The App Store Era Must End
Jason Snell (tweet, Macworld, podcast):
To a kid growing up in the 1980s, the idea that the maker of your computer would actively stop you from using software it didn’t approve of would have seemed beyond the pale. It certainly would’ve been a deal-breaker. And yet so many of today’s computing devices are locked down—for some good reasons, but also a lot of bad ones.
What do we want the world to look like in the future? Is the destiny of the most important invention of the last half-century, the computer, to become a series of locked-down devices controlled by the giant companies that designed them? Should the iPhone be the model for all future devices?
If Apple’s locked-down approach in the App Store era is our future, it’s a bleak one indeed. […] When we consider the future of computing devices, the Mac is the model we should aspire to, not the iPhone.
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But over time, the inevitable happened: Apple used the exclusivity of the App Store and its total control over the platform to extract money through rent-seeking and to bar businesses from admitting that the web existed outside their apps. Perhaps worst of all, the App Store’s exclusivity allowed Apple to essentially treat app developers as Apple employees, forcing them to follow Apple’s guidelines and please Apple’s approval apparatus before their apps would be allowed to be seen by the public. Whole classes of apps were banned entirely, some publicly, some silently.
It’s not often I want to shout “Amen!” as I read an article, but here we are. I think I startled my sleeping dog.
I do not know that there is a new argument here. But to see them in a single document is compelling.
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I worry the App Store model and the regulatory response has irreparably damaged Apple’s entire ethos. Not destroyed, but definitely damaged. Apple prides itself on making the entire widget: hardware, software, and services. No competitor has a similar model. It has gotten away with this through a combination of user trust, and not being nearly big enough for regulators to be concerned about. But the iPhone fundamentally upset both these qualities.
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There are certainly plenty of people who believe Apple should be able to do with the iPhone what it wishes, and that — thanks to the power of the free market — people who do not like those changes will simply go buy something else. Perhaps. But perhaps, too, Apple’s influence over a billion users worldwide is something worth checking on. If Apple had responded more amenably to concerns raised over the past decade, maybe it would not find itself in this position today — but here we are.
TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what they’re watching and to engage in a social network where they can comment on individual episodes, vote for favorite characters, post images and GIFs, and connect with other users, its disappearance didn’t go unnoticed.
On November 1, the company announced via a post on X that it was aware the app had been removed from the App Store and that it was “working with Apple to get it back ASAP.”
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After TechCrunch reached out to TV Time and Apple about the app’s removal, the app was reinstated on the App Store.
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“Despite Whip Media having complied with the DMCA and explaining that to Apple, the complainant notified Apple that its claim was ‘unresolved,’ and Apple decided to remove TV Time from the App Store,” he says.
Musi believes Apple acted improperly, breaching its contract with the app removal before investigating the claims made by YouTube.
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In many cases, it’s probably justifiable for Apple to boot the app, especially in extremely obvious instances of copyright infringement. However, an increasing number of developers believe that copyright claims are being handled poorly and that Apple’s power to kick apps is too much.
That bureaucratic failure of a developer falling between the cracks is merely one of many that have happened over the years.
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That old, and irrelevant inventory is a key problem. The apps people want to really use generally aren’t going to be found in the Mac App Store unless they’re apps Apple makes.
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Surely, we don’t want this disinterest to fall on iOS? We don’t want another disused, gray, box of a store. If people aren’t held by force inside of this magical font of app development then no one will ever use it!
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The reason that the Mac App Store gathers cobwebs is because Apple gave up on caring if it earns money when compared to its far more profitable predecessor. It couldn’t come close to the money the iOS App Store made, which is why Apple today expends so much effort arguing for iOS to remain as it is. It’s not because apps outside the App Store kill the App Store, it’s because the App Stores need to compete for business and if you don’t compete, well, you’re an office supply store owner hoping someone just doesn’t know how to shop on the internet.
“Yes, the App Store was a hastily rewritten version of the system Apple used for iTunes, a decision that sealed the fate of Apple’s software platform as a hit-driven marketplace backed by systems designed for record companies to upload music.”
I’m glad to see this acknowledged in the news media. It happens so rarely.
“Once again, the only way forward is the Mac”
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I wish that this would become the future. Fewer nag dialogs, fewer lock-downs. Maybe not for my tech-averse aunt, but for people who want to.
The funny things is that this single move most likely would solve most issues with the iPad and the Apple Vision Pro instantly.
Eye tracking isn’t available and access to the camera wasn’t available at launch. It is now, but it’s locked behind an entitlement only available to enterprise apps. This seems to neglect part of what makes the platform special.
You need the entitlement in order to try it out at all. You need to sell Apple on your use case before you can even start building.
Previously:
- Musi for YouTube Removed From the App Store
- DMA Compliance: Initial Acquisition and Store Services Fees
- Sequoia Removes Gatekeeper Contextual Menu Override
- UTM Blocked Outside App Store via Notarization
- Can Anyone But a Tech Giant Build the Next Big Thing?
- EU Fines Apple $2 Billion Over Anti-Steering Rules
- DMA Compliance: Alternative App Stores But No Sideloading
- iOS: Closing of the Frontier
- On Walled Gardens
- What It Was Like to Sell Apps Online in 2003
- Tim Cook on Sideloading
- Multiple Alternative Channels
- Requesting Entitlements, Still Broken
- New Apple Store Guidelines for Streaming Games
- App Rejected for Using Unofficial Tesla API
- Potential
- Another Apple-Funded App Store Study
- Software Before the App Store
Update (2024-11-25): See also: Hacker News.
I have said it many times. The generations before us created these awesome computers that we played with and learned to make awesome stuff on. But we used that to create these locked-down, stupid, devices so the next generations can only consume stuff on.
If you were a Mac developer in 2006 and earlier, you didn’t have to do anything that Apple wanted.
You didn’t even need an Apple Developer account, or indeed an Apple ID (which was used primarily for iTunes Music Store purchases). The Xcode developer tools came on disc with every Mac.
I’m not sure that developers today can imagine such a world of freedom. They come in adopting a servile mindset.
Update (2024-12-10): Isaiah Carew:
nearly every other major negative change to software industry in the past ten years can trace some roots to app store ubiquity[…]
