Apple's Indies

http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/6/23/apples-indies

by davidbarker • 11 years ago

182 112 11 years ago

cpr3• 11 years ago

Seems like this is a lost cause. With nearly no action after 7+ years, Apple's not going to change the app store fundamentals.

But, boy was it exciting at the start! Shed a few tears and move on...

coldtea6• 11 years ago

"No action" you mean like them adding in-app-purchases, better monitoring, easier provisioning, faster submission and check process, unified iOS+Mac subscriptions, bundles, and tons of other things?

cpr3• 11 years ago

Yeah, by no action I mean no substantial action that would seriously increase developer revenues like:

trial versions without hacky in-app purchases;

paid upgrades;

actual working app discovery;

etc.

k-mcgrady2• 11 years ago

This is pretty ridiculous. There's very little comparison.

1. Apple didn't respond to a letter from Taylor swift in < 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let's not forget it's rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn't been considering this for weeks already.

2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It's simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.

3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.

magicmu2• 11 years ago

This is completely true. Apple's absolute control over their ecosystem is not just a drawback -- it's also a significant benefit of them. There are far fewer apps in the Apple store than the Play store that are DOA, and the general quality of apps is far higher. Although it's somewhat contrary to the modern spirit of development, Apple's policies have proven to be a very good method of quality control.

notsony• 11 years ago

This is highly subjective...

lips• 11 years ago

I hear this constantly, and if you base your judgements on top-tier apps that are recommended via various techie sources, it's absolutely true. But if you start searching blind, you're quite likely to end up trying out or purchasing some truly craptacular iOS apps. I've been a split iOS/Android for 5 years or so, and am always flummoxed at this claim.

hahainternet2• 11 years ago

1. Apple explicitly responded directly to Taylor Swift.

2. App devs get a decent deal, but restrictions like taking a cut of all purchases done through an app are very distasteful.

strictnein• 11 years ago

Apple is processing those purchases and providing access to its vast collection of payment information. That has a lot of value. The amount purchased through Apps if each one had to ask for and process credit cards would be _far_ lower. I would never provide my card to some random app dev, but I'll happily drop $1 or $2 in a decent app/game that I'm enjoying.

yincrash• 11 years ago

https://twitter.com/cue/status/612824947342229504

The response was to taylor swift "and indie artists"

jediMac• 11 years ago

Agreed. One other thing to note—Apple doesn't prohibit timed trials of content. In fact, Apple supports it and builds in free subscriptions. What they prohibit is apps that completely stop working after a trial period. But they allow apps to have some functionality cease after an introductory period.

mikeash6• 11 years ago

It's nonsensical to compare to brick-and-mortar stores. We didn't go from brick-and-mortar to the App Store. We went from direct internet sales, where we got to build whatever we wanted, ship updates instantaneously, and keep 98% of the revenue, to the App Store.

adambratt• 11 years ago

You're forgetting all the money that we had to spend on marketing.

tfinniga3• 11 years ago

One nice advantage of the iOS ecosystem is that installing a new app is risk free. I have a relative that uses an iPad as their primary computing device. They install new apps all the time, as opposed to their laptop, which they are afraid that they will mess up.

Apple made a new market, and is charging for access to it.

I believe that you're still free to sell your apps on Android or jailbroken iOS devices, direct over the internet.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

#2 is true, but what the article points out that it's mainly an app store reform that the indie devs have been asking for for seven years now - to no avail, app discovery is still pretty much non-existent in the app store outside of the top listings and the 'featured apps'.

atmosx• 11 years ago

It's simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.

Care to explain further?

k-mcgrady2• 11 years ago

Sure. If you're an indie dev you get 70% of all purchases. No complicated contracts, no middle-men, no varying deals in different countries and distribution is as simple as uploading a file to Apple. With musicians they get almost the same % but it also has to go through a ton of middle men and the deals vary around the world. They're also locked in at a single price point (the streaming rate). Finally with brick and mortar stores the deals were much, much worse and if you couldn't get a deal you couldn't sell your software. With pure online distribution you had to build a website, payment system, update mechanism, manage DRM/serials and if you didn't market heavily you wouldn't make a penny because no one would know you exist.

esolyt• 11 years ago

Apple didn't respond to a letter from Taylor swift in < 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two

Yet the reply was addressing Taylor Swift personally. The fact that Apple replied to a letter by Swift in 24 hours does not change.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

I've read this a few times, and I'm still failing to understand what, specifically, indie app developers have been demanding "for over six years." Apple isn't going to publicly respond to every support ticket filed in less than one day - this really are apples and oranges

(Not to mention, the answer from Apple could be 'no' in both scenarios.)

titaniumdecoy2• 11 years ago

Off the top of my head...

1. App trial periods

2. Paid app upgrades

3. App Store search results that are actually relevant

4. Ability to respond to negative reviews

5. Mac App Store sand boxing that doesn't suck

Of course, there are many more issues but the primary problem is that Apple has addressed exactly zero of these issues and the App Store itself is virtually unchanged after 5+ years.

bedhead• 11 years ago

Taylor Swift's got juice. Indie devs don't. In other news, the sun is hot.

seqastian• 11 years ago

Taylor Swift is young and wants to be richer now and not wait 50 years until streaming nets here the same. Indies will have to make they money from live events and t-shirts anyways.

smanuel• 11 years ago

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

Shocking news.

bnegreve• 11 years ago

I don't quite get the logic here. Being "not news" doesn't make it any more acceptable to me. In fact, it's the other way around.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

At least some of the complaints of indie devs like Cabel Sasser relate to the technical restrictions that Apple places on Mac App Store apps. Based on statements by Apple, these restrictions are, to Apple, important from a security standpoint.

Thus it's probably going to take more than complaints to resolve them. It's going to take Apple engineers figuring out how to permit more power for good devs without creating holes for malware.

Apple is well aware of the shortcomings of the Mac App Store model, which is why they continue to provide an official, supported path for apps to be installed on Macs from outside of the App Store.

From a money standpoint, Taylor Swift is getting 1.5% more from Apple than App Store developers are...doesn't seem like that much to me. As far as I know, there is no "download and try it for 90 days" feature in the App Store.

pbnjay• 11 years ago

Apple wants access to Swift's market. Devs want access to Apple's market.

Simple supply and demand here - the demand side has to pay or otherwise they don't get in. Sure it sucks that the policies aren't very transparent and things are expensive, but them's the breaks.

exelius6• 11 years ago

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the only reason Apple caved is that the dollar amount was too little to be worth any amount of negative PR.

Apple is a $300 billion/yr company. They will not risk that revenue stream (which is largely based on their positive brand image) for a few points of margin on a product that will probably never be more than 0.01% of their revenue.

Kudos to Apple for recognizing that this is something they absolutely don't care about. The value of their brand is worth more than this. I just worry about the volume of new products coming out of Apple these days and wonder how much care and thought goes into them.

TillE• 11 years ago

That's pretty much it. It's a modest marketing investment which probably makes them look better than if they'd just done the right thing in the first place. I doubt it was calculated like that from the start, but that must be how it looks to them now.

exelius6• 11 years ago

Yeah, my guess is that their legal department negotiated the hell out of these contracts with the labels (which is what they're supposed to do) and obtained a concession. Someone at the labels probably went to Taylor Swift about this and told her what was happening, knowing that she would cause a public stink about it and Apple would cave.

Anyway, it's not as if Apple and the labels have a cozy relationship -- so all's fair in love, war and contract negotiations. I'm sure Apple has plenty of other pricing / payment levers they can use to claw back most of what they're losing anyway (which probably isn't much at all).

acron0• 11 years ago

I'm afraid I agree with the alternative sentiment, that is to say that this whole thing is a 'PR hoax'. Kudos to Apple for playing the game and coming out looking like the benevolent and merciful master, humbled by the pleas of his peons.

exelius6• 11 years ago

No company will ever intentionally bring its contract terms into the public spotlight. Not to mention the amount of coordination this would take is just too risky for a PR stunt. Apple would have been better off just paying Taylor Swift some money for exclusive streaming rights. It's not like they need to save money through use of guerrilla marketing.

modfodder• 11 years ago

Having worked in Advertising for the last 10 years including a tiny bit with Apple (freelancing) I have a hard time believing this was a 'PR hoax'. Advertising and PR at that level is extremely conservative and taking a risk like that would get someone fired even if the result was beneficial.

Look at Apple's campaigns and you see well designed but generally very conservative creative direction that goes through so many reviews it dulls any edge.

They are risk averse enough they will finish multiple spots with the intent of choosing one (because they aren't 100% sold on creative direction) rather than risk reaching a deadline without having approved deliverables (the only account I've ever worked on that does this). This doubles and triples a campaign's production budget without any tangible benefit.

They will become even more conservative as they move more of their Ad creative in house.

The other evidence that goes against the 'hoax theory' is the fact that Taylor's 1989 album still will not be available on Apple Music at launch (from everything I've read). If they were designing this huge PR stunt wouldn't it end with Taylor agreeing to release her latest album on their service?

dba7dba• 11 years ago

Oh so true that $ amount was so little to risk damage to their PR.

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

The Apple Watch doesn't inspire much confidence in Apple's future products. And I'm not talking about iPhones and iPads and Macs here. Those are "easy". But Apple Watch, Apple Car, Apple VR and whatever else they might want to launch in the future - I doubt they will be "Jobs-quality". And by that I don't just mean whether or not they will use premium materials. But whether the "product" package makes sense or works as well as it should.

exelius6• 11 years ago

I don't think there are many mass-market products out there left to be created that don't involve insane amounts of hard science R&D. By that I mean products that are so flexible as to be universally useful (i.e. the smartphone). Any revolutionary consumer product at this point is going to require a civilization-level scientific breakthrough.

I think what we have now in tech in general is a long tail of products catering to different use cases. The Apple Watch is one of those -- and it's not for everyone. Apple realizes that, which is why their sales targets for the watch were pretty low by Apple standards. Will Apple sell 100 million watches? Probably not. You see this in a bunch of other areas as well; IoT, virtual reality, etc. None of the use cases is universal enough to rise to the level of a smartphone; but there's a big enough market to support innovation.

jusben1369• 11 years ago

"Reminder: Apple uses music to make billions off hardware. Artists see nothing from this."

- I have never seen the exact numbers but I assume a lot more people have a portable music player with them at all times (iPod then iPhone) than they did a decade ago. I can only speak anecdotally but I buy more music because I know I'll have it with me at all times than I did in the portable CD/tape days.

josefresco• 11 years ago

The iPod was a success, but the iPhone and iPad were mega-super-success. Those devices were not about music, but apps, email and Internet. Apple certainly leveraged their success with the iPod but I don't buy that "Apple makes all it's money off hardware because of music" line.

mikeash6• 11 years ago

I buy no music today, because I know I can stream it at any time. Even my parents use Pandora and Spotify instead of buying new stuff.

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

I buy more music today than I ever have done in the past and having a decent portable media player (iPhone) has a lot to do with this. I actually buy 99% of my music from bandcamp which is a really great service that pays musicians quite well and has lossless downloads.

r00fus• 11 years ago

Music takes about 0.1% of my iPhone nominal usage... even when I'm doing other stuff.

I use my iPhone for business and personal connectivity - taking calls, sharing webex, emails, SMS/imessages, etc.

Once in a while I listen to music. It's great. However, I see no reason why artists of that music should get a piece of Apple's pie here.

protomyth• 11 years ago

Well, record player companies made money off of Artists without paying them. This is a basic secondary market (hell, parking garages make money off Artists) and has nothing to do with the direct making of money on music such as a subscription service or actual record sales.

This argument has actually been used to tax blank CDs which is bull. Should we tax all parking lots when a game or Artists is playing near them? Taxing the ecosystem because some group determined their part of it is more important is foolish.

nr152522• 11 years ago

Developer reactions have been mixed: Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit exclaimed, "Damn, I wish Taylor Swift were also a Mac App Store developer."

And perhaps build a new music app named 'Taylor' in Swift?

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone like blizzard said something similar about the App Store.

dpcan• 11 years ago

I think Supercell is more the Taylor Swift of the App Store.

Maybe if they threatened to turn off IAP on Clash of Clans until Apple made the developer split more fair, then we'd get a response? But then again, this could be apples and oranges.

metatation• 11 years ago

How about a web server?

https://github.com/izqui/Taylor

PaulHoule2• 11 years ago

Not much new here.

Apple has been shafting developers since at least 1987.

coldtea6• 11 years ago

Yeah, creating all this multi-billion dollar app market and all, what a shafting...

WorldWideWayne4• 11 years ago

Without apps, Apple has nothing. Developers should get 30% of the profits from Apple's hardware business.

chippy• 11 years ago

The interesting thing is why they keep on doing it, and why the developers keep on letting them.

yellowapple3• 11 years ago

And developers have been bending over with beaming smiles on their faces for just as long.

Apple's behavior might change if the developers keeping it alive left for other ecosystems in sizable enough numbers. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen in the mobile space, so Apple continues to have no problem shafting mobile devs (the desktop space is a different story, however, since Apple is not dominant there except for very specific market segments, like hipster Ruby programmers and/or art students).

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

Commoditise your compliments: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

hiou• 11 years ago

The whole thing between Taylor Swift and Apple is so obviously staged. The fact that this was done over Twitter, the most shareable possible format, the "Love, Apple" bit the wording of all of it. The need for Apple to position itself as the Artists streaming service. How are we seriously talking about this as if this actually happened unscripted?

Edit: It's a common negotiation technique to add something that you know the other party will object to. Since there will always be push back it's good to have something you can sacrifice that you never really needed in the first place to appease the other side.

kylnew• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a story of a photographer that would leave their hand in some of the shots deliberately so the client would point them out and spend less time nitpicking on the rest of the composition.

saturdaysaint• 11 years ago

A request to tweak Apple's music contracts that amounts to a rounding error on their quarterly profits is not exactly analogous to requests to change Apple's software platform strategy (which the OP leaves annoyingly vague).

skeltoac• 11 years ago

Pull request failed ingratiation testing.

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

The author seems excessively concerned with the language people use to interact with Apple. It would seem to me that a simple application of "you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" is all that's at play here, and that the author is tilting at windmills.

Apple's a big, powerful company, it's hard for one hand to know what the other hand is doing sometimes. All such companies have to rely on their customer base to guide them. If you think about it, Apple is far more responsive than most other companies their size or in their segment. Jobs used to answer emails ferchrissakes.

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

Unless it was all a PR stunt, then it all makes some sense. Let's see if Apple responds to the next music indie the same way.

Tloewald6• 11 years ago

I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in how it treats people.

The funny thing, it's everyone except Apple that gets a free ride from these discussions. First -- Apple is in fact offering a better deal to artists than pretty much anyone else. It's possible Amazon matches Apple in some cases -- as a book author, I know Amazon's "matching" of Apple's 70% is a sham (you only get it if you price your books low, lower than makes sense in many cases, otherwise your royalty is halved -- and even then they subtract "download fees" based on the size of your book from your 70% (or 35%)). When Apple entered the market, 70% was far and away the best deal in town. Since then it's only been exceeded by players trying to make a beach-head.

(Incidentally, Apple is going to pay the same percentage of its revenues to artists as everyone else -- but Apple Music has no free tier. In practice, Spotify and Pandora have minuscule revenues. 70% of almost nothing is nothing.)

A guy from Pandora chastising Apple for not being altruistic is simply disingenuous. Quoting that guy as an example of the industry being loath to criticize Apple for fear of ... something ... is even more dishonest. (Let's face it, at least part of the reason both Swift and the guy from Pandora couched their criticism in praise is that they aren't disinterested parties -- they're trying to make money too. Being nasty might just draw attention to the fact Taylor Swift is arguing for Apple to give her more money when they aren't collecting any. If a musician's agent or the record company has tickets to give away, do they pay for them? I doubt it.)

The bottom line argument is that Apple is offering a free trial loss leader and took the view that it would pay artists X% of what it collected, and X% of nothing is nothing. (A record label or hollywood studio would subtract accrued costs from future royalties, but hey who's counting?) Taylor Swift argues that Apple is taking more value away from the free trial than musicians -- she may be right, or it may be Ping all over again -- but she has a bazillion followers and she's Taylor Swift, so Apple immediately caves. (Hey, they named a programming language after her, what more could she want? j/k)

If you sell a CD through a record label, or a movie through a studio, or a game through a games company, you don't see royalties until production and marketing costs have been paid, and Hollywood and the Labels have become masters of padding their costs. For this reason, most artists use their albums as promotional tools for their live performances, and have done so since long before Apple.

tfigueroa3• 11 years ago

The Pandora guy, Tom Conrad, retired from Pandora; though I'd guess he still holds shares, I wouldn't say he's "trying to make money too". He's ex-Apple, pro-Apple, and was CTO of a tenacious music streaming company - all very relevant experience to comment on this.

His point, which I share, is not to chastise Apple "for not being altruistic" - it was that Apple tried to play the game with very different rules than most companies do. It's worth calling them out about it, especially because they are the Goliath.

Tloewald6• 11 years ago

Thanks for the correction on his status w.r.t. Pandora. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest he's disinterested then. But, calling them out for having straightforward royalties?

BTW the direct quote is:

"Nothing here to suggest Apple treats artists more fairly than anyone else."

Apple was going to pay as well or better than everyone else (actually a touch more, but no big deal) before agreeing to pay royalties when it isn't collecting revenues.

And again, Apple has no free tier -- Pandora's free tier (95% of users) generates very little ad revenue and that's presumably where artists get their 46.5%. Spotify has over 25% paid users (and is losing money paying out 70% of revenues).

Here's a quote from a somewhat misleading blog post ranting about Pandora's royalties:

"Here’s an idea. Why doesn’t Pandora get off the couch and get an actual business model instead of asking for a handout from congress and artists?"

Apple created a sustainable model for musicians in the age of Napster/Limewire. Now it's trying to do something similar in the age of Spotify/Pandora, and it's doing it with a (potentially) sustainable business model that pays at least as well as anyone else. But until now it wasn't just giving money away.

Let's put it another way: Pandora, Spotify, et al are trying to build businesses by giving away stuff that isn't free, and have the temerity to complain when a company that has an actual business model (buy stuff for X and sell it for more than X) tries to compete with them.

mosdave• 11 years ago

most musicians do live shows out of necessity, not by choice.

This is absolutely a correct statement, but not in the way the author intended. A writer writes, a painter paints, a musician performs. Not by choice but out of necessity.

mavdi• 11 years ago

Erm... no. They mostly love what they do and would do it as a hobby even if they didn't get paid for it. However musicians absolutely despise most kinds of live shows.

malnourish• 11 years ago

Where is your source for the latter half of your claim? I go to a plethora of local and small-medium sized concerts and I often get a chance to talk with the performers, they love sharing their art to a hungry crowd.

mesozoic• 11 years ago

I guess Apple is getting into making music now. They sure are playing Taylor Swift and the media like a fiddle.

pluckytree• 11 years ago

The likely reason for all this is Apple not wanting to be accused of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. It’s illegal to use your market power and financial position to sell products below cost and thwart real competition in the market. This is why they offered higher royalties later and no royalties for 3 months. It was designed so artists would get the same amount in the end but unfortunately have to wait 3 months to start getting in.

Apple’s reverse in direction is interesting. Perhaps they feel the risk is not as high as they were expecting. Apple gets sued every day of the week, but something like this could be very costly. Perhaps they know the financial benefit outweighs the risk.

Claiming Apple doesn’t care about artists is absolutely ridiculous. Except for a few high-profile critics, artists view iTunes as saving the music business and allowing even small-time artists to make a living without needing to sign with a label (other than with one of the labels that specialize in this sort of thing and for which artists don’t need to qualify).

allsystemsgo• 11 years ago

Would it not be mutually beneficial for Apple to relinquish their 30% cut from app sales? More developers would focus on iOS (because of the money), they'd make better quality apps, and Apple would sell more hardware.

drham2• 11 years ago

Though if Apple removed its cut it would likely be even less incentivized to fix thing like app store review times/app store discovery, as those teams would suddenly become pure cost centers.

rebootthesystem• 11 years ago

So...iOS app developers band together to protest the fact that Apple uses our apps for marketing purposes and to make the platform more attractive to buyers. Yet, they don't pay us a dime.

It's the same mechanism, isn't it? The iOS platform became attractive to buyers due to the HUGE investment on the part of developers who created free, freemium and paid apps for the platform. Apple has been using all of these apps in their marketing campaign since day one. The platform without apps is worthless. Ergo, the apps give them value and make them desirable.

And so, Apple created a slippery slope of an App Store model where just about the only way to have a shot is to give your work product away and hope to monetize it through paid upgrades or advertising. Failure on the App Store is the norm, not the exception. Yet, again, Apple still benefits from your free/mium app being there and they never pay you a dime for it.

Are there parallels between this and music? I think one could very well argue the case to be so.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

Look I agree with most of the points raised here but:

2. Apple can pivot in less than a day.

I seriously doubt this happened. I think it's crazy to believe that Apple changed it minds due to this one blog post. More likely they had been planning this announcement for some time and possibly moved it up a little bit due to Taylor.

serve_yay• 11 years ago

His criticism of Gruber (and others) is apt, and important. Even when these guys are being honest about the flaws in the things Apple makes, they offer very little structural critique of what has become the most profitable company in the world and a major driving force in the tech industry.

Yhippa• 11 years ago

I imagine if they are truly critical they are putting their jobs on the line. Apple will probably cut you off from them in a heartbeat.

drham2• 11 years ago

It's not just about Taylor Swift having way more pull than any developer, she was also presenting Apple with a problem simple enough that it could literally be solved by throwing money at it.

As Rob Napier pointed out in a great blog post [1]: The app store sustainability problem is definitely not the sort of problem you can just throw money at, and thus can't be responded to by Apple with the same way.

Even in this article it is immediately apparent there is no consensus among the affected as to what the real problem is: Is it lack of free trials? Paid upgrades? Review times?

[1] http://robnapier.net/throw-money

ChrisLTD• 11 years ago

Isn't it possible the Apple flattery is genuine?

Apple's Indies

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