I'm generally supportive of Apple's right to a revenue share from apps which sit on the App Store shelf and/or rely on Apple libraries and APIs—but even I think Apple should just completely give up on attempting to share revenue from multiplatform reader apps.
There's a lot of reasons why I think this, but for me the main reason is that the thing of value here—the creation of desirable content—occurred entirely outside of Apple's developer agreement and any of Apple's intellectual property associated with it. Plus it's a just a crappy looking thing for the largest company on Earth to do when directly competing with other "reader apps" in the streaming music and streaming television spaces.
Basically that is all I have been ranting about for years since they announced their Service Revenue Strategy in ~2016. Apple could charge game and software 30% all they want, but they shouldn't charge for access to iPhone user as in so called reader apps. Which some people disagree with not long ago (cough).
Unfortunately vast majority Apple supporters or Apple apologist seems to think Apple deserve everything because it is Apple's App Store.
Now signing up a remote teaching class which is basically a group video call ala Zoom doesn't require to pay 30% of that to Apple.
Edit: And I will just add, before 2016 that mandate to have signup link, most of these Services and Reader App were just fine. Apple argued it gives bad user experience because the App does not have any sign up link. That is BS. In reality no-one discover these Apps on App Store. The discovery process does not happen on App Store. It would have at least gave Apple a minuscule creditability if App Store Searching had actually worked. But it never did. People discover the services outside of App Store and download those Apps with links. ( And they know full well how all these worked and killed their Apps affiliation program in 2018 ) And as shown in court document Apple actually knew this and how the App Discovery process drive Apps related Ads which leads back to privacy etc etc. Basically there is whole new level of hypocrisy just to achieve their Services Revenue Goal by 2020.
>I'm generally supportive of Apple's right to a revenue share from apps which sit on the App Store shelf and/or rely on Apple libraries and APIs
This is nothing else but Apple imposing a tax. If Apple wants to pretend it is a nation state I think regulators of actual states should take notice and treat them like the peer competitor they intend to be.
Not even the Judge in Apple vs Epic agrees with this. For a very recent reminder of this, Virtual Legality today posted his observations[0] about the South Korea law and how the effect of it is being misreported in the media (and to be quite frank, by commenters in Hacker News). In here he reminds us about how people are improperly conflating the "right" and the "means" to collect a revenue share.
Not sure how that dismisses the claim. He argues that this is not a tax because Apple is not just a payment provider, but provides a marketplace? that's exactly what any state does with a tax, finance the commons. Except that in this case, Apple is staking out its own territory, competitors excluded, playing digital landlord.
Apple didn't merely "stake out" its own territory. It created its own territory where none previously existed. And being a landlord is a perfectly legal occupation, even if it doesn't win you many friends.
In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.
Should this be expanded to every manufacturer of devices and operating systems? Maybe Intel/AMD get their cut, and so does what ever Linux you happen to run from any purchase made on device? Why stop at apps? Why not expand to web stores, groceries? Or maybe if you use computer for stock trading should they also take 30% of all trades?
Does Apple deserve a piece of the action for every instruction executed on iPhone?
They've allowed web to go untaxed. Kind of.
There are web standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently. Maybe a judge should tell them they're not allowed to have a browser if they're going to treat apps differently.
They've corralled 50% of Americans into their bubble, and they're telling businesses to get in the correct lane to access them.
> There are standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently.
Developers who have signed Apple's developer agreement and utilised the libraries/APIs are being held to the terms laid out in that agreement.
A website is a website.
Whether you agree or disagree with how Apple has chosen to operate their iOS ecosystem—again, I believe that reasonable people can disagree—it's certainly not unlawful for Apple to distinguish between developers who rely on Apple's work (SwiftUI, Metal APIs, etc) and developers who publish web pages with open standards without any involvement by Apple.
The context of this discussion is government commissions putting pressure on Apple to revise their policies "or else".
Developer agreements and rules being unlawful or not doesn't seem to me to be a relevant framing here. One of the party can basically change the law if it goes against common sense or society's wellbeing.
To be clear, what you're advocating for is the nationalisation (internationalisation?) of Apple's intellectual property as a reward for building a very successful product.
I'm not saying this isn't a valid opinion to hold—I'm not necessarily opposed to nationalisation in other contexts—but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what your opinion entailed.
It was a regression to go from a world where we could repair and freely install to one where we could do neither.
It's further mired by the fact that Apple went from less than 10% market share to over 50%.
As consumers, we can't repair our devices or run the software we want to on them.
As small businesses, we can't ship software the way we want to anymore. It has to be in the form of an app to reach the target audience. We're audited, policed, and taxed. This isn't for some niche hobby or market - this is the primary form of computing for most Americans. We have to waste effort to develop applications twice because reasons, and we're treated like dog shit all the while.
Both sides of the coin suck, and the 800 lb gorilla in the room isn't going away. It feels like we woke up in bizarro world, because this shouldn't have ever become the status quo.
We are not talking about forcing them to GPL their OS or publish their API sources, or even allow uses of whatever they invented outside of their system.
Just "don't prohibit app devs from putting links to external web pages".
> Does Apple deserve a piece of the action for every instruction executed on iPhone?
"Deserve" is an entirely subjective question to which reasonable people can honestly disagree. To which reasonable people can express differences in degrees or in the margins.
The law (currently) says yes.
• If you write code that embeds or hooks directly into GPL libraries/APIs, then the FSF would insist that your creation inherits responsibilities under the GPL license and must be made available under a compatible license. In a sense, the open source community gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code for distribution on a PlayStation, Sony would insist that you comply with the license terms associated with their developer agreement. Sony gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code that relies on material supplied to you through the Apple developer agreement, if your app hooks directly into Apple iOS libraries/APIs, then Apple Inc says that distributing this software must be done in compliance with the license terms you agreed to under the Apple developer agreement.
1 and 3 seem to hinge on the ideas reimplementing apis is impossible without infringing on copyright for which google v oracle has already shown this isn't the case. For 1 whether dynamic linking counts is also still an unclear topic but still not relevant for the API portion. There is also the point that "and we limit the only way you can do anything on our device is via this licensed path" is different than "and these are licensed paths". Similarly it may be more steps but it still doesn't change that it's a forced contract to work on a device at all regardless if that's a direct decree or a forced path.
2 is a semi reasonable comparison but "and x does it" isn't proof "and therefore y is right". It could be that both x and y are wrong and y was just challenged first due to prevalence or that y is subtly different than x.
Google vs Oracle answered a very different question. In that case, it was ultimately determined that Google could mimic an API in their own code, when building their own independent work-alike system.
Whereas in the case of iOS applications, developers are agreeing to the Apple developer agreement and then directly embedding and/or linking to Apple intellectual property when compiling their binaries.
--
As for the analogy I made to the GPL, this was only to demonstrate that the open source community also leverages the enforceability of license agreements to require developers who use GPL code in a certain way to comply with community expectations. It's the same legal principle, even though it's used to very different effect.
There's a lot of reasons why I think this, but for me the main reason is that the thing of value here—the creation of desirable content—occurred entirely outside of Apple's developer agreement and any of Apple's intellectual property associated with it. Plus it's a just a crappy looking thing for the largest company on Earth to do when directly competing with other "reader apps" in the streaming music and streaming television spaces.