3 ms·

Apple made $11 billion from apps in 2017. I doubt they spent more than $1B on app distribution. You d have to add research costs to go up to 10%.

valuearb 8y ago
I guarantee they spent more. The host over 2 million apps, in hundreds of geographic locations. With updates, they are distributing billions of releases and updates a year. And some of those apps exceed a gigabyte in size. Outside of raw bandwidth and storage costs, someone has to run those tens of thousands of servers across the world, and manage development of the distribution software. Then you need sales and marketing personnel to build and run the App Store, and hundreds of similar staffs to build and manage the hundreds of international stores in dozens of different languages. Then you need software development teams to build and maintain the - payment processing, including server infrastructure, the iOS, Mac SDKs, the APIs, etc - software distribution and updating infrastructure, from tools to manage thousands of servers, as well as track and report, and more Mac/iOS SDKs and sever APIs. - The App Store itself, with custom app pages, search, advertising, Mobil app versions, web versions, account management, support, etc. - App Submission infrastructure, including XCode, Swift, Automated App Analysis tools, Bitcode, the Bitcode server infrastructure, crash reporting, TestFlight test distributions and infrastructure, developer accounts including security profile generation/management, ItunesConnect account management including sales and legal reporting along with App distribution interface and controls. And then there is - Sales and marketing costs, advertising, developer co-marketing - Customer support And finally, developer support. Apple likely has at least a thousand people working in developer support, mostly on app submissions. And they are all in Cupertino, meaning Apple is spending well over $100M a year just on payroll costs for that department alone. $1B? I’d be surprised if it’s less than triple that. They likely spend close to half a billion on App Store/Developer advertising alone.
- clarky07 8y ago
  >And they are all in Cupertino Do you have a source for that? I'm 99.9% sure this isn't true. I've had apps rejected where the screenshots had non-english characters in the status bar, and rejections because the app had no daily content because they were testing at like 3:00 am our time and we publish our daily content around 10:00 am.
- buboard 8y ago
  You wouldnt count ios development as a cost that apple pays for developers, its the price they pay to lure developers. Just like MS develops windows APIs for free. Developers work for apple, not vice versa, the question is if apple is paying them enough. App ecosystems or platforms were since decades free for developers, because platforms need developers more than viceversa. Apple’s case is unique, and it comes from their preexisting culture of a cultish, high-paying customer base. It is unfortunate that google and ms. copied their model, i think android app distribution should be free. At this point, i dont think they even did it for the money, but more for appearing to be ‘serious’ in their offering. It was a marketing decision. If it had been free from the start , companies wouldnt have invested so much on building increasingly higher walled gardens. Apps would be on the web, and some third party would have done a better job of organizing and reviewing them. I doubt app stores are a big cost as you say. It is pretty obvious from their quality that these companies just dont care about them. They use them to lock in developers.

valuearb 8y ago

I guarantee they spent more. The host over 2 million apps, in hundreds of geographic locations. With updates, they are distributing billions of releases and updates a year. And some of those apps exceed a gigabyte in size. Outside of raw bandwidth and storage costs, someone has to run those tens of thousands of servers across the world, and manage development of the distribution software. Then you need sales and marketing personnel to build and run the App Store, and hundreds of similar staffs to build and manage the hundreds of international stores in dozens of different languages. Then you need software development teams to build and maintain the - payment processing, including server infrastructure, the iOS, Mac SDKs, the APIs, etc - software distribution and updating infrastructure, from tools to manage thousands of servers, as well as track and report, and more Mac/iOS SDKs and sever APIs. - The App Store itself, with custom app pages, search, advertising, Mobil app versions, web versions, account management, support, etc. - App Submission infrastructure, including XCode, Swift, Automated App Analysis tools, Bitcode, the Bitcode server infrastructure, crash reporting, TestFlight test distributions and infrastructure, developer accounts including security profile generation/management, ItunesConnect account management including sales and legal reporting along with App distribution interface and controls. And then there is - Sales and marketing costs, advertising, developer co-marketing - Customer support And finally, developer support. Apple likely has at least a thousand people working in developer support, mostly on app submissions. And they are all in Cupertino, meaning Apple is spending well over $100M a year just on payroll costs for that department alone. $1B? I’d be surprised if it’s less than triple that. They likely spend close to half a billion on App Store/Developer advertising alone.

clarky07 8y ago
>And they are all in Cupertino Do you have a source for that? I'm 99.9% sure this isn't true. I've had apps rejected where the screenshots had non-english characters in the status bar, and rejections because the app had no daily content because they were testing at like 3:00 am our time and we publish our daily content around 10:00 am.
buboard 8y ago
You wouldnt count ios development as a cost that apple pays for developers, its the price they pay to lure developers. Just like MS develops windows APIs for free. Developers work for apple, not vice versa, the question is if apple is paying them enough. App ecosystems or platforms were since decades free for developers, because platforms need developers more than viceversa. Apple’s case is unique, and it comes from their preexisting culture of a cultish, high-paying customer base. It is unfortunate that google and ms. copied their model, i think android app distribution should be free. At this point, i dont think they even did it for the money, but more for appearing to be ‘serious’ in their offering. It was a marketing decision. If it had been free from the start , companies wouldnt have invested so much on building increasingly higher walled gardens. Apps would be on the web, and some third party would have done a better job of organizing and reviewing them. I doubt app stores are a big cost as you say. It is pretty obvious from their quality that these companies just dont care about them. They use them to lock in developers.