It's WWDC week, technically, and I know what you're supposed to be writing about if you have a tech blog in June 2020: Apple just said it's moving the Mac to its own chips, ARM instead of Intel, after fifteen years of Intel inside. That's a huge deal and I'll probably have more to say about it once developers actually start shipping stuff for it. But the story I can't stop refreshing Twitter over this week isn't the keynote. It's Basecamp.
If you missed it: Basecamp (the project management company, run by Jason Fried and DHH, David Heinemeier Hansson, the guy who built Ruby on Rails) launched a new email app called Hey a couple weeks back. $99 a year, no free tier, built from scratch around the idea that email should work differently, screen senders before they even hit your inbox, that kind of thing. I haven't used it myself (I'm cheap, and I've got a Fastmail habit that's fifteen years deep at this point) but by every account I've read it's a genuinely different way to handle email, not just Gmail with a new coat of paint.
Then this week Apple told them the iOS app was getting pulled unless they added in-app purchase, meaning Apple takes its usual 30 percent cut on that $99 a year. Hey pushed back publicly, hard. DHH has been on a tweeting streak that reads like he's been saving these arguments up for a decade. Apple's answer, more or less, is that the rules are the rules and everyone follows them the same way. Which is technically true and also kind of beside the point, because the rules don't actually apply the same way to everyone. Amazon doesn't let you buy a Kindle book through the Kindle app either, and nobody's threatening to pull that off the store over it.
What's stuck with me isn't even the money. It's that this is happening the same week Apple's on stage talking about empowering developers while also, in a much smaller room somewhere, telling a company they can't ship a bug fix. Two completely different Apples existing at the same time, and I don't think that's new exactly, I just think this is the week it's impossible to ignore.
My honest opinion, and I'll probably get an email or two about this: I don't think the 30 percent cut itself is the crime everyone online is making it out to be. Running the App Store costs money, review costs money, and if you don't like the terms you can build a web app (Hey has one) or just not be on iOS. What's actually bad here is the arbitrariness. Hey has been live and working for weeks. The purchase happens outside the app, same as a hundred other services that get a pass. Then suddenly, days before the biggest developer event of the year, someone at Apple decides this is the app that gets made an example of. That timing is not a coincidence, and pretending it is insults everyone watching.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I went and looked up Ta-da List, which was Basecamp's, well, 37signals back then, first product, a stupidly simple to-do list app from around 2005. It still technically exists as a page somewhere. Fifteen years between "let's make lists on the internet" and "let's fight Apple over what counts as a purchase." That's a wild arc for one company.
None of this is resolved as I'm typing this, so I don't know how it shakes out by the time you're reading it. Maybe Apple backs down quietly, maybe Hey caves and adds the IAP option, maybe it drags on for weeks. Whatever happens, it's a decent reminder of the actual power dynamic here: a company can spend years building something genuinely new and it still runs through a chokepoint owned by somebody else entirely. Which, incidentally, is one of maybe three reasons I've never once considered turning this blog into an app. Nobody can reject my blog for using the wrong payment processor, I just pointed the domain at a box through Tricknowtech years ago and it's stayed up ever since, no review process, no 30 percent cut, no waiting around for anyone's approval to fix a typo.
Go read the WWDC writeups if you want the chip details, there are better ones than mine for that. This is the story I actually cared about this week.