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Comment by komodo | Hacker News Reader

Apple takes 30% of the purchase price for app sales on the app store.

Which, in the days before the Apple App Store, when one had to contact Verizon or AT&T to get your app available to cell phones, was the other way around. They would take 70%, and give you 30%.

How quickly people forget this. It went quickly from Apple is changing the game, and giving developers an unprecedented cut of the sale of their apps. And for their 30% they host it, they process the credit cards, they provide the iCloud infrastructure and notifications for free, they make it searchable in their store. No one said it wasn't a good deal.

But a few years pass, and now it's the Apple Tax? Some people could promote and sell it themselves for less. A lot less? Maybe, maybe not. But most of us could never ever do it for the 30%. Why does everyone think they're the smartest one in the room these days? Odds are, you're really not. Sorry. You're just not.

Well appstore is a walled monopoly and has pretty awful discovery. There's a huge tail and only the top 10 really make it.

They are using their monopolistic stance to kill others. But then it's their platform and they can do as they please. They gotta make the $$$ to keep shareholders happy with ever expanding profits.

Welcome to America.

Just look at Android, despite having 85% or more of the smartphone market...

What you say is great if I was able to install Apps from anywhere and not limited to the App Store.

You wouldn't go to Verizon, you would need to get a publisher, which was very hard to get.

Getting approved was also a months long process that required a substantial upfront investment in bizdev, legal, and custom engineering. And you had to do this for every single carrier, which was extra fun internationally.

This is true, and it's also why apps hardly existed in those days. But really it just shows that the market has moved from having the mobile companies as rent-takers to Apple as a slightly more generous rent-taker. Neither the 70% nor 30% is really the product of a market process.

The counter-argument is of course the PC era, where you could sell stuff and give 0% to the manufacturer and OS vendor.

A lot of people came to iOS not from cell phone development, but from developing for the desktop, where 'store' fees did not apply most of the time.

I never had any issues sideloading J2ME apps...

How did you go about selling them?

I used a J2ME Twitter client where you paid via Paypal and entered an activation code - the shareware model.

Apple tax to me also means the average ~$1000/year I have to spend on replacing otherwise completely perfect Apple hardware that gets conveniently software upgraded to be too old for normal daily functions :)

What on earth are you buying regularly? Several 4 year old iPhones?

Probably a base model iPhone every 2.5 years @ ~$720 after tax/state fees, and $1645.90 for a base model MacBook Pro every 3 years. Figure OP might bump some specs up to hit the $1k spend a year mark, but minimum your spending $800 a year for a decent environment to target iOS.

And this is why I haven't made any apps for iOS :P

Look at the costs for developing for a VR environment ($5K+), Xbox, PS4, or literally any other platform.

Android's computer requirements are more modest, but if you're a serious Android developer you'll need to have at least one of the flagship phones from every major vendor to be sure your stuff runs properly. That can mean dishing out thousands a year for the latest Android device from Samsung, Motorola, and Google itself, normally unlocked so you're not also paying for service you don't need.

If all you're doing is building web sites, maybe you can hack it on a Linux desktop with Windows in a VM. Anything else requires more hardware.

VR is expensive, but $5K is really overstating it. I've done VR development very happily on my desktop with a 6700K and a 980Ti and, even with a VR headset (I had a free demo kit so I didn't buy it) it'd have been under $2500 all-told. Xbox One development these days is "get an Xbox One you can keep in developer mode" and a sub-$2,000 PC that'll remain relevant for five years at a time. If you're a spec-chaser, it'll be expensive. If you're a normal solo developer, not so much (and EA doesn't swap its workstations every year, either).

Android has also settled to the point where I disagree on the need for multiple flagship devices (most people I know develop on a single device and use something like Device Farm to test more widely, though this doesn't work so well for game development.

Definitely, VR dev can cost a pretty penny. The only reason I have a VR capable rig is cause I was given the CPU & GPU by a friend who reviews hardware after he was done with them.

Android has low development requirements, but you can definitely get by without a flagship phone from each of the major vendors, one mid-range device will usually suffice.

Wrt web development, why bother with a Windows VM? It either renders in Firefox & Chrome or it doesn't, and if IE/Safari can't hack it, tough luck, you get the JS free version of my web app for being a steaming pile. I'm not willing to waste resources on dying platforms, that is silly.

OP said: "replacing otherwise completely perfect Apple hardware that gets conveniently software upgraded to be too old for normal daily functions"

For iOS v10, the iPhone 5, which was released in 2012, is still supported. So no, Apple is not forcing you to purchase a new iPhone every 2.5 years.

No, I was pulling that 2.5 year figure from my prior life of selling cellphones to businesses and the occasional consumer. On average 40% of a wireless account will upgrade per year, so about every 2.5 years you'll see a line upgrade devices.

Its great that Apple supports the iPhone 5 still, but the user experience on an iPhone 5 is different from an iPhone 7, and its hard to optimize for a device you don't have that is multiple generations newer.

If you're developing on Apple hardware in Xcode, you have a number of simulators available in the development environment to test/optimize most of that. I'm sure someone will come up with plenty of reasons that this isn't good enough for some developers, but it's not something I ran into when I was developing for iOS.

What you have to optimize exactly?

If it runs fine on a iPhone 5, it runs better on an iPhone 7.

You are not writing drivers, you don't need to optimize anything.

For that money you also get a great laptop which you probably need anyway. If you don't, you can also use a Mac mini which isn't nearly as expensive and lasts for a pretty long time.

You can also use the iPod Touch for iOS development if you don't want to buy an iPhone.

Eh, I'd hate to own a MBP again, it just can't handle my lifestyle. With my current Thinkpad, everything is repairable, a new screen is $45 for 1440x900 @ 14in, DisplayPort is right there for my external monitor, and it can take a beating without issue.

I've thrown it in the back of my pickup and let it slam side to side as I drove all over town, no worse for wear. Speaker fell from 20ft up and busted the screen once, and an angry former friend punched it and broke the last one, but I was able to get a new screen same day and swap it in both instances. Took me two screws and less than 5 minutes to be back up and rolling again.

If I need more than an i5, 8GB ram & an SSD, I've got a new KVM box that I can use as a desktop easily.

Wrt iPod Touch as an iOS development target, that would likely work for some applications, but if your app involves voice or seeing how performance is over cellular, it'd be non-optimal. Same for using an iPhone 5, your missing out on features that newer devices bring to the table, so you can't optimize for them/leverage them.

On another note, the Mac Mini is one of the most neglected product lines out there that Apple is currently selling, akin to their routers before they finally killed them off (which was a mercy kill).

Mac Mini: http://www.macworld.com/article/3154027/macs/what-the-mac-ne...

Whereas that 3 year old Dell laptop and Samsung phone are humming along quite nicely?

FWIW I just replaced my 5 year old MacBook Air, but only because I wanted to. It was still working perfectly well - and is now my flatmate's main computer.

Until last month my wife was using an LG G2 (2013 flagship), and it was still going strong. What killed it? A broken screen due to being dropped, and we decided that it was probably time for an upgrade rather than repairing a 4 year old phone.

If a computer costs $3000 and you save up $1000 a year to buy it, in 3 years you can buy that computer.

I question your decision-making if you aren't doing bleeding-edge graphics programming and are replacing a $3,000 computer every three years.

Three years ago was when I got my current retina MBP, I do stuff on it that's considerably more demanding than iOS app development, and I expect to replace this in 2020.

Alternatively, they are sane enthusiasts who enjoy using and taxing state of the art hardware. Or they are gamers. Or both. I could say I question the decision making of someone (especially a hacker) who doesn't upgrade their laptop every six years. But that would be rude.

> Alternatively, they are sane enthusiasts who enjoy using and taxing state of the art hardware

If you're complaining about the "Apple tax" of hardware in a thread about Apple taking 30% off the top of an App Store sale, then it stands to reason that you're talking about using that hardware to build applications that would be hit by the first. But even if you overlook the "sail into a topic and go grind that axe" non sequitur of it, the complaint here was that software was being "upgraded" to the point where it no longer suffices for "normal daily functions"--which is kinda silly, Sierra is about as performant on my older MBP (a 2011 midrange one) as OS X ever was even if applications running on it have gotten more grabby, but that's not Apple's fault either.

(But to be clear: gaming? Hey, that's totally fine. I keep a moderately recent gaming rig, myself. But I don't then turn around and complain about the "tax" of my own choices, because that would be transcendentally dumb.)

Well, I agree with everything you wrote here.

Above that, the resale value of Macs is great. I typically buy a new MacBook every 1.5 years. But I can sell the old one for 75% of the purchase price. 300 Euro per year for a cutting edge machine is not a lot, especially if your income depends on it.

Hah, I can barely get the hardware on a heavily used laptop to last 2 years, let alone over 3. Shit is just junk, Apple stuff included. HDMI port failed on my new Macbook.

But a 3 years old $3000 computer won't have been obsoleted by software updates (the OP contention). So... that won't be an issue.

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