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Comment by bwilli123 | Hacker News Reader

  It's reasonable to assume that Apple chose 30% because that was the prevailing standard in the physical retail world.

That markup has been competed away in some circumstances (eg Costco) but otherwise still holds generally (Walmart 32%) It reflects unavoidable costs to all retailers, like local rents, staffing, transport etc Given that tech does not have a retail's fixed costs why has that markup not been competed away to establish a markup based on tech's unavoidable fixed costs?

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What is your argument here? That Apple's services cost literally nothing to provide?

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.

Apple's profit margin on the App Store was ~80% in 2019[1]. In a healthy market, competition would lead to increased efficiencies and more savings for consumers that would cut into those margins. Instead the market has stagnated because competition was forbidden, and one company profits handsomely from it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...

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