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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

But why would people be signing up from your App if not by discovering about your app through the App store? Is that not marketing through the App store?

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We have a couple apps and there really is no "discovery" through the App Store. You have to pay for ads, whether in the stores directly or in the many ad networks that put you in other apps or other advertising. Unless you're already at the top of the lists (because of your off-store brand), or you win the lottery in the game of getting featured, the App Store doesn't drive new users.

For the majority of apps, the App Store doesn't provide discovery. It provides a nearly frictionless delivery and purchase interface. That's worth something, but not 30% off the top. That's worth a premium on top of processing fees, like X cents per transaction and Y% of the transaction, where Y < 6, I think.

Edit: I should say, I don't think there's any way this is going to happen. It would take an anti-trust action to make any difference, but that's not likely to happen.

Searching for Netflix on Google, the App Store link is the second link with reviews and a button to install. Right after the main website. Which one do you think a user is likely to click? Is that App store marketing? In an App centric world there are countless other ways where users discovers apps first or even developers/businesses/website want the users to download the app first.

Yes, if you already know Netflix. For pretty much every non-Netflix level app, people are unlikely to be googling for your specific app. The little game TinyWings has made millions and they wouldn’t have made anything of it weren’t for App Store discovery. People overestimate their own importance in the marketplace — discovery matters. If you sell an app for $2 and you have an acquisition cost of $0.60 through, for example, PPC, then you have spent the same you would have paid in App Store commission and then you have to still handle billing, chargebacks, credit card fees, have a download server to handle the traffic as well as tax collection for every single country in which you sell.

Look at profitability of Android vs iOS — almost universally iOS makes a far greater profit that more than offsets the commission. I wouldn’t want to buy an app outside of the App Store because frankly, I don’t trust most developers with my personal information nor do I trust them to not engage in practices that are contrary to my privacy or enagage in sloppy coding that might subject my device to security risks. As a consumer, the App Store is great.

At the same time, there is a large contingent of apps in the app store that have 0 interest in discovery through the app store.

There are lots of b2b apps that are fully sold on the Enterprise level and the app is simply an add on. It is very frustrating to have to work within the walked garden when this is the case.

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