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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

>The simple fact is that Apple is injecting itself as an intermediary in the payment process and extracting a comically oversized commission for no meaningful added value.

Frankly anyone who says this with a straight face is being absurd. Apple's commission isn't for "payment processing", promotion, any particular API, or service they provide on their platform. That they do all of those things makes it an attractive place to develop for and sell your product, but it isn't the reason why they get to charge 30%.

They charge 30% because they've amassed 1 billion extremely valuable users who are willing to spend money on apps in their marketplace.

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> They charge 30% because they've amassed 1 billion extremely valuable users who are willing to spend money on apps in their marketplace.

Apps that are made up to 42% more expensive (NOTE: the 30% fee applies to all in-app purchases and the first year of subscriptions) in a way that's entirely opaque to those users. The fact that you think this is okay is the only thing I find absurd.

You also seem like someone who is for some reason predisposed to be an apologist for Apple's monopolistic business practices. You certainly don't represent what would likely be the average/majority sentiment of Apple's customers, were they sufficiently informed.

>Apps that are made up to 42% more expensive

Well, maybe not apps, but subscriptions surely.

>You also seem like someone who is for some reason predisposed to be an apologist for Apple's monopolistic business practices. You certainly don't represent what would likely be the average/majority sentiment of Apple's customers, were they sufficiently informed.

I'm willing to defend Apple because I'm tired of disingenuous arguments from either parties with self-interest or FOSS advocates who have some ideological opposition to Apple's closed nature (and have since the beginning of the App Store and decades before that with Macs).

Apple's customers don't care about the margin structure or costs of app developers. The App Store has massively increased both the supply and demand for apps, and it has actually led to a decline in prices for software. Everyone knows this because they've been complaining about how they can't charge as much for apps as they did in the packaged software days.

I'm sure Apple's customers care about how much money they spend. That's the whole reason Apple strongarms developers into masking the higher cost of products delivered through Apple's app store.

I don't know anyone who would like the idea of paying an extra 15-30% for a product because of a do nothing middleman that's managed to monopolize a portion of the market based on demand aggregation.

It's literally the definition of what I've always understood anti-trust to be. Apple is using their domination in the phone market to manipulate the software distribution market.

The current tech companies (all of them) make 90s Microsoft look like a charitable organization. It's unbelievable to wander around the internet and see so many people advocating for systems that are terrible for the average consumer.

Wealth inequality seems to have an inverse relationship with average intelligence.

If Apple doesn't think their customers care about the Apple Tax, then why do they structure their rules such that app developers can't even hint that the customer might be able to pay a lower price by signing up on their website? Seems like Apple is afraid if they allowed that, customers would spend a lot less through Apple's payments platform.

Would they also be unhappy if they knew the markup for every store? The markup for soda and drinks in a restaurant? Is there anyone who doesn’t know that retailers markup goods?

Those places are handling physical goods and they have a lot of real costs associated with their services. That's not the same as Apple taking 15-30% of revenue for a subscription where the developer is running the entire backend and all Apple does is host a few install / update files.

There's no developer on the planet that would agree to that deal if Apple couldn't use the customers from their phone business as leverage to extort developers on the software distribution side of things.

It's more like a bouncer at a club getting 15-30% of ALL revenue because they control the door.

You mean like developers didn’t agree to give retailers 60% of their revenue when they were selling physical discs?

Why do developers overwhelmingly give Google 30% of their revenue when Android users can sideload?

Should we also complain about the much larger margins that Amazon charges independent authors for Kindle? The amount Google charges for ads?

Sideloading on Android is a PITA by default, but it's enough of a backstop that some developers like Tinder and Epic have been able to give Google the middle finger.

There are cases where 30% of revenue makes sense. For cheap, purchased apps it's a good deal because the cost of running that infrastructure is comparatively high. However, once you hit a certain volume of sales or move into subscriptions, the value of the services being provided by Google and Apple don't make sense and it would be better to run your own infrastructure.

Seeing what Epic was willing to do to get out of the Play store is a really good indicator of how bad of a deal it is at scale.

And I thought traditional retailers chose their own markup, didn't they?

And as far as Epic, sloppiness by third party developers is a great reason for the App Store.

https://www.cnet.com/news/just-as-critics-feared-fortnite-fo...

Edit:

Most retailers do choose their own markup. Ironically, Apple got sued for working with book publishers where the book publishers set the price and Apple chose the markup.

However, the book publishers wanted this arrangement because Amazon was selling ebooks at a loss devaluing the hardcover and paperback books.

Isn’t the play store famously full of malware?

I think there are a lot of people who don't understand just how much retailers mark up some goods. But they're starting to get the idea now that D2C is increasing and you can see items sold directly by businesses at prices much lower than on e.g. Amazon.

> They charge 30% because they've amassed 1 billion extremely valuable users who are willing to spend money on apps in their marketplace.

This is almost the textbook definition of extortion. "Hey, wouldn't it be a shame if you lost access to all these potential customers? You better give us 30% of your revenue."

You are paying to access the pool of customers. You never had the pool to begin with so you aren’t paying to not “lose access”.

Arguably, that's not true for a typical mail service.

This makes it seem like they are apples customers to give, vs the entire population of the world who has a choice between apple or android phones, or not having a phone.

Imagine there was a certain kind of fuel required for all cars made by a certain manufacturer, and that manufacturer used DRM to restrict which companies could sell fuel to the car. In order to fuel the car, the manufacturer requires 30% of the fueler's revenue to authorize fueling. They provide no services for this fee aside from payment processing. Now imagine that that car company has 50% of the car market, and their only competitor is similar. Does this seem wrong?

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