Early thoughts on United States vs. Apple manton.org
@manton I have not yet read the full lawsuit which I will later today. But on the following excerpt
If you want to build and distribute for the most commercially viable smartphone platform, you have no choice but to follow Apple’s rules. Until Apple lets developers route around that monopoly through external payments and sideloading, there will be pushback.
There will always be only one "most commercially viable platform", right? Also, no one ever talks about why Apple's smartphone platform is more commercially viable than say, Android. What about it makes it so?
@pratik I might edit that "commercially viable" phrase, it's not conveying what I had intended. I don't think there would always be only one. Imagine 5 popular phones with 20% of the market each.
@manton But that's what I'm saying: developers, especially smaller ones, will also want to focus on the platform that gives them the most bang for the buck. For now, it seems iOS users are commercially viable at least more than Android. The equal 20% market share is ideal, but even then, do you want to create and maintain for five platforms even if there are minor differences? Developers (except large ones like Meta, etc.) right now can't do that with two.
@Ddanielson Good Q. The marketshare for iOS actually rose in the last few years. It's not even the primary platform outside the U.S., Japan, and maybe some other countries. In marketing, it's not how the size of your audience but rather what kind of audience. Otherwise, cricket viewership stats beat out the NFL every day.
Read this post on an Indian user who recently moved from Android to iOS. India, as you know, is an Android country or more like a WhatsApp country. They aren't locked in by iMessages and in fact, he faced troubles in transferring his WhatsApp messages from Android to iPhone.
@pratik But the point is that if it was 20%, I could choose whether to invest in one of those platforms, a few of them, or all of them. I could adopt the platforms that had the best design, fees, APIs, etc. With Apple having let's say 70% of the market (for people who buy apps, not just units sold), I can no longer choose, and Apple has all the power to twist the rules to their advantage.
70% of the market (for people who buy apps, not just units sold).
This is an important distinction. I don’t see any source for data for distribution of platforms for people who buy apps. Large developers may have that internally. But currently iOS-Android is 60-40 in the U.S. (in India, it may be 1-99) but the question here is, are people on iOS more likely to buy apps than on Android? I’m trying to understand why is that?
You can get an iPhone today for as cheap as $429. Flagship Android phones cost as much as high-end iPhones if not more. Foldable Android phones are as high as $1,800. So affordability of hardware is not the reason.
@pratik There’s no great data for this which is why I prefixed with “let’s say”, it’s mostly a guess. The lawsuit does say 70% of the revenue of “performance” smartphones. That’s not the same thing but there’s probably correlation somewhere.
@manton I’m exceptionally suspicious of large companies. I support many indie devs such as yourself. Doesn’t Android have side-loading and multiple app stores? And a wide range of 3rd party hardware makers? Genuine question: If these are solutions, why don’t users and devs flock to Android?