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Two options:

1) Free apps with advertisements. Paid apps are by far the minority.

2) I guess this statement is related to subscription models like spotify. If you acquire the user outside of the apple ecosystem and they subscribe on your own website and then download your free app from the app store, you get to keep 100% on the revenue that the user generates as well.

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Ah, the ad thing makes sense. It's technically true but the meaning conveyed in the statement is quite different.

As for the subscription model, I've thought about that but developers that aren't huge companies have a hard time NOT integrating in-app purchases for cloud services (see "Hey", which had to use social media to get their update approved [1]), so it couldn't be the "vast majority of apps".

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21296180/apple-hey-email-...

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