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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

The fixation on what Apple's costs are in operating the App Store is weird. It reminds me of the people that look at the estimates of the bill of materials for an iPhone and who use that to say Apple's charging too much. That's irrelevant. It's not meant to be run at-cost for the benefit of developers. The App Store is a business to Apple just like any of their other products. The cut that "makes sense" is whatever the market will bear.

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You could kill off any discussion about any product pricing by saying "the answer is whatever the market will bear", it's not really useful for the discussion though.

What the market will bear is made up of lots of people's opinions on whether the price is justified, and the person you're replying to is giving one argument that it isn't.

"Whatever the market will bear" requires a healthy market place with a range of options.

Like residential internet in the USA, mobile app stores are not a healthy market place.

If you use iOS, Apple has a monopoly, and there is no scope for any other market places by design.

If you use Android, Google has a monopoly. There is scope for other market places, but Google has a dominant monopoly that is unlikely to go anywhere else.

There are no other mobile appstores of consequence.

There's little reason for the incumbents to reduce their prices, as there is little-to-no scope for any competition that requires it.

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