Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
Some of us never become competent.
That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.
IME, it's when the crunch time hits, or an outage, or some other nasty surprise or fire, where you see the competency show itself (or not).
The accusation is that the companies hired more people than they knew what to do with / could apply productively in their business.
If such a basic task is beyond the capability of decisionmakers, who is to say that they are capable of collecting the feedback from rank-and-file employees required to assess who needs firing?
Mangers have many concerns apart from Performance, suppose we have Steve and Bob, and Bob is 50% more productive than Steve, but Steve is in the middle of delivering a critical project, millions of dollars are on the line. Meanwhile Bob is in between projects, and today they decided they must fire some staff, who do you think will get fired?
Also, is performance one metric? Suppose Steve writes worse code, but the business folks love his presentations, he is really good at explaining the issues facing the team. They can put Steve in front of a corporate client and win business. They never see much of Bob, even thought he is doing most of the 'real' work, so who is more valuable?
Unless you are dealing with someone totally incompetent, these questions are usually 'which skillset do we need most' and they are not so simple.
Ah, hold on, I know this one.
Steve will get fired, because the manager will think they can just drop-in replace him with the high-performing Bob.
Bob will then reach burnout due to the high demands and short deadlines, and he'll rage quit.
Then they'll hire Chad in a panic, who performed well at a whiteboarding interview.
Six months in, they're thinking of firing him, not just because he bro fists everyone in the office, but there's no one to replace him with.
So they promote him to manager, because of his obvious leader qualities, and assign him to hire his replacement.
I was told that all I needed to do was work one extra hour per day (in addition to normal support, elevation, etc). Why would I take a position with higher expectations for a 7% raise and a 13% increase in hours - a rate cut? Plus, if I'm a high performer in my current role I should be getting bigger bonuses.
I have a skip level where the department head asked what my career goals were. And my answer was to stay in my role. After all, I worked as a tech lead for a year and a senior dev the year after, with no talk of advancement until what I previously mentioned (which would be a rate cut).
My manager got me from my desk the next work day and you could tell he was pissed. He asked me why I would say that sort of stuff and said that was "stupid". I generally tell the truth and am pretty honest - I guess I'm stupid that way.
I heard through a friend thst they wanted to get rid of me for those comments and I managed to switch teams in time. My career has been in a downward spiral since.
The other thing is, my company measures your engagement and potential by how ambitious you are. The reason they wanted to get rid of me is because they thought with an answer like that I would be disengaged and didn't have any potential.
All of which is true, and phrases things so they know you're not turning your nose up at anything and that you have the company's best interests in your mind.
But if I were to work at a place where I felt similarly, I would absolutely be looking for a job elsewhere.
But taking the description of your situation at face value, I would have quit that company. Its values are so different from mine that I'd feel I have no business being there.
It's consistently ranked as a best place to work. The written policies are great, but they don't matter because there are unwritten backroom policies. They are also one of the largest employers in the area and I can't move due to family issues. I was screwed, but sure, if one has other options, one should take them.
So if you say you want to stay at "intermediate", that's an "out" you're voting for. If you say it (in the politically correct way) at senior (or whatever is the correct level for it at your company), you can stay.
Not only that - you may be perceived as a threat to anyone who takes the post that was offered to you and, since you turned it down, you have no actual power to control what happens.
I realized my “logic” brain scares the crap out of normies. I learned to ask other people for help with complex negotiations involving politics and emotion.
I realized I don’t process information the same as most people and this has been at the root of numerous career mistakes. Some of those mistakes were extremely damaging.
I recommend learning to run your decision making past people who are better in these areas than you. When it is a political issue especially. If you know you are not great at politics, you need to improve your decision making and avoid this problem in the future.
I learned after YEARS of stepping on landmines accidentally to be far more careful navigating internal politics. The costs of getting it wrong are devastating.
For example. If you indeed did the math and calculated (logically and truthfully) that management was a +7% increase in pay for a +13% increase in work that’s fine.
But if you used those exact words and numbers to a superior; they will view that as arrogant, selfish and entitled. Because their view is you should want to be the best you can be for the company and make a personal sacrifice to show you want the company to do well. That is basic “salary man 101” and doing the opposite of that (analyzing the exact math) is putting a target on your back as a “free thinking non team player individualist.” It’s career lethal to get that label
I suspect you may have a lot more Aspergers than you realize. Or maybe it’s a generational culture thing. And the most irritating thing about people who are on the spectrum is the refusal to introspect and self reflect about it.
I tried to coach a co worker who was similar. Dude was angering everyone. All the time. He didn’t want to hear that he had a problem.
I strongly recommend developing friends you can run these decisions by. It was literally a life saver for me. I realized I was like a blind person wandering around with a cane when it came to navigating politics and needed watch dogs who could analyze the situation for me so I didn’t blow my leg off.
In terms of this situation. It sounds like you did not prepare well for a long term career discussion. That is an extreme red flag. And didn’t take it seriously that a higher level authority was asking you for your plan.
You were being checked on whether you have a future at the organization. You failed.
I have failed these tests myself. I was late to a critical call with a VP. It ended my career. It showed lack of care or preparation and a lack of respect.
One late meeting ended my career.
I can’t blame you. If you are hyper logical in your mind you we’re probably just telling them that “2+2=4.”
The entire political career metagame that normies play does not have anything to do with logic. I personally don’t like it either.
It may also be generational. A GenZ who plans to coast and just get a paycheck while turning in a solid 30% effort might have given the same answer you did.
Some Aspergers dude wouldn’t know that this is career ending as an impression to give: “my plan is to do the minimum ser.” Is what your skip level hears.
It wasn’t what you said it was what they heard.
“I love the company and support you and want to grow into doing more, I’m so optimistic of the future.” That’s what they want to hear.
If you want to coast, at least say what I just said and give that impression. And you can probably carve out a way to mostly get left alone and negotiate your wants and workload. Or negotiate a project that allows you to coast. But holy shit don’t start doing comparative math on working hours versus pay.
Your company might not be doing well. If you don’t know that (they might not even tell you), they may really have needed you to do more.
I recommend working on your likability also.
Suspect your delivery and demeanor are just labeling you as an Aspergers robot.
Companies will tolerate incompetent, lazy, shiftless, unambitious workers who are positive, pleasant, non threatening, supportive, not “too smart,” keep their mouths shut, not crafty or aggressive. They will tolerate that forever. In fact they love it.
I suspect your demeanor and likability are bad. It starts with how you enter every discussion. Keep things light and funny. Never criticize, complain, bicker over hours or workloads.
Negotiate for what you want and have a clear plan and do it lightly and in a gentle way and watch the demeanor of those around you.
Doing Aspergers math on how much work they want you to do versus how much work you feel like doing: Holy shit. Don’t make that mistake again. That was me. Get a clue, learn to softened and likable. Don’t be logical. They hate that and they will hate you.
Be optimistic and clueless and get your job done.
I don't even know what the extra pay would be, but it's probably not enough to be worth making my job less enjoyable.
eg one of the first Google results for "teamblind Amazon offer eval" turns up someone who was offered >$100k of cash bonus in each of their first two years: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Offer-Comparison---Amazon-vs-...
Then at home, kids and multiple family health issues. I guess my age plays a role too.
So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.
apple is an enormously stable company in ways that (to be very honest) even most other tech blue-chips are not. even microsoft or google have the sword of damocles hanging over them - given a sufficiently long and severe position of mismanagement it is possible that even google or MS could be unseated or even go under. arguably that is the trajectory MS was on in the 00s, and google could be similarly unseated by AI.
intel would be a great real-world example of that. Even 10 years ago the thought of big blue losing control was unthinkable, un-thinkable. And here we are, they're circling the drain right now and need to make very deep cuts and refocus on the essentials or they're going to be in bankruptcy in 5-10 years, during a down market in general and a specific market that they glutted during the pandemic (a lot of customers have enough PCs/laptops/servers for quite a while). And in contrast Apple is still making money hand-over-fist despite the market conditions - now that's stability.
I'm not going to say that google or MS doubling their size on a short-term timescale sounds like a good idea but it's a ride-or-die industry, you're pretty much either getting bigger or getting smaller, and mere homeostasis is a rare luxury.
Working east coast in more traditional tech companies this has never really been a thing. It's always been conservative, staying profitable, etc.. It is the older way.
Apple, MS, etc.. were built this way too of course.
So satan is involved? That might explain how Jobs came back after getting boot #1.
Additionally they deal a lot with hardware design. Being in the office is going to be easier for certain things, particularly when you are as secretive as Apple.
This seems to be general sentiment here lately. Do you have any evidence to support this or is purely conjecture?
New hires take anywhere from 3 months to 8 months or more depending on the position to ramp up
During ramp up period, there’s a productivity toll taken on the team via teaching the new hire
Thus during this time, productivity is hampered
——
For culture, I think it’s a bit more subjective. But if you have a team of 5 who then gets 1 new hire to teach over 6 months, generally it allows them to “mesh” better in the culture.
Both in terms of team mates learning about the new hire, and the new hire having room to fit in within the culture, and bring their own value to the team (assuming an already existing good culture.
Now say you have 3 new hires on a team of 5. If we further presume productivity is also hampered more as more people are onboarded at once, that creates additional stress on the team to teach them.
Further, it could be harder to have the new hires feel part of the team if less time is spent getting to know each one. But assume this isn’t the case:
Business will most likely expect at least the same productivity from the team. Now they’re stressed from teaching, higher expectations on their output (onboarding a team member is tiring work), and the business is going to soon expect productivity to increase further after headcount is upped by over 50% in this example.
Now take that, and add on new teams created to interact with, additional communication layers, and it’s pretty straightforward to assume growing too fast can be negative
As the saying goes "revenue solves everything".
"If we want to know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. And the purpose must lie outside the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society, since a business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment. And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.
Because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. These are the entrepreneurial functions. Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business."
- Peter Drucker
On one hand, fair. Technically correct.
On the other hand basically all laymen use the word "company" to mean for-profit corporation, and pretty much everyone who wants to talk about corporations that are designed not to make a profit use the term "non-profit".
I think you've ignored the context in which the comment was made.
I would argue you did. The parent was being pedantic about the saying "revenue solves everything" and tried to make seem as if profit is the be-end-all. My overall point is still consistent with Drucker's "the purpose of a company is to create customers". If you're in a bull market and you hire like crazy to achieve the creation of customers, then hiring like crazy is NOT WRONG.
> On the other hand basically all laymen use the word "company" to mean for-profit corporation
P.S. - Amazon ran without profit for 10 years. Did we magically call them a non-profit for 10 years and then a company thereafter?
That statement was paired with a teleological statement about the purpose of a company. When paired with the common usage of the word "company", the statement becomes tautological. Admittedly, this isn't the most insightful realization ever, but the point from the comment was that people forget that a profit needs to be extracted.
> My overall point is still consistent with Drucker's "the purpose of a company is to create customers".
And, pray-tell, why do you think companies want customers, if not for eventual profit?
> Amazon ran without profit for 10 years. Did we magically call them a non-profit for 10 years and then a company thereafter?
Amazon made an intentional decision to re-invest profits, as a gamble that it would lead to greater profits later. That's not refraining from profit, but just operating on a time-scale that isn't quarter to quarter.
I would argue that perhaps Apple's business side of things is arguably well-run. I personally disagree; I think that since Tim Cook has taken over, Apple's business focus is more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality.
But I would also strongly argue that their software side of things has been trending downward (especially in terms of quality) since Tim Cook took over.
Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term.
(FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)
(/s)
No-- where are you seeing this?
Almost nothing in the Apple Music app on iOS or MacOS starts with "Apple Music" for me. Only really the "Apple Music" radio stations, which is necessary to distinguish them from the generic playlists and third-party radio stations.
There can’t really be anything bigger than the phone market that has 90%+ world wide penetration.
even a dell latitude business laptop is something else I'd consider that should probably be close to the intel nuc level of "mostly works with minimal flakiness" but it flatly was not... and the intel NUC was extremely flaky compared to everything apple I've used. And everything besides the NUC that used Intel wireless chipsets was a complete disaster that was basically unusable. When I have to put a USB bluetooth adapter in my B550 motherboard to get something that works... yeah.
know what I haven't had to fuck with since getting an intel macbook for work, and a M1 MBA for around the home? bluetooth problems. somehow apple can figure it out, even when using that same flaky intel hardware. nowadays I can just reliably assume that any connection problem means my peripheral has a dead battery for some reason.
But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major operating system! Now with the relentless yearly schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they start working on the next big thing and adding brand new bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year. The software is now underwater in technical debt.
Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major versions too often. The new major versions are always buggier than the previous major version with many minor patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to suffer the early growing pains of new software.
Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.
Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against.
There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.
Apple continues to make extremely long term highly strategic investments. You don't get to develop a highly original, industry leading SOC architecture without long term investment in technology. Bankrolling new process node development and thereby locking in capacity in strategic contracts doesn't happen by accident or on a whim. Development and implementation of the Apple watch happened entirely in the post-Jobs era.
So I just don't see it, they continue to commit to heavy long term investment in capital intensive technology projects and innovative new products. Not everything works out. The touch bar and butterfly keyboards were notable misses. But then that's always been true. I look at the phones, desktops, laptops, watch, Airpods, iPads, etc. They're the most Apple-y products Apple has ever produced, and not a single one of them is a me-to product slapped together to ride a trend.
And yes, I was still buying legit Macs and software, and a lot of stock when it was at $11. It was a blast, I tell you.
... the fact that the StarMax product hasn't been powered on for over two decades is beside the point. I want my nostalgia!
No, it really wasn't.
I know people who were techs for retail stores at the time.
The sheer volume of shit cheap-ass clones that crossed their workbenches during that era....
What spyware is on your modern Mac?
The iPad pro line is a travesty. IPadOS is horrible, Apple need to take it out back and shoot it. The hardware fits a great niche but Apple have ruined it with their gimmicky software.
IPhones have been getting bigger, heavier, and last less time with each generation. I recently upgraded from the 11 to the 14 pro, and the hardware feels strictly worse. It’s snappier and has a digital island, but it’s significantly heavier and is the first iPhone I’ve ever really been worried about dying during the day (even after turning off the stupid always on display).
AirPods have probably been their biggest win in recent years. The original were amazing, Pros, and Pro 2 were significant upgrades and they’re a big reason (along w/ apple ecosystem integration) I won’t jump ship for android. Maxs are horrible, heavy, and I just don’t understand why people like them at all (bose + sony both make better headphones for cheaper here).
The apple pencil difference is magnetic charging and magnetic storage on the side of the ipad. Which is nice, but it also means you have the camera in the absolutely most annoying spot in the world. Good luck using faceID while you’re browsing and you’re always going to have the worst angle/look like you’re staring into space during video calls.
iPadOS just doesn’t cut it for multi-tasking/any pro workload that would justify an M2 chip
When you really ask yourself what workload you’re doing on an iPad that requires anything more than an A16 is … I think you’ll find there isn’t much. You’re limited to iPad apps. You can’t even install a browser that isn’t a safari skin. Multitasking is horrible. The mouse/touch interface has weird janky things (like text selection).
You don’t have an escape key or a function row, so even many web apps are broken.
The iPad pro is about the same price as an M2 Macbook Air, and significantly more expensive than an M1 Macbook Air. While the hardware looks comparable, the software makes the hardware more or less useless.
If you have been using Linux for years, how come you've been experiencing increasing number of OS X bugs and performance degradation? I thought you've been running Linux for years?
My m1 mbp is the best laptop I've ever owned, and I've owned a lot. I don't really use any mac software though - just a terminal, emacs, and a web browser. Macos just stays out of the way and causes no problems. I routinely get 1 or 2 months of uptime - only ever needing to reboot to apply system updates. Maybe if I used more mac software I would see this supposed decline.
Yes, however it's clearly successful.
> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years?
Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And this is rather more the point that I tried to make: short term profits at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?
But it’s not good enough just to be right, you have to be right at the right time. How many products categories failed during the dot com bust that are doing well now?
It’s like me predicting the heat death of the sun. There is a big difference between saying it will happen eventually and that it will happen tomorrow.
Even if there are 7 dozen extra customers, that's maximum (looks up price of most expensive Apple Watch) of 7 * 12 * $799 = $67k.
Apple made a profit of $99 billion in 2022. $67K is the amount Apple made about every 20 seconds.
And they almost went out of business at least twice, once they survived because MS bailed them out.
Apple pre-iPod was a source of amusing commercials. Pre iPhone they were the catalyst for change in the music industry, but they were still a consumer goods company with one product that had pretty wide, but still overall limited appeal.
Apple still doesn't have a diversified revenue stream. If Microsoft had to stop selling Windows today, they'd still make a fortune from Office. If Microsoft had to stop selling Office and Windows today, they'd still make a (much smaller) fortune from Azure.
But you can easily look at Apple’s revenue breakdown between Mac, iPads, services, wearables, etc and see that it is well diversified.
And Microsoft never “bailed them out”. Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.
Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac license. It didn’t become profitable for another two years. The little money that Microsoft invested didn’t make a difference.
But so what? I can’t believe someone is seriously arguing that the failures of the Scully era are somehow damning to Apple under Cook. Sure, every company can fail. Apple is the most profitable company in the world right now, so it’s an odd time to sing doom songs.
They promised to keep doing what they were already doing.
If iPhones vanished tomorrow, how much trouble would Apple be in? Wearables are 100% attach rate to iPhone, and I'd presume so are the vast majority of service subscribers.
> Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.
As others said, the software support, browser + office were huge.
Apple 2022 revenue: $398B[0]
Apple 2022 ad revenue: $4B[1]
It is possible, with a lot of effort, that Apple could go from advertising representing 1% of revenue to maybe 10% over the next 10 years. I don't think that's realistic, but maybe. "Turning into an advertising company" is maybe overstating?
Besides, the whole reason Apple is in advertising is that free-with-ads is an important business model for media and developers, and the other players are pretty horrible. Me, I hate ads and will always pay directly for apps/media, and I don't like what Apple's doing in ads. But I think you're being a little over-dramatic there.
0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/revenue
1. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-iphone-...
The Macs are better than ever.
What else should he be doing?
They off-source all of their factory efforts to other companies. The other companies are doing the hiring and firing.
Probably the best run company is Qualcomm. I have never heard them do layoffs. And they are based in San Diego.
edit: Just googled it and found https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1l5vLinG
edit2: also, https://www.thelayoff.com/apple
And this is evidence they're not so well run? On the contrary...
I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3% and require allowing third party app stores (both actions would be equivalent economically because their current fee only works because of their monopoly), and I don't see someting like this not happening in the next decade.
It will be a huge and deserved adjustment when this does happen, and stock speculation will only amplify the blow in the form of lost stock value. There are many, many long-time holders of apple stock who might see the threat of such an event as a time to finally sell. Then we'll see how much value is really there.
Additionally, they have sunk billions of dollars in a brand new campus at a time when WFH is here to stay. That investment will also likely turn out to be worthless in the coming decades as the value of CRE races to $0.
Also, they will still be one of the, if not most, profitable businesses in the world even if they lose all the App Store revenue, so it does not seem reasonable to expect more.
The App Store model has served them well for years. If it stops serving them well next quarter, so what?
If it was true, these short sighted companies would fade away in the long run.
Empirically, top companies stay on top for decades.
Once you are that huge and cam but competition, you don't fade away unless you go full-on Lehmon Brothers
Apple Silicon was a decade-long play, largely by Cook. Even if the App Store is threatened, Apple remains plump.
We've seen pushback on the 30% but mostly for a select group of major companies who want to offer alternative payments. The majority of apps aren't going to be asking customers for their credit cards separately vs a single "subscribe" button, nor do they all have CCs already in their existing DBs. Even worst case if 25% of the revenue gets lost due to secondary subscription payment support (assuming they don't somehow still take a cut), that 75% is still a monster that could support Apple for a long time.
Not to mention the rest of their businesses.
At this point they should self-regulate, like any misbehaving child who realizes they are in the wrong should before they get punished. It's not a risk and it's not going to hurt their stock if it's self-imposed. People always praise anything that comes from within with Apple so it would actually be a pretty savvy play, given what's on the horizon.
Rumour is Apple is opening up side-loading so the "walled garden" thing might be neutered.
Not sure what other regulatory risks they have.
Welcome to the world of retail!
If Apple tried to make it so that you couldn't make an app and offer it both on Android and Apple, i.e. it had to be an Apple exclusive, then I'd say you have a point. The regulators aren't concerned with the 30%. Their concern is with the fact you can't go to another store and shop for a better price. THAT is what they're trying to fix. Watch out though - deregulation and market competition all-too-often leads to higher prices. People always act surprised by this.
How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
Let's say you have an iOS app.
If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And you sell 100,000.
App Store nets you $350k.
And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did everything yourself:
$5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you also have to collect and remit sales tax for jurisdictions in which you sell. Your street price is $5 + tax, and you keep the $5 but you incur some expense for sales tax compliance.
You have to use a payment processor. That's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So if you sold 100k apps at $5, that's $455,500 in revenue after credit card fees are paid.
However, there's also chargebacks. Chargeback ratio averages roughly 0.6% across all industries (it's much higher for digital goods and CNP transactions -- so let's call it 1.5%) So from 100k sales, you really sell 98,5000, so your revenue is $448,667 (after cc fees.) However, you have 1500 in chargebacks that cost $20 each (per stripe.). So that's $30k in chargeback fees. So now your revenue is $418,667. Apple rarely loses chargebacks and refunds are extremely rare. So that sales loss is negligible.
You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth. As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required. That's a non-zero cost.
Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
Let's just assume that you sell just as many outside the App Store as you would doing it yourself. (That won't happen, but let's assume your marketing is so good that it's the case.)
The difference is $419-$350k. (That's assuming zero expense for hosting, marketing, customer support, etc.) So you're "losing" $69k per year. After tax however -- $280k from the App Store, $335k doing it yourself. So $55k additional. Yet you have hosting, customer support, marketing -- etc. $55k per year as a salary for doing those tasks is tiny and that doesn't include the cost of the hosting and bandwidth.
Try $0. Look at the App Store charts. The 200 top grossing apps are ironically all "Free": https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/united-states/...
This is the real problem, the crApp Store race to the bottom. Apple's cut was never really the problem. The cut is obscene, but only because the prices are already obscenely low. I'd be happy to give Apple 50% if I could sell my software for higher prices.
> And you sell 100,000.
Good luck with that.
> You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth.
Cheap.
> As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required.
You have to do these things anyway.
> Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
You have to do all of this stuff regardless of whether you're in the App Store. As an App Store developer myself, I can tell you that Apple absolutely does not do these things for you.
Notice how many Mac developers, given the choice, choose to distribute themselves rather than via the Mac App Store. They don't see the App Store as a win like you do.
If you ask Apple themselves to split the payment processing from the hosting and 'marketing', they claim it's 3% and 27%.
So if you could use their payment processing by itself, that would put you at $485k before server costs, not $419k. So you can have very nice servers and over a third more revenue.
You'll have to decide whether being in the main app store is important enough to pay a big percentage. And advertising and updates and customer support are costs either way, so please don't imply you only pay them if you avoid the app store.
Most companies don't do their own payment processing. They have accounts with companies that provide merchant services (e.g. WorldPay, Ayden, various investment banks) under specially negotiated contracts. These contracts would cover contingencies that wouldn't apply to "normal" customers and there's obviously a premium to pay for that. What you're demanding is the financial equivalent of adding millions of people to an individual's credit card account.
Why would you think a for-profit company (or for that matter, any financially sensible individual) would should share the financial benefits its negotiated for itself with millions of others? Not only would Apple be introduced to additional legal and financial liability, but so would the payment processor.
Though I do have an answer to "why"! It's because Apple claims they want to be in charge of payments to protect their users. Even if we ignore the "charge slightly more and make tons of money" plan.
There's a difference between being charging payments as a service and acting as a financial fiduciary on behalf millions of developers. I don't think you understand the legal gravity of the latter.
Since the app store is apparently nine tenths of their fee.