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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Pull it is exactly what I would do. Apple gets a cut of the paid apps, but $0 from free apps who show ads. Take away getting a cut from the paid apps then free apps suddenly cost the developers money—no more free apps.

Imagine going to Walmart and telling them what you want them to give you all the revenue. Walmart will tell you exactly what they want to pay you, or you can leave.

Maybe 30% is too much, but 0% is a terrible idea.

In the old days before the web I had to pay up to 70% for distribution for my apps. If I was lucky I might get my cut 3-6 months later, plus I had to pay for the packaging and shipping to the warehouse and take it back if they didn't sell enough. 30% seems like a bargain.

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My god, Apple requiring a price for apps would be best thing that's happened to the mobile environment in AGES.

I'm a mobile game dev and I would sacrifice a child to go back to the days when people would pay 0.99 for a game.

Surely all free games currently would just be $0.01?

On Apple, the minimum price for anything is $0.99.

You can't set arbitrary prices - only price bands.

The current mobile F2P game market of about half a dozen distinct types of Skinner box, copied precisely and rethemed a zillion times, is quite grim. (Fortnite is an actual game, to be fair)

Apple really should shake up that market, though it's hard to say how a $0.99 minimum would work out in the end.

Except that the apps help sell the phone. Just look at Apple's marketing since the App Store came out. Having an ecosystem of easily accessible free and paid apps is a huge driver in terms of the iPhone's popularity.

Your Walmart analogy would make more sense if Walmart sold tickets for admission. For example, Costco, a store that does in fact sell memberships, does buy and resell some products for no margin or even at a loss in order to cultivate a variety of goods to incentivize people to maintain a membership.

> In the old days before the web I had to pay up to 70% for distribution for my apps.

In the old days it cost your distributors much more to distribute those apps. Charging $1 for 99¢ of work is okay; charging $1 for 10¢ of work is not. With competition, this is rarely a problem, but no one can compete with the App Store—short of creating an entirely new OS and getting everyone to port their apps.

Exactly, in the days before the web.

The majority of software sold for computers isn't sold through the Microsoft store or Apple store, it's through other channels with much lower costs. Apple won't let you load apps onto the hardware you own unless they go through the App store and pay the Apple tax.

Developers (and users) shouldn't settle for "better than retail, even if it's worse than the open web".

Depends on how much value Apple (not anyone else) puts on having Fortnite on the App Store. They are infamous for disregarding what customers say; sometimes with great results, other times, with less success.

Apple decided, a long time ago, that their platform would not be a gaming platform. Even though they often show off games at WWDC, they aren't really there for much more than eye-candy, to get developers thinking about using the base tech for other purposes.

I would love to be able to play better games on my Mac. I have a few games on the iPad (none from Epic), and I really only play solitaire on my phone.

For all the scorn heaped on Mac as a "toy" computer, it's a terrible gaming platform. iOS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a big gaming platform, so Fortnite might be quite important, there.

The problem is that the app store is an artificial market. It's entirely possible to load apps on a phone without an app store or any of the infrastructure it provides.

There is no reason our phones need to be so locked down today that they only allow apps to be easily installed via the app store.

Instead the app store should be able to stand on it's own and developers should be able to decide if the exposure gained by it is worth the cost.

Digital goods have almost zero cost other than the payment processing, compared to manufacture, distribution, warehousing, retail space... This is apples and oranges. I can sell a SaaS license thru Stripe for 3%. A subscription through the App Store takes 30% every single month.

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