I'm experimenting to see if frontier LLMs can do practical CAD modeling. I'm starting with a single task: designing a wall mount for my bike pump in OpenSCAD or CadQuery (two code-based CAD systems).
None of the frontier LLMs (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude) produce usable designs when just prompted with some photos of the pump and a written description of the mount. I'm now building a simulator in Mujoco that the LLMs can use to test and iterate on their designs to see if they can do better in this setting.
I'm hoping to make an interesting blog post of it and maybe end up with a usable wall mount design.
claude models are sufficiently competent at directly making accurate MJCF files as long as you go part by part. directly trying to port from CAD may cause issues when trying to "close the loop" so to speak because of the kinematic tree approach.
In my personal experience, OpenRouter makes it easy to call Gemini 3 Pro Preview and other frontier LLMs with very little setup. It’s great for projects where you want to compare different LLMs or have the flexibility to switch. It charges a 5.5% fee on top of the base API price so at scale you would want to switch to directly calling the provider.
This problem seems prevalent on cheaper devices. When I buy a device and discover it has this problem I always return it. I've seen it on the Hypervolt Go 2 (which I returned and replaced with a Theragun Mini) and on the Hitachi Magic Wand Micro (which I replaced with a Dame Dip).
Like the post mentions, I think this happens because the devices are missing two resistors that are needed to indicate, when connected via a USB-C to USB-C cable to a charging brick, that the device wants 5V power. Resistors are cheap and I think the only reason they get dropped is carelessness.
The whole point of USB-C is that you can charge any device with any power supply.
> This problem seems prevalent on cheaper devices.
I’ve seen it on plenty of higher-end devices as well; and even worse.
The worst offender I’ve encountered is the TermoWorks Billows. ThermoWorks is a well established brand that makes high end thermometers and is considered one of the best on the market. So I was quite surprised to discover how their ‘Billows’ product is powered.
The device itself needs 12v and has a USB-C port for power. You’d think it would do USB-PD to negotiate it’s power needs so you can just use any old USB-C adapter. Not the case. It comes with a USB-A to USB-C cable and requires a special adapter with a USB-A port on it that puts 12v on the pins that normally supply 5v.
I have no idea how they came up with this abomination. Why even use USB-A connectors if it’s not going to work with a standard USB-A adapter, and why supply an adapter that’s basically going to kill most USB-A devices you plug into it? If you have a custom adapter anyway, why not just use a simple barrel connector? Why put a USB=C port on the device if it can’t use USB-PD?
I can imagine some Chinese ali-express product using such an abomination to save a few cents on components, but why would a well-respected brand like ThermoWorks ship such a thing? It boggles the mind.
I've seen even worse. I was upgrading an old device that had a 12v barrel connector, and was happy to see the new one used USB-C instead.
It came with a power brick that I happened look at and noticed that the output voltage was listed simply as 12v (instead of all possible outputs like usbc bricks normally do). I hooked it up to a USB-PD breakout board I had and tested it. Sure enough, it output at 12v regardless of what is asked for.
Luckily, the device itself actually did USB-PD, so I was able to throw away that monstrosity before it fried anything. Annoyingly, the device only supported 12V, which is hot or miss on being supported by chargers, but at least a mismatch there isn't going to fry anything.
So it's based on Qualcomm Quick Charge? QC is a competing, slightly older, slightly simpler standard to USB-PD that can do what you described. It's...useful sometimes.
No, it’s not based on anything. A QC charger will output 5v by default and only increase the voltage after a negotiation. This is exactly as described: a USB-A style charger brick only it outputs 12v instead of 5v, no negotiation, nothing preventing you from plugging in a device expecting 5v and getting 12v. The only ‘safety feature’ is that it has ‘12V’ printed on it.
There are high-end brands that spec products to a high standard and have them made (to that standard) in China. But I agree, GP is confusing high-price with high-end.
That said, thermometry is pretty easy and well understood and you don't need crazy accuracy for cooking, so 'low-end' is fine really, just don't pay high-price for it.
I think there's a (wrong) expectation that an American manufacturer would idiot-proof their products and not do anything dumb like double the voltage while keeping the connector the same.
The number of times I've heard people complain about "cursed" M-M 3 prong AC power cables suggests that there is no amount of idiot-proof proofing that will keep a determined American safe from themselves.
Yes, not sure if you meant that to be disagreeing, but I completely agree. China has is at par with if not surpassing the most advanced manufacturing capability of anywhere else in many areas. It can just also offer very cheap poor tolerance mass produced crap.
Not sure what you are trying to imply here. Products manufactured in China are of poor quality? iPhones are made in China and it would be a challenge to find any device with higher build quality than that. On the flip side, we all know how terrible the quality of US made cars is.
This happens because these devices had USB microB before and the manufacturer just replaced the port without reading the spec.
Even some mainstream products have this issue. I have an automatic door opener from a large company and the battery pack has the same issue. It is shipped with a special cable you have to use as no other USB-C cable works.
There is also another problem. The spec is large and it's not aimed at those who want to implement the simplest possible USB C compliant device.
Based on the table of contents the most promising section is "2.3.4 USB Type-C VBUS Current Detection and Usage" but it doesn't actually talk about anything you actually need. You're supposed to click through to the section "4.6.2.1 USB Type-C Current" where it shows the reference circuit, but it doesn't tell you the values of Rd, which are in section "4.11.1 Termination Parameters".
It's a 300+ page document where you must already know what you're looking for. If you didn't already know that you need two resistors, you wouldn't be able to figure it out with the spec alone.
When you use a well-documented chip, the datasheet will contain diagrams and they'll have a working demo board which they'll give you the full schematic for. Closer to 3 pages than 300.
> Half of the comments on keyboard shortcuts were about how on Linux/Windows, the keyboard shortcut to copy/paste in the terminal is different from in the rest of the OS.
On Linux I rebind SIGINT to Ctrl+Shift+C and similarly Ctrl+V -> Ctrl+Shift+V. This has never caused problems, except when a friend/coworker is trying to use my machine.
GNOME Terminal makes this easy; if you map Ctrl+C to copy, it will automatically remap SIGINT to Ctrl+Shift+C.
I don't mind Ctrl+Shift+C so much, except that I mess it up several times a day, and that combo opens dev tools in Chrome, which takes several seconds to load on my work machine, messes up what I was doing and is a general nuisance. I wish there was a way to NOOP that combo in Chrome.
They are great as a way to avoid extreme weather on the surface (cold in Rochester's and New York's case, hot in Taipei's and Hong Kong's case) and car traffic.
Hong Kong takes things a step further in that it's actually hard to get around at ground level. Many streets don't have pedestrian crossings and there are barriers to prevent jaywalking. I'm not a fan honestly.
One of the interesting things about the Hong Kong system is that unlike many places with this pedway system, the terrain gets quite steep quite quickly, and so using the pedway systems may result in the same or fewer level changes than using the street network.
Great way to avoid extreme weather... if you're part of the working class. Most of these pedways are private property acting as a public space, so any undesirables can be ejected.
We need to stop the privatization of our public spaces.
Most private underground pedestrian tunnels are basements of existing buildings. Do you think the government should be using tax payer money to be cease/buy basements instead? Seems like a really odd use of resources just to not be able to kick out people who aren’t using the path for the intend purpose… but more so: Seems like something most local governments in North America would be too inefficient to handle without it turning into a project that takes 50 years and millions of dollars to complete 1 mile.
Usually the primary complaint about making them private, is that coordinating wayfinding for a bunch of private rights of way is very difficult, so what may be a complete network can be hard to use as such. Some landlords may not want you to realize you can go to a different property a few blocks away to complete your needs.
From @smallmouth's message below ("filthy dirty mess in disrepair and reeking of powerful weed, and fresh human feces and urine.") it sounds like you should be a lot happier now.
A significant part of this announcement seems to be the €0.50 "Core Technology Fee" that Apple will now charge for "each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold".
I think this essentially means that large developers pay €0.50 * (num apps they publish) * (num devices each app is installed on) per year. There are 2 billion active iOS devices [1], so I think that for the biggest apps like YouTube the fees could be in the hundreds of million USD per year.
4 of the top 5 most downloaded apps of all time [2] are published by Meta (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp), and I think they will pay this fee for each app?
> 2,000,000 installs is a minimum of $45k in fees, even with $0 USD revenue
> this seems obscene
This is why I never cared about the 30% take: it was combining all the costs you'd have anyway into one simple number. People just acted like those things were all free just because Apple wasn't explicitly listing them.
Could you optimise your expenses better by splitting them?
Probably.
And that may even be worth forcing the issue from a competitive PoV, because it means some customers will be effectively subsidising others: A weekly updated 2 gigabyte app that's free in the app store gets its bandwidth paid for in part by a 30 Mb app that charges a $10 monthly subscription and gets an update every 3 months.
But even then, companies are expected to make profits. What's the level where it's fine for Apple to say "we want this much extra just for us"? For a lot of people the answer seems to be "zero!" — while this probably would not disincentivise Apple from making iOS given they also profit on the hardware, it would almost certainly disincentivise Google from bothering with any updates to Android.
I don’t see why smartphones inherently have to be a special case of computer where the manufacturer or OS developer gets to keep their finger in the pie after the sale. I can install any software I want on my desktop or laptop, and nobody gets a cut of it unless both the seller and I freely choose to use an app store.
>I don’t see why smartphones inherently have to be a special case of computer where the manufacturer or OS developer gets to keep their finger in the pie after the sale.
In a pure technical sense, you're right, a mobile phone's computer doesn't have to be locked down such that the manufacturer like Apple controls the subsequent financial transactions on it.
Instead of technical reasons, what happened was Apple taking advantage of historical control of cellphones by the carriers that was in place before Apple flipped the relationship around in 2007:
- (1) before 2007, the cell carriers like AT&T and Verizon controlled what kind of software could be on the Palm Treo, Blackberry, Motorola, etc.
- (2) Apple showed an iPhone prototype to Cingular/AT&T that impressed them so much that they were willing to give up software platform control to Apple. This was the first time a phone manufacturer had the leverage to do this.
Cingular was lagging behind Verizon so that's why Cingular was willing to play ball and relinquish control.
- (3) after 2007, Apple now controls the phone's software ecosystem with their App Store restrictions and it's a power they want to keep. In their mind, they feel justified since they are the ones who spent money on developing the phone and they're allowing more "freedom" of 3rd-party software than the carriers did.
Apple's perspective is that its smartphones are not "open" computers like the IBM PC and Macbooks. Instead, it's the "closed" computers like the Sony PlayStation.
Another "closed" computer is the AMD Ryzen + Linux system in Tesla's infotainment system. There is no "Tesla app store" for it. Instead, a 3rd-party app like Spotify has to forge a formal contractual partnership with Tesla to get integrated into the car's software. Some stories about that: https://www.google.com/search?q=spotify+signs+partnership+wi...
Likewise, is there any technical reason why Tesla can't let you sideload any app on the car? No. But Tesla doesn't let you.
I had a Palm Centro back in those days; you could install anything you wanted on it, and as far as I know the WinMo devices were the same. The situation you describe was the case for "dumbphones" or "feature phones", but Apple is the one who extended it to smartphones.
Of course, Apple are also the ones who extended smartphones to a mass-market product, as before then devices like the Centro were very niche.
While there were certainly closed phons prior to iPhone, there were also open platforms like Windows Mobile. You could run whatever app you wanted to on Windows Mobile.
The relationship between phone manufacturers, OS providers, and careers was pretty complex that nearly every combination of openness and restrictiveness was part of the market before 2007.
But if it was a smartphone then it allowed third party apps to be installed without restriction. However, the OS itself might have been heavily controlled and/or modified by the carrier. It was common that say, Microsoft, would release an OS update and then that OS update goes to the carrier for testing and modification and then sometime later you get it. Apple, of course, was not interested in participating in that system.
Part of the early success of Android was that being an open platform meant that carriers retained a huge amount of control and they would release heavily customized carrier-specific phones.
> it's the "closed" computers like the Sony PlayStation.
PlayStation is seen by most people as an appliance for playing video games. Phones, on the other hand, are explicitly general-purpose computers. The iPhone is literally the only case of a "closed" general-purpose computer in this entire universe.
> Likewise, is there any technical reason why Tesla can't let you sideload any app on the car? No. But Tesla doesn't let you.
Cars are effectively bullets, they can kill people, so you can't just install anything in a car. I'm sure there's plenty of laws requiring Tesla and other car manufacturers to lock down car software.
(Just like there are laws requiring phone manufacturers to lock down phones - you can't just install an app that lets you override the GSM protocol and mess with the spectrum, not even on Android!)
Well, if you have a desktop/notebook with any kind of wi-fi chip you also cant override the protocol as not to mess with the spectrum, but you still get free reign over the rest of the machine.
All that to say that if things are properly compartmentalized there is no danger in letting the user install any software he desires.
This is a really nice well-researched take that rhymes with a lot of stuff I used to read back around 2007-2009.
But it's 2024.
I grew up on the App Store, maybe I'm just old and cranky at 35. But my guess is 95% of people cry in pain when they see a wall of text about how Verizon charged for J2ME apps in 2004, therefore iPhones iPads Apple Watches Vision Pros are special exemptions and Apple should be able to bill "$0.50 per install per year." whenever a binary is installed on a device you paid for. There's 0 reason for it.
Indeed this is something that has bothered me for 20 years, though significantly more so as phones have come to resemble general purpose computers more than just phones. Back then, I explicitly bought a Cingular phone instead of Verizon, because it ran a stock flavor of the Motorola OS, rather than the custom whatever that Verizon models shipped with which didn't let you install mp3 ringtones or j2me games.
Arguably the Steam Deck is a video game console with that open model. It gets fuzzy though because an open video game console looks like a general purpose computer.
Samsung phones come with a Samsung store in addition to Google Play for instance. All of Samsungs software go through their own store, and they also sell apps on it.
So instead of "opening up" the iPhone if customers really care about the multiple app stores feature they could buy the phone with that feature correct?
It's not really any different in my mind than phones with more battery life, a better camera, or any other product mix.
In general I agree with you, I don't want my phone to be a general purpose computer.
But the situation here is that there is now an actual law mandating that no, you're not to allowed host an app store on your phone OS without allowing alternative app stores.
For an exaggerated analogy, you can't make a car without seatbelts and tell consumers that if they value safety they should purchase a different brand of car.
>>I don't want my phone to be a general purpose computer.
Too late. It already is. Which makes all these restrictions on what you can and can't do with it stupid especially if its gonna sell for an amount of money nearly equal to reasonably spec'ed laptop.
Every single child who plays Fortnite in Android does it. You can't install Fortnite through the Play Store anymore after the payment processing lawsuit stuff.
> The problem is no one has made a smartphone with that open model.
Android is fully open. No one is making you use Google services. You can, in fact, buy a Pixel and simply uninstall the Play Store. As a developer, you can distribute your app without any Google involvement whatsoever.
Well, it's important to make the distinction between the Play Store and Google Services (the software). Plenty of things _depend_ on Google Services, some of them you have no option, like bank apps.
It's true however that you can use microG to replace Google Services, but even then some banks will block your account upon doing that (happened to me).
Granted, this really is a completely different point to what you were discussing, and I do agree with you. But, if we want truly open ecosystems, we need standards that ensure the authenticity of the user. Unfortunately, that gets distopian fast.
There's also Ubuntu Touch which I hope gathers steam. I installed it on an old Pixel 3a I had lying around mostly for fun, in much the same way I did for GalliumOS install on an old HP Chromebook.
That you then can't really do anything with either because of the super limited HW support (due to only using "free" drivers) or because they're so slow you just give up in frustration. Or lack of apps.
At least in the case of the Librem 5 its wildly overpriced for what you actually get (if you ever actually get it that is).
How is the limited hardware support connected to the free drivers? You can install Mobian, postmarketOS on a Librem 5 already. Pinephone is supported by 15+ operating systems.
If you think the hardware is slow, have a look at SXMo.
> if you ever actually get it that is
They've been delivering the phones within 10 days since a long tome already. Sent from my Librem 5.
I own an HP laptop. Why should HP get any money from what I do on my laptop and the software I install on it? I already paid them. Their product is the laptop.
Let's suppose that I still use Windows, which was installed on that laptop. I'm using Debian instead, but let's forget about it. Anyway, HP probably paid Microsoft for the OS. That's all that should be. I don't see any reason for me to pay Microsoft.
Now, let's suppose that both HP and Microsoft switch to a subscription model where the laptop costs some xx Euro per month and for the OS. Then it's different, I would think if I want to enter into that relationship and if I do then I would be OK for them "to keep their finger in the pie".
I won't use Windows anyway and I probably won't buy a subscription based computer. On the other side that would make me upgrade more often. It's more or less what some people do when selling their Mac to buy a new one. Sometimes the new one is not that good though.
The vast majority of consumers prefer and benefit from aspects of this control. Despite all the horror stories (both fp and fn) they keep the App Store much safer then mass direct installs would be.
Okay, and they can keep that control while some minority choose to host elsewhere. Androids Play store (pending some anti-trust issues, ironically) still has the majority of apps there and it'd be doubtful that any android alternative store can steal that mindshare away.
> Androids Play store (pending some anti-trust issues, ironically) still has the majority of apps there and it'd be doubtful that any android alternative store can steal that mindshare away.
If so, why did Google feel the need to bribe developers to keep their apps on the Play store?
I did mention that part briefly. And I am still a bit confused about the decision as well given some of the subjects that suppressed.
I guess 2010's Google didn't want any trace of a popular gaming store to take over, given that we now know F2P mobile games are 70% of the app store revenue (and I'm sure it's similar to Google). If EA made the supposed Steam of Android and most games chose to focus on the EA store, that's a huge cut into Google revenue, even if most other apps would still be on the play store. So better not to risk it at all.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the reality is that yes consumers do get some bit of benefit, but the real hole in the argument being made is that OS developers do make money off of us using our computers.
We all had to pay the licensing fee for the software. For many of us, a fee is paid yearly to the OS developer on our behalf. Just because the fee is not explicitly placed against our own debit/credit card balances doesn't mean a fee isn't being paid.
But even the fee argument misses the point. Myself and others are not asking that Apple not charge a fee. My feeling was that 30% on App revenue for example was too much. Given that the charges are now being itemized out in the open a bit better, do I still believe the fee was too high? I cautiously respond 'yes'. But I can now see where I might have been mistaken about what the amalgamation of the costs incurred to run this thing look like.
I guess all I really wanted was transparency. Let's get it all on the table and see what's what. Maybe 30% is a good deal? Maybe it's not? I don't know if you don't tell me everything that went into that. Consumers should be
informed, that's probably more what I believe now. I no longer believe we should change the model before we get a better idea of what the costs will be going forward. That could bankrupt a lot of small devs right now.
Perfectly valid, I feel that way about all subscription-based non-ownership — I want to buy a thing and have it and "they" can't take it away from me.
On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember when operating system upgrades were around 10% of the price of the original computer (for each upgrade, about once per year but not at all regular), and when I couldn't afford a compiler.
They’re not a special case, they’re just like game consoles which are similarly locked down. The PC is the special case and I think that’s an accident of history. If the PC were brand new today it would be a locked down, walled garden like all the rest.
The PC is “the one that got away” in fishing parlance.
I think the distinction in my head is that game consoles are explicitly single-purpose (or very limited-purpose), whereas smartphones are playing at being general purpose, but only insofar as their manufacturer approves of that purpose.
Personally I see the broader trend towards highly-restricted corporate-controlled hardware (of all types) as something explicitly detrimental that we should push back on wherever possible.
> I don’t see why smartphones inherently have to be a special case of computer where the manufacturer or OS developer gets to keep their finger in the pie after the sale.
You mean like consoles, set top boxes, and smart TVs?
Personal computers are the special case where you don’t have to pay the platform provider - there are far more phones+consoles+set top boxes than computers
As far as I know I can sideload apps onto my smart TV, and Sony isn't get a cut of my streaming subscriptions. Ultimately, though, those devices generally don't pretend to be general-purpose, whereas I think smartphones do, just with restrictions such that the manufacturer can keep a revenue stream going.
That’s not according to case law. Google got in trouble explicitly because they advertised their operating system as “open” and then changed the rules.
Apple was very explicit from day one and anyone who buys an iOS device knows exactly what they are going to get.
What costs that are rolled into Apple’s 30% are you saving on? Payment processing is let’s say 3% (including chargebacks). Delivering updates is just pushing bits, practically zero. What else are they doing?
If Apple features you, then I guess it’s pretty fair to say you’ve paid a marketing expense, but they feature a tiny percent of apps. Most of us get nothing but buried in the app store.
I'm not the person you responded to, but I'd also include stuff like developing the APIs developers use, Swift and SwiftUI, Xcode, developer docs, etc. Basically everything that Apple does that makes it possible for a developer to produce a high quality app on their phone. Apple has to pay for all that somehow, and that revenue has to come from somewhere. Product sales are one place, but it's a one time purchase and so there's even less incentive to support old phones. Charging per app install is a pretty easy way to do it, aligns the incentives decently well, and a cost to the developer proportional to how much users/benefit they get.
They could also just charge a large cost for access to the SDK a la console systems, or not actually track the downloads but have a license agreement where you pay based on your user base like other ecosystems (Unity?).
> Apple does that makes it possible for a developer to produce a high quality app on their phone
This is not one sided at all. Historically generally Apple benefited more from developers releasing apps on their platforms than the other way around. Arguably that's still the case.
> Apple has to pay for all that somehow
So by selling devices? How did they pay for developing OSX/macOS and their APIs and tools for decades?
> They could also just charge a large cost for access to the SDK a la console systems,
There are many exploitative and unfair things they could do because of their dominant positions in the market, yes that's correct.
1. Apple and Microsoft have both developed these things for 40 years without the fees and restrictions. They do it for the health of their ecosystem to sell devices/OSes.
2. The only reason there are two mobile OSes with significant marketshare (instead of more than two) is the app library. WinMo never took off because even though it was a wonderful OS, they couldn't get developers to make apps. It's hard to imagine now that any party, even one with practically infinite money like Amazon or Apple or Samsung, could develop a successful mobile OS because they'd be launching with two million fewer apps.
Chromebooks have been selling briskly with a relatively new OS because people no longer cared about apps on desktops when everything started working in a browser. This is the obvious attack vector for phones. If you can do everything in a browser you can do in an app, the door is open for another OS. That's why Apple doesn't want third-party browsers.
> Apple doesn't develop those SDKs and tools in order to make money selling them to developers; Apple develops that stuff in order to sell iPhones.
Nobody buys an iPhone because of the SDK.
Nobody… except perhaps developers.
Apple makes those things so that developers make more apps for their phones, which they want to support in order that people continue to buy new phones.
> Apple charges 30% simply because they can, and nobody has stopped them.
Yes.
And unless the government says "the thing we don't like is specifically the price", what you're going to get from demanding side-loading and other app stores is going to look like the same price charged in a more complex way that's distributed differently over all the developers.
This also means that it's likely some app providers will suddenly discover their costs go up.
As a consumer, I'm fine with however this shakes out: I spend almost nothing on apps anyway, and the selection is too large for me to care about the size and diversity within the marketplace.
As an iOS app developer, I have no idea how any of these options may or may not affect the demand for my skills on the job market, but I still don't care much because GenAI is a much bigger change than all of these options combined.
As an investor, I've been expecting Apple to hit the upper limit for corporation size before monopoly lawsuits 2 trillion dollars of market cap ago, which is one reason why I bought S&P 500 instead of APPL (the other being I'd like my income and my investments to avoid too many correlated failures).
To add to this historically Apple charged for OS updates. Windows still does. With iOS Apple switched their model to making the updates free and charging developers on the backend to monetize their software.
But most companies have some plan to monetize their software even if they also make money on the hardware.
Nothing quite says "high trust ecosystem" as when the people charging you 30% also make a buck on top from competitors putting their app in front of customers looking for your app by name.
> Building and supporting the SDKs that developers use to make money.
You're implying that this is a somehow onesides transaction and Apple is doing developers a favour while Apple always needed third party developers as much as developers need them (with iOS of course this balance changed a bit which allowed Apple to become a lot more exploitative than they were before/still are if we're talking about macOS)
Yes, and Epic charges a lot less for their support. We say how Unity was eviscerated for a much cheaper runtime fee, I can't imagine Apple gets away with triple the pricing.
Is it? Epic doesn't only provide and engine to make a game with. Online services, access to extremely high fidelity assets (meta human, Quixel megascans), photogrammetry. And of course it's working on its own store. All of these have a lower cut even if you don't negotiate.
The primary purpose of the 30% fee is not payment processing or delivering updates, it is the licensing fee for the use of Apple's intellectual property (SDKs and developer tools).
The primary purpose of the 30% is to get 30% of money. If apple could get away with 60 they would. Apple more than pays for the SDK development just with their cut of child casino apps they sell. Everything else is just free cash.
And? You can say the same about pretty much anyone that sells anything. Why does a restaurant charge $15 for a cocktail that costs them 50 cents to make?
Does Google charge a .50 per install fee for Android apps not installed via the Play Store? Does Microsoft charge a .50 per install fee for Windows apps not installed via the Windows Store? Apple is just making these charges up, because they think they can get away with it. It doesn't cover any real costs to Apple, above and beyond what you already pay for when you buy an Apple device.
I am wondering how the EU market will react. How many businesses in the EU have free apps that have more than 1 million users? Will businesses start charging for their apps in the EU just to recover the cost, or pull out entirely? Maybe more will offer fully featured websites and drive customers there instead. I don't know, but it seems like a stupid move on Apples part, a big game of chicken.
Is an app like eBay free in your definition? Because then you have Allegro, which is giant here in Poland. Apps from telcos. Public transit apps. InPost over here is quite big in deliveries. I think Alza in Czechia and Slovakia can easily have a couple million users.
Not very many businesses, but there are quite a few biiig ones.
Here on HN I often read startup stories about services which, on one hand, “nobody” has heard about, and which, on the other hand, “quickly grew to a couple million users and started having scalability problems”, which then spawns some story about scalability tricks. Always leaves me astonished as to how the heck some another glorified todo list/cat picture thing can rake millions of users so fast, but here we are.
I suspect there are way more niches in which tens of millions of users live, which the rest of us can just be ignorant of. It’s only when you approach a billion users that you can be sure “everyone” at least has heard the name of the service/app.
eBay is a great example for this case, yes. It would be very easy for ebay to stop distributing an iOS app in the EU, and instead push those users to using the ebay web app. Ebay could put more resources into making the webapp better, and avoid paying Apple a ridiculous annaul per installation charge.
But the thing is, the free apps can also just use the pre-existing distribution mechanisms. Of course, it's giving Apple the leverage to say, "see? No one* wants to use the alternative stores!", but also think that if you have an entire team with experience and established relationship of App Store review shenanigans, you just continue to use it.
It's more interesting about the upstart companies who might get big one day.
There a free apps that don't exist on iOS simply because Apple doesn't want them in their store. These apps are not necessarily malicious, but may contain content that Apple wishes to censor. If Apple continue to say what is and is not allowed on iOS, then nothing/not much is gained by this regulation.
Edit: Of course, eBay will likely continue to be allowed.
I wasn't aware that there was a choice for EU developers to use the new pricing model or the old one? If free apps can stick to the "30% of nothing" commission, yeah, I suppose most will do that.
As threeseed mentioned, most free apps esp. those without a per-install revenue source (e.g., Wikipedia) will likely not use the new model and stick with the old model which doesn't charge per app install
I suppose ultimately, the market is fragmenting and Apple is aiming to pull and set levels to encourage as many developers as possible to stick with the current system.
I suppose they're counting on the fact that inertia and laziness will encourage continued loyalty when it comes to non free apps.
Right I agree, the new model does seem quite punitive especially if you don't have an existing business model.
Imagine a new developer publishes a free app without a plan for monetization, and then it goes viral. They would be on the hook for thousands of dollars.
Unless they have a reason to switch most new apps will likely stick to the old model
> Does Google charge a .50 per install fee for Android apps not installed via the Play Store?
Give it about a month, and I'd guess so.
> Apple is just making these charges up, because they think they can get away with it.
Yes, with my non-existent MBA I assumed that's how most businesses set prices?
Business are not your friend, they're looking out for themselves only. This is why I do actually like governments: they can force businesses to be more aligned with public interests, even when that costs shareholders some dividends.
More fees can make them more money, but if they raise it too high developers will stop developing for the platform. It's up to Apple to decide on the right trade off where they make money and have a competitive platform to Android and Windows.
This applies similarly to many other businesses. There is a sweet spot for prices to maximize profit.
Let's see where they find their 30% if browsers were required to provide (essentially) 100% features of native apps, and if they were required not to charge for them.
Maybe iPhone costs would increase a few percent, probably not.
Fun fact: they already do. (Or at least Mozilla did, but given their massive engineering power it would be surprising if Google wasn't doing it as well).
From what I heard at a Mozilla meetup a few years ago, the only thing that prevented Mozilla to ship the actual Firefox to iOS back then was Apple ToS banning apps with their own JIT compiler built-in.
>A weekly updated 2 gigabyte app that's free in the app store gets its bandwidth paid for in part by a 30 Mb app that charges a $10 monthly subscription and gets an update every 3 months.
I've been wondering for a long time why there are no delta-updates at Apple...
I don’t think that’s true. People complain about tipping culture, which generally demands about 15-20%, sometimes less (e.g. for whatever reason, hotel housekeeping only gets a few dollars even if the room is $100 per night). If tipping 10% was the norm, you think there would barely be any complaining?
The buyer always wants the transaction to be more affordable and the seller always wants the transaction to be more profitable. The exact numbers don’t change that.
I think the thing that angers people is that the cost feels hidden, even if it’s common knowledge. You look at menu prices and see a price but tips, taxes, and credit card processing fees aren’t included. It can take you by surprise if you’re not thinking about it, even if you’ve been through the same dance many times before.
If I were running Apple, I would instead find a way to charge for developer accounts, code signing, etc. Things that are set up ahead of time and can have a known value, charged for upfront. I believe this would feel more fair, no matter the cost.
This is nonsense. Apple executives have repeatedly claimed that the 30% fee was a good deal compared to retail boxed software which they say was the norm in 2005 or so, but really there were large numbers of small independent software vendors making good money through specialised e-commerce vendors like DigitalRiver or the original Kagi with fees in the 8-15% range iirc, or just selling direct with payment processors like PayPal for ~5%. Bandwidth was not a big cost back then and still isn’t today unless you’re doing something like 4K video streaming.
> Kagi with fees in the 8-15% range iirc, or just selling direct with payment processors like PayPal for ~5%. Bandwidth was not a big cost back then and still isn’t today unless you’re doing something like 4K video streaming.
That's untrue, from my experience using Kagi (payment processor and marketplace/in-app SDK) to sell shareware in c. 2010.
Kagi had fixed fees in addition to a percentage, so anything sold for $5 had close to 30% just from Kagi, and my bandwidth also independently ended up close to 30% of my post-marketplace fees.
Hmm, perhaps my memory is from more like the $15-20 price point. Lower sale price would result in greater percentage being eaten by fees for sure. I remember using eSellerate c. 2005 and it was much less than 30%.
It looks like updates can count as a first annual install:
A first annual install may result from an app’s first-time install, a reinstall, or an update from any iOS app distribution option — including the App Store, an alternative app marketplace, TestFlight, an App Clip, volume purchases through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager, and/or a custom app.
However, there's extra mumbo jumbo about "it doesn't count for 12 months after a first install is counted. But the next one after starts a new first annual install."
So it's essentially some kind of twisted Orange County MLM logic.
>So it's essentially some kind of twisted Orange County MLM logic.
Are you referring to something specific here? Does Orange County have some stereotyped association with MLM schemes or something? (I'm genuinely asking as that would be hilarious and I'd love to learn more)
Orange county is stereotypically a hotbed of MLM scams. Stay in a hotel there sometime and half the conference rooms will likely be booked by one or another.
I’m from OC I didn’t know this was our stereotype but I’ve been pitched a bunch of MLM schemes when I was younger. I thought this was all over the place. However I haven’t been pitched anything since at least 10 years ago. Maybe I don’t look like I have a sphere of influence anymore lol
"A first annual install may result from an app’s first-time install, a reinstall, or an update from any iOS app distribution option — including the App Store, an alternative app marketplace, TestFlight, an App Clip, volume purchases through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager, and/or a custom app."
> First annual install. The first time an app is installed by an account in the EU in a 12-month period. After each first annual install, the app may be installed any number of times by the same account for the next 12 months with no additional charge.
This is on a per account basis - not a per device basis. The install for a phone and iPad are the same install.
Note there is zero way to audit this charge from apple. There's no way to identify an install on iOS anymore unless the user signs in/signs up for an account.
There's also usually up to a 10% "breakage" between people who install from the App Store but never run your app.
You don’t have to sign up for an account, an app can install some type of opaque object in iCloud that they can use to identify someone who uses their account.
If I delete Overcast from my iPhone or install it on a brand new iPad, all of my data is kept in sync. That data is stored in a database where the user id is that opaque blob.
Marco Arment (the author) does all he can to discourage users from storing a user name/password/email address as part of the login and only requires you to have one to associate your user to your account to access your podcasts on the web.
But I agree, as expected, this will go to round two.
Probably not even a new DMA just a court case about malicious compliance. The DMA was written expecting apples reaction
Still that they will reduce the commission fee is quite important on its own.
If this reduces the flood of free ad financed apps and moves the market to a more sustainable model I'm all for it (although I realise this stance is probably controversial)
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
The new business terms including the Core Technology Fee are only required for developers who will want to be able to upload their apps to alternative app stores like f-droid:
Pretty clear malicious compliance. "Oh, you want to be able to distribute your popular free apps on other app stores? You gotta start paying us massively then."
I wonder how they should comply with the law in your eyes. What is a fair way for Apple to recoup the investment they make into their developer programs?
- They sell hardware and licensed software to consumers. Within the law they may ask for money for feature updates.
- They also charge developers for access to their tools and access to their store front and payment handling.
That's all legit and if they want to hike prices or put parts of that information behind paywalls, the market will sort it out.
But if a consumer and a third party developer want to do business without all that, then it's my (and the DMAs) stance that apple has no right to a share of that. They EU is increasingly of the opinion that, in general, a device has to serve its owner and not the original manufacturer.
When they want to protect consumers by scanning for known malware that's fine but "Apple loses revenue" is not a threat at all.
So I’ve got to ask, is malicious compliance a real actionable legal theory or is it just something that has been written about but never prosecuted?
It reads like one of those buzzwords that doesn’t actually mean anything useful in a the context of a court of law, at least as a prosecutable offense, but gets talked about like it does, because the statement itself reads like an oxymoron. You’re either compliant with the law or you’re not, and malicious is subjective. Am I off base by saying that? What am I missing?
Yeah, except the text matters a whole lot more than the intent because that’s what you’re going to read and reference when determining how to comply. If the intent is just for Apple to roll over and show their belly, they’re not really obligated to do that. A legislative body can always rewrite laws passed by the same legislative body if the first set of laws isn’t working out the way they hoped, and the EU is a supranational entity formed by treaty between peoples with few in the way of what can be called shared legal traditions or sensibilities so you have to think the text has to really matter here.
So if it comes down to whether Apple is compliant, wouldn’t you just stack up their measures against the law as written? Which would then mean compliance is compliance, and the onus then falls on whatever prosecutorial authority is empowered here to show that it is not.
They will, the question that really matters is will developers. Is the case for DIY that compelling amongst European companies? I think it will cost companies more to rebuild their own walled garden then what it's worth. I suspect we're not going to see much change, and that most will stick with what they have. There doesn't seem to be any financial incentive to leave at this point.
You know these rules were drafted in cooperation with the EU right? Vestager was at Apple's HQ 2 weeks ago, and the EU spends millions to keep a regulator presence in Silicon Valley.
The commission knows they really don't have much to stand on, if they go any farther they know other EU countries are going to step in again (these rules are not very popular anymore after GDPR and now that the EU is falling even farther behind the USA economically).
The EU commission is a lot less powerful than a lot of terminally online Americans like to believe. EU courts constantly rule against them for overstepping their bounds and they have been caught submitting fake evidence before (see: Qualcomm case)
And if that's the case, I'd expect them to be more hostile to American tech companies than European social democrats, because those companies are instruments of American power.
No law like the DMA passes without the approval of parliament and the council of member states. In fact, all the details are hashed out between these two bodies with little to no say from the commission.
BTW: The way the commission is selected is one step removed from the voters but this principle is not too uncommon in European parliamentary democracies. For example the German or Austrian Chancellors or the prime ministers of Italy ,Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Poland are elected in a similar fashion.
It says "each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold" which I think means as long as you're updating your app at least once a year, you pay for each device your app is installed on (minus 1 million, which is a rounding error for the biggest apps).
> First annual install. The first time an app is installed by an account in the EU in a 12-month period. After each first annual install, the app may be installed any number of times by the same account for the next 12 months with no additional charge.
Multiple devices with one account or new devices over the course of the 12 months are still a single install.
> iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
>Developers can choose to adopt these new business terms, or stay on Apple’s existing terms. Developers must adopt the new business terms for EU apps to use the new capabilities for alternative distribution or alternative payment processing.
You don’t have to pay the fee if you stay on the existing business terms.
> Also today, Apple is sharing new business terms available for developers’ apps in the European Union. Developers can choose to adopt these new business terms, or stay on Apple’s existing terms.
Nothing here suggests the new terms replace the existing terms, just that it's now a choice for developers in the EU.
I suppose the difference being gamers seem to hate everything large game companies do, but tech community is pretty split down the middle on Apple being beyond reproach vs them being evil incarnate.
If they publish through the App Store they pay nothing though (for a free app), so won’t this just mean free apps stick to the Apple App Store and apps over the break even price (€0.50/30% commission in the App Store) go to side loading?
A big reason for alternative app stores is to allow apps that do not comply with app store rules though. Think emulators for instance. Or any other of the long list of arbitrary app store rules.
Yeah, I can only see this deal right now being beneficial if it's your only choice due to Apple simply not wanting to host your apps. So, 18+ apps, emulators, various apps banned from the app store over drama (Fortnite).
It's also beneficial if you keep you
1. Keep your install base under 1M. So only if you're sure you have a niche app that you barely need to maintain.
2. If you somehow have a premium popular app. A $2 app would mean Apple is taking a 25% cut, a $5 app is taking 10%. Of course, since this is per device you will probably be hit by users who use multiple devices. Worse yet, apparently the install fee is "first install per year" and includes updates. So you will take a huge revenue dive if you want to maintain, de-incentivizing devs from supporting existing users
3. Manage your own alternative storefront. I feel this is where the deal may start to hit anti-trust issues depending on how the store takes these costs. Apple doesn't have to pay it's own store fee while a new store has to pay Apple for existing. Sounds like a way to suppress competition before it starts.
I guess Epic v Apple part 2 will hit faster than expected.
EDIT: oh, I don't know the logistics, but #4 can be ad supported apps. The most user hostile style of app but potentially one that can keep making it's $0.50 back year after year if they have an engaged user base. But since I know so little about adtech I am happy to be corrected on if this is sustainable
"First install per year". So reinstalls after a year will be charged again. Honestly, it makes sense to charge for the bandwidth Apple provides. I'd rather see it broken out than baked into a 30% fee. Doing so would massively incentivize smaller binary sizes.
Exactly. People would conisder these alternative stores precisely so they don't have to rely on Apple's Bandwidth. But Apple apparently wants to get their money no matter how you host your app, and $100/seat/year is not enough money for them I suppose.
> Honestly, it makes sense to charge for the bandwidth Apple provides
The bandwidth that everyone is forced to use. The web has shown that decentralizing distribution is not only possible but works well. This is just another way for the worlds most profitable company to continue to rent seek.
Yes also for updates or pushed via mdm. But only once per account. Doesn’t matter how many devices you have on that account. It counts as 1 install every year.
As an aside, look how clear and well-written this web page is. I'm always blown away by how well the whole Apple ecosystem (even the the developer documentation) is designed
This means that alternative app stores will essentially not be allowed to distribute free apps, right? As soon as they reach the install threshold they will start owing Apple money. And distributing an update counts as an "install" for the purposes of the fee: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
I think this point is going to be the biggest sticking point to EU regulators. Third party app stores not being able to reasonably distribute free apps is a massive competitive disadvantage.
>Any apps distributed through third parties pay their own CTF if they meet the threshold.
But that cost to free apps means that useful free apps won't sign up to the program, and therefore won't be available in the third party stores. It's a distinction without a difference. While I'm sure Apple will argue the distinction when they get pulled up on this, it's pretty obvious that the EU is expecting viable 3rd party stores and Apple will be forced to deliver it. The more they screw around the more likely that EU will set stronger regulations with less discretion on implementation.
GP was talking about alternative stores picking up the tab for the apps they distribute. That’s simply not the case.
Now you bring up a new concern.
Namely that useful free apps would get so popular outside of the App Store that they’ll reach 1M installs on EU iPhones within a given year and that the cost per install they owe over installs in excess of that 1M would be prohibitively costly that they’d rather not.
I think that’s a pretty significant difference from the other scenario, one in which alternative stores are on the hook for all the apps they host.
Normally I would chalk it up to a difference of opinion, but we’re talking about significant factual differences.
Meta-discussion aside, I struggle to come up with an example of such an app that currently exists and would be subject to that CTF.
Non-profits, educational institutions and governments are exempt, so you’d almost certainly end up with an app by a company that extracts value out of it whether as a companion app to a service or some startup that’s burning through runway money.
Ultimately Apple wants to be paid for their IP, for the use of their frameworks and toolchain.
Earlier this week some people were saying that Apple then should split off the fee for that from the commission.
This is exactly that, and at a progressive rate where the first million installs is free, seems fair enough to me.
I see no viability issues for third party stores here because one way or another there is no free lunch.
> The more they screw around the more likely that EU will set stronger regulations with less discretion on implementation.
As someone who used to practice law in the EU on an EU and international level this always makes me chuckle.
The EU and its bodies are not some benevolent dictatorship that can do whatever they want.
They too need to move within the bounds of the law and have been burned when crossing those boundaries.
The DMA in its current form hasn’t even been subjected to adjudication, which on its own is going to be quite interesting, much less some hypothetical v2 that is stricter.
The main hurdle for the EU (and the US for that matter) is IP and property rights.
You can’t legislate your way around that without significant overhaul which would reverberate across all of commerce.
Or put plainly: you can’t just say “what’s yours is now public domain”.
Closest you’re ever going to get is “what’s yours should be sold at a reasonable price to others” and it’s going to be one hell of a burden to convince a court that this isn’t a reasonable price at any given day, much less when there ample examples in the market that charge more.
Another, more fundamental issue specific to the EU is that European courts really don’t like laws that look like they target a specific company or individual. The DMA’s issue is that it doesn’t just look like that, it outright broadcasts that it does that.
Apple had a decent chance at fighting the DMA as it currently exists, so to be quite honest, I expected them to make some basic concessions, await enforcement actions by the EC and then fight that tooth and nail.
Instead, to my utter surprise, they capitulated in nearly everything and then went above and beyond the DMA requirements.
The purpose of that is clear, to establish a very strong legal posture for the inevitable court case.
> The main hurdle for the EU (and the US for that matter) is IP and property rights. You can’t legislate your way around that without significant overhaul which would reverberate across all of commerce.
What?
Developing, compiling, distributing, and having users run an iOS app is not a "use of Apple's IP". The use of Xcode, SDKs, header files, etc is. What happens when an open-source SDK that is completely free of any Apple-copyrighted code comes around? What would the use of Apple's IP be then?
I ask this not as a gotcha, it’s a serious question.
There is no way to write an app that doesn’t use a single piece of Apple code.
Create a new project in Xcode, simply write print(“Hello, world!) right click on the print method, click “Jump to Definition” and you get to read Apple’s code.
To say nothing of all the boilerplate stuff (and more importantly all the stuff underneath it that is automatically created when you create a new project and that is necessary to run the app.
The open source SDK you talk about might be completely free of Apple’s code, but it most definitely makes use of Apple’s code.
> The open source SDK you talk about might be completely free of Apple’s code, but it most definitely makes use of Apple’s code.
It "makes use of Apple's code" in the sense that it calls iOS APIs. But the resulting binary wouldn't have Apple's IP, which is what matters for the purposes of copyright and patent law. When saying something "uses" an IP, we generally mean the exclusive rights granted to the holder by law. Merely interacting with an already-existing API on an already-existing copy of iOS is not "use".
If the opposite were true, all third-party aftermarket accessories for physical (patented) products that merely plugged in to the mechanisms and didn't implement them themselves would be illegal.
The way this always works is the law says “X”, then various parties come up with self serving interpretations of what “X” means, if they don’t mutually align they may go to a judge to figure out who’s definition of “X” will prevail.
It’s a dance, everybody knows the steps. Tech companies know the longer they can keep making money with their version of “X” the better - even if they know damn well they will lose when it goes to trial - which can take over a decade in some cases.
Microsoft practically invented the game, Google and Meta perfected it, and Apple is catching up.
I think the EU is going to have a hard time changing this, though. Because if Apple can't make money from licensing fees, they're asking Apple to spend all the engineering time developing APIs, xCode, etc. for free. They have the money, but in business it's not great to have a business unit operate without its own revenue or a path to profitability.
If you've ever worked in an engineering team in a regulated market, this is commonplace. Regulators aren't here to ensure you, the regulated party, can make money. They are in place to ensure the marketplace as a whole is fair(ish). Compliance is costly.
Except that this regulation only applies to so-called gatekeepers, so it doesn't affect 99.9% of the companies out there. Even if you made your own phone with it's own app store, until you have a sizable part of the market, you won't be a gatekeeper under the DMA.
A lot of sensible regulation provides escape hatches for smaller companies to avoid the huge costs of compliance. The exception is where there should be absolutely no exceptions, like medical regulation or privacy.
> they're asking Apple to spend all the engineering time developing APIs, xCode, etc. for free
I find such arguments more than absurd,
1. They have no issue doing that on macOS
2. Apple needs third party developers as much as the other way around. They are not doing this for free, they would sell a lot less devices if third party Apps weren't supported.
They already regulate how high credit card interchange fees can be, even though the banks had to spend money on building and maintaining the credit card infrastructure. They also regulate how high mobile roaming costs may be, even though cellular networks have cost hundreds of billions to build. Of course, they're only doing that because the interchange fees and roaming charges were abuse of market power and in no proportion to the cost of actually providing the service. Just like Apple's Core Tech Fee is.
So there's not going to be any problem with putting limits on the amount of money Apple can leech. Nor will there be any downside to doing it. Apple will not put any less effort into their platform or tooling even if such limits were in place. Nor is there any chance that Apple will abandon the EU market.
(If Apple was charging a nominal fee instead of a punitive one, they'd have a much better argument. But for Apple, it's not about the money they make from the technology fee. It's about making sure that the regulation can't actually achieve its purpose of promoting competition, because Apple will have smothered the competition in the crib.)
Apple's lawyers have been working hard to make it non-viable for third-party app stores while still complying with the law I guess. Sounds like this will be a no go in it's first incarnation and EU will have to come back with an even stricter version probably removing all control from Apple. EU does not fuck around when it comes down to it with things like this.
Another example: It used to be that telecom companies used to milk cross country calls and data within the EU. The competition to provide cheap calls between countries was basically not working. So EU made it a requirement that you should not pay any extra at all for international calls between EU countries, and whatever data package you bought at home works everywhere within the EU with no extra charges.
> So EU made it a requirement that you should not pay any extra at all for international calls between EU countries, and whatever data package you bought at home works everywhere within the EU with no extra charges.
Arguably that's not a new requirement, but simply the EU enforcing the existing single market rules.
> Before Intra-EU communications were capped, the average standard price of a fixed or mobile intra-EU call tended to be three times higher than the standard price of a domestic call. While the standard price of an intra-EU SMS was more than twice as expensive as a domestic one. In some cases the standard price of an intra-EU call was up to ten times higher than the standard price for domestic calls.
For how long? EU is also pretty good at coming after companies. Remember when Apple dodged switching from Lightning when micro-USB was a thing and now they're forced into USB-C?
What was the advantage to me as a consumer if a 2015 iPhone got USB-C? IMO, USB-C wasn’t an advantage over Lightning then. (USB-C was not yet a common connector and most Apple users already had Lightning cables or could get by with the one included with the phone. Apple users had 3 years of orientation-independent convenience before USB-C arrived.)
I still find plugging in the Lightning cable to be easier (less precise alignment needed) than a USB-C and by the time the iPhone 8 arrived with magnetic charging, any charging advantage to USB-C went away.
“Forced into”, as if apple hasn’t been producing literally every other items besides iphones with usb-c, based on their own choices.
Of course if there were a law like that, they will rather point their fingers at the EU, over their users blaming apple for the slight inconvenience of changing.
Apple has zero leverage here. First, they are a foreign company so there is no local sympathy like in the Epic case. Secondly, the EU is already pissed off with Apple, hence the DMA. Thirdly, even if Apple doesn’t care what the EU thinks, their shareholders surely do, since the EU has the capacity to inflict huge financial damage on Apple, via fines, import bans and/or much more punitive regulations.
IANAL, but this probably doesn't pass the requirement of the DMA to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. In many scenarios, these terms favor choosing the old terms where apps can only be distributed through Apple's App Store. In other words, Apple is using its gatekeeper position to benefit themselves, which is exactly what can't be done in the DMA.
They won't sign your store app and it won't install on anyone's phone. And they'll probably add any previously signed versions to a revocation list so existing installs of your store will be deleted immediately along with all the apps you distributed. That's the power of remaining a gatekeeper...
What? How do you think they support developing the OS, running security, notarizing and reviewing your apps etc.
This needs to be funded somehow.
I'm surprised there are commenters who have such a strong view - that they should just be able to access all the benefits of the iOS ecosystem that Apple has built over many years, and then have all that access for free too.
Apple sells hardware. They don't give away software for free, you (generally) need their hardware per their licensing agreements.
You have to pay Apple $99/year to develop software for their ecosystem.
I pay them for their hardware, I pay them to let me write software -- you want me to pay them when others use my software? What about when others view photos I take with my phone? Do they want a cut of that too?
How anyone can think Apple's stance here is reasonable is beyond me. I haven't paid Microsoft anything in over a decade, I wonder how they can afford to fund Windows development?
> One million free first annual installs. Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store and/or alternative marketplaces. [0]
For alternative app stores specifically: "First annual installs included in your Apple Developer Program membership can’t be used for marketplace apps."
It's not free for Apple to host free apps either. Free apps get subsidized by IAP and other paid apps. An alternate app store would subsidize the install cost for free apps with the money they make from their cut of IAP and paid apps.
Which is why the real solution is for a mechanism to install code on an iOS device 100% outside of Apple's control similar to side loading on Android.
I don't trust Apple at all with their capricious and arbitrary blocking of apps/updates. It was bad enough when it appeared to be mostly due to incompetence, but after what they did politically (and in concert with Google, Twitter and Facebook) to Parlor that's when any creditability they had for me in curating the app store went out the window. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, when a company starts to go down that path it's a danger for all of us.
But why? Apple is providing the whole ecosystem, operating system, security, notarization etc - there are costs to be covered.
Of course there are costs incurred per install. Previously there were covered by a higher 30% fee on app costs. Now, with opening up the platform to alternative stores, the EU has pushed Apple to a per-install model.
So to me, this seems completely reasonable as a standard iPhone user.
I understand the security and performance of the platform costs more - that is why I use an iPhone not an Android.
As I understand this, no app developer is forced to change to the new terms:
> New Business Terms for Apps in the EU
Also today, Apple is sharing new business terms available for developers’ apps in the European Union. Developers can choose to adopt these new business terms, or stay on Apple’s existing terms. Developers must adopt the new business terms for EU apps to use the new capabilities for alternative distribution or alternative payment processing.
I don’t understand this at all, is this really how it will work now?
Even if you sell an App for 2€ that would mean you will lose all the income from it to fees in 4 years if you release at least one update per year that users install? I must be missing something?
I don’t think your missing something. This is Apple’s way of discouraging use of an alternative app store for popular apps, or alternatively, of encouraging subscription models.
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install
emphasis added on and/or; it seems like Apple is being forced to break down fees according roughly to their costs (?). Maybe installs from altapp stores cost them some resources because they want to verify the notarization each time?
Apps don’t have to pay for notarization on MacOS, and nobody forces Apple to perform notarization in the first place. It’s also implausible that there would be any notable cost per install.
That is the point. This is malicious compliance, presumably they expect to get away with it while the legislative/legal systems in the EU spend years grinding through the process of figuring out how to punish Apple for it.
Yeah, why not? Stop selling the app when you hit 1 million and have a new version from a new company and just license the brand or whatever to the new one.
Companies do these kind of trickeries all the time. That's how they avoid paying taxes: by technically being within their rights. It doesn't matter if everyone knows what they are doing.
Apple's EU HQ is in Ireland and its totally selling the product from there, German companies are definitely don't sell restricted parts to Russia, they are selling it to Kazakhstan and Kazakstan suddenly had success with selling stuff to Russia, all the SV startups are incorporated in Delaware, all the Ships are Panaman and all kind of products that are assembled just the right way to avoid ban or taxes but can be reconfigured to do the banned thing.
Even at this very topic, Apple is trying to comply in such a way to circumvent actually allowing to freely install apps to iPhones.
This is an unacceptable comment for Hacker News. Just because you strongly disagree with this person on software funding doesn't give you any reason assume they disagree with...feeding the homeless?
Not sure what you're on about. It's actually illegal to feed the homeless in certain American cities and you can get fined for doing so. This is called an analogy.
It just means that the bar has been raised, no? There has been a certain accepted cost of doing business in the Apple sphere for years. They're just changing the price.
If you want to publish a retro-gaming emulator as a hobby/open-source project, you can’t do that on Apple’s app store. And on a third-party app store you’ll have to pay Apple millions once it becomes popular (which would seem likely).
Since apps are still subject to Apple’s review process even on third-party app stores, they are likely to reject this because it obviously circumvents the new business terms (if it doesn’t violate them outright).
Previously you only had to pay the yearly $99 for the developer account, and then could publish free apps to your heart’s content (subject to Apple’s app review process, of course).
I think you are underestimating how many apps get over 1M downloads. According to [1], the Google Play Store has over 34000 apps with 1M+ installs, I assume the number is similar for the App Store.
So if you have a popular free app, there is a good chance you will hit the 1M install threshold. This change is basically forcing you to monetize your app. Plenty of people can afford losing $99/year for having a free app that isn't monetized. Not many can afford losing several thousand per month.
The Core Technology Fee still only applies if you want to either
a) distribute outside the Apple App Store, or
b) pay the lower 17%/10% commission.
If you're already distributing the app for free, then you're not going to care about (b), so this only applies to apps that meet all three of the following criteria:
1. Free
2. Popular enough to significantly breach that 1M install threshold
3. Distributed through an alternative App Store
Anyone who has a popular free app out there right now doesn't need to change anything; they'll continue to have exactly the same expenses they had yesterday.
Maybe I'm misreading the original article, but it sounds like it would also apply to apps distributed only through the regular App Store:
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
Only if they choose the “new” terms, they can stay on the existing terms if they want to distribute through the App Store, as it’s free so the commission change doesn’t matter.
Basically seems to kill off Facebook forcing people to a Meta App Store for the free FaceBook app (and thus not being subject to App Store review, which has stopped some of the more brutal privacy invasions they’ve tried)
Small fraction of users but a huge fraction of the market share (and revenue generation share). Being that the DMA was specifically targeting these two things it seems quite at odds with "A free app like Chrome must pay us millions if it wants to distribute itself instead of using the legacy terms deemed illegal". If they didn't allow legacy terms it'd have a bit more of a leg to stand for opening the markets, same as if it didn't apply to apps distributed via third party, but the way it is now seems a contentious combination.
Imagine the new attack vector: You have a mildly successful free/very cheap app. Your competitor starts advertising your app, pushing it up over the 1m threshold and forcing you to start charging (or increase your price) to pay the core charge.
There's also no 1MM install threshold if you list your app on an alternative App Store, which seems like it will kill the attractiveness of using a different storefront unless you're a developer with a an app that has a recurring subscription that's either a) just not allowed on Apple's storefront, and/or b) has an subscription price expensive enough that the $0.50 annual fee is less than the amount of commission you're avoiding from Apple.
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
Sounds to me like developers have to pay the per user fee no matter where the app is distributed.
It's not, actually. It's the salaries of the engineers who work on the frameworks and OS that underpin the apps these developers are writing.
Are you proposing we should go back to charging users for software updates? Personally, I think it makes more sense to take a cut from other people doing business on top of the platform.
If they can't fund OS development without their App Store profits, which I highly doubt, then they should charge more for their OS.
It cannot be a valid argument against regulation that your monopoly product supports other nonprofitable parts of your business.
Such constructions are hurting competition and maintaining the status quo. It is very difficult to compete against a product which is priced unsustainably cheap.
Profit from the iPhone business alone should be much more than enough to pay those OS/framework developers since Apple claims that iOS and iPhone are indivisible/unsubstitutable parts to each other.
If Apple inexplicably chooses to sell iDevices so cheaply that they can't afford to pay the people who build the software for it, that's their mistake. The EU isn't forcing them to do that, neither are app developers. They've had years to remedy any pricing mistakes they made in the past and price their hardware appropriately.
They also pull in billions of dollars every year from their 30% cut on gambling/gacha games, and do almost nothing to earn that (those games have to provide their own updater/CDN because the Apple/Google ones aren't good enough, and those games don't meaningfully rely on Apple/Google for things like quality assurance or marketing.) Apple will be fine even if their Europe-specific cut is halved.
Claiming they're going to suffer or be unable to pay employees is simply not supported by any evidence.
There's a difference between the one-time upfront cost of purchasing a device, and the recurring cost of supporting it with software updates (which is, in the most recent case, sometimes mandated). It's not a "pricing mistake".
You can bake that into the list price of the device based on how long you offer warranty coverage and/or updates. Every device vendor is already doing this unless they're completely clueless.
Yes it is a pricing mistake. If I only use the built-in apps, Apple will earn nothing from my app usage, but they still have to provide security updates. And that should be the end of it.
Yet they managed to do this for years for free when they had their walled garden up and and supposedly offered so much value to developers with their app store and such
Would it be possible to create multiple separate apps each having max 1M users?
This Firefox1 app would host first million, then be removed from store but still provide updates. It would be replaced by Firefox2 app. And so?
Is there some clause in the contracts that says apps from same source will count as single app, no matter how many times they are uploaded as separate app?
It could easily fall under a fraud or abuse clause. If you decide to play games, Apple would be more than happy to pull their authorization and ban you out of spite. Now none of your apps work.
It's unlikely but they could also pull a google and ban any company who hires you in the future.
Maybe not side projects, but I'm running Android and Kde Connect, Home Assistant, Element or Mastodon are all listed as having more than 1 million install. I can't imagine these FOSS projects paying any significant amount of money just to distribute their free apps.
OsmAnd has more than 10 million installs, VLC more than 100 million. Can you imagine the fees? They obviously don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand to pay every month to Apple.
>>OsmAnd has more than 10 million installs, VLC more than 100 million. Can you imagine the fees? They obviously don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand to pay every month to Apple.
VideoLAN (VLC developer) is a non-profit so they are exempt from the Core Technology Fee even if they distribute on an alternate app store.
"OsmAnd is developed by a Dutch private limited company, OsmAnd B.V. located in Amstelveen, the Netherlands"[1] so it looks like they would be subject to the CTF if they choose to distribute from an alternate app store or utilize a non-Apple payment processor; or they could stick to the existing business terms and continue as-is in the Apple App Store.
Afaik there are currently no exceptions to apple's 30% fee. There are some apps, like netflix, that dont have to provide a link to subscribe, but I think thats the biggest exception.
And there won't be since Google just got caught giving Spotify a lower rate and now face anti-trust issues. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't give certain apps certain permissions. AFAIK, Apple gives Google special permission to enable VP9/AV1 formats decoding [0] and that's just what we know of.
Whether you like it or not, we're heading towards a future where Apple and Google choose who wins and who loses. A good app built on merit will never be able to compete.
The Epic v. Apple trial showed that no one got special deals. And Epic v. Google did show Google gave many companies special deals, like Spotify. Ironically that played a big part with the jury deciding against Google.
What are the differences between using AVPlayer and MPV?
AVPlayer is a system player component delivered by Apple. It provides best efficiency, performance and system integrations, but number of playable videos formats is limited. This means for Invidious/Piped videos the maximum resolution you can play with it is 1080p. There's no way to play higher resolution files as they are not provided in the right formats. Obviously, modern Apple devices are more than capable to hardware decode and play these formats. And in fact, Apple seems to be giving special entitlement to Google that allows them to enable VP9/AV1 formats decoding. Just remember that next time you hear how Apple treats all developers equally.
It’s from 2020 so it might’ve changed but it proves Apple gives certain apps special privileges. Who knows which other apps are given privileges and to what extent?
I think Apple will be a lot more hurt by not having Youtube on their devices than the other way around. Youtube is ubiquitous and has no alternative. If I was Alphabet, the price would be 0.
Not likely. I haven't had YouTube installed on my device in 18 months (mostly because of Google's insistence on using it as an authentication verifier).
YouTube works in browser, but the native iOS app offers a much more polished experience than the mobile web UI, especially for actually browsing the library.
It can ask for permissions like push notifications, I can't install ad-blockers on it, and they otherwise get more control over it. They even seem to intentionally treat web users a little better, cause I just got a full-sized homepage ad in the app for TikTok of all things, with a download button. The site doesn't have that, and I made sure to disable my blocker. Maybe they consider app users more captive of an audience, or they simply bring changes to it first that are generally about further monetization.
Not a huge deal though. In the past, pre-iOS-10 Safari was immune to the "no background playback" rule the app had, and before that, the site had no preroll ads while the app did, so it was a clearer difference.
> if Roblox, Youtube and Netflix went Android only then I'd be replacing all of our iPads with Android Tablets post-haste
Sure. Most wouldn’t. YouTube and Netflix would lose tens of billions of present value overnight. Hell, Apple might capture a good fraction of that surplus.
Yeah sure, people will give up on YouTube and Netflix to use iOS, that's not going to happen. They'll suffer through using Safari to access those and that'll reduce the perceived value of iOS devices for future purchases since it will be seen as clunky and not seamless.
Not being able to use YouTube properly is also one of the reasons (among others) of why Windows mobile failed.
Youtube is a monopoly and there's no way around it.
> they have a 100% market share on this kind of format
YouTube videos being the format?
Google owns YouTube. Google pays Apple tens of billions to keep its search front and centre. If Google thought YouTube had the leverage you do, wouldn’t you think they’d try swinging that around?
Yeah sure there's a few countries where it's not the case, that's why I mentioned that but it's rare.
People can usually replace the app X with an app Y but there's a few apps which are categorically needed on a phone otherwise it hurts the phone itself. Banks & government apps are part of those and Youtube is one as well.
Those are the ones really preventing a third company to join in.
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
You can stick with the existing terms, or switch to the new ones (which is when the core technology fee kicks in) -- you only have to switch to the new ones if you want to use your own payment processor or distribute on another app store.
So they've basically made distributing popular free apps on an alternative app store really unappealing.
"Developers can choose to adopt these new business terms, or stay on Apple’s existing terms. Developers must adopt the new business terms for EU apps to use the new capabilities for alternative distribution or alternative payment processing. "
Yeah apparently they will be according to the article…
“ iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.”
One thing EU regulators could do is to say "ok but you have to charge the iOS user for it instead of the developer". Then if users accept it - fine, let them have it.
The same should go for 30% appstore fee: make it explicit and add it to the user's bill: "1$ for the developer and your card is also charged separately with 30c Apple tax".
That would actual competition for the best platform real.
This only applies if these developers move to the new terms it looks like. So these large apps can stay with their existing setups and not pay the fee.
This only applies to install numbers within the EU.
It’s exactly what many have said Apple should do to get payment for usage of their IP: split it from the commission.
So now you can pay separately for the IP, separately for payment processing and separately for App Store services or a combination of all of the above.
As far as I can tell, it's a bit more subtle than that. What Apple is doing is offering developers either the old deal (with all its now-illegal restrictions) or the new deal that removes the restrictions but adds the punitive Core Technology Fee. The intent is obviously for nobody with a large app to take the new deal, but for Apple to be able to claim that they've lowered the App Store fees and made allowed alternate stores.
I think Apple is delusional in thinking that the EU will buy into this scheme, but who knows.
If they give in "without a fight" by following the spirit of the law (or even the letter) they will use a lot of income.
Companies are not our friends (not our enemies either) and only form a fleeting alliance if the goal of makeing money aligns with the interest of the user.
This is what I came here to find out. So it seems Apple will still get their cut. Seems they are nerfing things to make the existing App Store more appealing.
But I guess Tim Sweeney won in the EU. He gets his new AppStore so he can charge his own commission on gems and fake tokens.
And game streaming seems interesting I guess we will get Xbox streaming gaming on the Apple platform after all.
50 cents per install per year is hilarious trolling from Apple. Who wants to place bets on who will sue them first over this detail? Will it be the EU? Epic Games?
* Reduced commission: 30% -> 17%
* Payment processing fee: No fee to Apple
Some big mobile games may opt in this option by removing IAP and using their own payment processor, if "update"s are not considered as "install"s. Looks like Apple is desperate on keeping those apps in their app store?
*First annual install.* This is the first time an app is installed by an account in the EU in a 12-month period. After each first annual install, the app may be installed any number of times by the same account for the next 12 months with no additional charge. A first annual install may result from an app’s first-time install, a reinstall, or an update from any iOS app distribution option — including the App Store, an alternative app marketplace, TestFlight, an App Clip, volume purchases through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager, and/or a custom app.
*One million free first annual installs.* Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store and/or alternative marketplaces.
*Fee for each first annual install over one million.* Developers will pay a Core Technology Fee of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.
Eh, we know from the DoJ trial Google is already sending trucks full of cash down to Cupertino every day for search defaults. This may just add a little extra overhead on the next “protection” payment.
However the economics have changed now. It’s no longer practically free to support iOS. So some companies could make a reasonable argument that supporting iOS is too expensive when only a fraction of their customers do in app purchases from Apple hardware. So from Apple’s perspective, they now have more to lose in not making deals. While app developers have more to lose in supporting Apple.
This might just tip the scales into forcing Apple to negotiate on more than just app permissions.
There is significant cost associated with complying with the ever increasing demands of the EU. I have seen this personally. It makes sense that they have to recuperate this somehow.
Europe has a fairly blase attitude towards compliance costs in general.
For example, the official EC report on the cost impact of the EU AI Act finds that, for businesses who already have a Quality Management System (QMS), "An enterprise employing 50 persons would pay roughly EUR 159,000-EUR 202,000 for upgrading and maintaining the QMS, and bringing one AI product to market." (Notably, that estimate excludes costs of legal review.)
Around 200000 EUR for one product making use of AI would be seen as a heavy burden on startups and small enterprises in much of the world, but as far as I can tell, it's considered not particularly noteworthy by the EC.
Apple's cost structure announced today probably needs to be assessed in that context. Tech companies doing business in Europe are already used to various additional compliance-related costs of doing business.
Apple chooses this level of control for the iOS store. Being told your previous version was illegal doesn't entitle you to recoup the costs of compliance.
The use of language here, such as the word "illegal", is a psychological trick. It's an intentional conflation with past behavior/the status quo with being "immoral" (as illegal implies immoral).
Apple is never gonna financially recover from these impossible demands.
Come on now, that is utter nonsense. Apple has simply found a way to make even more money out of what seemed like a bad deal for them. They are not recuperating anything, they are increasing revenue.
> Apple is never gonna financially recover from these impossible demands.
That's not at all what I said. These regulations are increasing the cost of business in the EU. I'd much rather have those costs paid by those who democratically (?) decided these regulations that those in other countries who decided otherwise.
This is from a US small non-profit, and small for-profit operating with way less than $1M in funding, and not necessarily intending to deal with people in the EU context: Not every company has money to pay for the hours to ensure they are GDPR compliant, so they opt out of serving EU clients altogether. It's not always a problem forever, but it's definitely a blocker sometimes.
How is it any different than an EU company complying with Russian/US/whatever laws?
International laws have always been crazy expensive, if anything, being able to (mostly) target quite a big market by only making it EU-aware is more of a plus, than a negative.
That’s the thing: when I come onto a project they might not even know, nor have the hours to allocate to figure it out, and I ain’t working for free to figure it out.
Let me make this clearer: I'm not trying to do anything but work a job. These aren't my apps, and it's not a "me problem", but a them problem. I'm just the third party messenger relaying anecdotes.
Cookie disclosure/consent can be an issue, and again, sometimes companies would rather just not serve EU clients altogether than build a simple disclosure and not set any cookies. Not saying that's good or bad, but that's just what it is.
If you don't want to share what these apps are doing yet insist EU laws are troublesome, you won't be surprised for people to interpret them as doing something unneeded or anti user instead of just some "legal complexity barrier".
The apps could be perfectly fine, its just that people will speculate.
You’re happy with only large tech giants existing then. Because lots of regulations are just barriers to entry and allow the existing players to keep playing
The problem is the same argument also works in reverse: few regulations just make it easier for larger players to block smaller players from operating via dishonest business practices.
Ultimately existing players always have the advantage.
As a side note: the startup world is thriving in Europe. So EU regulations can’t be that high of a barrier ;)
Personally, I don't think this works in real life. Consumers catch on to dishonest business practices and want choose new market options if/when they becomes available, and do not need a nanny state to pick winners and losers. If anything, excessive regulation and legal hurdles impede and prevent this market force from working as it should. Internet providers in the US are a perfect example of this in action: why would these virtual monopolies want to provide a better product if it's so hard for competition to materialize? They are incentivized to offer a less than ideal product while also lobbying for increased or maintained regulation to ensure the status quo. This isn't capitalism, but cronyism.
Also, which startups are thriving in Europe with global appeal? Genuinely, un-sarcastically, curious.
> Consumers catch on to dishonest business practices and want choose new market options if/when they becomes available,
That almost never happens
> Internet providers in the US are a perfect example of this in action: why would these virtual monopolies want to provide a better product if it's so hard for competition to materialize?
Infrastructure costs is why you don’t see hundreds of competitors. New companies either need the capital to build new infrastructure, in which case they are usually more expensive due to economies of scale, or they have to resell someone else’s infrastructure. In which case they can only be as good as the monopolies.
The ironic thing is in the UK there aren’t any monopolies in ISP. There is lots of healthy competition. So your example regarding deregulation proves the opposite of your point.
Take the last link, for example, United Airlines scores low in customer satisfaction yet people still fly with them. Facebook might be hated yet people still use it.
Most people either too lazy or too cheap to boycott businesses they don’t like. And that’s assuming they even have a choice, because often there really isn’t much of an alternative to choose from.
That’s exactly my point. They don’t have to, yet they do.
Hence why you’re wrong in claiming that people are principled enough to boycott businesses at a scale that makes any difference to that business.
You claim that badly behaved businesses would just lose the custom and yet all the evidence out there proves that just doesn’t happen. Or at least not to the extent that amounts to anything more than a rounding error on their books.
I had said that, “Consumers catch on to dishonest business practices and want [to] choose new market options if/when they become available”.
So you agree then?
And ya know what, I think that’s BS: you definitely have a choice and if you think you can’t follow through you’re weak. You definitely don’t need to use facebook for anything and you don’t need to fly either. It’s a choice, mate, and if you don’t think you have a choice you’re weak.
Normally I’d be fine to agree to disagree, but you only have to look at the last 100 years of consumer habits to see exactly what I’m talking about. This isn’t something that’s nuanced. It’s clear as plain as day.
It's not like these companies are trying to steal your private data. They just don't see working through legal compliance as worth the squeeze — especially when they are young and don't have the resources to comply properly.
edit:
> worthy of the European market.
Also, what an entitled, elitist thing to say. Maybe the US would be better off pulling out of Nato and letting Europe alone after all.
I think you responded to the wrong comment by accident, because nowhere did the parent user say that the companies they worked with were trying to take users' data, or had trouble with privacy-related EU law.
Don't forget to double-check to make sure you're responding to the right comment!
A related effort is the NYC MTA's 10-year project to bring cell connectivity to subway tunnels (not just stations). You can already experience this if you take the L from Manhattan to Brooklyn: you will have continuous cell connectivity from the First Ave station to the Bedford Ave station. https://new.mta.info/press-release/mta-announces-universal-s...
It's not clear from the article whether the Underground is trying to add between-station cell coverage?
There is between station coverage. On the northern line I have been in-tunnel and got a solid full-signal 5g with 130mbps on speed.cloudflare.com tests for example.
I like Evan’s 2009 post a lot, but I like John’s analysis here even better. John seems to make fewer assumptions; in particular, Evan assumes a 95% confidence bound.
In Evan’s derivation, which derives the lower Wilson confidence interval on a binomial distribution, the confidence level is a parameter — you can replace it with any level desired. He just happened to use 1.96 for 95%.
John’s derivation is not based on the Wilson score but a Bayesian update on a beta distribution. They’re actually different algorithms. He starts a beta(1,1) and keeps updating. The advantage of John’s method is you get the variance as well but now to sort you have to technically calculate differences between normal distributions which is more involved (or you can ignore the variance and sort by the mean)
Both work for normalizing sort order so that small samples don’t get biased. But as the sample sizes get larger they both converge to the expectation by the law of large numbers.
I personally use the Wilson score method in my work and it’s easy to calculate and good enough for all practical purposes.
Jupytext provides a system for version controlling notebooks, code reviewing them, and using them in the context of a larger Python project, without imposing any constraints on the larger project, because Jupytext saves notebooks as plain .py files.
I ended up choosing Jupytext for a personal project because it seemed less complex than nbdev. (I never made it through the 90 minute nbdev introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7zS8Ld4_iA).
Are there advantages of nbdev over Jupytext that I'm missing out on?
Yes, nbdev is a system that "compiles" notebooks to python scripts, tests and documentation all from one source of truth. Jupytext cannot do this (nor was it designed to)
None of the frontier LLMs (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude) produce usable designs when just prompted with some photos of the pump and a written description of the mount. I'm now building a simulator in Mujoco that the LLMs can use to test and iterate on their designs to see if they can do better in this setting.
I'm hoping to make an interesting blog post of it and maybe end up with a usable wall mount design.