I get your point, but stores paying ~30% of their revenue in rent isn’t out of the ordinary.
Restaurants typically work on 30/30/30/10 for rent/wages/costs/profit.
Restaurants typically work on 30/30/30/10 for rent/wages/costs/profit.
Edit: Also, equating the rent of a physical space with what amounts to a webpage and checkout seems ludicrous to me. Physical space, especially one suited to a particular business is limited asset, not to mention the taxes and other costs to the owner of the physical space incur which don't exist for an app store.
As I added in my edit, equating the rent of a physical space to an app store seems absurd to me, as well.
Your own feelings don’t make a basis for law. You’ll need to find a meaningful difference here that constrains the rights of the private parties to draft contracts as they wish.
I'm also not sure why you're attacking me and "my feelings" here, especially when it's not that I "feel" that commercial rents should be negotiated, but that they can be and often are negotiated.
The problem with committing to your sense this is absurd is that you are neglecting to check if it is absurd. Perhaps your own assertions are the problem.
For instance the Apple App Store fee can also be negotiated. There is nothing preventing Apple or an app developer from negotiating prices.
Famously they did with Amazon for instance.
The crux of the Apple case is whether they may legitimately control what apps you may install on your own general purpose computer. That element is critical to not just Apple but how much power any computer manufacturer now and into the long future may possess.
The shopping mall analogy doesn't hold because both sellers and buyers have access to the entire free market. It's not controlled by the landlord.
I would guess your sense the situation is absurd is based on this, but you haven't been able to articulate it. However, it is very common to argue digital freedoms based on what we want and feel rather than what rules make sense, and that is necessarily critiqueable as a bad habit.
I find the comparison to rent absurd, because as I've said elsewhere, the risk and marginal cost of a property to rent is much higher than the cost of an appstore selling another app.
However, this is only an issue because there is only one app store allowed on the iPhone that is controlled by Apple.
That's the rule-based point of contention that won't cause collateral damage to other retailers who don't have a similar singular point of control.
The app stores perform payment processing, asset distribution/CDN work, malware detection and some minor tasks that AIUI have O(1) cost to them. They charge for only one of those, and make that charge high enough to cover all of the costs.
What is it that you're unhappy with — are you unhappy with the payment processing fee but feel that the price level would be acceptable if structured as a sum of three fees, or are you saying that the total fee is too much for the total work they do?
Even on Android, where it is possible, side loading is a pain and without root the play store has capabilities that cannot be duplicated, I think the fee is only acceptable because of the iOS appstore's fee being the same.
"Now, a handful of Chinese developers have started the fight to push their revenue split down to the global standard." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-10-08/china-...
IMO your argument is NULL, if there were alternatives like an Open source store, a Google, Microsoft and Amazon store on iOS you would not be forced to use them. Check the Android model, most people are using the Google store and the GIANT benefits is that if Google decides or is forced to not allow an application you are not screwed, you can go around that.
Again, if you want to consume ONLY Apple approved content then nobody would force you to not do it, see Android.
I actually agree with you on the fact that having other stores on iOS would not stop people from just sticking with the App Store. That’s true. My concern about forcing Apple to support other stores is the ‘forcing’ part.
People, throw around the term ‘forcing’ companies to do this and ‘forcing’ consumers to do that very liberally in situations where nobody is forced to do anything, but this is different. Apple doesn’t want to implement the APIs, security controls and services to support third party stores. Mandating that they do so would literally be forcing them to do development and testing work, and support features they don’t want to support. Presumably such a mandate would also have to specify exactly how such features must be designed and implemented in order to be compliant, so now we’d have government specified features and UIs. To me, that seems a few steps too far.
When companies do anti-competitive things they are forced by the society with laws to stop, without this kind of laws we would still have mobile phones that are locked forever to a network, still have a big tax when you call someone on a different network, still have a big tax when you would transfer to a different back or use other bank ATM(this examples are from EU not sure about other regions).
For example the laws related to preventing fires also FORCE companies to add more exit doors, use the correct materials, add fire suppression equipment etc. A few years back some night club bribed the fire department and opened without respecting this laws, around 100 young people died because some greedy bastards didn't want to do the correct thing.
Anyway, my comment was about the argument "I love Apple to protect me" that argument is NULL.
We can attempt to debate the actual market share of Apple, to define the actual markets, to decide if Apple and Google are actually competing or have an hidden agreement, to define how we measure the damage by the market abuse (if any), to determine fixes for this abuses (if any).
Moreover, while location (e.g. access to customers) is a good portion of what makes rents in the same locale different, the costs and risks of providing the physical location are higher than providing a webpage and checkout (of which the marginal cost is basically $0).
If all it were was just some webpage and checkout, then why don't someone replicate it and just charge less and undercut. mm?
At least with Android, it is possible and does happen. The play store still gives the most reach as it's pre-installed and has special permissions. I still think 30% is ludicrous, but at least it's possible to have competition.