YouSaid · the spoken record

John Gruber

lines on the record: 97
first: 2025-05-12
most recent: 2025-05-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right, in these compliance meetings that Apple is having, which, by the way, they started calling them Project Wisconsin and I'm from Wisconsin, personally insulting to me. But Project Wisconsin was how do we comply with the judge's ruling? And they landed on this back, literally reverse engineered 27% where they decided it was 27%, they went and hired a consulting firm to come up with some reasons. And the judge sees right through it and says, this is garbage. You just came up with this number in that process. Phil Schiller is saying, we should just not charge a commission on the web. Why do you think he's the character inside of Apple who had that realization, who could see the problem so clearly?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so here's my question. Actually, it's about Phil Schiller, who is as a character in Epic versus Apple, in this case, talking about the services line, talking about these commissions, her rates, keep showing up as the one person who is saying what you are saying everyone else can see, that Apple can't see. Hey, this is bad. Hey, we shouldn't charge this commission. Hey, we shouldn't play these games.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's no one point between 2008 and today where you could say, here's the point, this decision in 2012 or 2014 or whatever, that's where it happened. No, there's no one point. But the fact is they never budged, right? And there is at one point it was in the epic trial, but there was some old email from Phil Schiller circa 2010 where he ran up the flagpole internally, the idea that, hey, once our run rate, Apple's cut of the App Store reaches a billion a year. How about at that point we'll just keep lowering the commission to keep it, we'll make a billion a year from the app store and go from 70, 30 to 75, 25, then to 80, 20. And if it keeps growing and we keep making a billion, we'll go to 80, you know, just keep lowering it.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we can continue growing the services business where we're doing very little. I don't think at this point, maybe in 2008, 2009, you could make a big argument that Apple was earning its 30%, right? They had the credit cards on file. We're doing the distribution. They had massive App Store marketing campaigns, right? Every new iPhone owner was a potential new customer in a way that that is totally saturated now. I think it's basically impossible to make the argument that they're earning their 30% now.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's interesting, I feel like that was a happier time for software development, right? Like it was over. There was no subscription fee. You like had the product, you could use it however you want if you wanted anyone, you could go buy it, and now everything is this relentless series of subscriptions and upsells. And I do feel like that is also Apple saying what we want you to do is turn your apps into subscription services so we can collect the revenue every quarter.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2007. This isn't the world. And, you know, and I know you've mocked this in your writing. I don't think they've sort of dropped this angle. Who knows? Maybe their retort to YGR's decision is going to go back to it. But, you know, just a couple years ago, they'd still come out with the whole buying software and boxes in retail stores and talking about the margins that developers got when people would go in a store and pick up a box and come home and put a disc in a computer to install software. And it's like I remember that. You remember that. A lot of people listening to the show remember that. But that was a long time ago.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. So, like, if you were writing on one of those Java platforms from 2006 on the then smartphones, 7030 might be what you're getting, but the carrier was taking 70 and you were getting 30 maybe. So 70, 30 was a great deal. It was like, holy crap, we can write software for phones. And people can use them wherever they are. They're in their pocket. This is a great deal. The idea that here we are 18 years later, and that's still the deal. And I know there's the small business platform. And if you have a subscription, it drops from 30 to 15 after a year. And some of the, you know, there have been some slight loosening of those terms. But for the most part, it's a 70-30 split. Eight years later, with all of the two decades practically of innovation in online payments, right? Stripe wasn't a company.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little code as possible to make it efficient and make something as beautiful and cool and smooth as what you're making. But what they were saying, if you just put aside the technical nature of it, was, hey, you could just build free apps and ship them however you want on the web the way you want. Which again,”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really did shift from a scenario when the App Store came out in 2008. I mean, and everybody who was around at the time, me and you writing about this stuff at the time, we remember the first year of the iPhone when there were no third-party apps. And for a couple of months, Steve Jobs was saying, we don't want third-party apps. And they had their first WWDC when the iPhone came out, I guess right before it came out, and they were like, we've got a sweet solution. It's called web apps, which would have been it wasn't a way to make the apps that Apple itself was making for that first iPhone, right? So at an artistic level, developers weren't happy about it because they're like, no, no, no, we want to use these cocoa-like APIs. We want to use Objective-C and we want, you know, because those 2007 phones were relatively slow and memory was so concerning. We want to do what you guys are doing and pack as much into as little.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's like a very slight, it's just a bit of lingo. It's just, you know, it's a little formal. But when a ruling says the court and the court is uppercase, that means the judge. And every time you see her write the court, you could just see, yeah, she's like, fuck you for thinking you could do this in my court. Who do you think you are? And I think a lot of developers read that and they were like, finally, finally a court is just calling this out for what it is, which is just sort of preposterous It's been a long time and it has been a sort of very, you know, how long can the frog boil in pot before it's dead, right? It has been a very long time.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cases. They really can't. That's what I think. But all the rest of us, everybody else, whether you are a zealot, like a Tim Sweeney, the guy who actually instigated the case or just a developer, you know, or somebody who really believes in open source and that all of these closed platforms are fundamentally wrong and here, see, this is why. Or if you're just trying to observe it neutrally, everybody's looking at them and they're like, how do you not see how this is not going to fly? And it makes you look terrible. It looks bad legally. It looks bad regulation-wise. In places like the EU. And it absolutely looks terrible to whether you're a developer who's actually writing the code or you're just a business person from a company who wants to have an app in the store and you're looking at these terms. It looks terrible. Nobody wants to build on a platform where the starting point isn't.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there is something to that with apple on this front where everybody I know and have any relationship with at Apple, but especially higher up, you know, the sort of people that we get press briefings with, people with big titles, not necessarily the very highest, but people who get featured in keynotes, you know, people who are on the videos, they really do believe They really do. They're not feigning it. They really do believe that Apple is a good company and that they do the right thing and that they really do put the user first and that they are a fundamentally honest company. And because they believe that, I feel like their actions on this particular issue with the App Store, they can't see it. It really is a blind spot where they just do, they cannot believe that they keep losing these.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and there's something in there with the Upton Sinclair line. It's slightly not quite applicable, but it's the same sentiment that it's very difficult to make a man understand something that his job depends upon him not understanding it, right? Yeah.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there's reasons for the gap, right? You have to be a company of this scale moving this much money around. You got to have some sharks. Like, that's just the way it goes. You just don't want the sharks to be exposed to the public in this way. If you go too far, the judge is like, you know what? I'm going to have a second hearing because I think you've been lying to me. You're going to produce all of the evidence so I can see your decision making. And here are the sharks. There's just something about that with Apple in particular that I think is just fundamentally surprising to people and damaging to its brand in a way that I think if you if I said to you Amazon is full of sharks or meta is full of sharks you'd be like yep”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its credit, so wants you to believe that it is the company that puts the customer first and user experience first and design first, and then you see from the emails in this case that they had no reason for 27% except they knew that no one would use it. And there's just this gap. And I think a lot of the danger for these companies is that these regulatory efforts expose that gap.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Developers now view as a major villain, so much so that Epic Games spent many years in more than a billion dollars to go to war against the App Store. Know, I've been thinking a lot broadly about the image the big companies want you to have of them. And then what they have to be in order to be as big as they are and successful as they are. Google, I think, still wants you to think of them as beanies and slides in the office. They're a ruthless advertising company. Like we have all these emails from all of these trials. You can see the internal deliberations of these companies. I think Apple”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Back with daring fireballs, Sean Gruber. Before the break, Sean and I were talking at a high level about Apple's success and how the sheer scale of the iPhone's business has had some pretty distorting effects on how the company views the markets it operates in and its responsibilities to customers. Now that's really come to a head in two major ways that threaten the company's services business, which has become the company's main revenue driver as iPhone sales have plateaued. As we mentioned, the first is that the latest turn in the Fortnite lawsuit saga might shift a meaningful amount of mobile game revenue to the web. Out of the reach of Apple's 30% cut, the second is at mounting antitrust pressure here in the United States on Google might in turn harm Apple too because Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to be the default search engine in Safari. So now I wanted to talk to John about the specifics of Apple's app store policies and to really dig into exactly how we got here from Apple being one of the best things to ever happen to software developers after the launch of the iPhone to a company.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The injunction, it's not there. There are no backroom deals and handshakes between lawyers and judges, like the decision comes out and it's in writing and you can just read it and it's there. And there was nothing in that injunction that made it seem like Apple's goofy twenty-seven percent commissions and you have to open up your books and let us audit all of your transactions and track people for seven days and everything they buy after leaving your apps for seven days you owe us 27% for. There was nothing that made it seem like that complied with the injunction it was very strange. I don't see how they thought it was compliant or how they thought it would fly.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just information. And she, you know, I think rightly so, you know, she just said you can't do that anymore. And they just kept doing it and instituted this quote unquote compliance with it that was almost. And I'm very resistant to the whole malicious compliance argument, especially with their EU stuff. I think that term gets overused. But in the case of this injunction, it was almost, and the way that her new injunction, her new decision that came out a week or two ago is just dripping with anger because it was so clear. But for the last four years, I've been thinking, does Apple know something about her opinion on this that I don't know? But it's, and you're the lawyer, you tell me, but my understanding, and you know I'm married to a lawyer, and my wife has said to me, no, if it's not in.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I did a story years ago where they have a number you can call. You can actually call a phone number and make a real phone call and talk to a human being at Netflix. And I pretended like I didn't know how to sign up. And they're like, oh, you have to go to our website, go to a computer and go to netflix.com. And then you will sign up there and enter your credit card information there. And you can't do it in the app. So they're allowed to put a phone number that you can call where a human will tell you that. But they can't just tell you that on the screen. I mean, imagine how much money they're just wasting by having people answer the phone to do that, right? I mean, at this point, I doubt there are that many people calling every day, but somebody is, right? And it costs real money. And they could just put it on a screen.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a part of me that for years now has been looking at some of these things, and I've been thinking I don't know, maybe they know something I don't know because they don't seem panicked, right? And I would say with their compliance with Gonzalez Rogers' original injunction with the epic case in 2021, which was a case, and I think you'll agree with me, the epic versus Apple case. Apple almost entirely won. Epic lost Apple won, but on what I would call a side note, she issued this injunction coming out of it that, oh, you know, you win almost all these points. Epic, you lose almost all these points. But this whole this nonsense about the anti-steering provisions and apps being forbidden from even telling people famously, most famously like with Netflix. Like you download, if you're a new Netflix user on iOS, you get the app, there's no way to sign.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has been true for a long time. So you're just looking at a company where the manufacturing excellence is under threat with tariffs and trade wars for all of Cook's efforts to hold it together. And now the revenue pressure on what the iPhone has become in services is extremely real from regulators not in Europe, which are also mad at Apple, but from the courts in the United States, which are saying, well, maybe we're going to take The Google deal off the table. And maybe we're going to take all this Candy Crush money off the table. Is Apple ready for all of that”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, you, a guy or a woman who spends $500 a month on tokens or chips or coins or whatever you call it for this game, we'll give you a 40% discount if you just tap this button and preload your account from the web. And if you're spending, you know, $200, $300, $400 a month on a game, which, you know, like 1% of players do for some of these games, and which is where an enormous amount of the money that the most profitable games make their money from, it's exactly like a casino. It really is.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's $20 billion, 25 billion off from Apple. And then there's this ruling in Epic versus Apple, where the judge is furious with Apple for ignoring her earlier instructions for lying on the stand, she says, one of the executives lies on the stand. And she says, in a variety of ways that I want you to explain, now you have to go compete with purchases on the web. We're done. We're done playing games. And that feels like, oh, the services revenue is going to drop, right? No matter what happens now, the amount of money you're going to take from in-app purchases in games and other apps is going to go down because Amazon is just going to kick people to the web, right? It's already happened. Spotify is going to kick people to the web. It's already happening.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Apple has a deal where Google pays to be the default search provider in Safari. Google lost that trial. We're in the remedies phase. Google does not want to give up the ability to make these exclusive deals. It feels like that's going to be the first thing to go, no matter what the judge decides. Right.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, but I know you know this. The other thing, and it is a lot of money and it all goes into services, is the traffic acquisition costs from Google search with the deal with Safari, which is... We keep talking about 20 billion a year, but I'll bet it's closer to 25 billion a year right now.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Olive music. But what it really is, and this comes to the big Particularly net purchases and games. Apple services revenue is people buying stuff on their iPhone and Apple takes whatever percentage, between 15 and 30%, depending on the style of app and the subscription or not. That's the thing that's under threat now, right?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim Cook becomes CEO. And you see, over time, the company gets even bigger, right? It's much bigger now than it ever was as a company under Steve Jobs. The scale of that operation has increased. But they've also, and I think the Cook era will be, I think remembered for this as much as the scale, they ran out of people, as you said So they moved the iPhone's revenue from selling more iPhones every quarter to extracting more money from the people using their iPhones, in particular in services, right? That's the line they call it in their quarterly earnings services. Services has a lot of celebrities as the face, right? It has severance. It has silo. It has all these other shows. Ted Lasso famously.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To come to the manufacturing piece of it, I do feel like our own commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is very confused about what it takes to build an iPhone, but we'll come back to that. I just want to stay focused on this big Tim Cook change for one second. Tim Cook helps Apple expand, right? Without a doubt, something like the iPhone cannot scale to the volumes of production at Apple's quality level in particular without Tim Cook Master of the Supply Chain. And that's the role he plays for Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has these very big ideas. He is incredibly tasteful, incredibly exacting in his demands. Tim Cook is the person who says, okay, I can build you the machine that will make millions, hundreds of millions of these products a year to your specifications.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And even going back to next, I mean, and again, next for like the decade or so that they were an independent company, they were only selling hardware for about the first half of it. But at that point, they had a Steve Jobs-driven dream, not just to make the computers in America, but to have computers build the computers. And so there's a lot of people out there, I think casual people, who don't need to know this, who probably think like, oh, an iPhone, that's probably mostly made by robots. right it's not the factory line is it really is human beings screwing tiny screws into phones putting tiny you know just keep putting this one component into a phone here comes another phone put that tiny component in perfectly it is very labor intensive the next dream was to build a factory in california where it really was just like something from the jetsons right where it's it's all robots and robotics”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Steve Jobs famously wanted to build his own automated factories in California. And he did for some of the Macs, right? And then he hires Tim Cook, and Cook is the one who moves. All the manufacturing to third party contractors like Foxconn moves it all to China and begins to scale.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you really think about it at an operational level, the only way that they could make that many iPhones and that many more new ones each year was through China. There was no other mechanism, no other way, no other country had anything vaguely like the capability to expand a supply chain that quickly. To these incredibly tight, high precision specifications than China. That's the only way. In some ways, if you just go back a little bit, even like a decade before the iPhone, just go back to the 90s, it seems very iffy for China to be the path for an American company to be able to build this sort of business from the most profitable business in the history of capitalism.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mechanism of that, just to be very clear for the audience is every year Apple would add new countries and new carriers. So you would have all the people on AT&T in the United States, and then you would add Verizon. And then you would like triple the market, right?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This sensation, right? And famously, it's such an interesting way to think of it, but they sold more. The second gen was the 3G. They sold more than the original. And then the 3GS sold more than the 3G and the original combined. Then the iPhone 4 sold more in one year than the 3GS, 3G, and original combined. And that kept going for a couple of years, where each new model not only outsold the previous model, it outsold all the previous models combined. Now, obviously, that had to end eventually, and it ended, you know, I don't know, 2013, 2014, because the planet ran out of people.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, and the other thing that came out of my thinking about the scale of the iPhone success and this being Tim Cook's company is just how unlikely it was. And I truly do believe there was only one path For the iPhone to meet demand at the prices they've been selling iPhones for the last fifteen eighteen years, however long it's been. But when the iPhone became”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's his company that binds the United States and China and to a large extent Taiwan together now from the chips from the manufacturing to the global trade to the fact that the platform, unlike most other tech companies, operates in both countries and is a huge success in both countries and consumers want the products in both countries. And he has had to play statesmen with Donald Trump, with Xi Jinping, with Joe Biden to whatever extent this whole time. And it feels like Apple is more of that company than the big swing product company lately.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I needed an excuse to buy a new Mac Studio when they got announced, the M4s. And the tariffs were a good excuse. I think a lot of people just took the excuse. I might as well buy one. And I did a little like custom configuring. Made sure it had the right amount of storage and RAM and all this stuff. And then I watched it get manufactured to my specifications in China. Go through customs in China, get on DHL, come across the ocean on a plane, presumably, and then get to my house in a matter of days. And we don't think about that very often, but that is Apple's success, right? That that whole system exists. One thing I've been saying a lot recently is Tim Cook probably has more responsibility for world peace over the past several decades. And anyone wants to give him.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it gave me this palpable sense of just how big a business the iPhone is. I don't see how any company could not become distorted by that level of success, right? These are thousand dollar bricks, right? A brand new iPhone comes in a little brick of a package and they're, you know, 750, 800, 900, 1,000, $1,200, whatever, depending which one you get They just send all of them all the time non-stop out of China and India for a thousand dollars each with famously 35, 40 percent margins. It is hard to fathom. And I feel like we're hitting the point where the unfathomability of the iPhone success is we're seeing the ramifications of it.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things I keep coming back to, and it was such an off the cuff. Yeah, sure, why don't I spend an hour for me it turned into three hours, but why don't I spend an afternoon on this sort of seemingly goofy blog post of, hey, how many iPhones can you fit on an airplane, right? When there was a report when these tariffs came out of, hey, Apple's going to ship six full airplanes of iPhones from India ahead of the tariffs. It is like a fun little question. And my friend Ryan Jones, the guy behind Flighty, had the idea of, hey, you could just look at the weight of a Boeing 747 freight airplane and figure out how much does a packaged iPhone weigh and multiply it. And there's your answer, right? And maybe it's slightly off because maybe the volume doesn't quite fit. Maybe, you know, but as a baseline, the weight works. And it's like a lot of iPhones, right? In a certain sense, like if me and you had to spend the afternoon.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm good. There's been a lot of Apple News recently. I feel like we're in this state where, I don't know, two years from now, three years from now, maybe none of the big tech companies that we are familiar with look the same, are the same. Google might get broken up, meta's in the middle of an antitrust trial, Apple's facing one, but then it already faced one. There was a big ruling. I want to talk about in the Epic case. The Google money might go away from Apple. So I wanted to talk to you. You and I are texting briefly and I just thought I should just have John in the show and we should talk about what Apple is right now, what it has become, and what might be changing. Because you've been following the company closer than anybody for 20-odd years. And it feels like the question of what is Apple right now is more for grabs than it has been in a long time.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You like this one, as you'll soon hear John and I really enjoy talking to each other. Okay, Daring Fireballs, John Gruber on the future of Apple and the App Store. Here we go. John Kruber, the proprietor of Daring Fireball, the industry's leading Apple analysis source. How are you doing?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of that wasn't enough to put the heat on Apple. Well, there's also Trump's tariffs to deal with. And a Google Anitrust trial that could see Google barred from striking exclusivity deal for its search engine that currently pays Apple north of $20 billion a year. Apple also has to compete in AI with Apple Intelligence and Siri, products which are currently a mess. And John and I got into that here at the end and wanted to know if there was a connection between the corporate culture that produced the App Store mess and the recent news of Siri delays and dysfunction around AI inside Apple. So yeah, there's a lot going on in this conversation and there's really nobody better to dig into it than Sean.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Services, and whether or not that has fundamentally changed the culture of the company. See, his Apple kept selling newer and better iPhones, it simply ran out of people to sell them to. So in order to keep growing revenue steadily and keep Wall Street happy, Apple started to squeeze more money from its existing base of customers, including the very developers that put apps on the App Store. That made some of the most important developers, the company that make mobile games and stream media, very upset, but they had no choice, so they kept their apps in the App Store and continued to pay the fees. All of that combined with Apple's immense scale created a kind of hubris at the company, and as you'll hear John say, also created a major blind spot for Apple that has pushed it towards these very high-profile and very public legal defeats that could ultimately reshape its business.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of tactical stuff you might talk about in the aftermath of this ruling about what Apple might do next, how it might impact its revenue, how developers might respond. But I really wanted John to talk about the big picture view of Apple and how a company that so often prides itself on doing the right thing ended up so fully on the wrong side of the courts. One theme you're going to hear throughout this conversation is that Apple often presents itself as small, but the company is actually huge in every way. The company now sells nearly as many phones in a single quarter as it did in the entire first three years the iPhone's existence combined. Apple now operates in a geopolitical context that binds the United States, China and Taiwan in ways that you would have never imagined 15 years ago. And most importantly, it has total control over applications on the iPhone, which means it has control over what kinds of businesses can and cannot exist on mobile phones. That's the context for the other major theme you'll pick up in this conversation. Apple's shift towards digital”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, late last month, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who has presided over that case for the past five years, effectively banned Apple from collecting any fees on web transactions and harshly accused the company of purposefully disobeying her original 2021 ruling by creating a series of restrictions and hoops to jump through that would basically make it impossible for developers to send people to the web to buy things at all. The judge's extreme frustration with Apple is obvious in almost every line of her new ruling. She even referred Apple for further criminal proceedings, saying an executive had lied under oath on the stand.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I want to have John on the show this week is to talk about the most recent ruling in the long running Epic vs. Apple legal saga. This is the lawsuit about Fortnite on the iPhone and whether developers like Epic can circumvent the App Store's payment system to avoid paying those 30% fees on in-app purchases.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Dakoder. I'm Nilai Patel, editor in chief of the Virge, and Dakota is my show about big ideas and other problems. Doing something a little different today. I asked my friend John Gruber to come on the show and talk about the future of Apple, and importantly, the App Store. John and I have been friends for over a decade now. His independent website Daring Fireball was one of the first Apple blogs around, and it remains one of the most influential. John has more insight into Apple, its culture, and how it does things than pretty much anyone. Everyone at Apple and in the Apple developer community reads Daring Fireball religiously. In 2010, Steve Jobs himself emailed John's analysis of an early App Store rule change to an unhappy developer and called it very insightful, basically saying, this is what I think too. Personally, I will always remember a moment early in my career when a very excited Apple PR staffer pointed John out to me at an event like a celebrity sighting. This was very funny, also deeply humbling.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT