Apple’s App Store Policies - Interview with Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis
**Apple’s App Store Policies: A Developer’s Perspective**
In a recent discussion, two individuals delved into the intricacies of Apple's App Store policies, highlighting challenges faced by developers and questioning the tech giant's monopolistic practices. The conversation touched on various aspects, including the impact of Apple's policies on innovation, the burden of high fees, and the potential benefits of allowing side-loading of apps.
### Introduction to Apple’s Dominance
The discussion began with an acknowledgment of Apple's significant role in the technology sector. While Apple is celebrated for its innovative products like iPhones and Macs, there is growing concern over its control over the app ecosystem. This dominance raises questions about monopolistic behavior and its effects on competition and innovation.
### The Struggle of Being a Developer
The conversation shifted to the experiences of developers who create apps for Apple’s platforms. One developer shared their journey, noting that while they have managed to build a successful business over nearly two decades, the process has been fraught with challenges. They highlighted how Apple's policies, such as requiring 30% revenue cuts and restrictive app store guidelines, hinder their ability to innovate and compete.
### App Store Policies and Their Impact
A key topic was Apple’s strict app store policies. Developers pointed out that while these policies are often justified in the name of security and quality, they can stifle creativity and innovation. For instance, certain features or apps may be rejected or restricted, limiting what developers can offer to users.
### The Concept of Monopolies
The discussion touched on monopolies and their implications. While Apple does not hold a monopoly in every market it operates in, its dominance in mobile devices and services raises concerns about market control. Critics argue that this power can lead to unfair practices, such as favoring自家 services over competitors' or imposing high fees.
### Side-Loading: A Potential Solution
One proposed solution was allowing side-loading of apps on iOS and iPadOS. This would enable users to install third-party apps directly from their devices without going through the App Store. The developer emphasized that this could foster innovation by reducing Apple's control and giving developers more freedom.
### Challenges with Monopolies
The conversation explored how monopolies can negatively impact various stakeholders, including consumers and competitors. While Apple’s dominance has driven advancements in technology, it also raises ethical questions about fairness and competition. The high fees charged by Apple for its services, such as the App Store, were criticized as gouging.
### Conclusion: Striving for a Better Ecosystem
The discussion concluded with a call to improve the app ecosystem. The participants acknowledged that while Apple’s products are superior, the current model limits potential innovations. They urged for reforms in policies and practices to benefit both developers and consumers, emphasizing that progress requires addressing these issues.
### Final Thoughts
As technology continues to evolve, it is crucial to ensure that monopolistic practices do not hinder innovation or unfairly disadvantage smaller players. By fostering an open and competitive ecosystem, companies like Apple can continue driving advancements while promoting fairness and choice for all stakeholders.
For those interested in exploring more about the topics discussed, visiting [rog.com](https://rog.com) offers insights into the world of audio software development and related tech discussions.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is a special episode and joining me today is developer Paul koses he is the founder and CEO of rogba which is an incredible company that makes all kinds of Mac software and we'll talk about that throughout the show but Paul thanks so much for joining me today uh glad to be here so the reason why I reached out obviously there's the big antitrust Congressional hearing that happened here in the United States and Tim Cook was one of the four CEOs on it and he made some statements about the App Store and policies and things like that and I saw you or at least rogba tweet in support of Brent Simmons's article which we covered on the podcast and so I wanted to ask some specific questions and maybe we could start with something that goes back to history because one of Tim Cook's statements was that when the App Store was created the prevailing distribution options available to software developers at the time did not work well that's a quote from the actual hearing right saying that brick and mortar stores charged High fees and all that now rogba has existed since 2002 and and you could tell us how long you've been a developer even before that but talk to me about that statement as far as you know there was only one way to do it and it wasn't good back in the day meaning early 2000s 1990s right so yeah this is something that sort of caught our attention caught my attention and caught the attention of good number of developers that I'm in contact with uh who have been making software on the Mac for many years we as you said we've been around for almost 18 years uh just a couple months from now it'll be 18 years and I've been developing software for a few years before that so over two decades in that time I have sold my companies and I have sold software online exclusively we've never had a boxed product uh we've never been on a store shelf and as I said we've been running this company for almost 20 years 18 years we did not have the app store on the Mac until 2011 so our company existed for 9 years before the Mac App Store existed and our software is by and large not on the Mac App Store due to some of the restrictions that Apple has and for the 9 years since it opened since the app store opened we have continued to do business and continued to grow and gain new customers so this this it'd be good if we had did was that that was the exact quote that Tim said yes his exact quote was this was in his opening statement that the prevailing distribution options available to developers at the time did not work well brick and mortar stores charged High fees and had limited reach physical media CDs had to be shipped and were hard to update again totally bypassing the idea that developers could sell directly on the internet at the time right could could distributes put up a download online and then receive payment online and never need a physical product uh never need a CD never need to ship anything the the problem with that statement there's nothing that is factually incorrect brick and mortar stores didn't work well you had limited shelf space even the Apple Stores had limited shelf space right uh and you know you could only have I don't know whatever number 50 or 100 different software products on the shelf and uh developers had to pay to have that shelf space and you had to pay more to be on the end cap so that people would see you even if they didn't go down the aisle and you know you paid Staples to get your software on the on the shelf and uh that that was not a good model that Absol that is absolutely true but as you said this ignores that little thing called the internet and the worldwide web where you could put up a a website nowadays you can get payment processing working ridiculously easily oh yeah but even in 2002 it was a matter of a few hours maybe a couple days to get payment processing through a service right uh in our time we have used four different Payment Processing Services uh but all of that never required anything more than signing up online and getting approval and then they would process credit cards and we would pay a small 5 to 10% fee for that and then we at the end of the month we would have money and and it worked pretty well and it continues to work pretty well as I said the statement is everything in it is factually true but it ignores reality where the internet has made it possible to distribute software long before the app stores existed the problem is that the people that he is addressing the uh Congressional uh delegation that he's addressing is not necessarily in tune enough to realize how misleading this is now let me ask you again one of the big things that's been in the news is the cut that Apple takes and we all know it's it's 30% and we'll get to in a moment how that might not be equal across all Developers but one of the statements and John Gruber quotes this in an article that he wrote recently actually quoting Steve Jobs's announcement of the App Store back in 2008 from way back yeah I I read this and I had forgotten this quote it's a it's a very good quote so go ahead I'm sorry so Steve Jobs says and I quote we don't intend to make any money off the App Store we're basically giving all the money to the developers and the 30% that pays for running the store that'll be great end quote and this is that was from 2008 when they when the App Store launched right so we're now 12 years later the service revenue is a huge deal tell me when you began Distributing software is the 30% anywhere near what developers would pay outside of the App Store Distributing themselves No period I mean it's it's absurd no I mean like I I'll I'll go in in depth on this absolutely percentages are easy to talk about 30% is an absurd number it was an absurd number in 2008 it's even more absurd in 2020 right in 2008 when Steve Jobs said this I don't believe he was being forthright but I think there's at least it's at least defensible to say hey we don't know if you know there's going to be a whole bunch of free apps on the store and we're not going to make any money off those we get that we need to make money off the paid apps even to subsidize you know something nowadays it's like the Facebook app that has millions of downloads uh and you know does use a certain amount of server resources but even in 2008 uh server resources were cheap they were getting cheaper it was obvious that they were getting cheaper I remember in 2008 uh when you know 30% was announced I said man that's a lot of money because to me you know a Hollywood agent takes 10% I think the 10% to me is you know that's that's an agent style cut right so to to your question of you know what do developers pay I touched on it briefly when we use a payment processor I don't know what our current numbers are I'd have to look but you can set up payment through stripe Amazon payments PayPal uh or an actual Payment Processing service paddle is the one we use there's also fast spr and uh you know Digital River all sorts of services that make it very easy for you to put up a form on your website and take credit cards right and they will run from like 2 to 10% and 10% is high nowadays so it's really more like 2 to 5% is what any developer should be paying for the payment portion of this right as far as setting up a website and a server and everything you know the cost to set up a web server is minimal you know you can set up a server if you're just trying to get your business started you can set up probably a free server or 10 20 bucks a month uh and as far as downloads go the more downloads you have presumably the more sales you're going to have so that's going to pay for itself right uh and downloads are fractions of a scent as far as you know uh every download that we have of our software products do it doesn't even cost us a penny well and I have clients that I'll set up on Squarespace which they do digital downloads and you get a fir you get your first month free on there I think yeah and you can actually get a discount if you pay for a year but Squarespace even the business plan I think is $24 a month and then stripe they integrate with stripe and stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents right so minimal percentage we're talking about a digital download right so so the idea that 30% is just paying for the store like I said in 2008 it was maybe defensible that you that Apple didn't know what the store was going to cost them there's no way to look at this if you have any knowledge of what server costs are and what Payment Processing costs are and think yep 30% is just uh breaking even for them right it's it's not necessarily fair to use this quote from 12 years ago and say oh well you know clearly they're lying now because they haven't said this recently but at some point they decided you know what we do want to make money from the app store then things flipped and that 30% starts to make a lot more sense if they're saying you know what we want to profit from this as well right I don't think they should but it at least is uh it'd be more honest if they said yep we're charging 30% because we run this platform and we want to make money from it and we want to make money not just selling you the hardware not just selling our own software but off the work that other developers are doing so let me ask you it it appears that percentage is also a double standard and one of the things that came out in the antitrust hearing was actually an email between Eddie q and Jeff Bezos and basically Eddie Q was saying all right you'll have a 15% uh Revenue share with us as your Amazon Prime Video app goes on all of our platforms right this was to get the the Amazon Prime streaming app onto like the Apple TV and and iOS devices right yeah okay go ahead yeah and also I believe right now if you have a subscription service as a developer you pay 30% the first year of one of your customers paying and then 15% of that subscription fee year every year after that every year after exactly that's right but it's still Amazon apparently seems to have gotten this deal 15% from day one from day one which is way better than 30% this also goes to the fact about there are many apps that are considered these reader apps apps and that Apple seems to make special concessions for Netflix for example the idea that you cannot sign up for Netflix in the app you cannot pay for anything in the app you have to go to their website to sign up and then once you have the account you log into the Netflix app on your device this happens with many apps like Amazon Prime video like many Google Apps and then we come to like the hey.com debacle right where they seemingly did the exact same thing and apple were was not allowing their app to be in the App Store even though everything about the app seemed to match Netflix's exactly absolutely yeah when when the hey debacle first rose up we posted a posted I think it was a 10 tweet Thread about the experiences that we had had with the app store right app stores actually iOS and the Mac we had a lot of negative experiences with the app stores uh and a lot of negative experiences with the control Apple exerted and fortunately we are a Mac software company and at this time and hopefully in the future you do not need to be in the Mac App Store on iOS you need need to be in the IOS app store or your software can't get to anybody's phone right this was something where we looked at this and we said you know this is the same sort of problems we were having a decade ago are still in existence and seemingly potentially getting worse as Apple tries to exert more and more control basically get their fingers into more and more pies I'm sort of rambling here just because I find this so frustrating having dealt with this for over a decade but yeah go ahead so one of the quotes from Tim Cook from his opening statement also talks about one of the reasons for the app store existing this is one of his quotes we held a quality department store as a Model A place where customers can find a great variety of options but can feel confident that the selection is high quality reliable and current end quote so this is one of the things where quality and security are seemingly the reasons why Apple has the Walled Garden of the App Store to protect their customers unclear you know with the Mac there's the option in the system preferences where you know only allow apps from the App Store and there's the second option of allow apps and apps from trusted developers and then allow all apps well that's actually gone is that gone now the allow all is gone I think as of 10:15 you have to do at best you can do app store plus trusted developers and then you can manually open those uh non-signed apps so and I find this quote interesting because one I have three kids and they' found a lot of free-to-play games that are not of great quality that are junk right that are junk so the quality argument doesn't seem to hold water right but also the fact that you know there are so many great apps let's take the Mac for example such as rba's incredible apps you guys are not in the Mac App Store and so I feel like this statement is implying that we only allow the high quality apps in and so you shouldn't look elsewhere and high quality is not available elsewhere and I feel like if the iOS platform was open like mac you would find lots of great apps in other places so yeah I mean the the department store analogy I found very strange because there is no such thing as the department store that you're allowed to go to and there's no other department stores I mean we have they're all going out of business I realize that but we have Macy's and sear and Nordstrom and Lorden Taylor and and you know you've got these you've actually got competition whereas what he's describing is you know we made the place to get apps and we wanted it to be safe and secure and we wanted to have high quality but as you said there's a whole lot of junk you can find let's just talk about the IOS app store there's a whole lot of junk you can find because they have literally millions of apps and there's only so much they can do there right it's to me they really want to have this both ways if you look at a platform like uh Nintendo Nintendo exerts a tremendous amount of control on what can be on their platform and you need to get their approval to release anything for the Nintendo and it's a very limited platform in that regard and that's one way of doing it and you don't have this ecosystem of million ions of games for you know any Nintendo platform uh but you do have a pretty good guarantee that if you buy a game it's going to work well and you know it's not going to contain ridiculously offensive content and you know there's ratings whatever but right so that's one sort of extreme I think and then the other extrem is is something like the Mac where up until the Mac App Store and even to this day where you can download software still there's there's not a limitation as to where you can get your software there's an option to get software from the App Store but you don't have to use the app store and that seems to have worked pretty well too uh but they're the on iOS they're sort of trying to be in the Middle where they have some amount of control and they can shut down whatever they want as in the case of hay which we mentioned right temporarily anyway and yet also say oh but you know we've got these millions of apps anyone can develop anything and and there's almost no restrictions I don't know it it to me it just doesn't seem honest to say you know we're focused on security and quality but also we want to have millions of apps and the app review that we do is so minimal that as you said a ton of junk gets through that that's sort of my reaction when I hear that that analogy that it just doesn't ring true to what they're actually doing one of the points that Brent Simmons made he had an article I'll put in the show notes he's addressing another article uh from Cult of Mac talking about the App Store and how it's just fine and Brent taking the opposite stance that says you know the argument that the App Store is really there for security that apple is making sure that malware and virus prone apps don't get in there Bren makes the argument that two apple credit the security is actually in the OS itself and the idea of sandboxing and that apps don't have the ability to kind of reach over and get data from other apps or your personal information and so it seems like security is also kind of like a red herring as far as you know it's it's really not there for security either right absolutely and and especially going back to the mac Apple has developed systems outside of the Mac App Store we talked about it the developer ID system and now notorized if you want to distribute software for the Mac you sign up with apple and you pay $99 a year that's fine you get this developer ID which basically allows Apple if they need to kill your software and they have not used this I I'd have to look they've used this maybe two or three times a tiny number of times for the most critical cases where something was literally malware or was working in a way that was terribly insecure right they have used a very light touch with this and that's a very good thing because it means users can be secure against something but also developers don't have to worry oh Apple's going to shut my app down because I you know who knows for whatever reason so the Mac has continued to improve its security while still remaining an open platform where you don't need to go to the Mac App Store right and there's enough Technologies on both platforms on iOS and on the Mac uh that keep you secure without thinking that yeah App Store review is what's keeping you secure right I mean it's just that's as you said that's just not what's actually providing the security so your company rogba you have I think five or six different apps that uh you do I'm actually using one right now audio hijack and it is not available in the Mac App Store and now is that because of the technology limitations like apis or is it really just financially motivated because the percentage is is such a wide gap between what you can get outside the App Store and the 30% yes I mean yes to all of that yes to all of that and more uh I mean we so we have had two products in the App Store in the Mac App Store we had uh we have our audio editor fion in the Mac App Store which we put in there in I think 2012 shortly after the Mac App Store open and it has remained in there and has had relatively few issues as far as uh updates and things like that uh and we had an app called Pio which is actually what I'm using right now to to record that is our simplified audio editor or sorry audio recorder and that was in the Mac App Store initially because we wanted to have an audio recording tool in the Mac App Store and ultimately the restrictions that Apple puts in place and the limitations uh on what you can have in the App Store changed and we said all right we have to take this out of the App Store when we did we saw one we no longer had to pay 30% on those sales and the sales that we make directly we pay again something around 5 to 10% all in in terms of all costs MH so we make a lot more money per sale and we didn't really see I actually have a post from several years ago once we took it out and we saw that in the year after we removed Pio from the App Store we made more money and we had slightly lower sales but because each sale was worth more money we wound up earning more Revenue the 30% cut is part of it absolutely uh the limitations that Apple has prevent something like audio highjack or loop back from being in the app store because they have limitations that say you can't install anything so you download an application and if that application needs to install something additional it can't be in the App Store and our software needs some add-on components so those those are the two big limitations but also as a developer there's a whole lot of headache associated with updating on the App Store on the Mac we had prior to being in the app store for a decade we had been shipping software where we said you know let's put this together we'll test it and then we put it up on our website and we click a couple buttons and it's available to everybody and on the app store we have to submit it wait for it to get reviewed hopefully it gets approved then we can put it live then we have to wait for their servers to update and then anywhere from you know 12 hours to seven days later our software is available right and if you're trying to ship a bug fix and for a decade you've been able to say oh hey we've got a bug 90 minutes later we've got a fix and it's available on the website you can download it and you go from that to oh we've got a bug well we fixed it but now we got to wait for this whole process to play out and it might be a week that's definitely a step backwards right I mean the short answer to your question is that there are many issues and frustrations with the App Store and not enough of them have been resolved in the now n years that the App Store on the Mac has been around to the point where we don't want to have our software in there or or don't you know want to expend the effort to have our software in there when we can make it available directly and do so much better for ourselves and our customers there in terms of so I just to just to add on to that you know on our website we can offer discounts we can offer refunds uh you know we can bundle our software so if you buy multiple products together you can get a discount immediately uh all sorts of things that either weren't initially possible on the app store or still aren't possible on the App Store so much more control we have which uh I think is really beneficial for customers and we lose that in the App Store so let me ask you here do you have a percentage that you feel would be more reasonable as a cut from Apple for apps in the iOS and Mac app stores I'll give you I'll give you an answer but let me preface it by saying that I don't like to to say like well this is the number that it should be because right right right if it there's not uh this is the number it should be there's 30% is too high 0% Apple could afford it and maybe it would be good for everybody because their platform being successful means their Hardware is successful right uh but as you me as you noted earlier Services revenue is now a big push because that's where they can get growth and drive their stock up so I understand that right you know a number like I said right up top 10% is a number that to me is a finders fee kind of number an agent kind of number this is not something where apple is driving customers to businesses and I think that's the mistake a lot of people make I think a lot of people think well you're in the App Store and apple is delivering customers to you and in our experience that is not how it works right definitely not on the Mac uh you know we we've built up a name obviously over over 18 years but we are able to drive our sales and if we drive them to the App Store we lose 30% uh so certainly even our product that is in the app store on our website we don't direct people to the App Store it's just available in the App Store if Apple features you if they you know they have their features on the iOS platform and on the Mac platform where they talk about great apps that they like and and you know great tools for working from home right now I think they've got a feature on that yes that certainly does Drive customers to products and customers who might not find that product otherwise and that if you if they got some sort of additional referral fee from something like that sure that makes perfect sense to me but the fact that even an app that gets no benefit from the App Store Beyond hosting and payment is paying 30% is just egregious so to me a number look if they dropped it to 25% I'd say that's still really high if they said 20% I'd say all right that is at least in the ballpark right uh obviously 15 is a number that they're comfortable with because that's what you get the second year of a subscription right to me the number 10 is the best possible number that you'd get you know the most the last plausible number the lowest plausible number but something between between 10 and 20% I think you'd have a lot more people not so worried about the cut that apple is taking right and potentially worried about other things like the restrictions we mentioned some of the headaches that we mentioned that that I mentioned uh as far as uh you know actually using the app stores but uh it'd be a lot easier to put up with those sorts of things if you were paying less money uh on every sale right a tithe on every app if you would 10% right a tithe is 10% exactly yeah 10% is a number that comes up in a lot of uh lot of ways where you're you're splitting money and somehow 30% has become the number as of about 2008 so one of the other quotes from Tim Cook during the hearing this was right up the top and again this hearing is because Congress is trying to say that these companies have a monopoly on certain parts of the market and so Tim Cook said this up at the top quote Apple does not have a dominant market share in any Market where we do business this is not just true for iPhone it is true for any product category end quote and again this is one of those things where Tim Cook is saying something that's factually true right but also a little ironic because they're the most profitable company in the world and you know they have tons of money uh sell lots of phones so again it's one of these weird statements where it's true but it also kind of paints this weird picture of Apple a picture that doesn't match reality basically yeah yes yeah an an inaccurate picture and so to that point let me ask you this do you think that Apple should allow side loading of apps on iOS and iPad OS yes that's another easy one you gave me an earlier one that was was just straight out no this is straight out yes uh literally since 2008 I have been less so recently just because I'm so burnt out on this but since 2008 I have said if Apple wants to run an App Store that is great they can do whatever they want they can charge 30% they can charge 90% might even be worth it there's plenty of people that or plenty of companies that have made a lot of money in the IOS app store even with that 30% cut but if they want to run the App Store it does not seem right to me that they can charge 30% that they can block who can be in there uh you know all these limitations that they have I would love it if Apple ran an app store and allowed other app stores or other ways of getting software on there the same way they do on the Mac uh that to me is just a no-brainer right because this is also he Tim Cook compared the 30% to say that this is kind of like the going rate among app stores and ciding like a Google Play or and other app stores where did that number come from it came from Apple doing it they're all following Apple yeah that one was that one just had to make me chuckle because of course that's the going rate because everyone else said oh my God people are developers are paying 30% well why would we ever charge less than that right but also the huge caveat in that statement too is that on an Android phone the Google Play Store is not the only way to get an app right it's optional it's right it's optional and let me go to this you know talking about Monopoly and kind of the control that Apple has on especially the mobile devices one of the topics we've talked about on this show is the idea of sherlocking certain apps someone's not familiar with this it's like someone develops a flashlight app for the one of the first iPhones and there's a whole wealth of flashlight apps and then Apple then takes that feature and builds it into the OS and now that app is is gone in more recent years we've actually seen maybe less of that and more just straight Acquisitions like dark sky and workflow right you know apps like Luna display uh which is a hardware product and a software product and then Apple kind of Sherlocks that with sidecar do you feel like their Monopoly and control of their App Store does it lessen the incentive to develop good apps like this or does it you know how how does it feel as a developer knowing that at any moment this is possible that your app could be sherlocked you know it's an interesting question because we've been developing software for for almost two decades and you know well before the App Store sh I mean the term sherlocking comes from from 20 years ago right uh from the the app Watson that was made by a company called corellia and it was an improvement on Apple's Sherlock application and then Apple later made Sherlock better and uh Watson became sort of less necessary for for users and so this is a debate that's been had you know for well before the app stores how much should platform makers build in and how much space should they leave for uh developers to fill in the gaps it's always been a concern because the platform vendor in this case Apple wants their platform to be robust so they're going to build if if you build something that is so essential that 95% of users need need to have it you have to assume that apple is going to purchase it from you copy it or you know those are basically the options right they're not going to just leave you selling that to 95% of their customers and honestly they shouldn't if the platform needs something that badly uh it should be part of the platform right then the argument becomes you know should Apple pay for that should they acquire it or or whatever but I think it's a it's a lesser issue uh determining what should be done there uh than just deciding should Apple build things into their platform one of the things I've heard like John syracusa mentioned this also but like I use Clipboard managers on all my Macs and that's something where I would almost want Apple to have that kind of feature built into the OS so I don't have to worry about the security implications of a third party app snooping on my clipboard but on the other hand you know like audio hijack again which I'm using right now you cannot make that for iPad right there is just not the apis available to it if you tried to do something like that you know it would not be accepted Apple could you know Apple could take the and and allow you to you know do different audio input output settings and all that built into the OS personally I would love an audio hijack for iPad but you as a developer just can't even make that right yeah so I think I think that's more a a concern about you know how open is the platform like you said we could there are ways we could potentially build this we just would not be able to distribute it because if we submitted it to the App Store and it was using something like private apis the App Store review process would say Oh no you're rejected because you're doing this this and then we would have no way to distribute the software so to me I mean like look we made this on the mac Apple could obviate it on the Mac they could make it obsolete by building it in themselves and that's something we always have to worry about we have a product called air foil which lets you stream audio to airplay devices and for a long time on the Mac the only way to do that was with iTunes and after several years they built it into the OS itself so the OS could send audio to any device and at that point air foil became less necessary and it uh generated less revenue for us it got less fewer sales and that's sort of something that we expected would happen sooner or later and and we moved resources to other products and developed new products and uh that's that's something that's sort of fair game whereas as you mentioned on the iPad we simply can't even make a lot of products uh because we would not be able to distribute them right and I think that to me is something that consumers don't necessarily even realize because it's hard to it's hard to tell someone hey you don't know what you're missing on because you never even get to see it uh and I find that as a developer I find that sort of depressing because there's all sorts of great ideas you know not just that I have that we have but millions of developers out there have great ideas and only some of them will be approved by Apple and the ones that won't and the ones that you know might not because that's the other thing you can't know what Apple's going to approve until you submit it right uh so the things that our edge cases might never get explored and so we don't know what we've lost because of that right aside from what the general percentage is and all that you know I hear people say when they hear that Amazon Prime they get 15% uh but that's okay because they're Amazon and they're huge and apple needs to make that deal or whatever to get that content on their platform do you find that to be a reasonable hand waving away of that happening or do you feel like even the big guys say Amazon and Netflix should play by the same rules or is it just part for the course well so associated with that there was another quote at I don't want to misquote it so I'm just going to paraphrase and maybe you can find the exact quote but at some point I think at multiple points Tim Cook said we treat all developers the same right and then we see these things that show Amazon got a lower rate and Hulu there was a there was an email between Eddie q and some people internally talking about Hulu I think and they were talking about you know oh we can offer them a different rate and certainly there are all sorts of apps that are doing things that shouldn't be approved but get approved because oh it's Facebook or oh it's Uber and we want to have this on the platform and maybe we'll talk to them about it later and get them to fix this or or change the way they're doing it but uh for now we'll just you know give them green light to to do things that we don't allow other people to do so uh the thing that really bothered me especially about the testimony yesterday was where Tim Cook I don't know how to square that circle with that statement that says we treat all developers the same but also Amazon gets a lower rate and you know all these other things that I mentioned uh one of those things can't be true right and we know that Amazon got a lower rate so I'm not going to say Tim Cook lied to Congress but he was not honest in that answer and in in many answers so so to your question you know should we just accept this is this something that is par for the course I mean obviously there's only so much we can do talking about it helps but uh Amazon is huge and we're not and and other developers are not we're not going to get that that same deal uh but shining a light on it potentially helps and potentially forces them to say you know what uh everybody has to get the same deal and maybe it's that 15% or maybe Amazon has to pay 30 and the platform isn't quite as good because Amazon decides not to be on the platform again I think this goes back to the idea that if Apple had an app store and they said hey we want Amazon on our app store not just distributed side loaded or right from their website we'll give them a special rate I'd say you know what Amazon earned that they're huge and they got to that dominant position so they can use that leverage to say you know what we'll be in your store but you got to charge us way less money but when it's the only option yeah everyone should have to play by the same rules and apple should have to improve those rules such that everyone wants to play by them instead of just giving Amazon a pass and then if you're a small developer who honestly needs the money more I mean Amazon can afford to pay 30% probably they don't want to they don't have to but they probably could afford to way better than a small you know one or two person shop uh who's losing such a huge chunk of every sale do you feel like apple would ever actually allow side loing of apps it's a good question I mean it's certainly the drum I've been beating on literally since 2008 I think they should and I don't not just for me and not just for customers I think it would be the best thing for them because again if they just said hey these are our rules in our store but if you don't like them just don't use our store I think some huge percentage you know 99% of people 95% of people would still just use the app store and apple would lose almost nothing but would gain you know apps that they don't want to have in the App Store things that you know they don't necessarily approve of but would still benefit the platform the platform would be better off if ideas that developers had were able to be developed and released instead of just Apple acting as the gatekeeper on that right to answer your question do I think they will I think they might be forced to at some point in the future uh do I think they should absolutely and I think it would be in even their best interests I don't think tomorrow they're going to say you know what we're going to allow side loading I don't think you know 6 months for now they're going to say that but I think they're getting a lot of scrutiny because of the various practices they have in the app store where they really have been tightening the screws on developers I mean that's that's something we didn't necessarily get into but with the services Revenue push they have been trying to get more money out of more developers or get money out of more developers and as they do that I mean that's what happened with hay is that hay seemed to have something that matched what Netflix did just like you said and then Apple said no no no that's not a reader app so you need to pay us 30% yeah and they said well wait a minute we did not we didn't we didn't plan on having to pay you 30% we didn't plan on any of that uh that doesn't work for our business you get a lot more scrutiny when these things are happening more and more and not just this antitrust hearing but you know there's a lot going on over in the European Union where they're looking at these percentages looking at the control that these companies are exerting and I do think it's possible at least uh I have some amount of hope that they will either be forced to or they will say you know what the smart thing for us to do is to continue to run an app store and continue to run it based on security and quality and maybe even kick out some huge percentage of the apps that are in the App Store but allow them to be sideloaded but the concern about quality of apps on the Mac if I want to find a good app just a cursory Google search there's so many websites that already surface great apps for various needs you know again rogba stuff will come up all the time or or anything else that's not in the Mac App Store and I think it would be the same case with iOS and iPad OS you know if you want to find a great to-do app or a great calendar app and you search for it there'll be no shortage of Articles to say like hey here's one of the best apps and you can get it and you can trust it and you know that's honestly how I found a lot of iOS apps even now I typically don't peruse the App Store and come across a great app by searching in the App Store itself right exactly right and even like the new articles that Apple writes you know about a set of apps or a specific app and saying you know I still find apps that I love and and covered through Twitter someone tweeting it or someone writing an article or a review about it so I don't think that it would be a concern about all of a sudden you know you can't find the good apps no absolutely and and yeah it's something where we have the web we have social media we have Word of Mouth this stuff can spread in ways far better than the app stores allow again if Apple says this is how we're doing it and we control it but if you don't like it go somewhere else you can right now the go somewhere else is go use Android or go use Windows some days that seems somewhat attractive to me uh which is sort of depressing because I've used a Mac for oh my God 37 years uh no 33 years I'm sorry 33 years uh since ' 87 wow uh and I don't I don't want to have to switch my platform I like using these platforms uh I just wish they were a little more open to allow uh for a little more than Apple is necessarily comfortable with or or wants to give their uh primature to absolutely well you've been very kind Paul for your time did you have any other closing statements or anything that you'd like to comment about a whole lot of this has been there's been talk about Monopoly and uh you know does Apple have a monopoly and the problem that I see uh with the antitrust hearings that we just saw is that as the laws are written right now uh they don't have a monopoly a monopoly is defined by being the only uh supplier of something and therefore you can charge whatever you want I mean that's a super simplistic definition but right as as you sort of alluded to they have a monopoly on profits from mobile devices right and that I don't know if we need new laws or if we need to adjust the interpretation of current laws or there's plenty of people who think you know laws aren't the way to fix this whatever but if you look at the the situation we have right now where one company is dominant uh on profits for mobile devices profits for mobile apps right that's not really good for anybody except for that company it's obviously working very well for 1.7 trillion dollar market cap apple right but that's not a good thing for anyone else trying to make a platform obviously it's not a good thing for developers who have to put up with whatever limitations Apple wants to put in place and ultimately it's not a good thing for customers and that's really what the laws should be built to defend uh is you know customers should not be gouged on price and customers should not uh be limited in what they can can do with their devices and products so I think if you if you step back and look at it I I don't want to get into you know the legal aspects of it because we can people can Wrangle with that and and I'm not a lawyer I assume you're not a lawyer no but I think you can just step back and take a common sense look at it and say this situation is suboptimal where one company has the right to say your app doesn't get to be on our platform and that platform is incredibly important to the world right uh those two things are in conflict with each other and ideally would be improved and so we talked about side loing and we talked about other ways to do that but I think it's if if you step back and look at it you can see you know what this isn't as good as it could be and it would be better if we could improve this that would be a good thing right because already Apple has the Monopoly on what devices can run their software you can only run Mac OS on a Mac same thing with iOS and iPad OS again leaving aside any hacking toos that right sure you know there's already a monopoly on that and so if if someone wants to make an app Sid loaded in the app store or not it can only run on their device and so whatever quality grade apps are developed they already benefit because there's no other phone again unlike Google where Android can run on Samsung Huawei any thousand other brands you know there's already operating system Monopoly if you will I don't know if you need also an app store Monopoly which they have right absolutely so yeah I mean that's that's sort of that was the one thing we hadn't touched on that sort of would be my closing thought would be that if you stop and look at this situation the the problem is that so many people look and they say in 2005 I had a dumb phone and it had snake and it had uh a lousy WAP web browser and and this is obviously so much better than that and of course it is I mean the iPhone is so much better than what came before it and continues to get better but that's not what we should strive for We should strive to have something even better than that and I think we're running into the limitations of things like the App Store uh and that's holding back what we should be able to do with these devices I'll say it for you Paul but everyone should check out rog.com they make incredible Mac apps two of my favorites audio hijack and loopb if you do anything with audio on your Mac and if you're a podcaster especially check out those apps rog.com you could just search for it in your web browser and they'll come right up and Paul is there anything else that we can point people too for you or your business uh well let me just give you we years ago we acquired Mac audio.com because no one can spell the word rogue and no one can spell the word amoeba amoeba has multiple spellings but so the the better domain to point people to is just Mac audio.com which will lead you to ria.com you know it's kind of funny you say that because I was trying to type in rogia before we started the show and somehow I got another website called like Rogue America or something or Rogue American okay kind of autocom completed and that is a very strange website do not go to that one I'm sorry I even said it don't go to that one Mac audio.com rog.com if you can spell it not whatever one you into Mac audio.com get some of those apps they're incredible and you love them Paul thank you so much for coming on the show I really appreciate it thank you it's it's it's good to talk about this stuff and I think it's it's useful to sort of uh open people's minds to to what's possible on these platforms that maybe isn't currently possiblehello and welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is a special episode and joining me today is developer Paul koses he is the founder and CEO of rogba which is an incredible company that makes all kinds of Mac software and we'll talk about that throughout the show but Paul thanks so much for joining me today uh glad to be here so the reason why I reached out obviously there's the big antitrust Congressional hearing that happened here in the United States and Tim Cook was one of the four CEOs on it and he made some statements about the App Store and policies and things like that and I saw you or at least rogba tweet in support of Brent Simmons's article which we covered on the podcast and so I wanted to ask some specific questions and maybe we could start with something that goes back to history because one of Tim Cook's statements was that when the App Store was created the prevailing distribution options available to software developers at the time did not work well that's a quote from the actual hearing right saying that brick and mortar stores charged High fees and all that now rogba has existed since 2002 and and you could tell us how long you've been a developer even before that but talk to me about that statement as far as you know there was only one way to do it and it wasn't good back in the day meaning early 2000s 1990s right so yeah this is something that sort of caught our attention caught my attention and caught the attention of good number of developers that I'm in contact with uh who have been making software on the Mac for many years we as you said we've been around for almost 18 years uh just a couple months from now it'll be 18 years and I've been developing software for a few years before that so over two decades in that time I have sold my companies and I have sold software online exclusively we've never had a boxed product uh we've never been on a store shelf and as I said we've been running this company for almost 20 years 18 years we did not have the app store on the Mac until 2011 so our company existed for 9 years before the Mac App Store existed and our software is by and large not on the Mac App Store due to some of the restrictions that Apple has and for the 9 years since it opened since the app store opened we have continued to do business and continued to grow and gain new customers so this this it'd be good if we had did was that that was the exact quote that Tim said yes his exact quote was this was in his opening statement that the prevailing distribution options available to developers at the time did not work well brick and mortar stores charged High fees and had limited reach physical media CDs had to be shipped and were hard to update again totally bypassing the idea that developers could sell directly on the internet at the time right could could distributes put up a download online and then receive payment online and never need a physical product uh never need a CD never need to ship anything the the problem with that statement there's nothing that is factually incorrect brick and mortar stores didn't work well you had limited shelf space even the Apple Stores had limited shelf space right uh and you know you could only have I don't know whatever number 50 or 100 different software products on the shelf and uh developers had to pay to have that shelf space and you had to pay more to be on the end cap so that people would see you even if they didn't go down the aisle and you know you paid Staples to get your software on the on the shelf and uh that that was not a good model that Absol that is absolutely true but as you said this ignores that little thing called the internet and the worldwide web where you could put up a a website nowadays you can get payment processing working ridiculously easily oh yeah but even in 2002 it was a matter of a few hours maybe a couple days to get payment processing through a service right uh in our time we have used four different Payment Processing Services uh but all of that never required anything more than signing up online and getting approval and then they would process credit cards and we would pay a small 5 to 10% fee for that and then we at the end of the month we would have money and and it worked pretty well and it continues to work pretty well as I said the statement is everything in it is factually true but it ignores reality where the internet has made it possible to distribute software long before the app stores existed the problem is that the people that he is addressing the uh Congressional uh delegation that he's addressing is not necessarily in tune enough to realize how misleading this is now let me ask you again one of the big things that's been in the news is the cut that Apple takes and we all know it's it's 30% and we'll get to in a moment how that might not be equal across all Developers but one of the statements and John Gruber quotes this in an article that he wrote recently actually quoting Steve Jobs's announcement of the App Store back in 2008 from way back yeah I I read this and I had forgotten this quote it's a it's a very good quote so go ahead I'm sorry so Steve Jobs says and I quote we don't intend to make any money off the App Store we're basically giving all the money to the developers and the 30% that pays for running the store that'll be great end quote and this is that was from 2008 when they when the App Store launched right so we're now 12 years later the service revenue is a huge deal tell me when you began Distributing software is the 30% anywhere near what developers would pay outside of the App Store Distributing themselves No period I mean it's it's absurd no I mean like I I'll I'll go in in depth on this absolutely percentages are easy to talk about 30% is an absurd number it was an absurd number in 2008 it's even more absurd in 2020 right in 2008 when Steve Jobs said this I don't believe he was being forthright but I think there's at least it's at least defensible to say hey we don't know if you know there's going to be a whole bunch of free apps on the store and we're not going to make any money off those we get that we need to make money off the paid apps even to subsidize you know something nowadays it's like the Facebook app that has millions of downloads uh and you know does use a certain amount of server resources but even in 2008 uh server resources were cheap they were getting cheaper it was obvious that they were getting cheaper I remember in 2008 uh when you know 30% was announced I said man that's a lot of money because to me you know a Hollywood agent takes 10% I think the 10% to me is you know that's that's an agent style cut right so to to your question of you know what do developers pay I touched on it briefly when we use a payment processor I don't know what our current numbers are I'd have to look but you can set up payment through stripe Amazon payments PayPal uh or an actual Payment Processing service paddle is the one we use there's also fast spr and uh you know Digital River all sorts of services that make it very easy for you to put up a form on your website and take credit cards right and they will run from like 2 to 10% and 10% is high nowadays so it's really more like 2 to 5% is what any developer should be paying for the payment portion of this right as far as setting up a website and a server and everything you know the cost to set up a web server is minimal you know you can set up a server if you're just trying to get your business started you can set up probably a free server or 10 20 bucks a month uh and as far as downloads go the more downloads you have presumably the more sales you're going to have so that's going to pay for itself right uh and downloads are fractions of a scent as far as you know uh every download that we have of our software products do it doesn't even cost us a penny well and I have clients that I'll set up on Squarespace which they do digital downloads and you get a fir you get your first month free on there I think yeah and you can actually get a discount if you pay for a year but Squarespace even the business plan I think is $24 a month and then stripe they integrate with stripe and stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents right so minimal percentage we're talking about a digital download right so so the idea that 30% is just paying for the store like I said in 2008 it was maybe defensible that you that Apple didn't know what the store was going to cost them there's no way to look at this if you have any knowledge of what server costs are and what Payment Processing costs are and think yep 30% is just uh breaking even for them right it's it's not necessarily fair to use this quote from 12 years ago and say oh well you know clearly they're lying now because they haven't said this recently but at some point they decided you know what we do want to make money from the app store then things flipped and that 30% starts to make a lot more sense if they're saying you know what we want to profit from this as well right I don't think they should but it at least is uh it'd be more honest if they said yep we're charging 30% because we run this platform and we want to make money from it and we want to make money not just selling you the hardware not just selling our own software but off the work that other developers are doing so let me ask you it it appears that percentage is also a double standard and one of the things that came out in the antitrust hearing was actually an email between Eddie q and Jeff Bezos and basically Eddie Q was saying all right you'll have a 15% uh Revenue share with us as your Amazon Prime Video app goes on all of our platforms right this was to get the the Amazon Prime streaming app onto like the Apple TV and and iOS devices right yeah okay go ahead yeah and also I believe right now if you have a subscription service as a developer you pay 30% the first year of one of your customers paying and then 15% of that subscription fee year every year after that every year after exactly that's right but it's still Amazon apparently seems to have gotten this deal 15% from day one from day one which is way better than 30% this also goes to the fact about there are many apps that are considered these reader apps apps and that Apple seems to make special concessions for Netflix for example the idea that you cannot sign up for Netflix in the app you cannot pay for anything in the app you have to go to their website to sign up and then once you have the account you log into the Netflix app on your device this happens with many apps like Amazon Prime video like many Google Apps and then we come to like the hey.com debacle right where they seemingly did the exact same thing and apple were was not allowing their app to be in the App Store even though everything about the app seemed to match Netflix's exactly absolutely yeah when when the hey debacle first rose up we posted a posted I think it was a 10 tweet Thread about the experiences that we had had with the app store right app stores actually iOS and the Mac we had a lot of negative experiences with the app stores uh and a lot of negative experiences with the control Apple exerted and fortunately we are a Mac software company and at this time and hopefully in the future you do not need to be in the Mac App Store on iOS you need need to be in the IOS app store or your software can't get to anybody's phone right this was something where we looked at this and we said you know this is the same sort of problems we were having a decade ago are still in existence and seemingly potentially getting worse as Apple tries to exert more and more control basically get their fingers into more and more pies I'm sort of rambling here just because I find this so frustrating having dealt with this for over a decade but yeah go ahead so one of the quotes from Tim Cook from his opening statement also talks about one of the reasons for the app store existing this is one of his quotes we held a quality department store as a Model A place where customers can find a great variety of options but can feel confident that the selection is high quality reliable and current end quote so this is one of the things where quality and security are seemingly the reasons why Apple has the Walled Garden of the App Store to protect their customers unclear you know with the Mac there's the option in the system preferences where you know only allow apps from the App Store and there's the second option of allow apps and apps from trusted developers and then allow all apps well that's actually gone is that gone now the allow all is gone I think as of 10:15 you have to do at best you can do app store plus trusted developers and then you can manually open those uh non-signed apps so and I find this quote interesting because one I have three kids and they' found a lot of free-to-play games that are not of great quality that are junk right that are junk so the quality argument doesn't seem to hold water right but also the fact that you know there are so many great apps let's take the Mac for example such as rba's incredible apps you guys are not in the Mac App Store and so I feel like this statement is implying that we only allow the high quality apps in and so you shouldn't look elsewhere and high quality is not available elsewhere and I feel like if the iOS platform was open like mac you would find lots of great apps in other places so yeah I mean the the department store analogy I found very strange because there is no such thing as the department store that you're allowed to go to and there's no other department stores I mean we have they're all going out of business I realize that but we have Macy's and sear and Nordstrom and Lorden Taylor and and you know you've got these you've actually got competition whereas what he's describing is you know we made the place to get apps and we wanted it to be safe and secure and we wanted to have high quality but as you said there's a whole lot of junk you can find let's just talk about the IOS app store there's a whole lot of junk you can find because they have literally millions of apps and there's only so much they can do there right it's to me they really want to have this both ways if you look at a platform like uh Nintendo Nintendo exerts a tremendous amount of control on what can be on their platform and you need to get their approval to release anything for the Nintendo and it's a very limited platform in that regard and that's one way of doing it and you don't have this ecosystem of million ions of games for you know any Nintendo platform uh but you do have a pretty good guarantee that if you buy a game it's going to work well and you know it's not going to contain ridiculously offensive content and you know there's ratings whatever but right so that's one sort of extreme I think and then the other extrem is is something like the Mac where up until the Mac App Store and even to this day where you can download software still there's there's not a limitation as to where you can get your software there's an option to get software from the App Store but you don't have to use the app store and that seems to have worked pretty well too uh but they're the on iOS they're sort of trying to be in the Middle where they have some amount of control and they can shut down whatever they want as in the case of hay which we mentioned right temporarily anyway and yet also say oh but you know we've got these millions of apps anyone can develop anything and and there's almost no restrictions I don't know it it to me it just doesn't seem honest to say you know we're focused on security and quality but also we want to have millions of apps and the app review that we do is so minimal that as you said a ton of junk gets through that that's sort of my reaction when I hear that that analogy that it just doesn't ring true to what they're actually doing one of the points that Brent Simmons made he had an article I'll put in the show notes he's addressing another article uh from Cult of Mac talking about the App Store and how it's just fine and Brent taking the opposite stance that says you know the argument that the App Store is really there for security that apple is making sure that malware and virus prone apps don't get in there Bren makes the argument that two apple credit the security is actually in the OS itself and the idea of sandboxing and that apps don't have the ability to kind of reach over and get data from other apps or your personal information and so it seems like security is also kind of like a red herring as far as you know it's it's really not there for security either right absolutely and and especially going back to the mac Apple has developed systems outside of the Mac App Store we talked about it the developer ID system and now notorized if you want to distribute software for the Mac you sign up with apple and you pay $99 a year that's fine you get this developer ID which basically allows Apple if they need to kill your software and they have not used this I I'd have to look they've used this maybe two or three times a tiny number of times for the most critical cases where something was literally malware or was working in a way that was terribly insecure right they have used a very light touch with this and that's a very good thing because it means users can be secure against something but also developers don't have to worry oh Apple's going to shut my app down because I you know who knows for whatever reason so the Mac has continued to improve its security while still remaining an open platform where you don't need to go to the Mac App Store right and there's enough Technologies on both platforms on iOS and on the Mac uh that keep you secure without thinking that yeah App Store review is what's keeping you secure right I mean it's just that's as you said that's just not what's actually providing the security so your company rogba you have I think five or six different apps that uh you do I'm actually using one right now audio hijack and it is not available in the Mac App Store and now is that because of the technology limitations like apis or is it really just financially motivated because the percentage is is such a wide gap between what you can get outside the App Store and the 30% yes I mean yes to all of that yes to all of that and more uh I mean we so we have had two products in the App Store in the Mac App Store we had uh we have our audio editor fion in the Mac App Store which we put in there in I think 2012 shortly after the Mac App Store open and it has remained in there and has had relatively few issues as far as uh updates and things like that uh and we had an app called Pio which is actually what I'm using right now to to record that is our simplified audio editor or sorry audio recorder and that was in the Mac App Store initially because we wanted to have an audio recording tool in the Mac App Store and ultimately the restrictions that Apple puts in place and the limitations uh on what you can have in the App Store changed and we said all right we have to take this out of the App Store when we did we saw one we no longer had to pay 30% on those sales and the sales that we make directly we pay again something around 5 to 10% all in in terms of all costs MH so we make a lot more money per sale and we didn't really see I actually have a post from several years ago once we took it out and we saw that in the year after we removed Pio from the App Store we made more money and we had slightly lower sales but because each sale was worth more money we wound up earning more Revenue the 30% cut is part of it absolutely uh the limitations that Apple has prevent something like audio highjack or loop back from being in the app store because they have limitations that say you can't install anything so you download an application and if that application needs to install something additional it can't be in the App Store and our software needs some add-on components so those those are the two big limitations but also as a developer there's a whole lot of headache associated with updating on the App Store on the Mac we had prior to being in the app store for a decade we had been shipping software where we said you know let's put this together we'll test it and then we put it up on our website and we click a couple buttons and it's available to everybody and on the app store we have to submit it wait for it to get reviewed hopefully it gets approved then we can put it live then we have to wait for their servers to update and then anywhere from you know 12 hours to seven days later our software is available right and if you're trying to ship a bug fix and for a decade you've been able to say oh hey we've got a bug 90 minutes later we've got a fix and it's available on the website you can download it and you go from that to oh we've got a bug well we fixed it but now we got to wait for this whole process to play out and it might be a week that's definitely a step backwards right I mean the short answer to your question is that there are many issues and frustrations with the App Store and not enough of them have been resolved in the now n years that the App Store on the Mac has been around to the point where we don't want to have our software in there or or don't you know want to expend the effort to have our software in there when we can make it available directly and do so much better for ourselves and our customers there in terms of so I just to just to add on to that you know on our website we can offer discounts we can offer refunds uh you know we can bundle our software so if you buy multiple products together you can get a discount immediately uh all sorts of things that either weren't initially possible on the app store or still aren't possible on the App Store so much more control we have which uh I think is really beneficial for customers and we lose that in the App Store so let me ask you here do you have a percentage that you feel would be more reasonable as a cut from Apple for apps in the iOS and Mac app stores I'll give you I'll give you an answer but let me preface it by saying that I don't like to to say like well this is the number that it should be because right right right if it there's not uh this is the number it should be there's 30% is too high 0% Apple could afford it and maybe it would be good for everybody because their platform being successful means their Hardware is successful right uh but as you me as you noted earlier Services revenue is now a big push because that's where they can get growth and drive their stock up so I understand that right you know a number like I said right up top 10% is a number that to me is a finders fee kind of number an agent kind of number this is not something where apple is driving customers to businesses and I think that's the mistake a lot of people make I think a lot of people think well you're in the App Store and apple is delivering customers to you and in our experience that is not how it works right definitely not on the Mac uh you know we we've built up a name obviously over over 18 years but we are able to drive our sales and if we drive them to the App Store we lose 30% uh so certainly even our product that is in the app store on our website we don't direct people to the App Store it's just available in the App Store if Apple features you if they you know they have their features on the iOS platform and on the Mac platform where they talk about great apps that they like and and you know great tools for working from home right now I think they've got a feature on that yes that certainly does Drive customers to products and customers who might not find that product otherwise and that if you if they got some sort of additional referral fee from something like that sure that makes perfect sense to me but the fact that even an app that gets no benefit from the App Store Beyond hosting and payment is paying 30% is just egregious so to me a number look if they dropped it to 25% I'd say that's still really high if they said 20% I'd say all right that is at least in the ballpark right uh obviously 15 is a number that they're comfortable with because that's what you get the second year of a subscription right to me the number 10 is the best possible number that you'd get you know the most the last plausible number the lowest plausible number but something between between 10 and 20% I think you'd have a lot more people not so worried about the cut that apple is taking right and potentially worried about other things like the restrictions we mentioned some of the headaches that we mentioned that that I mentioned uh as far as uh you know actually using the app stores but uh it'd be a lot easier to put up with those sorts of things if you were paying less money uh on every sale right a tithe on every app if you would 10% right a tithe is 10% exactly yeah 10% is a number that comes up in a lot of uh lot of ways where you're you're splitting money and somehow 30% has become the number as of about 2008 so one of the other quotes from Tim Cook during the hearing this was right up the top and again this hearing is because Congress is trying to say that these companies have a monopoly on certain parts of the market and so Tim Cook said this up at the top quote Apple does not have a dominant market share in any Market where we do business this is not just true for iPhone it is true for any product category end quote and again this is one of those things where Tim Cook is saying something that's factually true right but also a little ironic because they're the most profitable company in the world and you know they have tons of money uh sell lots of phones so again it's one of these weird statements where it's true but it also kind of paints this weird picture of Apple a picture that doesn't match reality basically yeah yes yeah an an inaccurate picture and so to that point let me ask you this do you think that Apple should allow side loading of apps on iOS and iPad OS yes that's another easy one you gave me an earlier one that was was just straight out no this is straight out yes uh literally since 2008 I have been less so recently just because I'm so burnt out on this but since 2008 I have said if Apple wants to run an App Store that is great they can do whatever they want they can charge 30% they can charge 90% might even be worth it there's plenty of people that or plenty of companies that have made a lot of money in the IOS app store even with that 30% cut but if they want to run the App Store it does not seem right to me that they can charge 30% that they can block who can be in there uh you know all these limitations that they have I would love it if Apple ran an app store and allowed other app stores or other ways of getting software on there the same way they do on the Mac uh that to me is just a no-brainer right because this is also he Tim Cook compared the 30% to say that this is kind of like the going rate among app stores and ciding like a Google Play or and other app stores where did that number come from it came from Apple doing it they're all following Apple yeah that one was that one just had to make me chuckle because of course that's the going rate because everyone else said oh my God people are developers are paying 30% well why would we ever charge less than that right but also the huge caveat in that statement too is that on an Android phone the Google Play Store is not the only way to get an app right it's optional it's right it's optional and let me go to this you know talking about Monopoly and kind of the control that Apple has on especially the mobile devices one of the topics we've talked about on this show is the idea of sherlocking certain apps someone's not familiar with this it's like someone develops a flashlight app for the one of the first iPhones and there's a whole wealth of flashlight apps and then Apple then takes that feature and builds it into the OS and now that app is is gone in more recent years we've actually seen maybe less of that and more just straight Acquisitions like dark sky and workflow right you know apps like Luna display uh which is a hardware product and a software product and then Apple kind of Sherlocks that with sidecar do you feel like their Monopoly and control of their App Store does it lessen the incentive to develop good apps like this or does it you know how how does it feel as a developer knowing that at any moment this is possible that your app could be sherlocked you know it's an interesting question because we've been developing software for for almost two decades and you know well before the App Store sh I mean the term sherlocking comes from from 20 years ago right uh from the the app Watson that was made by a company called corellia and it was an improvement on Apple's Sherlock application and then Apple later made Sherlock better and uh Watson became sort of less necessary for for users and so this is a debate that's been had you know for well before the app stores how much should platform makers build in and how much space should they leave for uh developers to fill in the gaps it's always been a concern because the platform vendor in this case Apple wants their platform to be robust so they're going to build if if you build something that is so essential that 95% of users need need to have it you have to assume that apple is going to purchase it from you copy it or you know those are basically the options right they're not going to just leave you selling that to 95% of their customers and honestly they shouldn't if the platform needs something that badly uh it should be part of the platform right then the argument becomes you know should Apple pay for that should they acquire it or or whatever but I think it's a it's a lesser issue uh determining what should be done there uh than just deciding should Apple build things into their platform one of the things I've heard like John syracusa mentioned this also but like I use Clipboard managers on all my Macs and that's something where I would almost want Apple to have that kind of feature built into the OS so I don't have to worry about the security implications of a third party app snooping on my clipboard but on the other hand you know like audio hijack again which I'm using right now you cannot make that for iPad right there is just not the apis available to it if you tried to do something like that you know it would not be accepted Apple could you know Apple could take the and and allow you to you know do different audio input output settings and all that built into the OS personally I would love an audio hijack for iPad but you as a developer just can't even make that right yeah so I think I think that's more a a concern about you know how open is the platform like you said we could there are ways we could potentially build this we just would not be able to distribute it because if we submitted it to the App Store and it was using something like private apis the App Store review process would say Oh no you're rejected because you're doing this this and then we would have no way to distribute the software so to me I mean like look we made this on the mac Apple could obviate it on the Mac they could make it obsolete by building it in themselves and that's something we always have to worry about we have a product called air foil which lets you stream audio to airplay devices and for a long time on the Mac the only way to do that was with iTunes and after several years they built it into the OS itself so the OS could send audio to any device and at that point air foil became less necessary and it uh generated less revenue for us it got less fewer sales and that's sort of something that we expected would happen sooner or later and and we moved resources to other products and developed new products and uh that's that's something that's sort of fair game whereas as you mentioned on the iPad we simply can't even make a lot of products uh because we would not be able to distribute them right and I think that to me is something that consumers don't necessarily even realize because it's hard to it's hard to tell someone hey you don't know what you're missing on because you never even get to see it uh and I find that as a developer I find that sort of depressing because there's all sorts of great ideas you know not just that I have that we have but millions of developers out there have great ideas and only some of them will be approved by Apple and the ones that won't and the ones that you know might not because that's the other thing you can't know what Apple's going to approve until you submit it right uh so the things that our edge cases might never get explored and so we don't know what we've lost because of that right aside from what the general percentage is and all that you know I hear people say when they hear that Amazon Prime they get 15% uh but that's okay because they're Amazon and they're huge and apple needs to make that deal or whatever to get that content on their platform do you find that to be a reasonable hand waving away of that happening or do you feel like even the big guys say Amazon and Netflix should play by the same rules or is it just part for the course well so associated with that there was another quote at I don't want to misquote it so I'm just going to paraphrase and maybe you can find the exact quote but at some point I think at multiple points Tim Cook said we treat all developers the same right and then we see these things that show Amazon got a lower rate and Hulu there was a there was an email between Eddie q and some people internally talking about Hulu I think and they were talking about you know oh we can offer them a different rate and certainly there are all sorts of apps that are doing things that shouldn't be approved but get approved because oh it's Facebook or oh it's Uber and we want to have this on the platform and maybe we'll talk to them about it later and get them to fix this or or change the way they're doing it but uh for now we'll just you know give them green light to to do things that we don't allow other people to do so uh the thing that really bothered me especially about the testimony yesterday was where Tim Cook I don't know how to square that circle with that statement that says we treat all developers the same but also Amazon gets a lower rate and you know all these other things that I mentioned uh one of those things can't be true right and we know that Amazon got a lower rate so I'm not going to say Tim Cook lied to Congress but he was not honest in that answer and in in many answers so so to your question you know should we just accept this is this something that is par for the course I mean obviously there's only so much we can do talking about it helps but uh Amazon is huge and we're not and and other developers are not we're not going to get that that same deal uh but shining a light on it potentially helps and potentially forces them to say you know what uh everybody has to get the same deal and maybe it's that 15% or maybe Amazon has to pay 30 and the platform isn't quite as good because Amazon decides not to be on the platform again I think this goes back to the idea that if Apple had an app store and they said hey we want Amazon on our app store not just distributed side loaded or right from their website we'll give them a special rate I'd say you know what Amazon earned that they're huge and they got to that dominant position so they can use that leverage to say you know what we'll be in your store but you got to charge us way less money but when it's the only option yeah everyone should have to play by the same rules and apple should have to improve those rules such that everyone wants to play by them instead of just giving Amazon a pass and then if you're a small developer who honestly needs the money more I mean Amazon can afford to pay 30% probably they don't want to they don't have to but they probably could afford to way better than a small you know one or two person shop uh who's losing such a huge chunk of every sale do you feel like apple would ever actually allow side loing of apps it's a good question I mean it's certainly the drum I've been beating on literally since 2008 I think they should and I don't not just for me and not just for customers I think it would be the best thing for them because again if they just said hey these are our rules in our store but if you don't like them just don't use our store I think some huge percentage you know 99% of people 95% of people would still just use the app store and apple would lose almost nothing but would gain you know apps that they don't want to have in the App Store things that you know they don't necessarily approve of but would still benefit the platform the platform would be better off if ideas that developers had were able to be developed and released instead of just Apple acting as the gatekeeper on that right to answer your question do I think they will I think they might be forced to at some point in the future uh do I think they should absolutely and I think it would be in even their best interests I don't think tomorrow they're going to say you know what we're going to allow side loading I don't think you know 6 months for now they're going to say that but I think they're getting a lot of scrutiny because of the various practices they have in the app store where they really have been tightening the screws on developers I mean that's that's something we didn't necessarily get into but with the services Revenue push they have been trying to get more money out of more developers or get money out of more developers and as they do that I mean that's what happened with hay is that hay seemed to have something that matched what Netflix did just like you said and then Apple said no no no that's not a reader app so you need to pay us 30% yeah and they said well wait a minute we did not we didn't we didn't plan on having to pay you 30% we didn't plan on any of that uh that doesn't work for our business you get a lot more scrutiny when these things are happening more and more and not just this antitrust hearing but you know there's a lot going on over in the European Union where they're looking at these percentages looking at the control that these companies are exerting and I do think it's possible at least uh I have some amount of hope that they will either be forced to or they will say you know what the smart thing for us to do is to continue to run an app store and continue to run it based on security and quality and maybe even kick out some huge percentage of the apps that are in the App Store but allow them to be sideloaded but the concern about quality of apps on the Mac if I want to find a good app just a cursory Google search there's so many websites that already surface great apps for various needs you know again rogba stuff will come up all the time or or anything else that's not in the Mac App Store and I think it would be the same case with iOS and iPad OS you know if you want to find a great to-do app or a great calendar app and you search for it there'll be no shortage of Articles to say like hey here's one of the best apps and you can get it and you can trust it and you know that's honestly how I found a lot of iOS apps even now I typically don't peruse the App Store and come across a great app by searching in the App Store itself right exactly right and even like the new articles that Apple writes you know about a set of apps or a specific app and saying you know I still find apps that I love and and covered through Twitter someone tweeting it or someone writing an article or a review about it so I don't think that it would be a concern about all of a sudden you know you can't find the good apps no absolutely and and yeah it's something where we have the web we have social media we have Word of Mouth this stuff can spread in ways far better than the app stores allow again if Apple says this is how we're doing it and we control it but if you don't like it go somewhere else you can right now the go somewhere else is go use Android or go use Windows some days that seems somewhat attractive to me uh which is sort of depressing because I've used a Mac for oh my God 37 years uh no 33 years I'm sorry 33 years uh since ' 87 wow uh and I don't I don't want to have to switch my platform I like using these platforms uh I just wish they were a little more open to allow uh for a little more than Apple is necessarily comfortable with or or wants to give their uh primature to absolutely well you've been very kind Paul for your time did you have any other closing statements or anything that you'd like to comment about a whole lot of this has been there's been talk about Monopoly and uh you know does Apple have a monopoly and the problem that I see uh with the antitrust hearings that we just saw is that as the laws are written right now uh they don't have a monopoly a monopoly is defined by being the only uh supplier of something and therefore you can charge whatever you want I mean that's a super simplistic definition but right as as you sort of alluded to they have a monopoly on profits from mobile devices right and that I don't know if we need new laws or if we need to adjust the interpretation of current laws or there's plenty of people who think you know laws aren't the way to fix this whatever but if you look at the the situation we have right now where one company is dominant uh on profits for mobile devices profits for mobile apps right that's not really good for anybody except for that company it's obviously working very well for 1.7 trillion dollar market cap apple right but that's not a good thing for anyone else trying to make a platform obviously it's not a good thing for developers who have to put up with whatever limitations Apple wants to put in place and ultimately it's not a good thing for customers and that's really what the laws should be built to defend uh is you know customers should not be gouged on price and customers should not uh be limited in what they can can do with their devices and products so I think if you if you step back and look at it I I don't want to get into you know the legal aspects of it because we can people can Wrangle with that and and I'm not a lawyer I assume you're not a lawyer no but I think you can just step back and take a common sense look at it and say this situation is suboptimal where one company has the right to say your app doesn't get to be on our platform and that platform is incredibly important to the world right uh those two things are in conflict with each other and ideally would be improved and so we talked about side loing and we talked about other ways to do that but I think it's if if you step back and look at it you can see you know what this isn't as good as it could be and it would be better if we could improve this that would be a good thing right because already Apple has the Monopoly on what devices can run their software you can only run Mac OS on a Mac same thing with iOS and iPad OS again leaving aside any hacking toos that right sure you know there's already a monopoly on that and so if if someone wants to make an app Sid loaded in the app store or not it can only run on their device and so whatever quality grade apps are developed they already benefit because there's no other phone again unlike Google where Android can run on Samsung Huawei any thousand other brands you know there's already operating system Monopoly if you will I don't know if you need also an app store Monopoly which they have right absolutely so yeah I mean that's that's sort of that was the one thing we hadn't touched on that sort of would be my closing thought would be that if you stop and look at this situation the the problem is that so many people look and they say in 2005 I had a dumb phone and it had snake and it had uh a lousy WAP web browser and and this is obviously so much better than that and of course it is I mean the iPhone is so much better than what came before it and continues to get better but that's not what we should strive for We should strive to have something even better than that and I think we're running into the limitations of things like the App Store uh and that's holding back what we should be able to do with these devices I'll say it for you Paul but everyone should check out rog.com they make incredible Mac apps two of my favorites audio hijack and loopb if you do anything with audio on your Mac and if you're a podcaster especially check out those apps rog.com you could just search for it in your web browser and they'll come right up and Paul is there anything else that we can point people too for you or your business uh well let me just give you we years ago we acquired Mac audio.com because no one can spell the word rogue and no one can spell the word amoeba amoeba has multiple spellings but so the the better domain to point people to is just Mac audio.com which will lead you to ria.com you know it's kind of funny you say that because I was trying to type in rogia before we started the show and somehow I got another website called like Rogue America or something or Rogue American okay kind of autocom completed and that is a very strange website do not go to that one I'm sorry I even said it don't go to that one Mac audio.com rog.com if you can spell it not whatever one you into Mac audio.com get some of those apps they're incredible and you love them Paul thank you so much for coming on the show I really appreciate it thank you it's it's it's good to talk about this stuff and I think it's it's useful to sort of uh open people's minds to to what's possible on these platforms that maybe isn't currently possible\n"