1000% this. The App Store is stagnant because Apple refuses to improve their store to where developers choose to distribute their app on the App Store. 30% may have made sense in 2008, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense in 2020.

Author here. It would be interesting to imagine what Apple could offer SaaS developers that would make them want to pay the App Store a percentage.

Imagine if Amazon was the dominant platform, and they were the ones charging an App Store fee, but somehow that included AWS fees as well...

A subscription fee closer to 10% starts to look attractive at least for smaller ventures. By dealing with taxes, exchange rates and credit cards, that is a fairly nice set of things to not even need to think about.

But the developer APIs/processes for dealing with in-app purchases are brutal and virtually unchanged over the past 5 years.

I sent an email to their support team asking if they had plans to open source their apps and they said, "there are no plans".

What a shame, it was a nice piece of hardware that could have had a few more years of life.

Thank you for doing that. I really wish they did open source their apps also.

It's hard to believe they weren't acquired. The amount of driving data they have must be huge.

They were, SiriusXM acquired them just over three years ago: https://blog.automatic.com/automatic-siriusxm-4dfbc9a6885c

SiriusXM not shutting down yet?

They are kept alive by how annoying it is to cancel the service and avoid future 'complimentary' reactivations.

If you live in California, you can require them to delete your information so that they can't contact you about your radio ID any longer.

Highly unlikely. The big money sink is already spent (launching the satelites).

The satellites are likely much cheaper than the ongoing costs for content.

It looks like they are spending over $2B annually on content fees. They could launch a lot of satellites with $2B per year.

Wow, they spend $2B/year on content and somehow manage to only have Clearchannel garbage stations? They're getting ripped off.

SpaceX should strike a deal with Spotify (StarLink “Constellation” as a competitor to SiriusXM)!

Why would spotify even need spacex? I mean... it's just the internet...they already have access to that, and so does everyone else. 4g connectivity to your car is probably simple and could be done if needed or a lot of people just link their phone to the radio.

Just as XM has use case specific hardware just for audio in cars and semi trucks, you’d need a StarLink terminal to get just audio content over StarLink’s constellation. Hence, a deal with a content provider (Tesla did this with Slacker radio in their cars).

Not every vehicle might need or want a full blown satellite ground terminal that can provide IP service.

Satellites cost a ton to maintain, and need to be replaced eventually.

They just launched two fresh ones last year so they’re good for the next 15-20 years

Perhaps there is better datasets for sale.

The added information compared to what Google or Apple are collecting is perhaps ODB metrics, but I'm not sure whether ODB metrics of gaz cars have a lot of value.

2.4GHz 8-core, 64GB, 2TB, 5500m 8GB, external LG 5k display, no fan problems

I hope to make it out to this lighthouse someday to get photographs. I’m trying to get as many photos of Michigan lighthouses for an app I’m building. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/explore-michigan/id1024621444

Very cool!

I have used EveryDollar (everydollar.com) for the past year and it really helps me track spending. They have a plus version that only works with US banks but I have used the free version for a while now.