I’m a huge fan of Apple Pay and do not begrudge the 0.15% cut they take on those transactions. The cut they take for App Store purchases is over 100x that amount, which is obscene.
* Some level of guarantee that every app on my phone has been vetted (it's not perfect of course, but is better than nothing). It's unlikely that anything to nefarious makes can make it onto my phone, and if it does, it'll be removed.
* I get a better fit and finish. Apps on the iPhone very often have a better quality to them.
* I get the ability to refund when needed.
* Personally, my support requirements go down. When my nephew calls me with a problem, I know that he didn't go download some random app from instructions he got from a friend.
Clearly, there's also some profit in there.
Edit: Perhaps to get to my point -- these were ALL known when I bought my phone, and for me, were part of the reason I bought it. If I was not ok with this, I would have bought an Android phone.
Bandcamp, for example, provides both digital and physical assets, and only takes a 10% - 15% cut. They provide a secure experience for their customers free of ads, malware, spyware and spam.
One is payment processing, the other's a unified market of 155 countries and 1+ billion users where all the headache of payments, local sales taxes, APIs, etc are taken care of.
How about we do what's often suggested: we spin the AppStore off as its own non-profit governing body and they can disclose their operating costs and increase / decrease their fee as needed. The rules then apply equally to Apple vs. non-Apple companies.
It’s not just payment processing. They provide other critically valuable services to developers such as App Review, Hosting, International Distribution, CoMarketing, Store APIs, Security, etc, etc, and they all have thousands of employees and cost billions to provide.
Apple Services:
- AppStore $ 15 billion
- Licencing $ 10 billion
- Apple Care & Others $ 7.5 billion
- Apple Music $ 5.4 billion
- iCloud $ 4.5 billion
- Third-Party Subscriptions $ 3.6 billion
Total: $46 billion
Remember, you're stating that Apple isn't able break even at a 10% fee for the App Store. Recall that Apple charges developers a yearly subscription (99 USD for non-enterprise accounts per year) to be able to submit something to the App Store. And additionally remember that your "co-marketing" cost should include the money Apple makes from advertisers on its App Store [1].
The items you mentioned as costs are standard for many similar internet service (hosting, security, customer APIs, etc. etc,.) that do not make nearly the amount of revenue Apple does with its App Store.
Let's do a worst case and cut Apple's estimated App Store revenue from $15 billion to $5 billion a year to show how ridiculous the claim that they can't break even is.
And the $99 and ad revenues are service revenues. So their audited financials say, taking all of those revenues, that services expenses are roughly 32% of their revenues. Obviously this doesn’t include administration costs, interest costs or taxes.
32% of 30% is 9.6%, so it’s possible that’s their break even level, or even a little lower if App Store margins are higher than other services. But it’s unlikely because it’s likely the billions in the Google Safari placement check is close to 100% margin, meaning the rest of services has to have margins well under 68%.