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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

> There's no benefit to Apple allowing all these spam apps.

You're being naive. Even if the crapware didn't sell, getting it into the AppStore costs the developer an annual subscription fee, and thus creates revenue for Apple. And if you've seen the AppStore, you know that 99% of apps are crapware with maybe 5 users.

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There are 20M developer accounts. And Apple charges $100 per account per year. That's $2B in revenue. Apps on the App Store make $100B in revenue. So, Apple makes equivalent of 2% of Apps revenue from developer accounts. I doubt they'll intentionally risk the $100B revenue by making their App Store full of crapware for a 2% equivalent.

I think “developer accounts” doesn’t imply “pays $100 a year”.

I have an account on developer.apple.com, but never pay anything for it.

That gives me the right to generate a certificate to sign development applications and install them on a few devices (where the certificate will rapidly expire), but not to put anything on the App Store.

Are you sure there are 20M paying accounts?

Sorry, I meant that the maximum they’re making is $2B. But in reality it’s surely a much smaller number. Which makes it even more unlikely that Apple is optimizing for developer fees.

They are not risking anything since they also take a 30% cut off any successful scam. This can only be stopped by goodwill somewhere up the management chain.

It's the same principle as Amazon choosing to ignore the scams on their store.

Amazon still benefits from scam reviews, for example, because those reviews entice people to make purchases from Amazon. Amazon profits from the scam, and has little incentive to do anything about it, given that the vast, vast majority of their customers don't know or don't care about fake reviews in the first place.

For the app revenue it seems you are off by an order of magnitude. That is the dev's revenue and apple takes 30%. Also, credit processing takes another cut, hosting,... . Risking that is still dumb, but far from the 2% number you gave.

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