Apple Has a Major Developer-Relations Problem

Marco Arment, an extensively reputable programmer, app developer, and commentator on Apple, has analyzed Apple’s arguments and its questioning as formally portrayed in its lawsuit in opposition to Epic. He writes:

Apple’s leaders continue to deny and disclaim obvious truths. 

1. That our apps offer a large cost to iOS beyond the acquisition commissions amassed through Apple.
2. that the majority of our customers found our apps through our own advertising or reputation rather than the App Store.

To hold Apple responsible for disclaiming those is dishonest, factually incorrect, and extremely insulting—no longer helpful to our efforts but to the intelligence of all Apple builders and clients. This isn’t always approximately the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of different charge systems, or the policies in opposition to telling our clients approximately our websites, or Apple’s many different restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It’s approximately what Apple’s management thinks of the folks and our work. It is not always the App Store’s responsibility to “pay its way” by charging exorbitant prices for certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to depend so closely on cell apps that any cellphone or smartphone producer ought to make certain that this kind of healthy atmosphere exists as a desk stake for every person to shop for their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little cost to most of its clients today.

Apple Has a Major Developer-Relations Problem

If Apple desires to keep advancing weird corporate-accounting arguments, the big income from the hardware enterprise is what consequently truly “pays the way” of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and different app-improvement resources, simply because the hardware income ought to fund the improvement of Apple’s very own hardware, software, and offerings that make the iPhone attractive to clients. App Store commissions, annual developer prices, and profits from App Store Search Ads are all just gravy. The “way” is already paid for by the hardware; however, Apple uses its role in energy generation to double-dip, and it’s simply enterprise. Apple’s a variety of things, and “generous” isn’t always one of them. But, however deeply insulting, bullying and gaslighting developers into questioning whether we want to be kissing Apple’s feet for allowing us to add billions of dollars of cost to their platform isn’t the least bit greedy, stingy, or morally reprehensible.