Hacker News Reader

I think the current system is too much in Apple's favor, but I imagine they do have to spend a decent chunk of change curating the app store, validating submissions, hosting the apps for download, and maintaining the security infrastructure for developers to sign their apps and users to have confidence in them. This is all value added for developers.

View on HN

That is all in service of getting people to buy their phones. Those are no value added to the developer, they are restrictions on the developer so Apple can make statements about its ecosystem.

The emails from the testimony indicate they wanted only a $1 billion run rate. They have a $4+ billion run rate. Do we really think it costs them $1-4 billion to run the apps store? I'd be shocked it cost even $100 million a year to run it.

The excuse that the 30% cut exists to pay for the costs of running the store seem absurd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com