I’d say the $.60 per dollar to rights holders is a much better deal than $.30 per dollar to Apple for payment processing. There are a lot of people involved in creating a song vs a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.
You're totally within your rights to think that! (My advice to you: don't start a business literally built on top of Apple's platform!)
> a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.
This sort of oversimplification makes it hard to take your argument seriously. I'm pretty sure you don't believe that, but just in case you do…
This article[1] suggests that Apple made $4.2bn from the App Store in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018.
Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):
1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.
2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.
3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).
4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.
5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.
6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)
In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.
Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.
Fortnite has nearly 150 million installs on iOS. It's 1.8 gigabytes. That's 270 million gigabytes, and the game is free. 30% of users don't spend a dime in Fortnite. That's 81 million gigabytes of free bandwidth for Epic, before you forget about the fact that Apple promotes the game etc.
Neither party is a saint here. Apple and Epic both get a lot of out the app being in the store. But Epic has multiple options to resolving this without trying to rob Apple's platform of a significant part of its USP.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces... [3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind... [4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/
Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free. I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here. The app discovery ship has sailed and no one is going to find your small apps on those platforms. The review processes might benefit users, but is a detriment for developers who aren’t guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they’ve invested in.
Steve Ballmer wasn’t stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer. No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s and Apple would have been laughed out of the industry. Now everyone throws caution to the wind and marries into a system where they have no voice and no leverage. It’s absolutely crazy.
So you think the “average developer” is “stupidly” doing what they need to make money?
Does Epic deliver any “value” by selling skins? How they any different than Candy Crush?
Imagine if Walmart was the ONLY retail store on the planet and took 30% of all revenue while selling their Great Value products in industries that have 30% margin (ex: music streaming).
It’s time for regulators IMO.
This feels pretty subjective. My point was that you were suggesting the App Store is just a card processing gateway. It's significantly more than that.
> Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free.
And viruses and malware were everywhere, and many folks hated using their computers. People forget how far we've come since the days of malfunctioning and virus-riddled PCs being the butt of jokes.
> I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here
Eh? App review? Literally a general purpose computing platform with close to zero malware / spyware? User satisfaction for iPhone amongst the highest for any consumer product in history.
> The review processes might benefit users
Ah. Yes. That's the core of this I think: Apple cares about Apple, then Apple customers, then developers. Developers seem to care most about developers. Customers seem to care most about customers.
> developers who aren't guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they've invested in
What? If your app conforms to the rules of Apple's app store, you are absolutely able to distribute the app.
> Steve Ballmer wasn't stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer.
Tough gig to argue that every single app developer on the app store is stupid and you and Steve Ballmer are the smart ones.
> No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s
I want to write this in capital letters: every. Single. Consumer. Would. The app store is better for consumers. It's better to have one trustworthy company (Apple) with my credit card information. It's better to have a simple hardware-based authentication for payments like TouchID or FaceID. It's better to have no malware and spyware. It's better to have apps which don't crash or have showstopping bugs. It's better to have refunds controlled by one predictable entity. All of those things are made possible or significantly easier by the App Store.
> It's absolutely crazy
Crazy might look like dismissing all the huge benefits consumers love because one developer was unwilling to either accept the commission one of their marketplaces charges, or increase their prices to offset it.
It’s hard to be sure whether this is an honest mistake or not, given the generally well informed community.