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I think Apple sees one of its biggest moats as the App Store, and I believe rightly so. I really think that’s where a large portion of their stringent rules are

I think Apple sees one of its biggest moats as the App Store, and I believe rightly so. I really think that’s where a large portion of their stringent rules are coming from is protecting that moat. I wouldn’t be surprised though if they actually experienced more growth overall by focusing more on the developer experience, loosening some of their restrictions on payments (to me it should be a blessed API for other payment processors. Sure require they accept Apple Pay. That’s fine. But I do think that’s the way forward) and allow app developers to sell upgrades rather than just subscriptions, one time purchases, and in app purchases. I think it could really reignite the marketplace on their devices

cblconfederate 6y ago
Is the app store really valuable ? How often do we read about app store devs becoming millionaires (they don't). Users spend 97% of their time in the top 10 (free) apps from the usual suspects. App development is a dead end business. Apple is a premium products company and software was (and will be) always cheap so there s no way they will make their usual profit margins on that. They need to keep selling premium stuff, which has to be physical. At best they can add some premium content , but that's it.
- likpok 6y ago
  There are thousands or tens of thousands of millionaires produced by those top 10 free apps.
- treis 6y ago
  In app purchases are a huge market. This site puts it at $50 billion a year in the US alone: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/app-stores-saw-record-204-billion-app-downloads-in-2019-consumer-spend-of-120-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/app-stores-saw-record-204-... It's a huge market and Apple takes a 30% cut of that for not doing too much. The margins have to be bonkers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    That's 15B for apple, but there's not a lot of room for growth. Plus it doesnt seem apple has a big moat there, all big publishers are looking for ways to bypass them or just sue them. It doesn't seem like apple has a healthy relationship with devs, hence their heavihanded practices.
wonderlg 6y ago
Apple is doing great even if they’re not super friendly to developers. Why change? I think that they could become better once they start losing some ground, kinda like Microsoft is all about Linux now that the desktop market isn’t improving for them.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Is the app store really valuable ? How often do we read about app store devs becoming millionaires (they don't). Users spend 97% of their time in the top 10 (free) apps from the usual suspects. App development is a dead end business. Apple is a premium products company and software was (and will be) always cheap so there s no way they will make their usual profit margins on that. They need to keep selling premium stuff, which has to be physical. At best they can add some premium content , but that's it.

likpok 6y ago
There are thousands or tens of thousands of millionaires produced by those top 10 free apps.
treis 6y ago
In app purchases are a huge market. This site puts it at $50 billion a year in the US alone: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/app-stores-saw-record-204-billion-app-downloads-in-2019-consumer-spend-of-120-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/app-stores-saw-record-204-... It's a huge market and Apple takes a 30% cut of that for not doing too much. The margins have to be bonkers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  That's 15B for apple, but there's not a lot of room for growth. Plus it doesnt seem apple has a big moat there, all big publishers are looking for ways to bypass them or just sue them. It doesn't seem like apple has a healthy relationship with devs, hence their heavihanded practices.

wonderlg 6y ago

Apple is doing great even if they’re not super friendly to developers. Why change? I think that they could become better once they start losing some ground, kinda like Microsoft is all about Linux now that the desktop market isn’t improving for them.