30% of the gross, 100% of the net.
Also remember that this is gross vs. net revenue, not profit. You get no support from Apple when you sell content via in-app purchase. You still need to host the content and pay the bandwidth costs. The only difference when switching to IAP, therefore is that you can no longer offer to make an iOS user's purchases available to them on a non-iOS device, because you never find out who purchased what from you. The way around that, of course, is to still require that the user create an account for your platform, but then you're duplicating everything to do with that account— once for IAP, once for your own records. In other words, using IAP places an increased burden on anyone trying to be a good device- or system-agnostic vendor.
You must sell books from major publishers at the same price as Apple does.
Which is entirely wrong. You can't see books cheaper than Apple does, you can certainly charge MORE. This is a rather common thing in retail.
Under the new 'Agency Model', the publishers set the end-user price. They set that price at $10, and you, as an agent, get $3 of that. You can't change your prices up or down. Only the publisher can do that.
Those publishers must give you exactly 30% commission.
Apple does not say that anywhere, nor do they have ANY control over who much you pay to license content from others. This is just bellyaching and lies.
Sort of. They indeed can't affect how much you pay to license content. However, they don't need to: publishers no longer 'license' content— they give a fixed commission to sales agents. Many publishers give a different amount. Unfortunately, it's most commonly less than 30%. 30% is, in fact, the highest commission the publishers give any sales agents these days. So most booksellers will be getting perhaps $1.50 or $2 commission from that $10 book. But still, Apple will take $3 from them, meaning they have to pay $1 - $1.50 to the publishers out of their own pockets. Which is unsustainable, when it happens on every single bit of income your company makes (or a high enough percentage of it, like, say, more than 30% of your revenue sources).
iOS booksellers have to give 30% of their revenue to Apple.
Yea, and if you have even the slightest clue about the retail world, you'll know that when you put your shit in someones store, they take a cut. 30% is pretty much THE standard amount. In big box retail, there are times when you end up paying more to be in the store, per item, than your item costs total. Its not just a loss to be in the store, you're actually loosing more than just the cost of your item!
They're not selling books through Apple's store, though. They're selling software. And they're happy to let Apple have 30% of the price of the software, since Apple hosts it on their servers, advertises it, etc. The situation you describe would suggest that if I created an eReader device and sold that at a Wal-Mart, then Wal-Mart should be able to claim a percentage of all money I make through that device. Which is wrong— they sold my eReader, so they got their commission on that. They can sell gift cards for it, and get commission on those. But they don't get commission on anything they're not involved with.
The problem, however, lies with the eBooks being sold. Apple doesn't do anything with those. You have to pay someone like Microsoft or Amazon for Azure or S3 storage, or you have to run your own server farm (trust me, 3 million eBooks needs an awful lot of space). You then need to look at CDNs so your customers on the other side of the world can pull down content as fast as your local ones. You need to hire lawyers to negotiate with the publishers, since Apple doesn't do that for you.
In the end, what is Apple charging 30% for? What service are they providing that is worth so much?
Credit card transaction handling.
That's it. They don't host anything, they don't pay for bandwidth costs, they don't help with acquisition. They don't even do a great deal to help you get customers, since they're actively trying to lure your customers away to their competing software offering.
There is no enforced 0% profit margin, though I'll admit, why would you buy from someone other than the iBookstore if the iBookstore is the cheapest, but thats just business. Don't like it? Sell on someone elses device or make your own. Ever heard of Windows Mobile, Android, or BlackBerry?
Sure. The company I work for sells eBooks on just about every platform going. iOS is still more than 30% of our user base, and is likely more than 50% of our sales.
So we drop iOS and we could potentially (i.e. I don't really know the numbers, I just overhear the conversations) find ourselves barely breaking even on the other platforms all together.
It's a shame, sure, but iOS is where the money is. Without that, it can be difficult to pull in enough revenue to keep your company going at all.
If the app you want to use is rejected, you have to purchase it directly from the developer, not through Apple
There, fixed that for you.
Will the app store have the same lock down?
Not quite, no. Apps can be installed from anywhere on OS X, the App Store is designed primarily as a distribution method.
With no apps that can use plug ins?
Incorrect. Plugins and extensions are in fact allowed, and are exempt from the usual 'no unadvertised functionality' clause.
No games with user maps or mods?
Given the previous answer, I would expect mods/maps to come under the same umbrella as plugins/extensions.
No sex apps?
Correct. Get sex elsewhere.
No fat app?
Incorrect. Apps will need to be intel-only, but can be 32/64-bit fat apps.
$99 year fee even for free apps?
Correct. The service you get from Apple for that $99 isn't going to be paid for in royalties is it? $99 for a code-signing certificate seems to be a decent enough rate from what I've seen, too.
fixed price points?
Quite possibly. It gives a standardized pricing structure across many currencies. Also note that there are price points basically for each dollar value between 1 and 1000, although they might thin out at the upper end.
will you be able to buy app and use it on all systems you own?
Yes, this was explicitly stated in the announcement.
Will app dev be able to have app that you need to buy per system?
Not through this distribution mechanism I think. Maybe wait for guideline revisions or a public API for the store (i.e. sell a feature-limited version, unlock per-computer perhaps?)
can apple pull a app at any time?
Yes, although you can still distribute it yourself after this time.
Will there be a max app size?
Probably tops out at 1GB when zipped, similar to iOS app store.
Garbage collection is robust enoughâ" the block gets copied to the (garbage collected) heap when it's passed into dispatch_async() or similar calls automatically, and it uses scanned memory to do so, meaning the collector tracks a refcount on 'self'.
In non-collected situations, it's up to the developer to ensure that this doesn't happen somehowâ" for instance by retaining 'self' before the first dispatch_async() and releasing it inside the last block.
it does is not help you in determining *what* should be done in parallel.
I'd disagree slightly on that point; agreed, the technology doesn't actually make certain code blocks suddenly go "me! me! me!" but it does significantly ease the burden on the developer in making those decisions. I can throw something into the parallelization engine with a couple lines of code to see what difference that makes.
The key example would be something like this one here, which Slashdot's filter doesn't like (it says please don't use so many junk characters, bah).
That's a nice and simple change to make, and is easy to drop into any code which previously required synchronous execution. I can just wrap the existing synchronous code in two calls to dispatch_async(), one to throw stuff onto the background thread, and another to throw the last step back onto the foreground thread. If it doesn't help the program I can remove it. If it does help, I can leave it in.
GCD doesn't support using GPUsâ" that's what OpenCL is for. That said, there were some nice demos at WWDC where, for example, a solar-system modelling tool (tracking the gravitational movements of a zillion objects in real-time) was rewritten by adding first GCD then OpenCL. Using GCD to offload calculations to other threads in parallel made quite a difference, then OpenCL just blew the lid off. It was SCARY just how much difference it made. And the nice part was that GCD gave a nice performance boost by adding a couple of lines here & there to wrap little bits of long-running code in calls to dispatch_async().
As in interesting tidbit, you'll notice that clamAV is posted there as well. Hmm, makes you wonder.
It's used in OS X server, where it integrates with the mail service in order to filter/block emails containing known viruses.
"...but the highest form of intelligence."
Oscar Wilde I believe, but too lazy to look up a reference.
...if you read in a divx avi file with an mp3 soundtrack, it had to load the entire file, generate its editing information, and convert it to a
Actually, the issue around that is that the original QT code always generated all that information, because there was no concept of a 'playback-only' stack there. In QuickTime X there *is* that concept, so this information gathering can be skipped completely. At present, QTKit enforces this, so to get the cleaner and more advanced QTX playback rendering engine you can initialize a QTMovie for 'playback only' purpose, at which point the movie will be initialized using the QTX stack. If you want editing, it'll launch using the QT7 stack (or as a proxy to a 32-bit background service, if your application is running in 64-bit mode).
Would anyone care to look at the permissions on the -Caches- folder in question? I know, it'll make it harder to spout hyperbole about security, but it could be instructional I think:
MacBook-Pro:1tUM+kJcGEqwqSH2bBdLR++++TI jim$ pwd
MacBook-Pro:1tUM+kJcGEqwqSH2bBdLR++++TI jim$ ls -l
total 0
drwx------ 92 jim staff 3128 12 May 20:53 -Caches-
drwx------ 13 jim staff 442 23 May 20:12 -Tmp-
As you can see, the permissions on the -Caches- folder mean it's only readable by the owner, namely the current user. So it has the same protections as something inside the user's home folder. Also, by benefit of being in
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
