This week, the EU formally opened antitrust investigations{:target=’_blank’} into Apple’s questionable business practices around the App Store and Apple Pay’s unfair advantage in the world of mobile payments. The former deals with software distribution and the latter deals with preferential hardware+software coupling. I want to share some thoughts on software distribution.
I reminisce about the days of the open web. With some beginner knowledge, anyone could build a website and make it available to the whole world. As a teenager, I felt its magic, and I attribute my interest in software to the ease with which I could create websites. Best of all, it was an affordable hobby with potentially high return for kids like me who grew up in India.
I never envisioned that 15 years down the line, delivering your software to the world would get a lot more complicated. Today, if you want to build something for the whole world, you need to build an app. To build an app, you need to learn the programming languages of Apple and Google. To build an app for iPhones, you need a Mac and the several gigabytes heavy Xcode development environment. To publish an iOS app on the App Store, you need to pay $99/year. And that only publishes to Apple’s App Store. To publish to Google’s Play Store, you have to follow its own process in parallel.
This begs the question, why are we here in the first place? Smartphones let you download third-party apps in the early 2000s but as far as I can remember, it was a nightmare. And then, came the App Store in 2008. Apple single-handedly sealed the fate of the open web for the next decade by making developers learn their platform instead of letting web apps run on the iPhone as easily as their native apps. Walter Isaacson writes in Steve Jobs that Jobs initially “didn’t want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses or pollute its integrity”. It’s not surprising when you consider Jobs’ puritanical bent throughout his life. According to Isaacson, Apple board member Art Levinson lobbied Jobs about “the potential of the apps” and over time Jobs became receptive to the idea. As per Levinson, a controlled environment of apps gave Apple “the benefits of openness while retaining end-to-end control”. And to this day, that’s the stance that Apple continues to take.
This “end-to-end control” has provided Apple unchecked power in what kind of apps are allowed in the App Store and the commission that Apple takes from developers who generate revenue through apps. And that has sparked furious debate in the industry over what’s an acceptable amount of power for Apple and Google in the duopoly that is the app economy. Among the band of internet companies opposing Apple in this debate are wildly popular brands like Spotify, Fortnite, Netflix and Tinder. Recently, the creators of HEY{:target=’_blank’}, an email service with the ambitions of reinventing email that’s currently invite-only (sadly, an invite that I still have not received 😞), have come into the limelight after Apple rejected an update to their newly-launched iOS app. In general, Apple’s stance for such rejections is that the rules are stated clearly and the companies trying to bypass Apple’s massive 30% commission just want “a free ride”.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball exposes the shortcomings of this stance{:target=’_blank’}. Gruber makes an excellent point that Apple’s classifications of consumer vs business, reader apps vs non-reader apps are highly questionable:
At some level there’s a clear distinction here — Netflix and Kindle are clearly consumption services. But Dropbox? Dropbox is a lot closer to an email or messaging service like Hey than it is to Netflix or Kindle. The stuff in my Dropbox account is every bit as personal as the stuff in my email account. When you put Dropbox in the same bucket with Netflix and Amazon Kindle, it seems to me like the distinction is not so much between what is and isn’t a “reader” app or what is or isn’t a “business” app, but between companies which are too big for Apple to push around and those they can.
While the founders of HEY and John Gruber are well-known people in the industry with enough clout that their views make headlines, there is little a small developer can do to challenge Apple’s rejections apart from outrage tweeting or blogging. And even that comes with risks such as a permanent ban from publishing on the App Store because Apple doesn’t like it when people to go to the press against them.
Yet, people on Apple’s side of the debate argue that all this is justified. That the commission Apple takes is a “cost of entry” for the reach Apple provides, or essentially, the cost of a subscription to the App Store itself. It’s the price you pay for the level of quality you find on the App Store. They argue that the cost is the necessary barrier to entry that enables the high quality and in turn, the trust of a consumer in Apple. Also, how else will Apple make money to keep these services running? And with all that said, nobody is forced to be on the platform, so what’s wrong with pay to play?
It’s interesting to put this in perspective with a real-estate analogy. Imagine that you’re a landlord and the next time someone rents your place, the broker is entitled to take 15-30% of the rent every month for the rest of your life in return for providing potential tenants a website that lets them find places for rent and making sure your place passes their standard checklist before you rent it out. Wait a minute.. sounds like Airbnb, doesn’t it? Except, imagine that we lived in a world where there were only two websites to find or rent out a place to stay: Airbnb and GoBnb, and in order to list your place on either of these websites, you had to learn a new language in addition to the one you already speak. And on top of this, there was a $99/year cost to list your place, irrespective of whether anyone even visits your listing or not.
The major criticism of this analogy will undoubtedly be that Apple creates the means to publish these apps in the first place, shipping the best-in-class hardware and software that only Apple can enable. But what’s almost never talked about is that Apple created this “walled garden” in the first place. Today, you can write HTML, CSS and Javascript to build the exact same experience that you get with writing native Swift or Kotlin code, so why must these two walled gardens of Apple and Google exist at all?
What I keep thinking about is that if Jobs really believed in the power of the web and touted the iPhone’s web browser as the first powerful web browser that rendered websites the way they were designed to and marketed it as the biggest appeal of the iPhone at its launch — why did he not envision a future in which the open web as the great equalizer of humankind wins? It reflects a deep dichotomy that I suspect Jobs resolved by giving into the temptation of choosing massive, recurring profits over what’s better for the world.
Frankly, Apple’s policies seem discriminatory in nature — companies too big for Apple to fight get special treatment, building apps that compete with Apple’s own suite of apps is risky territory, their own products like Music and Apple Pay get an unfair advantage and products can work around the system by simply forcing users to sign up on the web instead of within the app. While it’s uncertain how these antitrust investigations are going to play out, it’s clear to me that this ecosystem that Apple has established is broken in both the context of design and fairness. And developers have had enough. In a midst of the chaos of 2020, the time has come for Apple to evolve its stance from a purely capitalistic company to one that cares about fairness. In fact, one may argue that the time has come for America as well as the rest of the world to follow suit. Apple can go to war, as it usually does, and dismiss arguments against it as “baseless”, but they’re not going to be able to silence critics and proponents of a fair and just ecosystem.
It’s time to rethink the whole world of apps and how much power the self-appointed ‘gatekeepers’ of the ecosystem should possess. The truth is that technology is cyclic. Access to internet in the 1980s was controlled by walled gardens of companies like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy with curation and safety as the selling point. Following that, the 90s era dismantled this reign of a handful of companies with the World Wide Web. That’s the era I grew up in. And then, just over a decade ago, with the advent of new mobile platforms to consume software, the power shifted back to a couple of companies that reaped billions of dollars as profits in the process. Inarguably, a plethora of companies arose from scratch during this last decade that capitalized on the concept of the app. And those companies created considerable prosperity, employment and opportunity. But I personally believe that the entrepreneurs behind these companies would’ve found a way to bring their ideas to life without the tight restrictions and centralized control of software distribution in the hands of a couple of companies. Developers and entrepreneurs made the best of what they were given.
To me, it seems that now we are ushering into an era where this power will shift back to the people. Do you need a tightly controlled system like an App Store with extraordinarily high taxes to offer curation? I envision a future where the things like Product Hunt become the new app stores. I envision a world where all you need to put software out to everyone on the planet is simply HTML, CSS, Javascript and a mechanism to serve your content. Our technical capabilities are taking us there, but the policies need massive overhaul. With the combination of good technology and policy, my hope is that we will get there — but the current realities are grim.
Anyone familiar with the larger-than-life persona of Steve Jobs will admit that his outlook on everything was somewhat influenced by Eastern philosophies. In Eastern philosophy, the concept of ‘karma’ is well-established: the sum of your actions in your current and previous states of existence decides the fate of your future existences. If in 2008, Apple had figured out a way to let web apps run like native apps while not compromising security and provided a curated directory of applications without making the App Store the only way to conveniently use third-party software, then Apple would’ve created good karma for itself. Instead, it made the internet more closed, gave its own products unfair advantage and charged developers outrageous fees. Tim Cook could still make major amends, but in the capitalistic world we live in, Apple is not inclined to and probably won’t and it may be too late anyway.