A Second App Store For Apple/iOS
Did you Apple has a Second App Store, original App Store, one which is without any restrictions. You can publish any apps to this store and that too without giving Apple its 30% cut.
Wait a minute this seems too good to be true. What’s the catch
Actually nothing. Which is why Apple is hell-bent on not allowing it to flourish. This App Store is Web and you can install any specially crafted Web App or just bookmark any plain website to the Home Screen.
I will talk about three things
- What’s this other original Web App Store and how do you install an app from it?
- If you are a web developer then why Apple is crippling it?
- If you are Apple, why should you let it flourish?
Web App Store
This was the first and only way to install Apps when the first version of the iPhone was released. Apple was responsible for web app revolution thanks to Webkit, the engine behind Safari and many other browsers (chrome is also based on it). They were responsible for getting so many of the new web features implemented. By this time Google hadn’t developed their browser Chrome.
But the inherent nature of the web is such that you write app/website for one platform and it works everywhere (we all know what works everywhere means) and that's where the conflict arises. Apple’s business is selling devices and recently monetising those users through various subscriptions like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, you get the drift. If you could easily move to another platform why would you stick to Apple?
One of the biggest reason people migrate or stick with Apple platform at least in the US is iMessage. Apple had found a way to discriminate you by colour (no not skin colour) but Blue or Green bubble colour. If you have iMessage you get all the cool features and that’s represented by the blue bubble else the message is shown in green. Either you are part of the inner circle or not. And who doesn’t want to be in the inner circle?
Imagine if iMessage was a Web App which works everywhere would you buy Apple device. This is the exact opposite reason WhatsApp succeded. WhatsApp succeeded because it was available everywhere. You pick a device or platform it just worked. It worked on Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia’s Symbian, it was there on every platform however small. The moment a platform gains some market share you find WhatsApp on it, case in point Jio Phone in India which runs KaiOS, a fork of Mozilla’s stopped phone OS.
The closed App Store that exists today wasn’t Steve Job’s idea. He was actually against it. He had to be convinced of the idea. But once Apple saw the benefits of the closed App Store and the huge number of Native Apps being devloped. It never turned its attention to the Web App Store.
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, the tech guru was opposed to allowing third-party to run natively on iPhone — and when pressured to do so by developers and others, he had a simple answer: Develop your own web apps that will work on the new platform.
Apple is crippling Web Apps aka PWA
This section is going to be primarily for developers Web or Native. Hence its in a new post. If you are a developer or wants to understand how checkout the below article and then come back here.
For the rest here is a quick summary. Apple has let Web Apps be a second or a third class citizen despite being the original way to develop apps for iOS. The numerous bugs and issues it has has prevented developers form considering it as a real option. It has never invested enough resource to fix the problem as that was never their priority.
Anti-trust concerns
European Commission has opened formal antitrust investigations. They investigating its 30% tax, mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system. The boils down to the fact that there isn’t a another easy way to install apps. In most of the Apple skirmish, I felt Apple was wrongly made the devil. I very well understood their motives behind each of the cases. Although it looks like they are being heavy-handed I felt they were hard but fair.
Take the case of Hey. As a user, you downloaded the App but there is no way you can use it without a subscription and the App has no info on how to purchase a Hey account/plan because the developer didn’t want to pay the Apple Tax. From a user point of view its a broken experience. But the whole world saw a monopoly. Had there been another easy way to install App the developer would have chosen that and problem would have been solved.
Take Epic or any of the recent issues concerning Apple tax all can be easily solved by users having an alternative way to install App. The only exception is Spotify. Since its a direct competitor it stands to lose a lot by paying the TAX. It isn’t just paying Apple its also filling the coffers of a competitor and that’s not fair. I suggest Apple reduce the Tax in such cases to 5%. If you are a direct competitor you pay only 5%.
Irrespective of what i feel or what Apple feels the world is gonna look at Apple as a monopoly. But that can be solved easily. By making it easy for people to install Web Apps, plain and simple, they can get the antitrust bogey of their back.
90% of the websites don’t need the cool API that Google or others are adding to the web. Most of the feature they need are already present in Apple. All that Apple needs to do is stop crippling them. Have a team that fixes all the issues that Web Apps added to Home Screen face and make it easy for users to add such Apps to the Home Screen. Developers won’t stop making native apps because users are going to look at the store to discover Apps or for that fact that at times experience is lot better with Native Apps. But this will take the Anti Trust bogey of its back and make the world a better place.
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