Instead, they have to make the indirect argument you do, and it's unclear what the harm is. They are not paying 30% more, the consumer is. There's no data to suggest they are selling less. Who is really injured?
The same issue arose in ticketmaster - outside of consumers, everyone else has a really hard time showing injury.
Meanwhile, the consumers, who directly pay the monopoly fee, are directly injured.
A law firm could easily pay a number of app makers to try this out in exchange for the data, and then make a huge class action out of this.
I think the big challenge is that there are a number of confounding factors, like Apple's ranking algorithms.
In your test just cutting the 30% „Apple tax“, the developer would still profit from these discounted gift cards. But it’s not the developer giving the discount from his cut, but Apple from the 30%. Moreover, the 30% covers not only handling and processing App Store Infrastructure and sales, but as well the editorial sections of the App Store promoting news apps daily. There already exist reports on how this editorial content boosts app sales.
So, your test would still take all this for granted and therefore would be highly skewed. The data would not be „statistically significant“ at all.
You may buy iTunes cards. I've never bought them, nor even looked at them. I don't know which of us is more representative, but I don't think that invalidates the broad strokes of a test like I describe.
I'm not sure you really want law firms doing this. The recent practice of people investing into litigation has not exactly done wonders for anyone.
So I think the class action itself would be difficult to win even if it were allowed to go ahead. Apple could argue pretty convincingly that their app store "monopoly" does not drive up app prices.
Or do I have this wrong?
Basically, is this actually the right person to be suing over this (it's pretty complex, and i'm removing a tremendous amount of nuance).
Plaintiffs bear the burden of proving standing. However, in most motions about standing and appeals of those motions, all facts will be assumed to be true.
This is because most standing dismissal is for "failure to state a claim on which relief can be granted" (FRCP rule 12(b)(6)) . Which means, basically,"even if all the facts are true, you still have no case". So they do the obvious thing, and for the purposes of that motion (and appeals of it, like here), they assume all the facts are true :)
Here's the case for manufacturer's standing: the manufacturer (app developer) might argue that the distributor's (Apple's) monopoly on distribution hurts them just as much if not more since the inflated price means they're selling less quantity than they would in a non-monopolized marketplace. Even though they technically set the price, having to pay Apple's rake on the App Store means that they must inflate their prices by at least 30% to bring them back to the price they'd otherwise sell at in the absence of the distributor.
In any event, I thought the case was a dog on the merits. How can Apple possibly be a monopolist, despite their 100% share of application sales on iOS, since the relevant market is for app-capable cell phones -- not iOS. Plenty of folks, the majority in fact, vote with their dollars by buying Android devices.