Subscriptions should be priced more like a credit card transaction fee. They could have marginal brackets that increase slightly at scales, to account for bigger apps possibly causing more backed development work.
I'm not saying Apple isn't breaking the law, I just really wish there were more suggestions on solutions on what they should do instead. So for that, I appreciate you helping me to see it in a more nuanced way.
Apple currently has $192.8 billion cash on hand. If Apple took a smaller cut, they would simply have a few less billion dollars in the bank. Many, many individual developers and small business would have a little more money in their bank accounts. The small businesses are more likely to be actively put this money back into the economy then the idle billions in Apple's bank accounts.
This is already the case. $100/year USD to get the privilege of being on the App Store.
Actually, getting on the App Store is not even guaranteed after you pay the fee, since you still need to pass their review process.
If you want to sell your game on the Humble Store on the other hand, well then they take a 25% cut. That’s the value in being able to deliver a customer.
Apple’s fixed 30% cut is effectively saying: our brand is more important than yours in delivering customers to your App. The imprinteur of being in our App Store and bringing you a customer is worth 30% of your income. Your ability to deliver your own customers is irrelevant; we’re taking 30% either way. Unsurprisingly this sticks in the craw of some companies.
The fact that Apple’s systems make it almost impossible to effectively communicate with your own customer is an even bigger problem for a customer-focused company who’s income & branding depend on a close relationship with their customers: those companies are completely stuffed by the Apple App model & are the reason the App Store has not lead to the explosion of innovation some of us expected - it’s just not possible for a company to sustain themselves outside a very narrow set of income generation patterns.
My costs for direct distribution on Mac are ~8% and are absolutely dominated by payment processing - and that’s only because I choose to use a merchant of record instead of Stripe to save on VAT accounting costs. The rest of distribution costs are peanuts.
I agree that running a payments platform is not nothing. The issue is that there is zero competition in the space of iOS payments (very convenient for Apple that they get to make the rules and also benefit from them). That harms consumers because sellers will often charge more to account for Apple's 30% cut (and if Apple bans charging more on only their platform, the seller has to raise prices for everyone, which hurts their non-iOS user base). An alternative payments processor might charge 20% or 10% or even less. Healthy competition in that space would benefit consumers, while forcing Apple to charge a fee more in line with the actual cost of what they provide.
(There are certainly downsides; Apple has done a lot of work to ensure the security and privacy of their payments solution, and other processors may not do as good a job. And without restrictions, it's the seller who decides what processors to support, not the buyer, so the buyer doesn't get to -- for example -- choose to pay a little more to keep their information in Apple's care.)
Perhaps a good compromise would be for Apple to require that apps support Apple's in-app payment system, but allow other payment methods in addition, and also allow sellers to charge more to users who use Apple's system. If customers don't value whatever Apple is providing for the extra fee, Apple will be incentivized to charge less.
> Possibly charging app developers directly for access to the app store.
They already do this, via the yearly developer fee.
If Apple allowed the market to set the price, we would know what this activity is worth. They don't, that's the issue.
Err, Apple does charge to develop for their platform.
It's not nothing. Maybe not worth 30% but it is worth something. They run the store, buy the servers and pay for the bandwidth. Pay the engineers to develop and manage the infrastructure. Run the app certification process. Maintain the security of the platform. etc.
If they can't charge their 30% cut, they will need a different business plan. Possibly charging app developers directly for access to the app store. They are not going to just give up their 30% and do nothing.