7 ms·

I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distrib

by st3fan 6y ago

I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc. The danger of saying 'the developer membership should account for that' is that they will actually run the numbers and come back with MUCH higher yearly fees that simply push many small devs out.

chrisseaton 6y ago
$100 seems like basically zero for an app developer. Half an hour's billable work. Seems completely insignificant?
- sitzkrieg 6y ago
  who's making $200/h on apps? not indie app devs
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Anyone working on apps at a big company in the US. I guess lots of indie developers work in their spare time while doing that kind of job full time?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
mikepurvis 6y ago
I feel like the $100 is just supposed to be a token amount to provide a speed bump for tire-kickers, spammers, etc. If they were serious about it as a revenue stream, it would make sense to go with something more like the UE4 model, where it's free up until the point where you're a big fish, and then a more aggressive fixed fee kicks in.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  $100 probably is also a speed bump for open source developers who do not want to charge users.
  - jachee 6y ago
    AudioKit is churning out high-quality, open-source apps, despite that.
- tracker1 6y ago
  I'm not sure that most of us have issue with the $100 cost of entry... even if it were $100 for each app for store submission and a lesser fee for updates to offset the review costs even. The issue comes down to if you spend even a modest amount of time/money on development of something to jump into a vast sea of competition, where someone searching for the name of your app specifically cannot find you and to add insult to injury takes 30% if your gross before you're even able to recoup costs and there's no way to work around their distribution or payment models. Take Netflix for example, which doesn't run on Apple's distribution network... Should Apple have to pay for part of the deployment of all the assets and feeds? They don't... the margins are already thin and Apple frankly doesn't deserve 30% of that recurring revenue.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I think I agree with you, but it's interesting because you're actually making two points which are kind of the opposite of each other— on the one hand arguing that it's hard to pay the 30% before costs are recouped, but then also arguing that it's unfair to pay the 30% in perpetuity long after Apple's fixed costs (review, etc) have been recouped. I think if anything this kind of thing makes the case for explicitly having multiple tracks— maybe an enterprise one where you pay a 5-7 figure fixed annual fee (for support, timely review, policing of the store for phishing/knockoff apps that target your own, ensuring a direct hit for explicit searches) and then either a single-digit percentage of revenue or for free "portal" apps, some other way that Apple is compensated for user engagement. And then a totally separate indie track where all the revenue is yours up to X, after which some kind of sliding scale kicks in. In reality, there are almost certainly enterprise deals going on behind the scenes (or at least mostly behind the scenes, cough Epic) and the details of those are almost certainly very proprietary, due to how the negotiations would occur. But having at least one option for which the details are public would be nice.
callalex 6y ago
It’s funny how, as someone who builds cloud services, I thought your statement was going in the opposite direction until the end. $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting that is more than adequate to run most indie app downloads for a year. The counterpoint to my claim which you stated is that the App Store also provides reach and marketing, which are quite pricey. I agree that they are expensive services, but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?
- ajharrison 6y ago
  Among us
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded. > but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success? There are tons of apps that got popular due to App Store editors choosing to promote them. For example, getting App of the Day nets you a 1700% boost in downloads: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-featuring-boosts-downloads-by-1747-games-by-792/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-feat...
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    > It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded. You paid for that already when you bought the Mac that's mandatory for developing on iOS.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      The iOS software stack is certainly not what people are paying for when they buy a Mac.
skunkworker 6y ago
I was doing some back of the napkin math earlier today to figure out just how much bandwidth Fortnite on the App Store has done over it's lifetime. Assuming 116 million ios users with a 2.5 to 5gb depending on the device. That's 580 petabytes just for the initial download, not to mention updates probably push it into the low single digit exabytes range.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  So what, Apple should bill them some bandwidth fees? Make them host it themselves maybe?
  - st3fan 6y ago
    No the argument above is that those 580 Petabytes should be covered by the $100 developer program membership. How much does 580 PT cost at AWS?
    - chucky_z 6y ago
      ~445k in s3 costs according to aws calc, using a naive "there is 1 object in the bucket, it's been fetched 116 million times, and that used 580PB of fetch bandwidth."
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      If you needed to serve petabytes of data, you'd be throwing a lot of money away on storage and traffic costs using AWS over other solutions.
IronRanger 6y ago
The purpose is gatekeeping, and setting a minimum basis of quality. If the annual fee was $0/year developers would be worse off due to the flood of low-quality applications. This is exactly what happened on Steam when the platform was opened to anything for a $100 submission fee - quality tanked and revenues even for established Indie developer have declined significantly.
pornel 6y ago
Bandwidth for app distribution is cheap. Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app. 99.999% of apps don't get any marketing from Apple at all. Apps get lost in the crowd and the poor search that still struggles with obvious keyword spamming and rip-offs. Actual app ads are charged separately. Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product. I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut. It's not about recouping Apple's costs, but increasing Apple's profit.
- sooheon 6y ago
  > Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app. And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no? > Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
- no_op 6y ago
  Pretty much nobody prices software or digital services by looking at how much they cost to provide and adding some margin, which is how this implies Apple should be reasoning. The common model is to price on value. Taking a percentage of revenue is a pretty good proxy for that. And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer. This is a huge part of why native apps even emerged as a major phenomenon on mobile, against the tide of webification that's swept the desktop over the last 20 years.
  - 6y ago
upbeat_general 6y ago
They could scale costs based on how many downloads if they really wanted to. Make an exception for totally free apps.
ddevault 6y ago
>I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc. Then the carrot the fee unlocks in terms of access to these services should speak for itself, without the stick of having no other choice.
m463 6y ago
Wouldn't that also allow for competition FOR developers? Alternate cloud services, alternate distribution, tools, etc? remember apple has not only a monopoly on apps but a monopsony as well.
hrktb 6y ago
> they will actually run the numbers Are we assuming that after more than 10 years of App Store, Apple didn't run the numbers and/or is taking a bad deal ignoring its bottomline for some reason?

by st3fan 6y ago

chrisseaton 6y ago

$100 seems like basically zero for an app developer. Half an hour's billable work. Seems completely insignificant?

sitzkrieg 6y ago
who's making $200/h on apps? not indie app devs
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Anyone working on apps at a big company in the US. I guess lots of indie developers work in their spare time while doing that kind of job full time?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

mikepurvis 6y ago

I feel like the $100 is just supposed to be a token amount to provide a speed bump for tire-kickers, spammers, etc. If they were serious about it as a revenue stream, it would make sense to go with something more like the UE4 model, where it's free up until the point where you're a big fish, and then a more aggressive fixed fee kicks in.

vbezhenar 6y ago
$100 probably is also a speed bump for open source developers who do not want to charge users.
- jachee 6y ago
  AudioKit is churning out high-quality, open-source apps, despite that.
tracker1 6y ago
I'm not sure that most of us have issue with the $100 cost of entry... even if it were $100 for each app for store submission and a lesser fee for updates to offset the review costs even. The issue comes down to if you spend even a modest amount of time/money on development of something to jump into a vast sea of competition, where someone searching for the name of your app specifically cannot find you and to add insult to injury takes 30% if your gross before you're even able to recoup costs and there's no way to work around their distribution or payment models. Take Netflix for example, which doesn't run on Apple's distribution network... Should Apple have to pay for part of the deployment of all the assets and feeds? They don't... the margins are already thin and Apple frankly doesn't deserve 30% of that recurring revenue.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I think I agree with you, but it's interesting because you're actually making two points which are kind of the opposite of each other— on the one hand arguing that it's hard to pay the 30% before costs are recouped, but then also arguing that it's unfair to pay the 30% in perpetuity long after Apple's fixed costs (review, etc) have been recouped. I think if anything this kind of thing makes the case for explicitly having multiple tracks— maybe an enterprise one where you pay a 5-7 figure fixed annual fee (for support, timely review, policing of the store for phishing/knockoff apps that target your own, ensuring a direct hit for explicit searches) and then either a single-digit percentage of revenue or for free "portal" apps, some other way that Apple is compensated for user engagement. And then a totally separate indie track where all the revenue is yours up to X, after which some kind of sliding scale kicks in. In reality, there are almost certainly enterprise deals going on behind the scenes (or at least mostly behind the scenes, cough Epic) and the details of those are almost certainly very proprietary, due to how the negotiations would occur. But having at least one option for which the details are public would be nice.

callalex 6y ago

It’s funny how, as someone who builds cloud services, I thought your statement was going in the opposite direction until the end. $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting that is more than adequate to run most indie app downloads for a year. The counterpoint to my claim which you stated is that the App Store also provides reach and marketing, which are quite pricey. I agree that they are expensive services, but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?

ajharrison 6y ago
Among us
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded. > but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success? There are tons of apps that got popular due to App Store editors choosing to promote them. For example, getting App of the Day nets you a 1700% boost in downloads: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-featuring-boosts-downloads-by-1747-games-by-792/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-feat...
- josephcsible 6y ago
  > It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded. You paid for that already when you bought the Mac that's mandatory for developing on iOS.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    The iOS software stack is certainly not what people are paying for when they buy a Mac.

skunkworker 6y ago

I was doing some back of the napkin math earlier today to figure out just how much bandwidth Fortnite on the App Store has done over it's lifetime. Assuming 116 million ios users with a 2.5 to 5gb depending on the device. That's 580 petabytes just for the initial download, not to mention updates probably push it into the low single digit exabytes range.

jimnotgym 6y ago
So what, Apple should bill them some bandwidth fees? Make them host it themselves maybe?
- st3fan 6y ago
  No the argument above is that those 580 Petabytes should be covered by the $100 developer program membership. How much does 580 PT cost at AWS?
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    ~445k in s3 costs according to aws calc, using a naive "there is 1 object in the bucket, it's been fetched 116 million times, and that used 580PB of fetch bandwidth."
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    If you needed to serve petabytes of data, you'd be throwing a lot of money away on storage and traffic costs using AWS over other solutions.

IronRanger 6y ago

The purpose is gatekeeping, and setting a minimum basis of quality. If the annual fee was $0/year developers would be worse off due to the flood of low-quality applications. This is exactly what happened on Steam when the platform was opened to anything for a $100 submission fee - quality tanked and revenues even for established Indie developer have declined significantly.

pornel 6y ago

Bandwidth for app distribution is cheap. Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app. 99.999% of apps don't get any marketing from Apple at all. Apps get lost in the crowd and the poor search that still struggles with obvious keyword spamming and rip-offs. Actual app ads are charged separately. Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product. I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut. It's not about recouping Apple's costs, but increasing Apple's profit.

sooheon 6y ago
> Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app. And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no? > Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
no_op 6y ago
Pretty much nobody prices software or digital services by looking at how much they cost to provide and adding some margin, which is how this implies Apple should be reasoning. The common model is to price on value. Taking a percentage of revenue is a pretty good proxy for that. And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer. This is a huge part of why native apps even emerged as a major phenomenon on mobile, against the tide of webification that's swept the desktop over the last 20 years.
- 6y ago

upbeat_general 6y ago

They could scale costs based on how many downloads if they really wanted to. Make an exception for totally free apps.

ddevault 6y ago

>I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc. Then the carrot the fee unlocks in terms of access to these services should speak for itself, without the stick of having no other choice.

m463 6y ago

Wouldn't that also allow for competition FOR developers? Alternate cloud services, alternate distribution, tools, etc? remember apple has not only a monopoly on apps but a monopsony as well.

hrktb 6y ago

> they will actually run the numbers Are we assuming that after more than 10 years of App Store, Apple didn't run the numbers and/or is taking a bad deal ignoring its bottomline for some reason?