Apple restrictions with Hyperpad
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Not sure if you guys are following the latest news with fortnite creators epic games suing apple for removing their game from all apple devices. Supposedly epic games created a third party payment option within its game to bypass apples payment gateway and them taking out 30% which to me is just ridiculous. Taking 30% of a companies revenue is way too much just because they own the devices. Thats like saying online classes will now be giving 30% of its tuition to apple just because people use the ios apps. Anyways i remember @Murtaza mentioning that they had to keep within apple strict guidelines from within hyperpad. Im curious to know what that means exactly. Is apple not allowing you guys to create certain features? I think listing what apple can say you can or not add would help the community better understand and request for things that are beyond hyperpads limitation. Because right now i think alot of people such as myself feel that hyperpads limit is the sky when it comes to requesting new features.
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Steam also takes 30%. Epic games only takes 12%. Wow I was surprised to see fornite actually removed from the App Store. 30% does seem like a lot. I don't know how Epic Games could manage to sue Apple when they probably had to agree with that term of 30% revenue to Apple, then broke that rule if that's actually what they did. Curious now, might look up that issue myself lol.
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@Aidan_Fire yes its an interesting case. Unless your a company like amazon who doesnt have to follow this rule whatsoever. Your kind of screwed with the whole 30%. Imagine amazon having to pay 30% to apple for each purchase a customer makes from their app. The numbers shows here that epic games generated 1.2 billion in sales from apple alone. 130 million had to go to apple. Which is insanely crazy to me. I hope this fight with epic and apple changes the way company takes fees from their consumers because thats just robbery. Imagine coming up with this great idea and almost half your sales have to go to a company that had nothing to do with your creation. If thats the case apple shouldnt even charge a developer fee.
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The biggest thing we're not allowed to do is download and run executable code. So that means things like the following is a no go:
- Running games or projects from the hub
- adding scripts, real programming, or writing your own behaviours/plugins
- compiling actual code on device
So, obviously we have a hub with projects you can play... Our behind the scenes "magic" with our behaviour system lets slide in here. However depending on the reviewer we sometimes still get flagged and have to defend our app and how we do things.
At this point we're pretty good at navigating around the guidlines so we don't get in too much trouble.
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As for the 30%. It's honestly not that bad for the most part.
Most publishers are around that range, and the stores are usually worse.Better than it used to be in the old days ;).
Plus other than handling payments, traffic load, security/trust, they do some promotion (if you're lucky), but most importantly give you tools to actually develop your app as well (I guess the $99 developer fee also covers this...)
Where it gets unfair is where apple "double dips", they try to make money iff your in-app purchases and subscriptions. And reaaaaallly don't like it if you offer an alternative method for users getting your services.
For example, netflix. Apple HATES that netflix users can pay for a subscription outside of the app store. So they make the guidelines really inconvenient so users can't somehow subscribe by viewing the site in the app.We actually ran into this early on with subscriptions. From our help page, you were able to go to the main hyperpad site and subscribe from our site instead of through the app store. We got rejected for that until it was fixed.
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@Murtaza interesting on writing your own behavior or plugins. So i think its safe to say the idea of the community creating their own plugins in which we can share is out of the question. Other then that it seems apple does give alot of freedom for basically creating your own game engine for the ipad. It would be cool if you guys did some type of partnership given the fact hyperpad is strictly for ios.
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@SplitMindGaming
Plugs are out of the question, in the short term... At least, plugins that run on the iPad it self. Technically you can do this for exported projects with the broadcast behaviours since they can talk to external code written in xcode.As for creating and sharing behaviours, well we actually have a plan for this. Since the hyperPad behaviour system is awesome and super powerful already. Our goal is to add proper "functions" to hyperpad behaviours. But also make these functions sharable. So using the behaviour system you can create behaviours and share them :).
This is actually one of the reasons why it's taking so long to add functions to hyperPad. We want to make sure we do it right, and have it sharable. Coming up with a way to do that, while working with existing projects, and not anger Apple is the tricky part.
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@Murtaza thats some exciting news. I cant wait
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@Murtaza I know this is a necro (for which I apologize), however, after years away and a lost account, I've been following your progress again.
I'm having a hard time discerning if "prefabs" are part of the "functions" feature you're discussing here. I know back in the days (which was somehow only 3 years ago; yikes!) there was a big discussion about adding them. This was because run-time cloned objects were a major pain - during the game press to tappa.bl transition - having to manage your own ID system and such.
I'm rambling at this point, so I'll let it be :)
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@xotikorukx said in Apple restrictions with Hyperpad:
@Murtaza I know this is a necro (for which I apologize), however, after years away and a lost account, I've been following your progress again.
I'm having a hard time discerning if "prefabs" are part of the "functions" feature you're discussing here. I know back in the days (which was somehow only 3 years ago; yikes!) there was a big discussion about adding them. This was because run-time cloned objects were a major pain - during the game press to tappa.bl transition - having to manage your own ID system and such.
I'm rambling at this point, so I'll let it be :)
Yes, we're thinking functions and prefabs will work together. While not the same feature, they will rely on each other. But this isn't 100% the case, and we may decide to go a different route.
