I am annoyed by something else: today Apple stepped on the wrong toe, the community will cry foul and someone from Apple who reads HN will rush to salvage the situation. We have seen this pattern before (usually but not exclusively with Apple). But what about the thousands of small and nameless developers that were crushed by some script bug or killed by operator misclick? Who will ever help them?
What I found unacceptable is "We are banning you and we won't tell you anything about it". This pattern is extremely common. And extremely frustrating. You can't put one in jail without telling why (and right to defend). In many developed countries you can't even fire a worker without a solid reason. It should be prohibited for companies to halt service someone without providing a reasonable explanation.
I am banned from being an Amazon marketplace seller. I have no idea why. They say there is no way to learn more, and it's for life. I've never even sold anything there.
My wife was banned a bit before more. She sold one textbook and fulfilled the transaction perfectly. She found out she was banned when they said they were keeping her money for 45 days, and they would be kind enough to release it to her if the buyer confirmed receipt of the book (they did, and she did get her money eventually).
Based on the mail that was arriving, we _think_ that someone who lived at our apartment before us was doing something shady. Amazon doesn't care though.
This kind of thing is why it's incredibly frustrating that people blithely let a few companies control most commerce.
I wonder if that attitude is reflective of simply how tech companies whitelist and blacklist stuff for many things. Once, my organization's email server was considered a spammer because it had a new IP address that apparently was part of a blacklisted IP block. It took us so long to get everything sorted out and get ourselves off of all the blacklists.
Admittedly, we at least had recourse, while you don't for whatever reason, in the event that you one day do want to become a marketplace seller. My point is that it's really easy to get blacklisted. Perhaps it's because they prefer to have some false positives, rather than deal with real bad actors. Just a conjecture.
You really should be able to sue them for cheap. Like filing it by yourself, without any lawyer, at a small claims or conciliation court (<$5000). There should be a guide explaining how to do that and the justice ministry needs to support that guide. Lawyers will not come up with such things. E.g. http://hirealawyer.findlaw.com/do-you-need-a-lawyer/before-y...
Might be $500 max for the court fees.
Then they eventually have to explain it and litigate with you. And eventually revise their ridiculous CS practices.
>It should be prohibited for companies to halt service someone without providing a reasonable explanation.
By US standards, that would require an absurd level of legislative and/or judicial overreach. I don't think I'd even want to do business in that kind of regulatory climate.
This is very true. However, I wonder if we as engineers and the like can provide a better TLDR ratings guide for marketplaces. Kinda like https://tosdr.org/ or a BBB that works... Then we as engineers refuse to build apps for marketplaces below some kind of score.
Or does it even matter if the Apple App store is the only marketplace of its kind?
Self reply- it appears that Sam Altman made this assertion in a recent New Yorker article as well as a blog post. I think the observation of low growth is good, but the assertion that democracy does t work without a economic growth is less persuasive. All forms of progress need not be measured by GDP. In fact, many issues indicative of social progress have difficult to measure economic impact or even potentially negative economic impact with good social benefits.
On a related note, as a small startup I am looking for some TOS generator that I - the single developer - could also understand and that will be clear and fair to my users. Any advice?
How could that be worse than doing business in an environment of dominant platforms that will arbitrarily shut you down whenever the business they lose to a false positive (i.e. none, because the business just moves to the next guy) is cheaper than the investigation that would avoid the false positive?
Electricity providers, water providers, road maintanance, phone systems, etc... Infrastructure everywhere is either in public hands or tightly regulated. Infrastructure provision is simply not a problem for which unregulated markets are a good solution, for fairly obvious reasons.
Sooner or later the IT infrastructure companies will need to be regulated like infrastructure providers.
The reason these things are regulated is because they are fundamentally limited by and tied to land property/ownership laws and there is no way to efficiently reach a consensus without violating them.
IT infrastructure has nothing in common with this aside from ISP.
Large internet services do not form natural monopoplies. Amazon has New egg, ebay, walmart, plus a million new ones trying to overthrow them. The local cable company only has the local Phone company.
For Amazon this might just about be true, however, there are strong platform effects. Amazon is growing faster than the market. There is a fairly obvious argument to make for why its a natural monopoly: If its the first place buyers go to look for stuff, it's the first place sellers go for stuff. If it's the place where all the sellers are, it's the place buyers go to look first.
Really, given that this is a market that is growing double digits by year, the amount by which amazon dominates it is shocking.
And that is in a market that is still growing rapidly. For Facebook/Whatsapp this is even more obviously not true. Facebook even failed to leverage its social network monopoly to establish its messenger against insurgents, simply because they were a bit late.
That might look the way in theory, but it is not so in practice. There will never be another Google, or another Facebook, or another Amazon - efficiency based on scale and network effect mean they are entrenched as monopolies for ever, too big to fail.
Which is why Facebook replaced MySpace and Google replaced Yahoo and Altavista and so on.
The idea that economies of scale make it impossible for a company to never face competition is ridiculous. The only thing that can do that is govenment protectionism.
Along with economies of scale is the opposite effect: the inefficiency of bureaucracy and having competing interests between business units.
Yahoo was in a completely nascent unsettled market, and Microsoft didn't go anywhere. Microsofts net revenue and net income are large than Alphabets/Googles.
Except apple is not society. It is not democracy. It's a for profit company, and can do whatever it wants. It is in no way entitled to be fair.
If you don't want it to behave this way, as a consumer or developer, you just have to choose to not deal with it. But you don't want to, because it makes you money and makes you life more comfortable in some way.
What it means is that you value money/confort more than been respected by this company. Accept this is what you choose and don't bitch about it, this is dishonest. You can't have it both way.
Society can decide what behavior is allowed and what isn't. Just because a company is a company doesn't mean it's out of reach of judicial rules.
A company can't dump chemicals in any river without oversight; it could be compelled to accept an appeals process when terminating a contract with a developer.
These aren't even in the same league of similarity. Dumping chemicals harms society -- even those who are not participating in a particular market. Apple dumping a dev? Not even remotely close. A company should have the right to terminate a business arrangement provided the terms of the contract governing such an arrangement are upheld.
Imagine it this way: you are a contract developer, should you have no right to terminate a contract with a client under the terms of the agreement? Almost every contract I'be ever signed as a developer has some form of "either party can terminate this agree with <some days> notice."
From what I am reading here, we want to hold Apple to different rules than the ones we ourselves routinely follow?
I get it: Apple should give the guy an explanation. However making laws to require it? That's absurd. Should there be a law that when a girl (or guy) doesn't accept a dinner invitation that they provide a valid reason? That's really what this comes down to. And no, Apple isn't a monopoly. This company can still sell their products, just not at that particular store.
I feel bad for the situation, but extending government power into private business relationships is a bad idea. Contract law already covers this.
Society isn't harmed by this company not being able to sell on the App Store. This isn't dumping chemicals into rivers or denying service based on skin color.
If the developer was wronged, he could file a lawsuit. However given that the contracts governing the relationship were known in advance, the situation is just the realization of the risks inherent in doing business.
> the situation is just the realization of the risks inherent in doing business.
Precisely. You signed the contract. You could have not done so, but you wanted the money. And you wanted it to come from this source, because this source fits some of your needs. So you decided it was worth putting your life into their hands, and sometime, you loose. It sucks, but you are half responsible.
>Now we can act as a society to make it illegal, but this won't happen.
Certainly not if everyone heeds your advice to "Accept this is what you choose and don't bitch about it". Bitching about stuff is a necessary part of the democratic process.
No, debating, finding solution and acting is part of the democratic process. Bitching is just acting like the victim you aren't, since it's just the consequence of your choices. There will always be apple like players. Either you do something about it, or you don't.
Making this illegal is a dangerous slippery slope. It could end up like France where firing an employee can be a multi year process and the result-- a shortage of permanent contract employment because employers fear being stuck with an employee forever.
Making this illegal would result in an arduous approval process just to join a marketplace. Additionally it could result in bad actors being unable to be expelled from a market while the legal process unfolds. That could result in a net loss to consumers. Imagine a malware developer -- Apple can't evict them quickly because they'd have to perform extra legal investigation so they wouldn't get in trouble for acting too quickly.
What you are saying is "to avoid making it inconvenient for apple, we shall let them the right do juge people guilty unless proven innocent, and not give any feedback about it".
There is a reason we don't accept that for our law system. We currently accept that from companies, and I don't think it's a good idea.
But don't get me wrong. I don't think going legal is the right way to go. I think either you accept it, and enjoy the benefits of playing with apple and stop complaining, or you don't accept it, complain AND follow the complaining with action such as putting your business elsewhere.
Any unavoidable monopoly is indistinguishable from a government. Whether Apple has reached that point is obviously debatable -- I think most people would say 'No.' But still: their goal is to be the only game in town, and if they reach that goal, we will have to change the rules.
When a corporation behaves this way, it needs to hurt.
How should the law define "reasonable explanation?" In the US that kind of thing is litigated, which small companies can't afford.
Such protections exist for employees, involve lots of lawyers and complexity, and sometimes screw companies and sometimes screw employees and sometimes screw both (though they do also fill an important need). But the economic cost of compliance and management of these rules is quite high, and there are a lot more employees than software developers by several orders of magnitude.
A law could be written so it only applies to larger companies. Those companies both have greater leverage/power over consumers and small businesses (making the regulation more important), and have more resources to handle the overhead. I believe some existing regulations in the US already have an annual revenue threshold before they kick in.
They don't need to disclose how they caught it, just what said misconduct was - going "yeah we're closing your account due to misconduct" is like fining someone for no reason. It'd be a violation of human rights if that happened, and in this particular case, it's potentially ruining someone financially.
Except false positives always happen, and when you have such a policy, innocent people are caught in the middle and face an accusation of vaguely defined misconduct with no details to use to try and appeal the incorrect accusation, because they don't even know what they're being accused of.
Is it? I don't think the idea is that they can't stop service for whatever reason, but that they have to provide a reason. On the other hand, I guess it doesn't have any teeth if they can just say, "Because you smell funny plus it's Tuesday..."
Do you mean the kind where my wedding cake costs twice as much because I'm gay or the kind where my car insurance costs twice as much because I'm a serial car wrecker?
well depending on the service you are not allowed to halt that service for various reasons - for example you can't halt or refuse to provide service in just about anything for reasons of race in countries whose legal systems I am familiar with, therefore there is some requirement to provide a reasonable explanation for refusal of service in almost any business - it just so happens that an app store type business seems different enough that it does not have to provide the same level of explanation.
No, I was replying specifically to the parent comment that said it was a terrible idea that a reasonable explanation be provided. Although, depending on the relevant legal system, just specifying fraudulent conduct without providing a lot more detail would be in itself problematic.
Take this question for what it is-- I'm not blaming the victim here-- but how much responsibility do small and nameless developers bear for making a deal with the devil to begin with? Don't they go into this knowing that Apple can at any time capriciously cut them off from the sole means of distribution of their product at will?
I get that there is money to be made on the iOS app store-- but why is there a willingness to set up shop in a town where if one of the local officials doesn't like you-- for any reason-- he or she can effectively confiscate your hard-made product so you can't sell it anywhere else and kick you outside the walls?
The choice is that if you're going to develop software for sale to the public, you can choose to develop software for sale in another market which is not so restrictive and oppressive. Other platforms and marketplaces exist, and money can be made there. To contemplate the actual possibility of sweating for years building a business, slaving over software, creating marketing campaigns, and a brand and fighting to beat out the competition, all while knowing that at any point for any reason Apple may decide to pull the plug and leave me with absolutely nothing-- no sellable product and no other avenue to sell it-- sounds like a pretty obvious choice: Don't ever get in business under circumstances like that unless there truly is no other choice.
Stories like this from Dash (and others) is a real-living and breathing worst-case scenario... it makes the choice to not participate in this marketplace all the more obvious to me.
"The choice is that if you're going to develop software for sale to the public, you can choose to develop software for sale in another market which is not so restrictive and oppressive."
The smartphone 'market' is an oligarchy, ergo, it's not really a free market, and those kinds of principled positions just don't hold.
It's pretty reasonable to argue that Apple's arbitrary control of the AppStore is an anti-competitive practice.
If the market were commoditized, like, the choice you have for where you want to 'eat lunch' or 'buy a car' - it would be different.
Just goes to show that selling App's in a walled ecosystem is NOT the exact same as building a software business. You lose so much control over your product, you essentially become commission-only contract software developers. Publishers have been pushing for this kind of control for a long time.
People work and go into business and otherwise partner with people who can capriciously screw them over all the time, that's how businesses work. You can put a certain amount of things in contracts and internal procedures but ultimately you need to trust your partners/boss/employees not to screw you over. The App Store is no different and many people build their businesses around it because it is a huge market and Apple has built up a lot of trust that mistakes (presumably like this) are corrected and AFAIK they do not go around wantonly destroying people's businesses.
Can we drop the whole "need to eat" language when talking about software development? We're talking about people with abundant opportunity to make tons of money. Tugging on the heartstrings with "they need to eat" or "feed their families" is preposterously over the top rhetoric.
Yes of course, your family needs to eat and you need to eat. If you're most concerned with just making enough money to eat, you have a huge number of jobs available. If your app's failure vs. success is the difference between eating and not eating, you've made that decision consciously, knowing that you (necessarily) have the skills to get other jobs without such dire consequences.
The point I was making is that this rhetorical device of "I need to eat" is used way too often as a euphemism for "I want to make a lot of money". It's used that way because the former statement elicits sympathy and the latter statement attracts derision.
In the context of the original comment, the "need to eat" phrase was used in the context of an app developer. You don't create an app on the app store as a last ditch attempt to feed your family. You do it to make money, and you do it knowing the risk that it won't be successful and you won't make any money. Apple's inscrutable opaque approval process is another annoying risk on top of that, but whether you're going to eat shouldn't be a part of the equation here.
I was going to say something clever and snarky here, but then I realized that I am an "at will" employee for a single company that could ruin me financially with one arbitrary decision, and they would have no obligation whatsoever to justify it to me in any way.
At least Apple only takes ~1/3 of the value of the work you put into in the App Store.
It is not the case that all developers have easy access to abundant income. It is at least as wrong to assume that is true as to assume that they are living hand to mouth.
For those developers, it makes even less sense to pony up for a Macbook and an Apple Developer license and spend all their time on an app that's going into someone else's environment - especially someone who has a history of treating developers on their platform as second-class citizens.
It is fairly easy to assume that there are other routes to food than publishing apps in Apple's App Store. No one is guaranteed abundant income in general, never mind via some third-party business.
If a particular practice is acceptable for Apple, then it is presumptively okay for other software companies to do, too. And conversely, if everyone in the market for software-development labor wouldn't be allowed to do something, we shouldn't allow Apple to do it, either.
If a particular bit of conduct would be a poor idea if everyone were to do it, that's a pretty good idea it shouldn't be allowed at all.
Yes, developers have multiple opportunities, but often they don't choose what actually works. I did many things over my career, the only one that was truly successful financially was in a closed, proprietary environment. My open-source projects are all semi-failures. So where I spend my time is not my choice, it's my customers'.
So much this. There are also weird quirks to deal with when dealing with browsers vs. native. On iOS, native scrolling 'just works,' but within our app (Cordova-based) it took a bunch of hand-holding to make it a decent experience.'
One example, on iOS WebKit if you flick to scroll, and then "click" (touch) on the screen while the scroll animation is still running, the click event will report a position on the webpage that was as if the scroll had never happened (e.g. you had clicked on the same place on the screen without having scrolled in the first place).
Well, then all browser vendors are to blame, because the experience with Apple browsers is no better or worse than any other browser for serious web-based apps.
When people say "there is no choice" it usually means there is a choice. A better way to have the discussion is to avoid the binary framing and talk about the tradeoffs.
Here is one key tradeoff I see: the App Store brings more visibility in exchange for a cost. This situation accentuates another downside: plug-pulling for intentional or unintentional reasons.
