It’s not just the 30% cut, it’s the “loan” that stores get by withholding payments to developers for arbitrary amounts of time. If you have a poorly-performing

It’s not just the 30% cut, it’s the “loan” that stores get by withholding payments to developers for arbitrary amounts of time. If you have a poorly-performing app, it may take months for a few “purchases” to even reach you! Meanwhile, all expenses (web hosting, $99/year developer fees, etc.) don’t stop, and any downsides (e.g. supporting “customers”, or reviews from “customers”) still affect you. Apple loves to boast about its thousands of “developers” but imagine the size of the slush fund Apple can maintain if there are tons of poorly-selling apps not being paid out for awhile? It’s a large, interest-free loan to Apple. Meanwhile, discoverability and other features that could actually improve sales are entirely up to Apple (and most of these suck). So if you devote most of your time to a poorly-discovered app that no one buys, you can’t make money. Thus, it isn’t surprising at all that lots of apps start to be “shoveled” into the store, in the hopes that the poor sales of all of them combined will be sustainable. Rinse and repeat. Apple is directly responsible for huge problems with the app economy, and there is really no defense of their tactics at this point.