> Today, a free app brings Apple zero revenue
Today and always, a free app brings Apple $99/year for a developer account, which is mandatory to publish on the App Store.
Today and always, a free app brings Apple $99/year for a developer account, which is mandatory to publish on the App Store.
As a point of comparison, in 2019, Apple did about 50 billion in sales [1], which means they made about $15 billion
In 2018 (latest I could find numbers for) they reportedly had 20 million registered developers [2] so that's another $2 billion. That's 3.5% of their 2019 net income of $55 billion [3] (of course there are costs to running the app store, distribution, etc that aren't accounted for in here).
It makes me think of Costco -- whose membership fees make up nearly all their net income [4]. Don't make money from the thing, make money from enabling access to the thing -- well or I guess in Apple's case, make money from both.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/apple-app-store-had-estimate...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...
[4] https://money.com/costco-doesnt-make-much-money-selling-you-...
Keep in mind that the term "registered developer" is fairly ambiguous. Does it include non-paying developers? Does it include all developers under a single business account (e.g. at one of my jobs, I was a registered developer under a broader organizational account)?
The point would still stand though that the total revenue from Apple Developer subscriptions would not be insignificant (perhaps insignificant to Apple’s overall revenue, but still enough to be a sizable startup’s budget on its own), which I should have noted in the original article.
Their documentation suggests otherwise[1] (scroll down to “Benefits and Resources”). “Safari Extensions distribution” and “Software distribution outside the Mac App Store” are listed on the column of the 99 USD fee.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/
Just remembered that Safari now only lets you install extensions from the App Store, so that would actually make sense if a paid developer account is now required.
There’s yet another reason why Safari has so few extensions.
This is also the reason why I dont buy the argument about App Store 30% cut bringing you the development tools. Those are well covered by the $99 and more. Now thinking about it, I would be surprised if the reviewing of Apps were not covered by the $2B annual developer fees alone.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/there-are-now-100-million-...
From an App Store revenue perspective, the $99/year seems incredibly insignificant compared to what any tiny percentage of sales from SaaS subscriptions would look like otherwise. That would have been a better way to frame it.
Granted I've only had to do that twice in a decade, but I can still develop android apps on any old equipment I want.
Per Apple's specs page [0], these devices are supported.
> MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
> MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
> MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
> Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
> iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
> iMac Pro (2017)
> Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer)
There weren't any "MacBook"s manufactured between 2013 and 2014 (inclusive). The only model year of the iMac Pro ever manufactured is 2017. All trash can Mac Pros and forward are supported, but not any of the tower style models.
As a side note, I'm quite impressed that my 2012 doesn't feel like it aged at all. I'm still doing Max quality, non vr gaming on it.
Even if Apple made $0 off of all apps, apps are a complementary product to their devices. Apple knows this, it's part of why they always tout all the apps they didn't make. Every app you find useful on your iphone makes it more valuable to you, and keeps you in their ecosystem.
The real reason for the fee is just to stop spammers on the App store. It probably blocks around 99% of them, without the fee I'd wager the appstore would be unusable.
I was a student and signed up to tinker for about $99/year under that tier for access to xCode (and they sent me a free t-shirt for every new version of OSX.
I think you could spend a lot more money for a full enterprise dev account.
Not that I fault Apple for trying to profit from this creation of theirs but the ambiguity and lack of standardized enforcement is problematic.
I don’t even like Hey. I’ve posted about why.
However, I can’t differentiate between the Hey app and Fastmail. Allowing one without the other seems crazy to me.
> “We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years.”
Which shows how unlikely Apple is to back down here, unfortunately.
Edit: do the math -- $99/year x 1 developer account versus even $1 for the app for a modest number of users. you're dealing with a fixed price versus a scaling factor.