I've seen at least one company use the Enterprise program to circumvent paying Apple 30%. One company I know preloads their app on an iPad, resells the iPad and associated hardware, and charges a subscription to use the app.
Hell I developed apps for at least two clients that did close enough to this. Is an authorized dealer/installer an employee of the one of the companies whos products they sell? No. Do we need to find ways to get apps to them that aren't relevant to the consumer market. Yes. Enterprise apps are a release valve for the constraints imposed by Apple on the app store, if they clamp down too hard they risk more businesses moving over to android.
The Apple Enterprise terms simply state you cannot distribute to the general public. It doesn't matter that the app was terrible, the violation itself was much more boring.
I did not say the app was not nefarious, I said that their enterprise account was not revoked because the app was nefarious.
The enterprise certificates were revoked primarily because they violated the #1 rule of the enterprise account - do not distribute outside of your company.
They were targeting children, who were not capable of giving informed consent. Furthermore, because they were providing financial rewards for installing the app, it was exploitative of the poor.
Seeing that you are and have always been allowed to sell a subscription outside of the App Store and still distribute within the store, you don’t need an enterprise certificate to do that as long as your app meets the guidelines.
Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Spotify, DirectvNOW, Sling, and quite a few other apps don’t allow in app subscriptions. There are others that you can subscribe to inside or out of the app.
It's technically allowed but not easy unless most of your business is outside of the app.
App store guidelines ban having a link in your app to an external subscription website. They also ban "calls to action" that encourage customers to purchase non in-app purchases
All of my “business” for each of those products is within the app. There has never been a ban about requiring subscriptions outside of the app, you can’t have a link to an outside website that is true.
The only reason they get away with that is because you're willing to sign up and pay at an external website that you can find on your own. Most apps would lose most of their customers at the "now go find our website and how to pay without any help" step.
> So in other words, Apple is providing a valuable service and the 30% is a customer acquisition cost?
According to what Rebelgecko said, it sounds like the only reason Apple's service has any value at all is that they artificially restrict any possible competing payment methods on their devices.
There is nothing wrong with Apple charging a 30% fee on App Store Purchases, or purchases made in-app via Apple's framework. I suspect just about everyone will agree on this point.
The "extortion" part is the complete and total ban on purchases made outside the App Store.
It's not only a distribution fee. Someone had to develop the frameworks, the APIs, the OS and all the other systems that allows for your App to exist. These things aren't free and take resources to make and run. We can argue about the exact % but people often take all the work that goes behind the scene for granted. Same for Youtube and any other platform. We're just so used to having it all for free that we forget the sheer amount of work that goes into making and maintaining the platform.
Ok. But that’s also baked into the cost of the device at sale. If we’re talking about the App Store, bandwidth, redistribution, etc that it provides sure. But .. I don’t agree with your listed examples.
I disagree. Apple works on its development ecosystem in part because they know doing so drives App Store revenue. It's not like "Oh yeah, we build all these dev tools, documentation, and libraries, but that's only because we sell the hardware. If we shut down the App Store tomorrow, we'd keep making all the dev tools with the same level of investment."
At the same time, without apps, nobody would buy an iPhone. Apple didn't pull Facebooks app from the store because it would have a huge impact on iPhone sales.
Sell the development tools then and allow people to make their own. Then the market will quickly work out if its worth it or build an open source version.
Most online marketplaces cost 30% - Steam, Google Play, App Store. That doesn’t make it alright, but no one is forcing you to write apps for iOS either.
Exactly. You can distribute raw APKs. You can put your app on FDroid. You can put your app on the Amazon Appstore. You can create your own appstore to compete with Google's and Amazon's and FDroid.
There are a lot of problems with Android, but an appstore monopoly isn't one of them.
