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Comment by faragon | Hacker News Reader

It's "fair": ARM takes 1% of the iPhone CPU, i.e., less than 0.1% of the total phone price, while Apple takes 30% of the apps in the iStore

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Spot on! The 1% is indeed absolutely reasonable when you consider the 30% or so Apple tries to leech of from both developers and its user base.

Google and Apple charge 15% for most apps.

--and about 50% of the total price of an iPhone.

Yeah it’s like people don’t understand the concept of value addition. An ARM CPU by itself is worth less than what it is with the software, app ecosystem, dual sided market place Apple has built. While I think a 30% mark up is a tad expensive, it’s not hugely out of line with what retail store fronts generally charge to begin with. You can argue that virtual store fronts don’t have the same overheads, but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.

> but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.

are there any estimates on how much apple is costed in server costs because of apple app store and if there are, can that be considered with the 30% that they are leeching and compare the two of them and compare that estimate with the retail example you brought.

So there are 2 million apps in app store. Assume average to be 100 MB so that is 2 million * 100 /(1024* 1024) = 190.734863 TB using $0.015 / GB-month Cf r2 with 0 egress costs I get the price as 2929.6128$ per month or 3 Grand/month ie. 36 Grand an year

Heck, consider the average app size to be FOUR times the cost. Then you get the salary of 1 apple engineer and that's STILL less than the average salary of 1 apple engineer.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E11...

And we are forgetting the 99$ something which apple app devs have to pay iirc at sometimes. I am an android guy and actually android has similar number of apps so the estimate is same actually.

But I would assume that the engineers aren't the bottleneck either. I assume that both apple/android stores aren't so complex to build to deserve 30% of transaction.

Some might be interesting about the malware/static-analysis but there was this hn post made recently about instagram blackhole which uncovered an malicious apple app which was available in app store so :/

The only reason one might think so is maybe considering the development cost of apple but I think that is an hardware decision and when we buy apple devices, it should be used to recoup the costs not trying to cash cow either. Its a trillion $ company trying to extract 3$ from a 10$ transaction you might do to anybody's patreon from the app :/ Yeah.

TLDR: No. I don't think a 30% transaction is justified.

Hope this helps.

The easier way is to compare other app stores and whether they charge similar or different. If a less overhead business model worked, you’d see them doing otherwise. Yet from Android to the Sony PlayStation store to almost every other store, the 30% cut seems about standard. Indeed, Apple actually only takes 15% for small businesses and 30% is for businesses that see a huge amount of revenue from Apple’s sales channel.

Also a huge thing you’re completely discounting is all the resources spent building App Store APIs and infrastructure (from code signing to end to end things like on demand resources). Saying it should only cost them to run 36 grand and one engineer is laughable - if that were true Apple would do that and further increase their profit margin. But they have teams behind this for a reason

Physical storefronts “merely” have to pay for rent and employees at every location, and they have to worry about things like shrinkage (theft, essentially). Not to mention the vast differences in economies of scale.

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