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Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. People quickly forget what a tremendous li

Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers. It's also not about the developers, the success of the App Store comes from Apple's users. They trust the App Store because they trust Apple's curation/privacy/security. That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. Trust doesn't come cheap.

lostlogin 6y ago
> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers. We do, but at the same time, physical stores selling software are now rare or non-existent. Apple is not competing with them.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  Right and that’s partly because online store like Apple's out-competed then on price by taking less than traditional distributors.
  - biktor_gj 6y ago
    More because the Inetrnet came and allowed every vendor to sell directly from their webpage instead of going through the distribution channel, making retail software stores obsolete There are two platforms that drive 100% of the mobile phone industry. One (Android) allows other distributors in the platform (even if they have to go through loops like sideloading an app and then allowing that app to install other apps). The other will kick and try to destroy you if you try to do something like that. Is that legal or anti-competitive in the US & Europe? We'll find out...
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. Zero %. Retail used to buy boxed software and sell it at risk. Were Apple buying units of software/service up front and the taking a risk reselling it, it would be valid to compare the split of end-user cost with classic retail, but Apple's not doing that, so it isn't.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  They may have meant mobile marketplaces before AppStore. Those charged anywhere up to 90%. And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products, or they would go out of business. Logistics, distribution, and store markup all add up to the final price of the product on the shelf.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products Yes, they do, unless it's consignment model, which wasn't usually the case for boxed software. The retail sale happens after retail has made the purchase. It’s obviously usually at a higher price than the retailer paid, but they don't take a cut of what the vendor is asking for the software. They pay whatever the vendor (or, often in real retail, a distributor that sits in between) is offering to sell the product for, in advance, and takes a risk that they will be able to sell the units they have purchased at a higher price. It's structurally not at all the same as what an app store does, where it pays no one, anything (indeed, often charges an access fee up front to the seller) before a sale is made, and then pockets a share of the sale at no risk.
    - setpatchaddress 6y ago
      You seem to be getting stuck on the word "retail" referring to point-of-sale-to-end-user, where other people are using it to refer to the cost of the entire retail model, which is the comparable thing in this discussion.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      What a simplistic view of the world. You, the seller of the product, have to decide what the final price is suitable for your product, among other things. Oh, you want to earn $60 per box? Well, good luck with that. After logistics, distribution, retailer (and/or possibly multiple resellers in between) margins your product will sell for, let's say $90. Good luck selling that to customers. So, when you distribute your goods through the retailers, you will factor all those costs. You want to sell your product for $60 to customers? Subtract all the costs I listed, and you end up selling it to the retailer for a significantly lower price. Hell, if you're new to the market, you may end up paying the retailer an upfront sum to cover potential losses. But yeah, retailers get a "0% cut" on your money.
wvenable 6y ago
Wait till you learn how much Apple charges for app promotion -- which the 30% cut has nothing to do with. App promotion is a $500 million to $2 billion dollar industry for Apple.
antibuddy 6y ago
Apple does just the distribution. The promotion is still on the developer and you may not even promote your own services in your own app. It is also save to say that a lot of developers would like to do the selling themselves. Apple is not supposed to do the distribution for free, but 30% is really a lot, especially when they do unwanted stuff for you (the payment). Also the App Store really is the only way to get apps on an iOS-device, so the user has no real choice anyway.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  The promotion is still on the developer Apple does plenty of app promotion, from promotions inside its own store to multi-million dollar television campaigns showcasing all the cool apps that are available inside the App Store.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    Is it really promotion if you pay the same 30% cut as your competitor, but their app ends up on national TV and yours doesn't?
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      People are confused because promotion is a separate service that Apple charges separately from publishing.
_qulr 6y ago
> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers. People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed. >That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. No, that was caused by a billion people buying shiny new mobile computers. They would have bought a lot of software in any case, even without an App Store. New platform, new software.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed. He's talking about when you used to have to pay $50 to $500 for software in a store, but the author was lucky to see $5-$10 of that.
  - grumple 6y ago
    What do you mean? Microsoft was certainly seeing more than 5-10$ per product sold.
  - x0x0 6y ago
    And now Apple generously gives you up to 85% of $1 to $5!
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    True, but today is mostly certainly not 1998.
- hn_check 6y ago
  "People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed." Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic. Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year). Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing. As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. Well, that was before the Internet era, wasn't it. Personally I'm buying macOS software outside of the AppStore and I'm very happy with it. I also feel good that I support the developers directly.
ryanbrunner 6y ago
Do you think the marginal cost of distributing software for Apple even begins to approach the cost of housing it in a retail store?
ksk 6y ago
>They trust the App Store because they trust Apple's curation/privacy/security. That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. Trust doesn't come cheap. People buy way more on Amazon, and Amazon doesn't rob 30% of your sales.

lostlogin 6y ago

> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers. We do, but at the same time, physical stores selling software are now rare or non-existent. Apple is not competing with them.

thewebcount 6y ago
Right and that’s partly because online store like Apple's out-competed then on price by taking less than traditional distributors.
- biktor_gj 6y ago
  More because the Inetrnet came and allowed every vendor to sell directly from their webpage instead of going through the distribution channel, making retail software stores obsolete There are two platforms that drive 100% of the mobile phone industry. One (Android) allows other distributors in the platform (even if they have to go through loops like sideloading an app and then allowing that app to install other apps). The other will kick and try to destroy you if you try to do something like that. Is that legal or anti-competitive in the US & Europe? We'll find out...

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. Zero %. Retail used to buy boxed software and sell it at risk. Were Apple buying units of software/service up front and the taking a risk reselling it, it would be valid to compare the split of end-user cost with classic retail, but Apple's not doing that, so it isn't.

dmitriid 6y ago
They may have meant mobile marketplaces before AppStore. Those charged anywhere up to 90%. And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products, or they would go out of business. Logistics, distribution, and store markup all add up to the final price of the product on the shelf.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products Yes, they do, unless it's consignment model, which wasn't usually the case for boxed software. The retail sale happens after retail has made the purchase. It’s obviously usually at a higher price than the retailer paid, but they don't take a cut of what the vendor is asking for the software. They pay whatever the vendor (or, often in real retail, a distributor that sits in between) is offering to sell the product for, in advance, and takes a risk that they will be able to sell the units they have purchased at a higher price. It's structurally not at all the same as what an app store does, where it pays no one, anything (indeed, often charges an access fee up front to the seller) before a sale is made, and then pockets a share of the sale at no risk.
  - setpatchaddress 6y ago
    You seem to be getting stuck on the word "retail" referring to point-of-sale-to-end-user, where other people are using it to refer to the cost of the entire retail model, which is the comparable thing in this discussion.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    What a simplistic view of the world. You, the seller of the product, have to decide what the final price is suitable for your product, among other things. Oh, you want to earn $60 per box? Well, good luck with that. After logistics, distribution, retailer (and/or possibly multiple resellers in between) margins your product will sell for, let's say $90. Good luck selling that to customers. So, when you distribute your goods through the retailers, you will factor all those costs. You want to sell your product for $60 to customers? Subtract all the costs I listed, and you end up selling it to the retailer for a significantly lower price. Hell, if you're new to the market, you may end up paying the retailer an upfront sum to cover potential losses. But yeah, retailers get a "0% cut" on your money.

wvenable 6y ago

Wait till you learn how much Apple charges for app promotion -- which the 30% cut has nothing to do with. App promotion is a $500 million to $2 billion dollar industry for Apple.

antibuddy 6y ago

Apple does just the distribution. The promotion is still on the developer and you may not even promote your own services in your own app. It is also save to say that a lot of developers would like to do the selling themselves. Apple is not supposed to do the distribution for free, but 30% is really a lot, especially when they do unwanted stuff for you (the payment). Also the App Store really is the only way to get apps on an iOS-device, so the user has no real choice anyway.

reaperducer 6y ago
The promotion is still on the developer Apple does plenty of app promotion, from promotions inside its own store to multi-million dollar television campaigns showcasing all the cool apps that are available inside the App Store.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  Is it really promotion if you pay the same 30% cut as your competitor, but their app ends up on national TV and yours doesn't?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    People are confused because promotion is a separate service that Apple charges separately from publishing.

_qulr 6y ago

> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers. People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed. >That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. No, that was caused by a billion people buying shiny new mobile computers. They would have bought a lot of software in any case, even without an App Store. New platform, new software.

reaperducer 6y ago
People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed. He's talking about when you used to have to pay $50 to $500 for software in a store, but the author was lucky to see $5-$10 of that.
- grumple 6y ago
  What do you mean? Microsoft was certainly seeing more than 5-10$ per product sold.
- x0x0 6y ago
  And now Apple generously gives you up to 85% of $1 to $5!
- ethbr0 6y ago
  True, but today is mostly certainly not 1998.
hn_check 6y ago
"People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed." Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic. Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year). Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing. As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software. Well, that was before the Internet era, wasn't it. Personally I'm buying macOS software outside of the AppStore and I'm very happy with it. I also feel good that I support the developers directly.

ryanbrunner 6y ago

Do you think the marginal cost of distributing software for Apple even begins to approach the cost of housing it in a retail store?

ksk 6y ago

>They trust the App Store because they trust Apple's curation/privacy/security. That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. Trust doesn't come cheap. People buy way more on Amazon, and Amazon doesn't rob 30% of your sales.