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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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