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How should Apple charge for the costs of building and maintaining SDKs for 3rd parties? There are plenty of UIKit SPI that undoubtedly took a lot of investment

How should Apple charge for the costs of building and maintaining SDKs for 3rd parties? There are plenty of UIKit SPI that undoubtedly took a lot of investment to turn into API. Apple also seems to spend considerable development resources building API which simply would not need to exist if there weren’t third parties on iOS (e.g. IDFA and its associated controls). Sometimes they likely have to develop new technology, such as 3rd party integrations with Siri or CoreAudio. Finally, there’s also the maintenance burden of API which Apple no longer uses but third parties do. I’m sure there’s more work in providing a platform; this is just what I can think of as examples for now. Who should pay for this work? How would you go about accounting for it when calculating the “cost” of operating App Store? Is it fair to say that all this cost should be capitalized into the hardware price of an iPhone, given that most customers use only a small subset of the features on iOS? Should developers be charged by API call, similar to the business model of a cloud platform?

nolok 6y ago
Ah yes, developing APIs wouldn't be possible if every software maker didn't give them a 30% rent on their revenue ! Except Windows had already proved it's false. Those APIs are investment, you factor their r&d costs into the cost of your product, so the buyers of ios devices are already paying for that.
- shuckles 6y ago
  You are arguing a straw man, and it’s quite obvious the price of hardware doesn’t cover the cost of iOS development because iPhones don’t cost much more than Android flagships, where the smartphone maker gets the OS for nearly free (and with little after-sales support!).
  - nolok 6y ago
    You are weirdly confused trying to compare two different things. Apple's financial results are public and you should check them because you will see that they make a massive amount of profit on their iphones, and they actively separates those numbers from their "services" (appstore and icloud) numbers. Apple themselves disagree with you in their financial statement.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      It’s really unclear what your point is or how you are engaging with my question about accounting for the “costs” of running the 2nd most successful application platform in history, after the web. It is undoubtedly much higher than the cost of running a store, but how much? iPhone gross margins are about 35%. Even if it was a loss leader, $350 for five years of iOS is obviously underpriced, so I’m not sure what you mean with your reference to financial statements.
      - username90 6y ago
        > $350 for five years of iOS is obviously underpriced No it isn't, windows is much cheaper than that.
        shuckles 6y ago
        Every major release of Windows costs over $100, and iOS has a major release annually. Trying to compare iOS and Windows without any adjustments whatsoever is almost comical.

nolok 6y ago

Ah yes, developing APIs wouldn't be possible if every software maker didn't give them a 30% rent on their revenue ! Except Windows had already proved it's false. Those APIs are investment, you factor their r&d costs into the cost of your product, so the buyers of ios devices are already paying for that.

shuckles 6y ago
You are arguing a straw man, and it’s quite obvious the price of hardware doesn’t cover the cost of iOS development because iPhones don’t cost much more than Android flagships, where the smartphone maker gets the OS for nearly free (and with little after-sales support!).
- nolok 6y ago
  You are weirdly confused trying to compare two different things. Apple's financial results are public and you should check them because you will see that they make a massive amount of profit on their iphones, and they actively separates those numbers from their "services" (appstore and icloud) numbers. Apple themselves disagree with you in their financial statement.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    It’s really unclear what your point is or how you are engaging with my question about accounting for the “costs” of running the 2nd most successful application platform in history, after the web. It is undoubtedly much higher than the cost of running a store, but how much? iPhone gross margins are about 35%. Even if it was a loss leader, $350 for five years of iOS is obviously underpriced, so I’m not sure what you mean with your reference to financial statements.
    - username90 6y ago
      > $350 for five years of iOS is obviously underpriced No it isn't, windows is much cheaper than that.
      - shuckles 6y ago
        Every major release of Windows costs over $100, and iOS has a major release annually. Trying to compare iOS and Windows without any adjustments whatsoever is almost comical.