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It's nice to see Apple admitting that they have for a long time, and for the detriment of everyone, fused two very distincts roles. The first is distributing s
by C4stor 8y ago
It's nice to see Apple admitting that they have for a long time, and for the detriment of everyone, fused two very distincts roles.
The first is distributing software, and the second is processing payments.
Incredibly, the first is free for everyone, even if you distribute billions of copies of your app, which doesn't make any sense in a vacuum.
But they allowed themselves to become the only payment processor available on their hardware, while there are a ton of options in the wild, and this payment processor takes a 30% cut. This is roughly ten times what Stripe charges for the exact same service !
If Apple really wanted to allow a fair competition on their hardware, they would provide these two services independently, and allow competition on the payment processing part.
It would mean start charging for app distribution, but that would only make sense anyway, since they endure a cost (however low) on every download.
But of course, it's not what they want (nor what google wants with the App Store). They want to have a monopoly on payment processing, because that's where you can extract as much money as you want.
Which leads to these ubuesque situations where greedy corps #1 fight with greedy corp #2, and in the end, it's the customers that are losing anyway due to jacked up prices on non competing-services.
And people saying that there is the option to switch to Android, well...it's the same payment processing fee ! It's really a wonder none of those two giants are competing on that point to attract developers...
- mrunkel 8y agoThe 30% is for distribution, payment processing (including refunds) and first line customer support, in both directions. It also includes vetting all app submissions for users. I would wager that neither Google nor Apple cares about the developers directly. Indirectly they want to make it possible for developers to reach their (Apple's) customers because it's good for the customer. However, the developer pays apple $99/yr, the customers a great deal more. I still see the app store as a great thing for customers and developers. And again, if you don't want to pay apple anything, release your app for free and have your customers login to the app after they buy it somewhere else. But if you want to leverage the app store's reach, you need to pay Apple their share.
- C4stor 8y agoThat's exactly my point : 30% for everything makes 0 sense ! 1. Distribution shouldn't be indexed on the price of what you're distributing. Distribution costs are mostly flat. They could be charging a per MB cost of download, plus a flat cost for app curation for example, it would make sense. 2. 30% for payment processing is ten times what it needs to be. 3. Same as 1., customer support costs doesn't depend on the app revenue, they should be charged independently of that it Apple played fair. $99 a year is a laughably small amount to pay for big editors, it doesn't even cover bandwidth costs of distributing data. The only point is preventing the app store being literally flooded by low quality apps. So yes, to leverage the App Store reach, I should pay the App Store something. And that something should nothing at all to do with what my own customers are paying me, which the App Store shouldn't even know to begin with.
- mikelward 8y agoIt's not technically free: you have to buy a Mac and pay the annual Apple Developer Program fee. This alone irks me. Why do I need to pay Apple, even if I develop my app in Flutter or some other cross-platform SDK? But sure, there is no additional per-unit cost.