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I disagree for two reasons: one, Apple is not raking in huge profits on the app store. After credit card fees, bandwidth, developer/support time, etc., they're
by frankus 17y ago
I disagree for two reasons: one, Apple is not raking in huge profits on the app store. After credit card fees, bandwidth, developer/support time, etc., they're probably barely breaking even on their 30% take (although they do sit on your money for a while before disbursing). I still think they're primarily a hardware company that realizes that their sales are driven by software.
Secondly, a web app highly optimized to the point where it acts just like a native iPhone app is not that much more cross-platform than a native app.
- brandon 17y agoI don't have any solid numbers on Apple's margins, but I'm not sure I agree with your break-even assessment. taptaptap recently announced that they clear $1M/month via AppStore sales (and they don't currently have any apps on the 100 Top Grossing list). From a per-customer perspective, I don't think Apple spends their $450,000 take supporting taptaptap. This will pan out differently with less profitable customers, but I imagine that the lower-end customers are effectively subsidized by the giants like EA (13/TG100), Gameloft (5/TG100), et al. I'd absolutely love to see Apple's fixed and variable costs for developers at different sales levels, but I'm not holding my breath.