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Comment by bsamuels | Hacker News Reader

only tangentially related, but I think it's screwed up that apple can take a 30% cut of absolutely all the money moving through the ios platform and not have an antitrust suite brought against them

if microsoft can get screwed by the FTC for bundling IE with windows, why can't apple get screwed for only allowing app store apps on their devices?

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You can see FTC's own explanation here:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

It's hard to see how Apple taking a 30% cut in their App Store meets any of the criteria.

I thought this argument was long dead. Go talk to an MBA, and ask them if they'd like to sell something that netted them 70% of retail price. That 30% cut, among other things, includes processing payment for your application and handling fraud.

For physical item retail, the creator would by lucky to get even 30% of the final retail price - wholesaling, transport, retailing, so on and so forth, they all take their own cut.

Edit: rogerbinns below has a much better list of what you get for your 30%

One is "I don't like that Apple takes my money", the other is a company abusing their platform to choke out competitors.

Apple is free to charge whatever they want to play inside their walled garden. Lets say the cost of all the engineers, infrastructure & bandwidth to run the app store cost 30% of all the revenue in the app store. What right does the government have to dictate that Apple should run the app store at cost, or at a loss?

> the other is a company abusing their platform to choke out competitors.

The line is a lot blurrier than that. For example, Bitcoin wallets were disallowed on the App Store... until after Apple Pay was launched when they suddenly became OK again.

Even if Apple were found guilty of using their platform to suppress blockchain tech, it wouldn't change the fact they could still charge 30%.

Before the app store model became popular, it was much more expensive and difficult to get your content published. Until 10 or so years ago, the most common channel for selling video games was retail, which meant you had to go through a publisher who -- if you could convince them to publish your software -- would take a massive chunk of the profits.

It's no mistake that the "golden age" of indie gaming has coincided with the availability of platforms like Steam and the mobile app stores. 30% might seem like a lot, but for many developers, it's probably much less than what the channel is worth.

How is it any different than a retail mall charging rent based on square footage and revenue?

There are thousands of malls out there. You're not locked into one. However, if you want to get any sort of app for the entire iOS ecosystem, then you have to go through a single chokepoint, and 30% of the developer's money goes to Apple for the privilege.

There are 3 or 4 different OS you could go with though. Android, Windows, Apple and BB. And then there are multiple stores for Android you could go with.

30% of the money goes to Apple for taking care of everything for you, money, hosting, servers, marketing, and more.

The difference is, in the late 90s Microsoft really had a monopoly. Even graphic designers had moved to Windows in the 90s because Photoshop, Illustrator, Macromedia Director were ported to Windows.

Apple, Google and Microsoft all charge 30%.

And before Apple came along, to get your app published (J2ME days), you had to get a publisher who would take 70 to 80%.

Another similarity is ThemeForest. In their example calculation, a non exclusive author gets $36 when selling an item for $100.

http://themeforest.net/become-an-author

Even if you are an exclusive author - you are only getting 50% when you start, then it grows up to 70% once I reach 75k in sales. On top of that you HAVE to provide support for all your items which nobody pays for

When J2ME was first starting, we were told something in the neighborhood of $50K per carrier just to be listed in their stores, and that wasn't fixed – it was all per-project and sounded likely to go up for a big client.

Yup ... I was trying to be an indie dev in the old J2ME days .. the insane fees from carriers killed the dream for me. I ended up missing the entire app store revolution since I had preconceived notions of what carriers would allow. Too early to mobile I guess :p Curious .. how did you fare?

That actually killed the projects we'd been talking about - we'd been doing web and Flash work for a couple of clients and they decided not to try J2ME once they heard about the pricing.

There are a lot of things a company can't do when they're a monopoly that non-monopoly companies can.

Microsoft was abusing retailers and system builders because those vendors didn't have an alternative option.

I agree the 30% is atrocious, but not likely illegal.

This explanation is circular. Microsoft had a legally determined monopoly, not a real actual market monopoly where no one else could participate in the market.

For instance, Apple made computers that were such sufficient substitutes for Windows computers that Microsoft chose to produce a version of one of the their core products for use on Apple computers.

30% on a $0.99 game where apple is eating the credit card costs along with hosting, making sure the store isn't overwhelmed with spam and malware and bringing millions of eager paying customers to your table hardly seems atrocious.

I refuse to believe it's anything but a cash cow for Apple.

That 30% cut got them 6 billion dollars in 2015.

Which means they made $14 billion for developers.

Wal-Mart made $130 billion in profits in 2015 on $486 billion revenue, 27%. This is how stores work.

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