There's only a handful of sources for the services revenue which is growing like crazy, I wonder if they've been able to negotiate a higher ad revenue cut with Google which was revealed to be 36% in Google's antitrust trial, leaving a lot of money on the table.

It definitely looks like they've been able to stall the effect of rulings allowing apps to use third party payments. But earlier this week the courts reversed a stay of December's injunction that limits Apple to a very small fee, in their arguments against the stay Epic claimed developers were hesitant to use 3rd party payments until they knew what the final cost would be and that reversing the stay would mitigate their fears so it will be interesting to see what happens next quarter.

It's worth considering (IMO, anyway) that users don't want to use apps that use third party billing, too. That's my own preference, I avoid them and look for something that lets me pay via the App Store instead. In the cases where I can't do that (Disney, Netflix), I just leave a bad review and send feedback on their website asking to pay in the app.

Among even non-tech people I know, it's now common knowledge to check on the web if you can get a discount without the Apple tax before doing an in-app purchase. I think most people care more about saving 10-30% on their purchases than the convenience.

Interesting, I haven't heard of people doing that. I just asked my non-tech sisters and neither of them do it, but they do pay for the big media apps outside of Apple since there's no choice there.

For me, I much prefer the convenience of having all my subscriptions centrally located in the App Store, and, more importantly, being able to cancel them with one click there too.

For me there's definitely a trust factor for random app developers and an indifference for non-subscriptions where the one-time fee is irrelevant, but I wouldn't pay an extra $20 - $100 a year in fees to avoid a company like Netflix or Disney managing subscriptions it's just not that hard to do and they're adequate at it.

There may be one or two good examples of companies who do not depend on dark patterns to keep subscriptions, but plenty of the big names are associated with absolute horror stories of numerous hour long phone calls fighting retention specialists to get a service canceled.

For me the ease of seeing what subscriptions I have in one place with easy cancellation options avoids the stress of trusting companies with PII and credit card info and ever needing to deal with anything over the phone.

That said… making it impossible to sell your product with less than a 30% margin does not seem in line with today’s software and streaming economics. I am not sure the model Apple should adopt, but the current one lacks artistry.

Looks like 122 when it's all installed

Seems it's 1078 total dependencies. Only 2 prod dependencies, but as we saw with recent attacks, dev tooling is an attack surface.

I ran this script to count all packages in package-lock.json:

  node -e '
  const lock = require("./package-lock.json");
  const entries = Object.entries(lock.packages || {}).filter(([k]) => k); // skip root ""
  const c = { prod: 0, dev: 0, optional: 0, peer: 0, total: 0 };
  for (const [, p] of entries) {
    c.total++;
    if (p.peer) c.peer++;
    else if (p.optional) c.optional++;
    else if (p.dev) c.dev++;
    else c.prod++;
  }
  console.log(c);
  '

Output:

  { prod: 2, dev: 955, optional: 113, peer: 8, total: 1078 }

So, 1078 total dependencies.

Concerts and performances as well. Taylor Swift fans could have saved the device by themselves lol.

This looks awesome.

They can't because smartphones are almost entirely closed to this idea and that's the most important device for consumer adoption. Although Android is slightly more open there are, after ~17 years, zero mainstream Play Store alternatives or mainstream popular sideloaded apps in most countries, while iPhone is entirely closed to this in the vast majority of countries.

Best they could do is have each app individually submitted to these stores or streamed, either way they need to use the platform in-app purchases mechanism and on Google Play I believe they have to pay a large fee on third party payments, while Apple prepares their Supreme Court arguments that they should have an even larger one.

I just meant a vetted desktop apps marketplace for apps built on top of the Agent SDKs hosted and sold via Anthropic and OpenAI.

A way both developer and lab can make money on apps that are approved to use subscriptions.

Harness Gloves that enhance normal use and aren't 24/7 inference hogs like the Claws.

As they say, money brings out the worst in people - they might rethink if they could scale to 3 billion consumers at relatively little cost and keep the proceeds for themselves.

Of course it is, the playing field is stacked with companies leeching off it - massive profit margins for TSMC, Nvidia, RAM manufacturers, AWS/Azure/Google Cloud, and a 30% fee for using your smartphone.

You've covered a lot of the visible stuff but I would also go deeper into their API endpoints and make sure users can only access their own stuff, endpoints can't be repurposed to do destructive things, passwords are irreversibly hashed, sessions work, exceptions and logging don't leak secrets, and rate limiting on authentication and payment endpoints.

This isn't referring to the efforts Google has gone to try to thwart sideloading.

It is another requirement of Google's, where all developers must be registered to them and apps must be signed by them and anything that isn't will be blocked.

I really like OpenAPI in conjunction with openapi-fetch to create a typed interface for frontends/tests/etc to leverage. I especially like deleting the manual types that get strewn around frontends with inaccuracies, bespoke class names and unnecessary property names/types transformations.

I wouldn't work without these tools anymore!