A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.
No, it wasn't. I'm not going to dig up links, but one could pop a web site storefront and Fastspring for payment processing (as one example of a company I used) for less than 10% (Fastspring would take something like 6-7%, IIRC). Discovery has always sucked on Apple's store, so no value-add there. In fact, I'd argue that the only value-add one gets out of Apple's store is access to their closed garden.
And "50-90%"? Is that in reference to putting software in physical boxes and on CompUSA shelves? Because no mobile publisher charged 90% before Apple's store came along.
The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibilities.
I guess it's normal that the exciting frontier shifts around, but I really can't believe that it's somehow a good thing in this case.
For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely.
AFAIK physical boxes are way above 50%.
When I was authoring software (over two decades ago) and a company acted as publisher they took 85% of gross.
For author/publisher relationships at that time, this was pretty typical (book authors/publishers being the closest analog).
Needless to say there was, in addition to the cost of creating and shipping floppies, advertising that the publisher had to cover.
Apple's 30% cut seemed fair to me when the App Store arrived.
I'm not sure if I would try to ship an iOS app these days though. Not because of Apple's cut but because of the race to the bottom that was unleashed shortly after the App Store gold rush: where now you don't appear to even be able to sell a $0.99 app.
But there's 2 reasons the comparisons aren't valid:
1) The revolution Apple brought to mobile phones was making them personal computers. So the relevant comparison really should be with personal computers and I doubt any of them had stores that took as much of a cut.
2) More relevant, the vast majority of such app stores which charged 40-50% were optional marketplaces. A customer didn't need to go through them to install an app on their phone (I believe Palm was like this. I'm pretty sure the likes of WinMo allowed many different ways to install apps). So if a marketplace was charging 40-70% it was entirely for the fact that they were bringing a customer to you. If you were able to acquire a customer by yourself, you didn't need to pay anyone any cut.
The big problem with Apple's 30% cut has always been that they charge you that amount just for having a user, even if you did all the work to get that user to use and pay for your app. Outside of the maybe 3% credit card fees, Apple provides 0 value.
One may argue (as many Apple folks do) that they charge for the frameworks, etc., but that argument is absolutely backwards. Apple creates the frameworks and APIs because they need the apps, not because the apps need them. If Apple was to get rid of its 3rd party APIs and frameworks, so there were no 3rd party apps, it's not the app developers who would suffer because all those users would migrate to Android. It's the iDevices and Apple that would basically disappear.
In fact, App developers would be thrilled because now they only need to support 1 Operating system.
And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed.
The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way to disable protections then the scammers will get grandpa to do it. And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.
This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
The iPhone was never sold as a computer it was very much just a better UI on a traditional cellphone.
2) Again no, most cellphones at the time where extremely locked down flip phones. Hell, selling ringtones used to be a thing because of how locked down phones where back in the day. Look up what kind of a cut musicians got of that fad.
Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?
You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue.
You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the iphone is not remotely comparable.
It actually works against you to suggest apple's iphone software store and steam are comparable at all because it's so incredibly bogus.
You want to make the case that steam suck too but with loads less market power. Go right ahead. We're listening. You don't need absolute and total market power to be abusive of it. Apple will immediately attempt redefine the market to include android or people spending money on coca cola instead of apple product to suggest that customers have real choice so there is no market power abuse here.
Let me fix this.
There was a full range of views. Some considered the 30% cut to be good at the time, some didn't consider it much at all, some considered it to be a criminal abuse of market power. I remember commenting myself that microsoft would be crucified for attempting to tax everyone who wanted to write software for windows 30% of revenue. I don't recall anyone suggesting that was a controversial comment.
Why are you implying I am saying something different to what I /said/.
I can see both sides of the argument here. It sucks having no choice as a developer, and feeling forced pay Apple a tax just to get paid for your work. It's especially egregious with subscriptions, where Apple doesn't even do any of the content delivery. However, as a user, I think it would also suck if a huge player like Facebook or Google decided to open up their own iOS App Stores, and developers started flocking to them as a means to escape Apples increasingly strict app privacy rules.
Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps or allow Flash on his platform? If they truly wanted to be remarkable, this would have been the future.
The answer is control.
Apple is a cutthroat business just like any other, and their "privacy first" veneer is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. They're playing it up as an attack against Google and Facebook, meanwhile they still phone home about the apps you're running and can shut them off remotely.
Microsoft never taxed software on their platform. Jobs had to invent that business model. It flourished like wildflowers thanks to him.
It would be understandable if Apple owned most of the computer/smartphone market, but they don't. iPhones make up less than 20% of smartphones out in the wild. Nobody who wants to avoid Apple is put in a situation where they are at a disadvantage, unlike a telephone user in the 1970's trying to avoid Bell.
That was exactly his intent when he announced the iPhone, and he got absolutely obliterated by the internet for it.
Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.
So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.
The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.
Destroying a way to deliver native-like, cross-platform applications without an app store was good?
Jobs did it for control. He didn't want interop between Android and iPhone, and he didn't want any web browser with enough flexibility to do anything sophisticated.
Microsoft did worse, they did charge more than 30% to everyone that published software for the xbox.
People with skin in the game, game publishers, game developers, mobile app developers for nokia, blackberry, samsung, motorola, etc, considered Apple taking "only" 30% to be an excellent deal at the time. It was so good in fact, almost all other store splits collapsed shortly thereafter to the same 30% to compete with Apple.
Others complained, sure. I too complain Ferrari charges way too much for customizing the color of the thread of the interior lining on their cars, I don't know why they don't seem bothered.
We live in a bubble, so it was exciting for us.
The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world, and in no small part because normal people finally felt confident enough to try all that sweet sweet software that became available thanks to people like you who don't need a safety net to tinker with stuff.
Windows used to be a sieve. The infection rates and general abuse Windows received went down by orders of magnitude once they added UAC and the default malware scanner/antivirus.
And they didn't need to lock down everything, completely.
The rest is an easy money grab from the OS vendors who obviously don't want to remain "dumb pipes".
- - - - -
https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/
> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.
- - - - -
The simple fact that Apple feels they have to enforce this proves they're afraid. If they <<knew>> that their model is absolutely superior, they'd just let people choose.
But if they do that, they'll lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. So it's not about "security" or whatever, it's just about money.
This is the same company that nickels and dimes every Lightning cable maker to the tune of several billions of dollars, when USB C has been around for many years.
The same company that removed the headphone jack for bogus reasons just to create a market for wireless headphones, worth several billion dollars.
I could go on and on and on about their anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.
There were a range of valid opinions held by intelligent people who had "skin in the game" seems to me to be an utterly uncontroversial statement. Your unsupported list is also only one segment of one particular kind of stakeholder in that market. I think this has probably now gone past being useful to anyone if you agree I wish you the best. Otherwise enjoy the last word...
It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.
Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.
You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.
The iPhone only became a device for the masses, truly, when carriers started subsidizing the older models for zero down, around the iPhone 4g era. This has continued today where Verizon currently offers the iPhone SE for "$0/mo" like some cheap flip phone of old. Before that, the iPhone was exclusively rich persons phone, and probably still would have been in the U.S. at least (like it is in the rest of the world) had it not been for carrier subsidies and cheaper mobile internet plans (or maybe just the normalization of spending so much on a mobile plan every month). The iPhone didn't even get third party apps until years after launch, and when it did, the most popular of that sweet sweet software during those early days were mostly dumb stuff like apps that make gunshot sounds, or flash game clones. The real gems during that era was software written by the jailbreak community, and a lot of that added functionality was cloned by apple in later OS versions.
That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.
The fact is that 30% was far less than the carriers and Qualcomm were taking with their stores.
-the mobile carriers cut - up to 70 percent
-the publishers cut (depending on whether you used them). up to 70 percent (carrier fees included).
-some publishers requiring apps to be code signed like Java Verified (a cost that could go up to 50 thousand dollars PER J2ME/JAVA ME app) or Symbian Signed or BREW.
It was a horrific time to build mobile apps.
I am still not defending the 30 percent cut. Just that the cost was seen as trivial then (also the miniscule 99 yearly membership fee that included code signing - Blackberry started at 2500 USD a year).
A simple solution to all this mess is to have rules allowing us to download apps (at our own risk) from outside the app store like you can on Android.
Today, I'm sure you could still publish independently of Steam... but you'd be at a disadvantage.
Linux file permisdions are still kinda rubbish. Move a file from system A to system B and it's oner is no longer Rob, its now Bob because they have the same Id!
You live in a buble, most of the world can't afford to spend $1000 on a phone.
Microsoft used to charge ridiculous fees for things as simple as submitting a patch for an XBox 360 game.
>Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000 in an interview with Hookshot Inc. earlier this year.
"We already owe Microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform," he said. "People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...
People who think a 30% fee is outsized tend to have no idea whatsoever what the costs were previous to that.
"Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product."
They didn’t have to acquire the user themselves and now they have more eyeballs on their service. How many of these users buy a few things later and make waiving the fee worth it?
Steams not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
Lots of revisionist history here.
Until the iPhone 3G, vast majority of people I knew here in Sydney had Nokias. Getting data was also expensive.
Apple changed all of that here. Affordable plans with data to make a smart phones useful. Then they were everywhere. So it wasn’t a “rich persons” phone here in Australia. Maybe a middle class phone. They also got software updates for years, letting you keep the device longer. Once Android got their act together, I remember all the Android users churning through phones at least once a year because they were so bad.
The iPhone was first launched in Jan 2007. The App Store launched July 2008. So it wasn’t “years” before third party apps either. Most of the useful ones were for public transport, messaging, GPS, maybe a few games.
Don’t let their questionable acts now, cloud your memory of what they did. Apple nailed it with the iPhone. They were the under dog back then and took down all the big players to bring smart phones and digital software purchases to the masses.
Do you?
> Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason
Yes. One of those good reasons is that it allows people to purchase Steam games without buying them on Steam, thus avoiding having to subsidise Valve's 30% cut.
There's an absolutely gigantic ecosystem around buying Steam games from first-party (developer) and third-party (marketplace/bundle) sellers. I don't think you realise that it's a perfect example against the point you're making. There's enough competition from the ability to "side-load" games into Steam that it's very common to get some of the greatest games ever made for under a dollar, when their MSRP is up to two orders of magnitude higher.
Other examples include checking all the text meets the platforms spec. It's says "DualShock Controller" not "Joypad". It's always Press ○╳□△ and in the correct color for that button, and responds to the region/system setting. For example that X = select in USA, and ○ = select in Japan
The point being that the game console owners don't just trust that your patch didn't break the rules of their technical requirements checklist. Someone actually has to check and it's not a small amount of work. Maybe $40k is too much but $0 is arguably too little
AFAIK, Apple and Google don't do this much. Certainly not to the same extent as Sony/Nintendo/XBox
I thought my question was pretty straight forward, and it seems like your answer is full of deflection and vitriol. Fair enough- we're on an internet message board after all.
But I sure wish you'd draw the line somewhere. Do you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's platform or not? Do you feel equally entitled to sell software on my cable box? my car's dashboard? my thermostat?
How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?
A simple 30% cut with no other price gouging additional fees was a huge improvement over the status quo.
That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number.
For instance, Verizon was sued for disabling the ability of phones on their network to transfer photos using Bluetooth, because they wanted to charge you money for a simple file transfer.
https://www.eweek.com/mobile/verizon-wireless-users-sue-over...
And yes, they connect to a wireless carrier's network. But I can also connect my laptop to a wireless carrier's network by buying a USB dongle and a SIM card. I'm certainly not expecting anyone to pay 30% of their revenue to sell me an app on my laptop.
Also consider the iPod Touch. It is much closer to being a PDA than a phone, despite the fact that it's essentially an iPhone without a cellular modem.
There are probably a few developers who’d love to pay just 40k to Apple.
Given that review costs are fixed, what is the cost of distribution?
Note the developer saying that with all the additional costs, they ended up in the hole instead of making a profit.
These arguments are being made by a tiny minority for the benefit of a small community of techies who already have platforms available to them that work they way you want and take advantage of it, like you do. It's like coupon clippers insisting on a law that all products sold must some with discount coupons.
Microsoft has to handle patch distribution, patching itself, tech support for patching, complaints and rollbacks and so on for many years after release -- remember, they still provide patches for Xbox 360 games sold in 2005!
If something breaks then I expect the total costs for all that could easily exceed $40k for very popular titles. Just imagine how many installs of FIFA '06 - '19 (the versions available for Xbox 360) there is! This is obviously not the case with an indie platformer purchased by a few thousand players, though, so for smaller businesses $40k would hurt badly, while it's probably a very good bargain for EA and the likes.
Considering the recent backlash regarding Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One/PS4 (not to mention Mass Effect: Andromeda a few years ago), I'd say rigorous testing is warranted. I doubt CP2077 would even have been released for those platforms if they had been properly tested in the first place (not that it would have been an option to not release the game -- It's been pre-orderable for over a year, and the Xbox live store was full of ads for it for many months before the release).
The same logic applies to patches -- if a patch were to actually break a game then it needs to be handled and that isn't necessarily cheap.
They were, Sony and Microsoft just believed CDPR when they lied about fixing it before release [1]
[1] https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-developer-cdpr-admits-...
Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not.
Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself.
0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ICv-UE4i651yMkpD...
If this is a personal computer, solely because it runs a browser, then the goalposts have shifted dramatically.
Genuine curiosity, not trying to troll or anything.
A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.
It isn't, because the momentum is with big vendors, and big vendors look at economies of scale. Doesn't matter if "tinkerer's market" is 10x as big as it was 20 years ago, when "grandpa's market" is now 100x bigger than that, an every marginal unit of effort is better spent on that than on catering to power users.
> and the GPU shortage kind of proves that.
It doesn't prove the tinkerer's market grew, it's a result of being able to use GPUs to turn electricity directly into money. It's not tinkerers who buy them, it's the business-savvy people. Tinkerers' role is to handle setup.
> It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try.
It's not a fallacy, and it is effective. That's why everyone is doing it. That's why, for example, smartphones are locked down tight and the ecosystem shuns attempts at unlocking them. The pressure is everywhere. Even if the phone vendor lets you root it, your banking app will try to detect it and refuse to run.
> There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
Can you name some? Because as much as I hate the "sanitized amusement park experience" trend, I honestly can't think of an alternative approach that would work. Past a certain point, security and usability are mutually exclusive - the features needed to protect you from someone impersonating you, or to protect you from getting tricked into self-pwning, are directly restricting what you can do on your own device.
The other problem is of course that no one else can really enter this space. It's now only Apple and Google. It will be very hard for anyone else to enter. There were many more publishers and the competition and differentiation was higher.
Most of the limitations you mention like compiling are completely arbitrary and added by Apple. The devices are powerful enough and it's easy enough to do everything on a $300 Android phone.
The fact that iOS/Android prevents you from installing gcc does not mean it is unable to do so.
You could use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and output HDMI over the usb/lightning port and have a super portable dev machine if the OS was so inclined.
My point is that such debacles are going to be costly, not just for the developer, but for the platform owner as well.
Apple, however, transformed the phone industry by bringing that same model to mobile that had already existed in PC/console game storefronts.
The mistake of the platform owners was to believe CDPR when they said they will have fixed all the found problems by release time.
That doesn't resemble anything like my memory of the time. I had multiple general purpose windows mobile phones before iPhones existed. It wasn't limited and it could install apps. Neither Microsoft not the carrier took 30%.
Apple bears all the same costs for iOS and it all comes out of that same 30% fee. For free apps, they eat all those costs.
Hell, Apple provides free in-person customer support as well as support by phone.
HyperRogue, Hollow Knight, and LOGistICAL.
That said, a general purpose personal computer is defined by its advertising not its hardware. My iPhone was never advertised to be able to run any arbitrary binary. The fact it can JIT some version of Python, or run a watered down variant of a program I want does not change what I purchased.
In fact my iPhone was advertised as a multi-purpose, specific device, “arbitrarily limited” to my satisfaction, with a walled garden for my personal protection. This is the device I very intentionally purchased and recommended to family and friends!
Forcing it to be ruined for billions of customers because a few hundred thousand developers are less happy is not only ok with me, I paid for that privilege, thank you.
If “developers” (which I am one of) wanted more open access computing devices, they should have self regulated and ensured viruses, scams, malware, bloat ware, etc were not so common as to drive away every user!
Now it’s time to switch jobs, or be successful with a 30% (which hopefully in the future is 3% - I’m happy for you and anyone to push for a reduction in this value). Now is not the time to complain that Apple is anti-competitive and should be forced to ruin a billion customers experiences, given its users are actively inviting Apple to their defense.
(See more in my response to your sibling comment)
That in my opinion is Apple advertising the iPhone as a do anything software device, a personal computer. Considering the only thing holding back the iPhone from doing everything like running GCC, Blender, etc. is a locked bootloader keeping people from easily hacking Linux or Android on there doesn't IMO make it not a personal computer. Whether you are happy with the walled garden approach or not doesn't make it not a personal computer either. But it's frankly ridiculous IMO to state that an iPhone is not a personal computer because Apple's ad copy doesn't say so and not on what it does.
> That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number
Then maybe they shouldn't have shipped buggy software. Go back a few years and they'd have shipped a CD/DVD/ROM and no patching available.
Secondly can you please define general purpose computing device such that it doesn’t include my toaster, pressure/slow cooker, or oven?
> "-There's an app for that."
My definition for general purpose computing device is, when there needs to be an app for that, and if the app doesn’t exist, I (or anyone) can’t do it without Apple’s permission. Which is what Apple marketed me.
> a locked bootloader keeping people from easily hacking Linux or Android on there
I am actually for an unlocked boot loader on iDevices (with a voided warranty and no expectations for driver support).
I’m also for pushing Apple to reduce its fees from 30% or 15% or whatever to even lower. As long as it continues to be profitable for them to hold a high security/privacy bar and ideally raise it even higher.
I’m just very much not a fan of opening up iOS to sideloading. And I’m not a fan of reducing Apple’s control over developers on iOS.
> Secondly can you please define general purpose computing device such that it doesn’t include my toaster, pressure/slow cooker, or oven?
Sure. I'll use my toaster oven as an example, a Panasonic NB-G110P. I'm assuming no hardware hacking obviously.
My toaster oven doesn't have any built in way to store or add storage for a users program. No support for a cassette drive or even a paper tape reader. It doesn't have any sort of way for the user to run "programs" or instructions in memory outside the predefined functions from the manufacturer like "Waffle mode" that are probably burned into ROM and immutable to the user. While it DOES unusually have TWO 8 segment LCD displays for output there is no way for the user to output results or perhaps inspect memory addresses for anything beyond seeing the time remaining in "Waffle mode" or the like.
An iPhone by contrast has storage for user programs, ways to load and run instructions not included or designed by the manufacturer but a third party, ways to output the results of those programs and allow users to interact with them in some ways.
You also don't need Apple's permission to create a program of your liking for iOS but you do need Apple's permission to distribute it in a fashion that's reasonable for the non-technically inclined.
Apple's lock on software is in my opinion just as gross as Apple's or John Deere's lock on hardware. It's the manufacturer imposing constraints on what I can do with my device for mainly their benefit. There's a small security benefit to this approach but in my view what Apple is getting out of the arrangement is far too much weighted in their favour.
You're right bootloaders should be unlocked. But if they're not going to provide drivers then they have to provide documentation that would allow drivers to be written by those that can and care to. Keep iOS locked if they want but give a reasonable way out.
You’re intentionally picking a dumb toaster. I could also intentionally pick a dumb phone. What about the toasters that run Linux? or use a Raspberry Pi internally?
> ways to load and run instructions not included or designed by the manufacturer but a third party
As far as I know an iOS device can’t load non-Apple or non-Apple-approved code from a third party. Not even by me without explicit approval from Apple (which I need to pay them for the privilege).
How is the current situation meaningfully different from Apple hiring consultants, code reviewing the consultants code and adding that as optional iOS code (with the consultants retaining rights to the code)? Or including a random open source library into iOS as a downloadable, optional part of the OS (with the open source contributors retaining rights to the code)?
And to state again: as a customer I paid for this device wanting these limitations.
I am a third party. I can load a non-Apple approved app onto an iOS device for free. Even ignoring jailbreaking by using Xcode. The app will only work for 7 days before I have to resign it but it doesn't need to be submitted or approved by Apple or follow their store guidelines at all. Altstore basically wraps that process up into a little bow to make it easier. Don't even need your own Mac.
I could also use Pythonista to write a working Apple I emulator. Is the iPhone still not general purpose PC?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H69SJ2/
I’d like to see the Apple 1 emulator please. I’d like to know which of iOS’ permissions you hit first.
You don't need any permission's because it's possible to build entirely within the sandbox of Pythonista!
I’d rather they all prioritize security, rather than extensibility.
Reading more about Pythonista, it’s seems unlikely that you could build a stateful Apple 1 emulator. But even so it looks cool. Arguably a little too permissive for my liking on iOS. I hope Apple closes all of those Inter-App communication channels. That seems like a security risk waiting to happen.
I ended up using that phone to take a picture of the background I wanted. Verizon didn't charge for setting wallpapers using pictures taken with the phone!
I switched to a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone (Samsung Blackjack) and it was so liberating. Sync music via USB! Set custom ringtones using your own MP3s and not whatever the Ringtone store was selling for $2.99.