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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

They mean for the average app purchaser:

    $0.70 - App
    $0.30 - Apple Fee
    $1.00 - Total

And I agree. The reason it’s obfuscated is because people would instantly realize it’s bad value.

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Meh. For a consumer with historical context it seems like an incredible value. Apps used to cost $49.95 at Egghead, and Egghead was certainly taking a bigger cut than 30 cents. Apple fucked ISVs by dramatically driving down the cost of apps, not by taking a cut for distribution.

It's bad value for a few big actors who sell enough to be able to bulk aggregate a lot of international transactions. It's great value for most small developers, as far as I can see.

Imagine you release your app, and you expect to hit a few thousands users... except those users are world-wide. Now imagine attempting to figure out how to process credit cards from 100 different countries, register your business enough to be able to file tax records for those 100 countries, actually file taxes for those 100 countries every year, etc. Sure $3,000 of your $10,000 went to Apple, Google Play or whatever, but it would have gone towards a huge number of other costs if you'd tried to go at it alone.

Reality -- nobody cares. The consumer is paying $1 in that scenario no matter what. If the Apple fee goes away, then the developer is going to keep the price at $1.

I care. For the same price I buy CD Projekt red games on gog, and I buy games on epic store rather than steam because I know more money goes to those who did the real work.

Ok, that's a fair point. I'll say "very few people care".

Epic store is an interesting example. They are losing massive amounts of money. We will see if that is sustainable or not.

At least from a consumer point of view, this doesn't seem to change the price much: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/why-lower-platform-fe...

Isn’t Apple’s fee 15% now?

However, I do agree. It should be shown to the user like this.

Only for developers making less that 1 million in net sales per year will the fee be 15%. For every other developer, it's still 30%.

First million is at 15% for everyone I figure?

I believe that's how Google is doing it, but Apple is not

Google does a 15% progressive fee for the first $1mil. Apple sorta does the same, though once you cross the $1mil threshold, you pay a 30% cut next year on all your sales.

Only recently in response to all this anti-trust stuff.

This article [0] says the Play Store takes 15% from the first million but Apple's store takes 30% of everything once you pass one million/year. But it also makes it clear that only a very small percentage of apps in either store make more than one million/year.

Another article [1] says 98% of developers in the Apple store would be below one million/year but also that that long tail generates only 5% of the store's revenue. There are a tiny number of apps that are enormous winners, games I assume, and there's everything else.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/data-shows-how-few-google-...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...

> but Apple's store takes 30% of everything once you pass one million/year

So it's much better to earn 999k instead of 1.1 million...

If your app doesn't make over a certain amount. Large apps still have to

> Isn’t Apple’s fee 15% now?

I think both Apple and Google did that. It's a desperate attempt to avoid regulation IMO. I think both should be forced to facilitate competing app stores. There should be no mercy for them after a decade of anti-competitive price gouging.

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