1) Apple should be able to charge as much as they want to use their app store. Even 100%!!
2) You should be allowed to install other app stores on the device you own, over which Apple has no control.
Anything else is a half measure.
In theory, if there's a truely competitive market (has such a thijg evwr actually existed for anything?) it shouldn't matter what a particular store charges as any other store could come in and charge a lower percentage and provide a 'better' service.
That can't happen without very open access to alternative app stores though.
In an idealized enviornment whoever could provide the best app store for the least amount of overhead and fees would be successful.
That said there's something about defaults and the many year headstart Apple has had with their own app store which makes me skeptical that even in a completely open environment that there could ever realistically be a mass alternative for everyone and expecting the average user to care about developer fees they don't understand is a hard sell.
You could decouple distribution from payment processing. Have an "app store" with only free apps, but they can have in-app purchases if they handle their own payment processing. This is basically just a CDN. We already have a very mature and open market for CDNs, and they're very cheap.
We also already have a mature, slightly less open market for payment processors. Stripe charges about 3% and provides almost all the features the App Store provides for 10x bigger fees. The one feature most people would probably miss is centralized subscription management, but there would be nothing stopping Stripe (or someone else) from offering the exact same basic feature, charging way less than Apple, and still making a huge profit for themselves
Imo, Apple should be allowed to charge what they want - I'm ok with that as long as I can sidestep their thrall and sideload whatever I choose at no cost. If I get burned, that's on me.
I think their costs in running the AppStore are the cost of doing business. They need this for their product. Without it, the product is nothing. And they get to suck 30% out of everything. Got to admire that.
Better would be a replacement OS but is that even possible?
How would apple recoup the costs associated with allowing third party app stores? Even ignoring the direct costs, they will probably get derivative costs such as extra support requests that they can’t do anything about but have to burn man-hours telling people that.
In order to recoup the costs they would have to increase prices elsewhere. Having third party access from the start as part of the value proposition would mean they had already priced that in like the others, but they didn’t, so they haven’t.
Apple isn't really incurring any costs for this. They don't make any of the content, they don't write any of the software, they do host the 'applications', but they only deliver the tiniest parts of the app (they host a small binary, but they aren't hosting the videos on Netflix or YouTube, for example, or the major assets in an MMO game or such) and a lot of the labor they do "provide" isn't necessarily valuable (their "review" of the apps, for example).
The 30% figure seems to be pulled from gaming console markets, but it was never really justified over there either, and the previous economics that made it work (like subsidized hardware) never applied to Apple's ecosystem. (iPads aren't like, $99 each, and priced at that point, with the expectation that Apple will 'make it up' via the 30% tax on app store sales, the way consoles once were)
For Epic this is almost entirely about Fortnite, where they're making ~$5 billion a year selling skins and emotes to children while not being in App Store or Google Play.
Epic wants the millions of users and IAP they would get by being on these platforms but they want to pay 0% to the platforms for it.
Of course not. That's why the ask has always been a percentage reflecting the economic value to the developer created by the platform, which is surely non-zero.
And even then - the Super Bowl ad pricing is directly correlated to the number of users that ad will be delivered to.
All of that becomes even more emphasized if there's an alternate app store experience.
Correct. The value is in the audience reach, not the opportunity cost of not being able to show another ad.
Epic stands to make billions from the audience reach of these platforms, but when it comes to paying for that reach it somehow computes the value to be zero. That's some Hollywood accounting.
The "App Store" is a platform that offers reach in distribution channels. The Epic Games store is a platform that offers reach in distribution channels. The iphone is not. If you buy software through the epic games store, then apple gets nothing but a middle finger.
Epic would not be fighting so hard to get back on iOS and Android if they did not expect to make piles of cash from the massive market those platforms created, but when it comes to paying those platforms, they say the fair value is 0. That's the same logic at play.
As for buying from the Epic Games Store, I think you may be a little confused. These terms are for link-outs from apps you first installed via the App Store. You're still getting the app via Apple with this.
I would argue that it's also entirely possible that if Apple had taken or being willing to negotiate a less usurious cut, that Epic would have been quite happy and not played hardball.
No you just don't understand accounting. Hollywood Accounting has nothing to do with hiding revenue. It obfuscates profit.
Epic standing to make money is not a problem. Apple made its money when it sold the phones to customers. It has no right to continue to extract taxes. That is completely unrelated to hollywood accounting.
The fees on links are just part of a broader problem that apple is preventing fair competition on software distribution.
This is more like the TV manufacturer demanding a cut of the ad revenue because they've demanded all incoming feeds go through their middleman software layer.
Something smaller, like under 5%, close to the cost of providing the service, would be more like a "finders fee" on the other hand shouldn't have such a duty.