Or you can use none of those services and program against the Web API and pay them 0%.
It seems like a fair choice.
But they do charge 30% for the privilege of using it to make commercial software.
I'm pretty sure the EU provides a lot of "value add directly to the transaction and ecosystem." They certainly provide more of that than Apple. Good, comprehensive laws and regulations that are consistently enforced are a lot more important to sustaining modern society than producing a smartphone with a mildly curated app store.
If there were another major app store with significant market share, Apple would find it more difficult to evolve the platform.
To answer yout question: 5-10%
So, you think Apple should collect 2.5-7.5%!(after covering CC fees) to confer the infrastructure required to run the app store (people, servers, office, etc)?
In a free market situation someone will build a thriving business with such economics.
Monopoly power over iOS users is the only reason Apple gets away with murder (i.e. skimming 30%).
S3 storage / bandwidth prices according to google is $0.021 per GB per month for storage and $0.085 per GB of transfer so approx 3c for storage $8500 for transfer if we pretend that apple has to pay so much. In reality its probably much lower.
They would earn 75000 by taking 7.5% so nearly 9x the cost of executing so one would imagine that could easily cover any overhead.
In practice the revenue generated 26.5 billion for developers and 11.5 billion for apple in 2017. Even 2.5% would be almost a billion dollars 7.5% would be almost 3 billion dollars. I'm betting that apple can run an app store for 1-3 billion in a competitive market.
And yes i think my ballpark number is fair. This appstore market is a billion dollar industry. 10% of that is certainly more than enough to cover the expenses you mentioned. Believe me, if Apple had proper competition in smartphone market the fees would have been closer to my number. They are simply dodging taxes in Ireland, building t a trillion dollar fund, ripping of developers by abusing defacto monopoly, selling snake oil privacy first speeches while bending over for communist China. Fking sick and tired. I dont like regulations by gov, but with greedy no-longer innovating corporates we really need them
They're also providing a mechanism for automated updates.
They're also providing a degree of trust around the sale process, including the developer's identity and an additional layer of guarantees of suitability and merchantability.
They're also providing to the end user a level of confidence—whether real or perceived—about the products being sold and their ability to mislead, abuse or damage the device.
They're maintaining the ecosystem that allows the App to be sold in the first place.
And they're providing all of the above for free to developers who want to give away their apps.
I'm not saying the sum total is worth 30% of gross sales—or even half that—but it's not simply credit card processing and binary hosting.
I mean, if I want a refund for valid reasons, and Apple won't give it to me, and I call up my credit card company and they issue a charge back, will Apple do something negative to my account (such as block other purchases I made?)
> They're also providing to the end user a level of confidence
Yeah, and I paid for that already.
> They're maintaining the ecosystem that allows the App to be sold in the first place.
That benefits them, because without it, I wouldn't buy an iPhone.
> And they're providing all of the above for free to developers who want to give away their apps.
No, they aren't providing it for free. I'm paying for it, the iPhone/iPod owner. They are literally using these things you mention in their marketing of the iPhone. Take away apps, and see how well the iPhone does.
Apple takes 30% because they can. I'd much rather see the producer of the App get my money, but Apple makes this difficult to do easily for customers.
If Apple really had my best interest in mind, they'd charge a modest fee for the app store and processing, or allow companies to use 3rd party processors.
> Yeah, and I paid for that already.
The point is Apple is providing developers access to that reputation. Anyway, I agree that the sum total of everything they provide is not worth 30 percent.
But then again, when I bought boxed software of a retail shelf fifteen years ago, the retailer applied a 50-100% mark-up. It has never been easier to sell software.
Apple does not rent you a device. They sell them. Once they sell them, they should be yours. That's how property works.
If a refrigerator company put in special protections that made it difficult to put food in your refrigerator, without paying a 30% tax, would you accept that? I wouldn't.
If I am a factory, I can't build iPhones and sell them to people. Even if I was previously a factory that Apple contracted to make iPhones previously, and therefore they are exactly the same.
On the other hand, the same arguement does not apply to refrigerators. Most refrigerators are basically the same. It is easy to provide alternatives that are almost the same.
This is not the case for smartphones. Smart phones are a strongly differentiated good, and another company can't just make an iPhone that's exactly the same as Apple's iPhones, as that's illegal.
Therefore apple can do whatever they want with their iPhone, and nobody can really make the decision to buy an iPhone that doesn't have these restrictions.
Indeed, when people tried to remove these restrictions, Apple tried to sue people who jail broke their phones. That's not ok. It is horrible of them to have done that.
Nobody can make the decision to buy a Chromecast or an Echo or a Nest or a Tesla without restrictions inherent to those devices. In what way is Apple special here?
Apple is different in this respect in that if you try to do something with the phone that you bought, whether it be repairing it against their wishes, jailbreaking it, or whatever, they'll sue you.
These matters have come up multiple times in the courts, and this is what Apple does.
The only reason why they aren't sueing customers today for jailbreaking is because they lost that court battle. But the intention is there.
I don't want them to have the ability to sue anyone ever for doing something to property that the customer already owns, because that's how property rights should work.
Other companies generally do not sue you for modifying hardware that you bought.
For the record, Apple has never sued anyone for jailbreaking. They did argue it should be illegal under copyright grounds, and lost that argument. If that's a dealbreaker for you, so be it.
Linux repos provide an obvious model for multiple sources of packages accessed through the same interface.
It also shows that not being a cesspool isn't necessarily ready. They deserve to be compensated for that effort.
EU should look into their app fees