Or Apple could drop the charade and charge users for access to apps based on whatever pricing scheme they want.
The promotions one is interesting; I think it has the same pitfall as AdWords: if my app / web page is the best result for the user for a given search, why should I have to pay money to promote it? If Apple or Google is doing their job right, taking money for promotions is actively detrimental to users. Not that that stops AdWords, of course.
Charging the users would make sense. It’s a shame that we’ve all been trained to expect this stuff to be free.
I guess subscription-based stores are a decent approach? Like Apple Arcade. But that has downsides for users too -- you potentially end up paying multiple subscriptions (like most people do now for streaming TV) so it adds barriers to entry for new (possibly better) stores. Who wants to pay for yet another subscription service?
How should Apple go about making money from the App Store? Paid apps are dwindling off. They do charge a flat fee per developer, but it can’t be too large or they’ll lose all the indie developers, and there just aren’t enough developers overall to make that a viable business on its own. They could charge a flat fee to the developer per app download -- something really small, a few cents per download -- but then what about free apps?
What they want is to take a share of the profits from developers who are making money on their platform, while also supporting free apps free of charge. The 30% fee is their attempt to do that. The problem is that it’s easy to game the system and just run your payments outside their store. Hence all the silly rules to try to prevent that.
Maybe 30% is just too much. Would people complain as much if it were 10%, or 5%?
Or maybe they should just give up on App Store revenue and focus on hardware sales. But it would be a little weird for them not to have a direct incentive to improve the store experience for users.