Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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As much as so many hate how Apple acts, they’ve gotten better since day 1.

They let developers choose more price points. They offer only a 15% cut of subscriptions in a number of circumstances instead of always taking 30%. IAPs and subscriptions have given developers more choices of how to monetize their apps.

At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers. Even the yearly developer fee is still $99 despite the HUGE increase in App Store revenue.

It’s understandable people want Apple’s cut to shrink, but that doesn’t appear to be legally required. They didn’t make things worse so it seems they’re in the clear.

(They still lost on the alternate payment method thing)

> At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers.

Except the entire time they required a 30% cut and you weren't allowed to point to other payment methods.

It was 30% from the beginning. By definition, it was the same cut throughout, not more.

Right.

I had never thought about it but I wonder if this is why they’ve never tried to raise rates.

It would certainly be a PR nightmare. But would it also immediately open them up to the “iOS monopoly abuse” case so many think this case was/wanted it to be?

People are also forgetting it was better than the status quo at the time (IIRC 70% cut to telecom companies)

You could run whatever apps you wanted on phones.

Nope, on J2ME and Symbian phones, unless you had a developer kit, you would run what the telecom provider made available on their stores, reachable via WAP or SMS download links.

No it was just continuing the status quo. Apple explicitly said they used Valve's Steam as a reference for monetizing a digital app store.

As far as mobile app stores went Valve's model wasn't the status quo. However, Valve showed that what they were doing was working.

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