MBW 724: Rene's Beautiful Mug

@Leo asked about digital asset management for photography. Capture One is the leading tool used by photographers once you decide not to use Lightroom. An excellent RAW processor and photo editor, you can purchase or subscribe.

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Exactly my point, @big_D. You may take your chances in other neighborhoods. But you cannot blame the mall owner that people whom you would like to sell your products don’t live there.

What I’ve been trying to say in my previous posts is, it’s the mobile-app market and not iOS-app market that is free, public, and governed by the authorities, who make sure that everybody has equal access to services that are offered there. And that’s exactly what Apple products are like: there are certain rules, the same for everybody. Whether we like them or not is another topic that I’ve been specifically trying to avoid discussing.

EDIT:

Apple might as well have decided to never open the App Store and either provide their own apps or make deals with developers to do that as a cooperation. And it would’ve been just as legitimate. And if I think about it, this is what the Store is actually. Apple just made it easier to sign a deal with them in order to be able to exist as a part of the ecosystem.

John Gruber has been discussing this topic quite a bit on the last two episodes of The Talk Show. I think he’s only been on MBW once a long time ago, but it would be interesting to have him on again this week, given they’ll be talking about it again with the recent congressional hearing. I know they aren’t taking in many guests lately, but it would be interesting to have him and Alex Lindsay debate this.

I would like to see Apple make some changes to their rules and/or their split, before government decides it needs to be regulated. But the current state (like the rule where you can’t explain the rules) is not user friendly, coming from a company that prides itself on having a great user experience.

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I would love to see Alex and John debating on this as well. Together with @Lory.

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Nope, because the consumer can choose NOT to buy an iOS device and go to Android

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Except, as an Apple iOS user, I have to shop at the mall, I can’t decide to buy the product cheaper elsewhere.

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The best fix would probably kill Apple… It would be for regulators to say that hardware must be open enough that anyone can load their own OS into it, no matter what.

You can, @big_D. @Computeforloot already said, what I was gonna say. You may shop for mobile apps in other places. There’s nothing wrong about a special kind of them being exclusively available in a certain area. Whether a user likes it or not is another story, and I’ve been specifically avoiding that discussion, since we may not decide if rules are legitimate or not based on your personal preferences.

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What about if we think about the App store as an agency rather than a retailer?

Agencies core business is to provide people wanting a product or service (ie. customers) with someone who has a certain set of skills to provide what they need (developers). The agency provides this service for a fee that is essentially a cost of doing business. Apple are not the only agency in town, in fact they don’t even service half the mobile users out there. Even on iPhones, web apps are increasingly functional and, although they are second class citizens in terms of hardware access, they are available. And as an agency, they do perform a bigger role in marketing their clients to potential customers and realistically should receive a reasonable slice of the pie.

The subscription rules and refusal of price differentiation is where they might have a problem outside the US. For example, over here in Australia we are used to seeing payment terminals with surcharges for credit cards, and even higher fees for AMEX (if its accepted) that reflect the costs incurred in providing that payment method - this is legislated as acceptable practice.

As a side question, has Apple ever reported who takes the hit on discounted retail App store gift cards - does this come from Apple, the retailers or the developers cut?

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Seems like Epic is gonna call Apple’s bluff… they don’t allow a different price to non-Apple payment methods inside an app, so technically they should kick Fortnight off of iOS devices…

EDIT: Yup…

EDIT2: Epic was planning this and had an Apple “1984” take of their own prepared in advance:

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@PHolder typo, 1984 :wink:

Yeah, typing too fast too early in the morning :wink:

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