neoncat

retrogusto said:

Let’s see a show of hands—how many would like to see a change in the way the App Store is run vs. how many would like to see a change in the way congress is run. 

And which would make a bigger and more positive impact?

I'll take your bait. Speaking only for myself, I'd be happy to see the entire App Store paradigm burned to the ground, and then burned again. But this reflects my own preferences. I am not so strident that I can't see how the structure, as it exists, serves a certain class of user quite well. 

tokyojimu said:

Should be pretty cheap since the composers are mostly long dead (and out of copyright).

Composers may be dead and no longer subject to copyright protection, but the performances and performers are not. Classical CDs (the ones that aren't, you know, "The 10 Best Classical Songs EVAH! Volume 37") were often more expensive back in the day due to the complex license and rights-management with more layers to it than standard ASCAP licensing for popular/modern music.

9secondkox2 said:

If a developer gets to avoid an Apple commission based on a successful customer facing outreach, how is that fair to Apple snd the massive financial investment in maintaining a great App Store?

ridiculous. 

It’s seems like the legit hard working people get shafted all the time and lazy freeloaders get everything handed to them these days. 

Apple itself, within its own financial statements, indicates that the margins on the App Store are wild—70% or more. Their "investment" is minimal. 

Also, calling the App Store "great" is hilarious in tis own right. Increasingly full of advertising and paid marketing puffery (you didn't think that editorial content you see about particular apps or groups of apps was free or generated by Apple out of the goodness of its heart, did you?), poor ability to surface apps from small developers, tens of thousands if not millions of copycat apps freely stealing the intellectual property of other apps, and minimal protection against bad-actor actions due to a fundamentally broken and overwhelmed review process. 

The App Store is a bare-minimum effort that makes Apple a shitton of money. That's their only motivation in defending it so aggressively, and creating this non-settlement to try and save the golden goose. Apple does a lot of things incredibly well and produces best-in-class products. The App Store is not one of them.

Funny article.

Trialed AA for 3 months. Beat a dozen games easily, got tired of the same tired metrics used over and over again (there were a couple I liked, forget the names. Very nice artwork, but the play setup was pretty thin). And I'm 50 years old, for crissakes. I can't imagine who isn't bored to tears by AA's developer cast-offs. 

Have Game Pass on my Series X now, which is glorious. Converted my XBox Live Gold membership into three years of Game Pass for the same price as Apple Arcade. Have exactly one game on any of my iOS devices now, which is Words With Friends, a nice diversion when I have a moment out and about.

"Adobe does that with ‘creative Cloud."

Not to worry, some fossil will be along shortly to bemoan subscription software and how they own all their software, thankyouverymuch. <roll eyes> But yes, with the release of Photoshop and Illustrator for iPad, I'm finding new ways to use my 2017 iPad Pro in partnership with my main desktop iMac workhorse. My goal is not replacement, but augmentation, and while it'll take a while for me to figure out the best workflow, at least Adobe is making it easy for me to experiment. 

I think the fixation with the iPad replacing a desktop computer is misguided and highlights the sort of limitations the article's author runs into. Remember that Apple likely sells way more $299 10.2" iPads, so iPadOS is always going to be beholden to whatever that model's limitations are (and what that model's audience requires from the device).