Play the game

Re: Apple’s convoluted EU policies

It's surprising how often D&D is relevant in my everyday life. Most people who play D&D are in it to have fun. They follow the rule - not just the letter of the law, but the spirit.

But every once in a while you'll encounter a "rules lawyer," a player who's more concerned with making sure you observe and obey every tiny rule, punish every pecadillo, than actually having fun.

All the worse when it's your GM, the person in charge of running the game.

But there's one thing you learn quickly - if someone is trying to game the rules, the only way to win (or have any fun) is play the game right back.

For smaller/mid-tier devs, if you're only offering free apps you should probably just continue in the App Store.

But for larger devs who might run afoul of the new guidelines where apps distributed outside the App Store get charged a fee every time they go over a million users?

Oops, Apple just created collectible apps, where if you have Facebook (and not Facebook2), we know you got in early. Think about it: Same codebase, different appId. The external app stores can even set up mechanisms for this to work - every time you hit 999,000 installs, it creates a new listing that just waits for you to upload the new binary (and switches when you hit 995K). Now your users are incentivized to download your app early, in case becomes the big thing. Lower app # is the new low user ID.

If I'm Microsoft, I'm putting a stunted version of my app in the App Store (maybe an Office Documents Viewer?) for free, with links telling them if they want to edit they have go to the Microsoft App Store to download the app where Apple doesn't get a dime (especially if Microsoft uses the above trick to roll over the app every 995K users).

Even in the world where (as I think is the case in this one) Apple says all your apps have to be on the same licensing terms (so you can't have some App Store and some off-App Store), it costs barely anything to create a new LLC (and certainly less than the 500K it would cost if your app hits a million users). Apple's an Irish company, remember? So one of your LLCs is App Store, and the other is external.

To be clear, I don't like this setup. I think the iPhone should just allow sideloading, period. Is all of this more complicated for developers? Absolutely! Is the minimal amount of hassle worth saving at least 30% percent of your current revenue (or minimum $500K if you go off-App Store)? For dev shops of a certain size, I would certainly think so.

The only way to have fun with a rules lawyer is to get them to relax, or get them to leave the group. You have to band together to make them see the error of their ways, or convince them it's so much trouble it's not worth bothering to argue anymore.