usually don't depend on one piece of software. They did not keep a web page, even though I'm almost sure they made it in HTML.
That is the point, they relied on one thing only too much. It seems a job of passion too.
The author is grovelling to the point of it being honestly pitiful. The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.
It’s transparently from an author who built their entire business on the shoulders of a single third party and is now horrified in realising it’s been taken away.
If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.
To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.
This in itself isn’t news. Dropbox got flat out told by Steve Jobs to sell immediately for whatever he felt generous enough to give them or he’d crush them with a competitor. There was a podcast recently wherein someone who sold to Apple (I’m sorry I can’t remember who it was, will try to dig it out and update) got his deal reduced by 25% or so by Steve Jobs in person - after accepting it and flying out to Cupertino just because Jobs could and he wanted to make a point.
This isn’t new information or a new policy, although maybe it’ll be a fairer playing field now that the hornet’s nest has received a good kicking.