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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, roughly half of Apple's money is made from hardware. The app store is extremely lucrative and apparently 70%+ of their revenue from the App store is just leeching off of mobile games, but Apple can definitely survive without the app store if push came to shove.

BUT, I will also mention that part of its market capture comes from all the charges on devs even before the rev share. You need apple equipment to develop, and they (apparently) don't sell server racks anymore for businesses to scale off of, nor any legitimate form of emulation. You have a small cost per year to have a developer account, and a cost to submit your app for review. Then if you care about visibilty they have their own ad discovery program you can pay into.

So I did disagree with a brief judge statement about how "It's possible to skirt around Apple's innnovation for free...". Apple controls and charges for the entire pipeline, even before you launch the app.

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> a cost to submit your app for review

They charge you to submit an app? Is this new? When I worked as an iOS developer this was not a thing but that was many years ago.

No they don’t

You pay 99 per year. But this definitely doesn’t cover their cost. The review process is very labor intensive on their side

As someone who has developed a commercial app and spent time on the app store - their review process is a joke... there are non-compliances all over the store and I suspect a lot of their review process is highly automated.

Yeah just because it's labor intensive doesn't mean it's good.

Im sure both App stores have lot of automated tests. But I've submitted a lot of apps and the feedback from Apple is much more specific and from humans.

I agree it's very annoying, often complaining about things that are explained in submission notes.

But if I submit and do around 5-10 updates per year that seems highly unlikely it covers their salary cost.

Most of their review is for their own interests so they should foot the bill.

Their priority is to ensure every dollar gets taxed and to block features they want to monopolise. The idea that it is a service to developers that they should pay for is insulting.

Would you pay a drunk rich person $99/year, so that you can publish a community newsletter to your local town or sell custom decals to your state's car enthusiasts club? Who then randomly decrees your newsletter is not allowed, forgets why, then slurs THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER and bans you yelling "I'm everybody safe, keeping!"

In this case, who exactly are they protecting, the townsfolk or car enthusiasts that you have an independent relationship with?

Would this scenario seem like a good idea to agree to? If no, why is the app store/walled garden model an appropriate use case at all/how is it substantially different?

The review process is only there to give Apple a fig-leaf to remove apps at will without recourse.

It depends how often you submit. Also they do it mostly in cheap labour countries.

And it doesn't have to conver the cost really. It's not a service to developers like developer support would be. It's more an impediment due to its randomness.

Not really, I put in a feature to record the screen and all they did was launch the app, click a button and then auto approve

However it’s so inconsistent and arbitrary that it hardly ever mattered.

you are trippin

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