taking 30% of other people's revenue is as close to free money as you can get.
Apple runs the modern digital mall. They provide the space, the signage, the discovery, they even handle payment for you.
Also, small indie developers are only being charged 15% until they exceed $1 million. So the 30% you always hear about are the big fish that can afford it anyway.
So when do we start complaining about Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Spotify, etc. etc?
They all take 30%+ margins on their platforms.
Also Google takes the exact same cut on the Play Store and yet Apple is still the one that usually gets singled out.
>Apple lawyers also took the dominance of consoles as a chance to ask why Epic Games has not sued Sony for the 30% fees it charges to Epic Games. (Sony is a major investor in Epic Games, and it recently put $200 million into the company.) Epic’s lawyers’ rebuttal was to point out the major differences between phones and game consoles, as well as the fact that Sony and Microsoft are more willing to negotiate than Apple. At one point, Sweeney said he would have taken a deal from Apple for lower commissions, if it had been offered. Sweeney also noted that most game consoles are sold at a loss and make money back from sales. Unlike phones, consoles are mainly used to play games. To Sweeney, this was a big reason why Sony and Microsoft’s fees are more palatable.
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article251156384....
Maybe its because 30% is a relatively small price to pay for the benefits of app stores versus trying to get users to manually install your app via side loading.
Asking Apple to allow side loading and alternative app stores is like forcing Tesla to make a gasoline powered car.
Would I prefer if there was a truly FOSS mobile operating system? Yes. But life is what it is and I'll take the /option/ to use F-Droid over only having the App Store any day.
Signage and discovery are a joke. The App Store is littered with garbage, and even when you search for an app by name, you often get unrelated apps for pages and pages before the real app.
> Also, small indie developers are only being charged 15% until they exceed $1 million. So the 30% you always hear about are the big fish that can afford it anyway.
This is a new development, which seems to have resulted only because of the pressure from regulators.
The 15% was actually part of the settlement of the lawsuit Cameron, et al. v. Apple Inc.
That's what you get by making it is easy for anyone to develop and release apps. It is a very low barrier of entry. Almost anyone sitting at home can make an app and release it. If they release garbage to game the system and Apple blocks it, then there cries of draconian policies.
Imagine the garbage that you will have to wade through when sideloading is forced upon them.
Also I doubt other stores are going to charge a subscription fee like streaming services do. So there's nothing wrong with having multiple stores.
You're mindlessly repeating Apple's bullshit.
That and their curation and vetting process turned into complete garbage over the last few years.
We can only hope that one day Apple will save Mac users from the horrors of being able to run software of our choice.
Apple isn’t stopping anyone else from creating a new platform, though it does seem pretty difficult.
See: Samsung, Huawei, BlackBerry, etc
There's just the two malls, and nobody has successfully started another mall in a decade.
If they allowed other app stores, I wouldn't make the move. I get a ton of value out of Apple's ecosystem, including - maybe especially - the ability to see what subscriptions I have and cancel them with a single click without even interacting with the app vendor.
idk what they'd have to do to make me move over, but man, it'd have to be demonstrably valuable - not just the same thing but different 3 feet over that way.
[edit] What if I told you Amazon had its own Android App Store, and literally nobody cares. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Yes, that's exactly the reason Apple is not allowing other malls. /s If it's so harmless for Apple, why not just allow other malls?
> If they allowed other app stores, I wouldn't make the move. I get a ton of value out of Apple's ecosystem, including - maybe especially - the ability to see what subscriptions I have and cancel them with a single click without even interacting with the app vendor.
What makes you think other app stores can't do it? What if apps are cheaper on other app stores because other app stores don't charge 30% tax?
I'm sure it's partly related to cost, but also, part of what Apple users value is a consistent and trusted experience.
- Since Apple is currently charging 30%, another app store might charge only 10% and so you might be able to get your spotify subscription for 20% less.
- A provider of especially expensive software (say a CAD or Mathematica) might be unwilling to cede so much of their margin to anybody at all and may prefer to run their own single-item "store", making them the only place to get that particular item.
- Same for especially inexpensive software. Open source game ports that don't want to pay Apple's developer fees. They may make so little margin, including 0, that they aren't feasible with Apple's tax. New software may become sustainable to develop and distribute that isn't currently.
- Porn. Emulators. Anything that doesn't conform to Apple's capricious reviewers. Software that does conform but the pain of dealing with Apple made them give up. The kinds of things that are available on the jailbroken appstores currently.
I'm glad you personally don't have a need for any of these things but that's hardly evidence that the market for it shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Respectfully nobody jailbreaks their phones anymore. 10-15 years ago sure. Partly because security improved but also in large part because Apple's rules relaxed to the point the vast majority of what people want is just in the App Store now. Don't get me wrong Cydia brings back memories, but the last stable release was 3 years ago.
The EU is going to ruin app stores like they ruined the web with cookie notices.
Instead of the official walled garden App Store that we have now we'll end up with the Apple, Microsoft, Epic, Amazon, TikTok, Meta, X (formerly known as Twitter), Steam, etc.
That's nice in theory. In practice I'm sure it will be they charge the same amount and pocket the other 20%.
Spotify might just increase its price to get more profit.
iOS will be allowing other stores in the EU before then, and it’s hard to see other places not passing similar legislation when their citizens ask why it’s allowed in the EU but not there.
I'm still waiting for European-style health care in the US. ;-)
We don't have a GDPR-style law either.
Different European countries have wildly different healthcare systems. e.g. the Swiss system is privatized to an even higher degree than the one in US.
They aren't providing 10x in value over basic card processing just by running the app store.
What do you think the margin is at the mall?
Most of the things Apple takes a 30% cut for are things that are very easy to do on other devices, it's just that people specifically want to do them on the iPhone. The most notable 30% case is with Fortnite but that's an excellent example of portability. There isn't really anything locking anyone to playing on iPhone except wanting to play on iPhone. Purchased skins and the like are all accessible regardless of where you purchase or play as long as it was linked to your Epic account.
Well, yes.
There's only two generally available phone platforms and they both collude to take a 30% cut, so avoid that cut amounts to getting exculded from the largest computing platform used worldwide (except China)
Now that you can pay your way to the top with a shitty spammy app and outcompete a good quality less well funded app, because search and discover ability are absolutely dire, I don’t think it holds true.
Being an indie developer used to be great. Now you just get a bit shafted by the system.
I still don't understand how they got away with it in the first place, what if Microsoft said they are entitled to 30% of all revenue generated by all Windows applications?