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Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

We need to have a shared definition of rent seeking. Rent Seeking necessitates no economic value creation. I struggle to objectively see Apple's AppStore as a merchant of record deriving no economic value. Same for their subscription management, inclusive of refunds, fraud detection, payment retries. Same for their IDE and development pipelines. CloudKit with automatic syncing and object management just built in via CoreData // SwiftData. Oh and discoverability via a single source of truth for Apps. And numerous more...

I would encourage anyone to try doing a fully 1:1 app in both web and native iOS for good measure to judge for themselves. Perhaps you could say 30% is a 'premium'; however after 1 year it drops down to 15%... objectively, I struggle to characterize the dev ecosystem as 'rent-seeking'

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Maybe the better question is to ask whether the current oligopoly(?, or in the case of the Apple app store perhaps a monopoly?) is moving towards increased or decreased consumer surplus.

Apple acts as if the app store is the driving factor behind users installing apps when in many cases it's not. In many cases users install apps because of the developer's own marketing efforts while Apple did nothing at all to deserve to be an intermediary in this relationship. Most iOS developers I know don't see the app store as the godsend that Apple wants it to appear. On the contrary, they see it as an asinine obstacle they have to clear to reach their users.

Mac app store has to compete with developers doing their own app distribution and we can see pretty clearly that its adoption is kinda meh.

Apple doesn't believe the App Store is the driving factor for users installing applications.

They believe the App Store is one part of the total value of the iOS platform, and one which they chose to monetize.

And while the Mac App Store is a solid counter example to "do users value this?", the other counter-example is the Play Store, where, despite the availability of side-loading on Android, the Play Store is still, by far, the preferred way that users download and install applications on their Android device.

In Epic's lawsuit against Google they argue that google makes sideloading unusable for businesses by making users jump through a bunch of hoops and scare screens.

They can argue that, but it's not a good argument.

The fact that no businesses have been willing to distribute via sideloading and save the 30% cut is pretty good proof that it doesnt work.

Yep. User's like having a single, trusted source for app discovery, installation, etc.

The Mac App Store has failed because Apple didn't make it good enough for developers to make it useful enough to users.

As the parent comment was saying however, it’s not just the App Store’s services that are being funded, but also platform, SDK, and developer tooling.

30% is probably too steep of a cut, but I don’t think it’s wrong for them to to take some percentage (the 15% rate they give to small devs who ask for it seems closer to reality).

> but also platform, SDK, and developer tooling

This is also a strange argument. The "platform, SDK, and developer tooling" are actually funded by device sales because those things are inseparable form the cost of developing the operating systems themselves, which in turn is included in the device prices.

To some extent yes, but marketplace cuts help further incentivize investment in those things.

This can be seen in the difference in the rate those things improved between when macOS was the flagship platform and when iOS took that crown. All of that sped up dramatically after the App Store really took off, with AppKit largely getting left in the dust compared to its iOS counterpart UIKit and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

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