Something odd about this argument is the fact that 30% is pretty much an industry standard. Apple isn't jacking up the price.
Google does the same thing with Play Store. If you sell an app in Play Store, Google takes 30%. If you use Goolges payment processing, Google takes 30%. They can kick you out, not permit you in the store, etc. The difference is that a developer isn't forced to use the play Store or Googles payment processing.
You can distribute your APK in any way you want to and users can install any APK from any location they want to. You can absolutely sell your Android games on your own website and just provide an APK to a paying user and now you don't have to pay 30% out of every purchase. If you want to provide in-app purchases the user can provide their CC information and you're free to process the payment in any way you want to, again, circumventing Goolges cut.
This is the primary reason you can't get Fortnite from the play store, instead you have to download an install an APK. Epic also uses their own payment processing systems, so they don't need to pay anything to Google for IAPs. They can't do that on their iOS apps, meaning they're losing on some hefty profits simply because no alternative exists.
So it's not that Apple is jacking up the profits, rather you could say that you need to pay a hefty tax to provide your app to iOS users.
One important point on this is that the Play Store does allow some apps distributed within it to do billing themselves [0], but not games, which is why Fortnite is distributed outside the Play store.
There are some other rules, but if you're building a cross-platform app, you should know that many Play Store distributed apps can do billing themselves on the grounds that they have "digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself".
Spotify and Netflix do their own billing on Android, as opposed to iOS, where the Netflix app has a button to call a phone number that plays a voice recording telling you to go to netflix.com (web links to sign-up pages aren't allowed).
People forget that there were phones before the iPhone decided all phones would be rectangles with touchscreens.
Those phones ran apps and games, and you downloaded them from app stores... there was in fact a cambrian explosion of app stores, when you made software you had to publish it to hundreds of them.
I can't remember the %, but it seems unlikely, in the fact of all that competition that it was as high as 30%.
It took off because it was a good experience (one stop shopping) and because of the popularity of the iPhone. And of course it doesn't hurt that it was the only App Store for iOS.
(Apple's may have been the first store operated by a hardware maker rather than a carrier though.)
Apple's store isn't open to anyone.
> and that took a much bigger cut than Apple.
AFAIK Docomo (largest carrier in Japan) took 9%. Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?
I had plenty of J2ME and Symbian apps before iOS was even born.
Send SMS, get download link, done.
Use the Web store from the phone provider, done.
They even had contests for apps. I did apply to one at Vodafone when the Sharp GX20 was released, to show off the device capabilities.
https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/166989-vodafone-javatm-...
> Vodafone is pleased to annouce the Vodafone Java(tm) Games Challenge 2003 - a competition for J2ME games developers. The top three winners will receive: - A Sharp-GX20 - The new Vodafone live! handset with QVGA screen resolution - A commercial contract with Vodafone to deploy the winning games onto Vodafone live! in several countries Vodafone live! currently attracts 1.5 million customers across 13 countries. Register at www.via.vodafone.com and submit your games by August, 1st !
And while they had lots of trash, the gatekeeping kept it lower than current store offerings full of copy-cats.
I think the BREW ecosystem had some solution to set up a store of this kind that they used to supply to carriers?
Sometimes it takes an 800 lb gorilla (with fresh iPod $$$$$) to take on the other 800 lb gorillas, even if it mostly meant we spent the first 8 years or so paying ridiculous 2-year contracts for "subsidized" $700 phones.
And some how the lifetime of those phones were much longer than the iPhones, until they had to stop forcing updates which degraded performance.
Many of the J2ME etc app stores prior to Apple were run by network carriers, and their cuts were considerably higher than 30% - upwards of 50%, even more for things like direct carrier billing (the app would be charged to your phone bill).
Motorola phones might have been truely “dumb”, that wasn’t true for a Casio or a Panasonic phone for instance.
It's ironic how some people seem to like saying "well they just copied Apple" and expect Google to be absolved of the actions they think are bad, but for everything else they would vehemently deny Google copying Apple.
And since I can’t stop them from clicking them, my only solution is to have them use iOS devices.
* iTunes gift cards regularly go on sale for 60-70% of its value on third party markets, and * 30% is a reasonable, to cheap, price to pay for money laundering,
I think your theory is unfounded.
https://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/381/3iie3...
Gift cards would be the least efficient method here for large amounts, so I guess it would not surprise me it's not used there. No one's gonna go hunting small amounts of gift cards on discount on ebay to launder tens of millions of dollars. But who knows...