Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

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When the App Store first launched I think 30% was pretty fair fee for Apple to collect, but that was a long time ago, and before IAP/Subscriptions. Apple might still be entitled to some percentage but they've expanded to cover more and more things (like this Patreon change or Kindle back in the day) and now we have moved far, far beyond the pale.

Apple (perhaps like all corporations but I'm focusing on Apple) is a greedy company that has massively lost it's way. Tim Cook support fascists and/or anything to improve the bottom line, especially if it increases "services" [0]. Alan Dye (thank god he is now busy screwing up Meta) shipped the worst UI revamp I've seen in a while from a company Apple's size and the iOS/iPadOS/visionOS/macOS software is all in dire straits. And they managed to do all of this while alienating developers left and right and playing chicken with governments around the world [0] instead of relaxing their hold on their platforms.

But who cares? The stock price went up. /s

I was overjoyed to see Alan Dye leave (and Jony Ive) and hope that we don't have to wait too much longer to bid Tim Cook adieu. Whoever takes over next has a lot of work ahead to dig out of the hole Tim Cook dug for Apple.

Tim Cook might be the best thing for shareholders but he has been horrible for product quality (software and hardware) and for democracy.

[0] Pay no attention to how much of services revenue came from the Google search deal with the majority of the rest coming from casinos for children and adults alike.

[1] Like the EU DMA, which, I have publicly and privately voiced my dislike of parts of it but Apple has no one to blame but themselves. By keeping a white-knuckle grip on their revenue they forced governments across the world to pass laws (often bad IMHO) that fragment and confuse the entire iOS market.

30% was always excessive.

I suspect developers are looking for these workaround because of the 30%. If Apple had asked for, say, 10%, would there be as many developers looking for loopholes?

I don't know. Apple perhaps should ask for compensation for "vouching for" the developer's app, hosting the app, distributing the app. But Steam shows us another model where the developer themselves pay a modest up-front cost to have their app hosted ($100) and then Steam steps out of the way.

I wonder if this would go a long way too to thinning the herd so to speak from the Apple App Store—perhaps improve the overall quality of the apps submitted.

I think a lot of developers were willing to let it slide when App Store was a luxury market. You could just ignore it and make regular webapps and/or desktop software.

But now iOS is the most popular computing platform in the US. We no longer _have_ an option to ignore it.

And 30% is just crazy. And it's _on_ _top_ of all other expenses: Apple hardware that you need to buy to develop for iOS, $100 per year subscription fee, overhead of using Apple's shitty tools, etc.

To be fair, the fee is really 15%- 30% only comes into play only after you've made $1mm USD in the prior year.

That's the issue, though. These aren't the Patreon devs running the app. These are creators using Patreon. It's 2nd level rent seeking.

Steam takes 30% cut, though?

Yes, and that is also excessive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I have to respond to your point, though. Whether 30% cut is excessive depends on whether devs feel like they are getting a good deal. As far as I can tell, game developers don't seem to complain about Steam cut very much, it seems like the value you get is worth it.

For example, this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/10wvgoo/do_you_think... seems like majority is positive about it, even though people debate. When Apple tax is brought up, there's almost never even a discussion there, it's pretty universally hated.

Apple seems to have almost adveserial relationship to its developers. I deploy to App Store and I feel like I'm getting screwed. Even compared to Google, which takes the same cut, but does bahave a lot more nicely to its developers.

I'm not judging that, it just seems to contradict the "But Steam shows us another model..." sentence, so I'm trying to make sense of that.

You're right, I didn't know it was 30%.

Checking an LLM, it sounds like they more or less all charge 30%. That's shit.

Tim Cook has been horrible for software, but the hardware under his regime has been incredible.

May I introduce you to years he let Jony Ive control that. Which brought us things like the butterfly keyboard, thinness at all costs (battery life), and loss of ports (in part due to thinness) that had to be walked back.

Yeah, I have no love for Ive's anti-bauhaus philosophy of form-über-alles.

Ports hiding on the back so you have to endure the sound of USB-tin scraping against anodized aluminum, the round mouse, etc.

Incredible is stretching things. Apple had to catch up with AMD in efficiency, and they did that. Outside the mobile market, Apple is basically a non-entity.

Apple doesn't have huge sales volume for Macs because of macOS and their astronomical pricing schemes, but it's not because of the hardware. Macbooks are easily the best laptops you can buy for most purposes, and they have been since the M1 came out. That has never been true of Apple computers before.

It's because of the hardware. For mobile Apple is competitive, for desktop applications they don't even show up on most benchmarks next to AMD/Nvidia hardware.

For example, you have to scroll beneath last-gen laptop GPUs before you can find any Apple hardware on the OpenCL charts: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

That's also because of software. Apple deprecated OpenCL in MacOS eight years ago. In productivity software with solid Metal implementations, like Blender, the M4 Max is on par with the top of Nvidia's (mobile) 5xxx line, except with much more VRAM.

No software fix exists, Apple's GPUs are architecturally limited to raster efficiency (and now, matmul ops). It's frankly bewildering that a raster-optimized SOC struggles to decisively outperform a tensor-optimized CUDA system in 2026.

I get the feeling you had a specific use case that didn't work well with Apple GPUs? I'd be curious what it was. The architecture does have some unusual limitations.

By software problem, though, I meant referencing OpenCL benchmarks. No one in 2026 should be using OpenCL on macOS at all, and the benchmarks aren’t representative of the hardware.

I agree that the early days when every app was a single purchase and the prices were much higher it made more sense. A lot of people got rich from the App Store. So 30% wasn't a huge piece when you were seeing consistent growth every year in the user base.

I think the most annoying thing is how unevenly the policy is applied. Some megacorps pay the 30% and others like Amazon get sweetheart deals. So it unfortunately comes down to who benefits more. If you have something Apple really wants then they will cut a deal. But if not then you pay the high tax. They've at least cut it down somewhat for smaller devs and teams, but the whole industry needs to change. IAP/Subscriptions shouldn't just inherit the pricing systems of old.

I have a feeling Tim is just going to tank the Trump stuff and then peace out next admin so he gets all the blame. Much like Ive and Dye have been.

> I think the most annoying thing is how unevenly the policy is applied. Some megacorps pay the 30% and others like Amazon get sweetheart deals.

I agree, there were deals down to 15% I think (maybe lower) but I don't think that's still happening? I mean, Netflix finally gave up but only after increasing their IAP fee to cover the difference for many years. I might be behind the times on this but I didn't think they still had better cuts for larger corporations. I do know not all developers are treated the same (see Meta still being on the app store after all the shenanigans they pulled with enterprise certs, or Uber), and that does suck. It means that if you are big enough you can break the rules while an indie dev can have everything taken due to an automated system or mistake, even when it's not their fault.

> I have a feeling Tim is just going to tank the Trump stuff and then peace out next admin so he gets all the blame. Much like Ive and Dye have been.

I agree that's likely, though the thought of him staying till the "end" of that is not attractive.

>but I don't think that's still happening?

Apple and the contracted company are very very unlikely to tell you they have a secret contract for lower prices in effect unless they are forced to under court disclosure.

Oh, I 100% agree. I was wrong, I thought they got in trouble for doing that but I think I am only remembering things that came out in discovery for the Epic case, which didn’t center on that or prevent Apple from having such arrangements.

There's little assurance of safety or 'fitness for purpose' for apps in the App Store. Apple takes 30% for distribution, and you're basically on your own.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-betrayed-trust-says-iph...

It was the opposite. US mobile operator stores charged upward of 50% to sell stuff on their feature phones, with cherry on top in the form of paid submissions.

You think that's bad? Grugnar charge 80% to sell rocks in front of cave, but Grugnar killed by Bugluk and then cave belong to Bugluk. Bugluk eat you and take rocks if you try sell in front of cave.

I'm replying to the statement that 30% was always a bad deal, by providing an example that shows that it was a clear improvement on the market of mobile development (as others did the same in this comments section).

In your cavemen logic the closest example would be that nobody killed the first guy; he was forced out of business because a new cave opened nearby and they were selling rocks much cheaper.

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