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Comment by darkwizard42 | Hacker News Reader

That is because the person who does the billing incurs the costs...the billing isn't based on usage, it is based on who processes the bill.

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processing fees are on the order of 2-3% at most, platform fees are 30%. That being said, the platforms do incur all sorts of other costs, but these costs are unequally shared across all apps. A free app with no ads does not pay anything but gets all the same features as a 100$ app who contributes 30$ on each sale. The problem is that there isn't a more "fair" solution.

Of course there is. There are multiple other ways that Apple and Google could decide to charge application providers, but they've decided this one makes them the most money.

They could have a standing charge for each app, with charges per thousand downloads, for instance, which would more closely follow their actual costs, and charge 5% for payments. That would have a different set of positives and negatives, but the way they've chosen is just one way amongst many options they've got.

So if a large non-profit wants to create an app, let's say Wikipedia, they would have to potentially pay millions? What about people in third world countries where value of their money is worth a fraction, how will they compete?

The fee is much higher than would be for just "processing the bill"

I don't think it's costs they care about, but control.

When apple gets control over the transaction, they can take whatever cut they want

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