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> Alternatively, if everyone who is publishing free on Apple is using an alternate payment system, and Apple doesn't collect anything from those apps, would it

> Alternatively, if everyone who is publishing free on Apple is using an alternate payment system, and Apple doesn't collect anything from those apps, would it be reasonable for Apple to have some sort of "Developer pays $10 for every 10k push messages from a free app?" and "Developer pays $0.25/month for each app on the App Store"? I think this has been a missing piece of the conversation for the most part. Apple needs to pay for servers, upkeep, development, etc. and deserve to make (some) profit. Why is the conversation about whether Apple can charge 30% or 0% or somewhere in between per transaction rather than based on actual usages and costs associated with operating the platform? AWS offers similar features and technologies but we don't see them charging based on your product's revenue. Why should Apple? Price setting is obviously a problem though if Apple continues to be the only company allowed to provide a service like "App Review" or "10k push notifications".

extropy 5y ago
Fair question. If apple charged for the actual costs it would be a non issue. Instead they charge 10x the industry fees for credit card transactions and gives the rest for "free". And that puts any app that has considerable running costs at disadvantage. And gives competitive disadvantage to Apple's own products that get to pay for the actual costs.
shagie 5y ago
Amazon sends a bill rather than having it be part of the "you're making money, we're taking a bit of it." https://smarthomestarter.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-an-alexa-skill/ https://smarthomestarter.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create... > The determining factor of the pricing structure for creating Skills depends primarily on their complexity. > In other words, the more complicated the request being processed (and therefore, more cloud services required), the more it will cost to publish the Skill. With that model, free skills cost their developers money. ... Though, I'm still going to point out - https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purchase/isp-payments.html https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purch... > Amazon pays developers 70% of the marketplace list price for all sales. So, not only do you pay to have AWS crunch your data, but if you're charing for that with some in skill purchase, Amazon is taking a 30% cut.

extropy 5y ago

Fair question. If apple charged for the actual costs it would be a non issue. Instead they charge 10x the industry fees for credit card transactions and gives the rest for "free". And that puts any app that has considerable running costs at disadvantage. And gives competitive disadvantage to Apple's own products that get to pay for the actual costs.

shagie 5y ago

Amazon sends a bill rather than having it be part of the "you're making money, we're taking a bit of it." https://smarthomestarter.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-an-alexa-skill/ https://smarthomestarter.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create... > The determining factor of the pricing structure for creating Skills depends primarily on their complexity. > In other words, the more complicated the request being processed (and therefore, more cloud services required), the more it will cost to publish the Skill. With that model, free skills cost their developers money. ... Though, I'm still going to point out - https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purchase/isp-payments.html https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purch... > Amazon pays developers 70% of the marketplace list price for all sales. So, not only do you pay to have AWS crunch your data, but if you're charing for that with some in skill purchase, Amazon is taking a 30% cut.