Monday, June 21, 2021

Amazon Appstore Lowers Fees

Elias Saba (via Hacker News):

The Amazon Appstore has announced that it will be reducing its cut of developer revenue from 30% to 20% for developers that earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. The new terms, which Amazon is calling the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, will also provide developers with AWS promotional credit in an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the developer’s revenue if they earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. If a developer chooses to use those AWS credits, that brings their total Amazon Appstore revenue share up from 70% to an equivalent of 90%.

Previously:

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Old Unix Geek

Microsoft just announced App Developers in its store can keep 100% of their earnings.

They also said platforms larger than Windows can be made on Windows. Although Gruber pointed out the Web was built on a NeXTStep box (how much of that is still left in MacOS?) I think Nadella's point was that the web could not be made on iOS because that is so locked down. It's unclear when MacOS will be similarly locked down. Back in the day, Jobs wanted developers. Now, they assume/presume there will always be developers desperate to program Apple devices.

>I think Nadella's point was that the web could not be made on iOS because that is so locked down.

That would be my guess as well, but it's not what their blog post-esque press release says:

>Windows has always existed to be a stage for the world’s innovation. It’s been the backbone of global businesses and where scrappy startups became household names. The web was born and grew up on Windows. It’s the place where many of us wrote our first email, played our first PC game and wrote our first line of code. Windows is the place people go to create, to connect, to learn and to achieve – a platform over a billion people today rely on.

So maybe their point is "if you're a boomer, odds are you were most likely to see the Web for the first time on Windows". Or, to put that in a different way, "we were the predominant platform then, and we wish we still were today! Oh well, at least we can emulate Android".

Maybe Satya's point in the video was a different one than Panos's in the post. Who knows.

It doesn't really ultimately matter that TBL wrote http://WWW.app on NeXT any more than id Software wrote Doom on it. I don't think Microsoft did all too much, especially in the Web's early days, to cater to the Web in a way other platform vendors didn't. The predominant browser was Netscape, not IE; predominant tooling to create websites were things like Apache and Perl+CGI, not IIS and ASP. Microsoft was largely me-too in that era, which doesn't mean their products were bad (they made some good choices, like embracing CSS rather early on), not pioneering the way the post makes it sound like. AOL had much bigger influence than MSN.

That many saw the Web for the first time on Windows was a side effect of Windows being huge, not of good strategic choices or Microsoft-specific technology. You probably launched AOL, and through that, a browser or e-mail client.

> Back in the day, Jobs wanted developers.

Jobs wanted developers when his company depended on any ecosystem it could get. (See also: a lot of emphasis on Java in the Mac OS X prerelease era.)

They still want developers, but they haven't been hungry for them since the iPod.

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