Even if it was, that’s definitely not significant. Each engineer is probably paid more per day than that.

(I’m not a fan of the flat 30% charge, but developer program fees are not a challenge for any group with a revenue stream if any kind.)

Yeah, I meant per developer. Wires crossed. But it certainly doesn't matter what each engineer is paid.

Apple has 20 million registered developers.

[Edit: And let's say a third of them pay that fee, which is admittedly probably a stretch. The finer details are not my point here other than to say here's a bunch of money that comes in no matter what]

I don't care what those developers are making: that's serious income right there. If Apple think they are entitled to more, that's their problem, but don't act like they're making any kind of sacrifice here, and for fuck's sake people need to stop trying to convince themselves that Apple are their friends.

It still seems like you’re confused about what’s being paid here.

There is no per seat / per developer / per engineer fee. "A developer" in this context means an individual person, not an entire organisation.

An organisation pays $99/yr to publish on the App Store. That covers all their developers, whether they have one or a hundred.

In addition to that, you don’t have to pay anything to be a registered developer. It’s free to register as a developer. You pay the fee to publish on the App Store.

Apple having "20 million registered developers" doesn’t translate into the vast sum of money you seem to think it does. The income comes from the number of organisations publishing on the App Store, which is surely far lower than 20 million considering there’s an order of magnitude fewer apps in the App Store than that and publishers can publish many more than a single app with their account.

20 million * $99 certainly is real money.

For a popular income generating app, the $99 will make an insignificant impact on the marginal cost. But the vast vast majority of apps are not in that category, and the $99 does have an impact.

Also, the enterprise accounts are $299 and I imagine other than the overhead of the initial on-boarding checks, these generally have pretty low overheads as the enterprise signed apps go through no review process.

It limits the types of apps found in iOS.

And it limits spam.

It’s not $99 per developer, either.

https://developer.apple.com/support/purchase-activation/

The latest figure is now 23 million developers.

I often wonder how they count those developers numbers if it was not paid Apple Developer programme.

A third of $2 billion is serious revenue for a company that made $260 billion and that is worth over two trillion. The $99 is not per developer, it’s per business.

It’s not about Apple being anyone’s friends. It’s about being logical.

> Each engineer is probably paid more per day than that.

Except for parts of the world where that's closer to a week or months worth of pay...

And those parts of the world aren’t buying $400 iPhones (which are more expensive in developing countries) plus Macs. They are developing for Android.

It looks like you may be out of touch with the global market

There are substantial portions of the world where median income per household is 10000USD or less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

And software developers make few times the median in such places.

Source: am developer in a country you describe

Do people who live there own an iphone or a macbook? If not, how are they developing for those devices?

They often take a bank loan to buy a Mac + iPhone for the whole office, and devs take turns working on it and programming on it. The Apple Account would be for one person ("the company").

That's where hackintoshes come in. Technically development doesn't require a physical device too. Of course, UX is likely to be kinda poor when working in simulator only. But that's how it goes.

In those parts developers ain't paid local salaries..