A number of prominent third-party iOS developers have formed a union to put pressure on Apple to change several App Store policies.
We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store.
Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit – by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July – to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we’ll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.
I’ve railed against the long-term sustainability of the application store model for years now, long before it became en vogue in wider developer circles. I absolutely love the idea of independent developers forming a union – even if it’s not a literal union – as a means to put pressure on Apple, Google, and other owners of application stores to take better care of developers.
At the same time, I fear that they are too late – the vast majority of the App Store’s revenue comes from crappy pay-to-win mobile games, not from well-made, lovingly crafted applications. I simply don’t think these developers are important enough to a bean-counting bottom-liner like Tim Cook.
Such an union would have absolutely no strength. The vast majority of the revenue (about 94-95%) goes to just a few hundreds of app developers, while the average income per app is between $1 and zero. The demands of the developers doing those apps mean absolutely nothing to Apple.
Apple could close the app store tomorrow, for everybody but a few selected developers, and they would see little to no change in app income.
Of course, Apple continues to spread the gold rush, so they can get some big numbers to show at presentations and also sell quite a bunch of computers and devices to those starving developers.
To bad that “union” will have absolutely no leverage against Apple. If iOS developers want to reach iOS users (on devices the users theoretically own) they have to go through Apple’s App Store so Apple makes the rules.
In Android they can always create their own app store and set strict quality rules (no pay to win junk for example) but you see Android programming is hard for those Devs because they have to support multiple screen sizes and resolutions (the horror).
Edited 2018-05-19 11:44 UTC
I am confused by their demand.
How is this so much better from a free app with one IAP to unlock all content?
“the vast majority of the App Store’s revenue comes from crappy pay-to-win mobile games, not from well-made, lovingly crafted applications”
Every company not especially bothering about the competition will go that way. Apple’s hardware quality took a significant dip in the last few years with a lot of embarassing or questionable design flaws, so has their software quality. And yet people keep overpaying for it. Now their App Store seems to adjusting to that strategy.
So why bother about making a quality product, if the users seem completely happy?
I find it amazing that the complaint comes from the developers, NOT the _users_.
Edited 2018-05-19 18:04 UTC
Because they are locked in Apple’s ecosystem. At least back in the old days you could take your CDs and use Wine to run the software on Desktop Linux, instead everything you buy using the App Store stays on iOS. Google’s Play Store is the same.
Edited 2018-05-20 01:02 UTC
not really, unless you run ads in your apps.
people on android can use e.g. f-droid with custom repositories.