Like… within months.
Why do people not get this?
Apple wants their cut. This is the only way for them to get any cut at all. It’s either this rule or $0 revenue.
Why do they deserve a cut?
Uber and Lyft, deliver a material service, Apple have not contributed to that in any way beyond existing as a general purpose computer manufacturer.
Take an alternative, food delivery service, you pay a monthly subscription for a set selection of fruit and veg delivered every week. The cost is made up of food cost and delivery cost... You could sign up through a website, or you could sign up through an app on Apple's app store, in the later case the only option would be to increase the price by 30%, because there is no where near 30% profit left over.
Not convinced? Ok lets go to an extreme, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay? Does their App store really deliver that much value?
Before, it was sort of justifiable when people were trying their get rich quick schemes with flappy bird clones... because the argument from the other side was a weak "but that's my get rich quick scheme", Apple's platform and what they shove in front of users faces made a real difference to the almost pure profit of those Apps, the apps simply would not be popular without Apple... but as soon as we start talking about apps that deliver material services and other significant value it makes no sense to argue that Apple deserve even 1 penny. Apple have gone completely fucking mental with their own greed, they think they deserve a slice of the entire world.
If the iPhone was a general purpose computer, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Allow users to do that and they can put whatever rules they want on their store.
I mostly support the argument that EVERY middleman is useless but…we kinda live in a world of middlemen.
There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).
Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.
In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.
> There is some reasonable cost involved […]
Apple is just taking a profit like your corner store, COOP, Migros, etc. Is it reasonable? Don’t know! Are profit margins how most business operate? That is for sure.
I don't know if you're trolling or not... but are you seriously unaware of the value they're providing? Is this some kind of mystery to many people?
In the PC/Linux space -- where traditionally no online marketplace existed with wide reach -- if you want to sell your software you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps:
1. Create a website.
2. Market your software. Nobody will see it. Spend more money on more marketing, and then maybe -- just maybe -- you might reach 1-10% of your potential market.
3. Sign up with a credit card payment processor. Find out that people will navigate all the way to your store page, see the CC entry form, and click cancel. A lot of people. Like... 50%.
4. Discover that you're treated like the dirt stuck to the bottom of the payment processor's shoes, and they charge a lot of overhead too. Especially for small transcations. You have no hope, ever, of selling 1 million copies of your small app for $1 and make anywhere near a million dollars.
5. Get hacked because you can't afford a full security team to babysit your online store 24/7.
6. Discover that you're on the second page of Google's search results for your exact product name because of competitor's SEO.
7. And so on. And on, and on...
Apple's 30% cut is cheap. It's notably less than doing it yourself at a small scale, under one million dollars or so.
They instantly provide you with hundreds of millions of potential customers, free marketing and exposure, frictionless payment processing that goes down to the single-dollar range efficiently, secure systems for all of that, and more.
Everybody in the mobile app industry knows that while there are more Android devices out there, the profit is in the Apple ecosystem.
An ecosystem Apple created at enormous expense.
An ecosystem that has devices that are mostly kept up-to-date (by Apple! For 6+ years! At huge expense!), massively reducing development and test effort. Notably, unlike the Android platform which is a shit-show of bargain basement garbage with either zero vendor support, or next to zero.
An ecosystem where customers feel safe because of the security guarantees provided by Apple! Confident customers spend more. A lot more. The Android marketplace is like 30% malware at this point, for comparison. Customers don't feel safe spending their money there. I know I don't.
I could go on like this for pages and pages, but I hope you get the point.
You're getting the end-result of the main product of the world's biggest company. If you think this is worthless, literally without value, then you're probably one of those people that also think that they could reproduce the Uber app over a weekend...
Price is not based on cost.
But Apple didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent the barcode scanner. Apple sells a hardware with a ridiculous profit margin. Devices that only have value through the software that is written for them, Uber is not selling a device with a GPS, they are selling a taxi service (for better or worse), and they will use whatever is available on the device to make that work well.
So maybe Apple did something “right” to deserve millions of developers and billion+ consumers to chose them instead of others?
It’s awesome to be in 2022 and act like “Apple doesn’t deserve anything”. Look at last 15 years of mobile history and what Apple has done to this industry.
I don't have a stake in this, I don't own an iPhone or Android phone, or any smart phone and never have... I just see a rent seeker abusing their position as much as possible.
> Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs [...]
Note that we are discussing a huge markup on a material service, not merely software.
Fairly certain that I, the iPhone owner, paid for that in full. Plus a healthy margin.
Amazon operates this way, DoorDash operates this way. You aren't paying the cost of your deliveries, sure you get charged a fee but the bulk is paid by the seller forking over 30% of their revenue for the privilege of selling to you.
Just because you're paying doesn't mean you aren't the product.
And Apple's not asking for a cut of that. Apple is asking for 30% of the monthly Uber Membership fees, created as an IAP. The part that is completely non-scaling to the amount of rides the person takes. The part that is practically guaranteed to come from Uber's profits and not from the end users or from drivers.
So, I really find it hard to care about big companies fighting about it.
> e, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay?
Apple's made it a point that they don't collect 30% on real (non-digital) purchases. Like a mortgage. They would be collecting 30% of the $25 convenience fee your bank slaps on, not the mortgage payment. Which may make it less likely a bank decides to add those fees.
It's reasonable to assume that Apple chose 30% because that was the prevailing standard in the physical retail world.Apple provides developers access to an enormous marketplace that they run. A marketplace with hundreds of millions of "high value" customers pre-configured for payments. All sorts of related services are included, such as fraud detection, currency conversion, etc...
What do you think Apple does? Just skim 30% off the top without doing anything else?
Seriously, some people live in this fantasy world where all products should be worth 100% of their raw material cost, and services should cost only what the showroom rent+aircon costs to provide.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...