> I shit you not, I've personally had apps rejected by the review board because they didn't like the screenshots. Those were screenshots of the app itself.
My experience sending applications to the app store was certainly frustrating as a first-comer as the App Store has numerous rules about the screenshots, descriptions, naming etc. that you have to follow.
However, every time the app got rejected, the reviewer sent clear feedback on which rules the submissions were violating and how to fix those issues. After that, you could send your app for another review. Calling that "shutting you down" is slightly harsh in my ear. We fixed the problems they had with our submission and then we got approved.
Also... I've submitted a minor bug fix and got flagged on something I did not change that was previously approved and their terms did not change. That gets frustrating. I feel like every update is a gamble. Some parts of it seem pretty vague. Sometimes I just resubmit and get a new reviewer and he approves on the iffy ones. But with people in the loop interpretation is always a thing and I can't get too mad over it.
Luckily, this is something they recently said they won’t do anymore
I had a bugfix update rejected a little while ago for a business app.
Apple wanted a video walkthrough of every screen in the app, explaining what each screen is for and with a breakdown of device permissions needed on each of those screens. That day was a complete write-off. If the app required excessive permissions I could understand there might be some concern, but it doesn't. Any permissions we do need are justified in the info.plist as required, and are very descriptive.
They then rejected it again the next day, as I had apparently failed to mention what we use ARKit for in the video. We don't use ARKit and it is not in the codebase.
Another day goes by and they finally approve, with a friendly disclaimer that they will now require an updated video with every future update.
It just seems like busywork to me.
My main point is not about rejecting an update, but about pulling you out of the store entirely or never accepting your app. Even deleting your Apple dev account as we just saw with Epic.
Even if they are representative of 99% of experiences - imagine the damage and anger caused by the remaining 1%.
Something like 5 cents + 1.3% would be a great deal on payment processing, generally. Apple is a behemoth, so let's assume they're getting a good deal.
For a $1 purchase that'd be ~$0.07 to the transaction processor... which is more than the flat percentage already. Then Apple has some amount of costs involved (bandwidth, maintenance of systems, general overhead, etc) even if they started running the App Store at cost as they originally claimed they'd do.
There's definitely room to lower the cut Apple takes... it's just that somewhere in the 10-20% range is still a reasonable fee to cover their costs.
It's also worth considering how gift cards affect what Apple can charge. Apple sells gift cards through retailers, who are getting a cut of those sales. That cut comes directly out of Apple's portion of the sale, so they have to account for some percentage of transactions having that effective cost, which is probably higher than the aforementioned payment-processing cost. (There are some markets where gift cards are incredibly common. Kids get given them a lot. They're super common in Japan and other countries for everyone.)
(The flat $1 fee wouldn't fall apart on processing costs until you reached really expensive in-app purchases... but it'd massively change the economics of the App Store, where $1 apps / in-app purchases are pretty common. I have no idea if that's a good idea or not.)
I don't know what discount retailers expect on gift cards, but I would guess that in the range of a couple percentage points, otherwise networks like Visa would lose money on those sales.
No sane developer is going to reduce the pricing on their $0.99 app to $0.82 just because Apple has reduced their fees but the lower fees mean that you have to pay extra for low cost apps. $0.82 may become $1.12 after adding credit card fees but if the price stays the same you may even have to pay $1.29.
Electricity and processing power aren't that expensive.
They'd probably do just fine if they'd lower the fee to 10%, and stop enforcing that you don't have third-party payments.
Especially considering they're a) charging a yearly fee and b) selling ads on the AppStore (which as someone else here pointed out is their aim to grow ad sales by clamping down on the ad identifier to make ads outside of the AppStore less useful).
Off the top of my head:
- Non-free apps sold on the app store take a 20% cut, up to a max of a $5 fee. (This would be a bit of encouragement for developers to price productivity apps higher than $25; the "race to the bottom" in app pricing has been a deterrent for some classes of apps, in my understanding.)
- In-app purchases and subscriptions take a 15% cut, with a drop to 10% for subscriptions in their second year and beyond.
- Links to external web payment forms are allowed (with no Apple cut or penalty) in apps that are clients for cross-platform services, e.g., Netflix, Kindle, and so on.
There'd be a lot of details and nuance to work out with respect to those last two, but it doesn't seem like it'd be an impossible hurdle to figure out where to draw those lines.
And don't get me wrong, I think Apple is a great company. But they are sitting in a monopoly today. Maybe some folks here are too young to remember but companies like microsoft got punished in the past for having too much control over people' choices and, in my opinion, it was way softer comparing to what Apple is doing today.
I remember Steve Jobs saying (about not allowing adult-themed apps) that iOS was "freedom from porn!"[1], which to me sounded more like "freedom from choice!"
1 (yeah, ok, like Safari does't do pornsites?)
The whole selling point of the App Store payments was supposed to have been convenience, so, however much they charge, is supposed to be worth it on its own for the indie players.
What do we get instead? Instead, Apple doesn't allow their useds to buy books from Amazon.
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My personal opinion is that it must be required that Apple payments are accepted within the app, and that the app makers aren't allowed to pump and dump promotions for tricking users into adding credit card details by providing temporary benefits (e.g., Apple price cannot be more than however much Apple charges in commissions), otherwise, there should not be any restrictions about two consenting parties from making a transaction however they feel like. (Cannot sell to the end users the idea that a 30% "convenience" fee is reasonable? Well, maybe it's not that reasonable, after all?!)
Likewise, there should be an advanced-user setting (similar to Android) for installing any app from any source. This setting isn't used very often in Android at all, but it's something very basic to ensure the competition on the platform, and that the manufacturer would never be able to preclude me from consenting to a transaction that I'd like to consent to.
Surely you don't do "cost plus" pricing for your own services.
You do value based pricing for your services. I'd bet that you don't think at all about the electricity and processing costs that it takes to do what you do.
Apple is no different.
If the app store were really so incredibly great for app developers then Apple should have no trouble allowing alternate app stores.
Well, and building a product and ecosystem nearly from scratch that arguably started an industry that’s now around half a trillion dollars a year.
That's a particularly interesting example, because Gift Cards regularly go on sale (at least here in Australia). I would often wait until my local stores sold the $100 App Store gift cards for $85, and stock up so everything I bought on the App Store was 15% cheaper.
So if Apple is able to sell retail gift cards at 15% discount, it suggests their 30% rate might be higher than it needs to be.
If this stuff is that big of a problem for the average iOS developer, then shouldn't this at least be an opportunity for Google (to attract more developers to its platform, possibly exclusively)? Or no because G has pretty much the same incentives that Apple does? Or is this already happening and I'm just not aware of it?
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/202038/microsoft...
AAA devs were already trying to leave steam as much as possible, so they tried to bring them back while doing nothing for smaller studios and indies who can't afford to exist off steam.
I know I’m in the minority, but especially indie titles I try to buy somewhere else and look for a direct sale, GOG, and itch.io first
If your game sucks then it doesn't matter because 30% of nothing is still just nothing. If your game is good enough then you get a discount.
If I sell something at Target for $50, I’m probably getting $25 tops. Don’t think I’m in partnership but definitely an important relationship.
If I was selling my software at Walmart, I have to change nothing to sell it at Target.
You don't have that choice in iOS.
Over upcoming releases of AOSP, Google intends to disable sideloading in Android, except for that tiny tech audience who knows how to enable developer mode and install over the command line. So, both direct APK downloads and F-Droid will be accessible to fewer ordinary Android users than is already the case. Definitely not enough people to build an app business on.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/24/android-11-install-...
This is a gross and anti-competitive overstep.
With android, I can have an .apk that is distributed via the play store or I can have that exact same .apk distributed via any other store that exists for that device.
It seems like Apple still likes to give some antiquated metrics for how much cheaper iOS is compared to retail software, but it's never explained why that's the metric.
> Making your own CPUs is cool but ultimately not all that for a product that most users won't have even the slightest clue of the trade-offs that went into that decision
Is developing better hardware not a valid reason? It’s too much of a luxury to legitimize fees?
They don't get a "cut" at all, they resell the product at a markup (and set their own prices, so they can even sell at a loss if they want to). Totally different dynamic vs. the App Store.
What's the difference?
BTW, Apple regularly sells app store "dollars" at a loss. I once bought a $200 app store gift card for $165 at Costco.
Well: actually, when you sell boxed software in a retail store in 2020, you sell nothing because nobody does that and this is a super stupid comparison for Apple to keep making. The Mac App Store isn't competing with Target and the ghost of CompUSA, it's competing with other online store systems like Paddle, which takes 50¢ + 5%. The iOS App Store is competing with... nothing, in practice, because it's literally the only way to get applications onto your iOS device. Which is kind of what's getting everyone to argue about this, right?
- Microsoft charges 30% for the Xbox Store.
- Shopify charges 20% for their app marketplace.
- Valve charges 30% for the Steam store.
Can you provide evidence that Apple is charging a lot compared to its peers ?
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15195638/nintendo-switch-co...
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-not-making-any-money-on...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/apples-iphon...
But the difference here is that you've prepared an asset that can only be sold in one place.
If someone doesn't deserve 30% it is Google. With Apple at least I speak to a human (or if this in an AI - cudos to the developers, it is super real). While with Google all you get is a bot reply "Sorry, we can't tell you shit. Go figure out a problem and unless you do we will block your account and all RELATED accounts". Well that is some wild shit.
I wonder if it gave rise or "justification" to the 30% thing, but don't know.
Now it's just simply not.
But before the iOS app store, there was none.
[0] Today roughly one-in-five American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Nearly three quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/smartphones-72percent-of-peo...
If you mean for desktop, nothing has changed.
That kind of editorial feedback seems like a good thing, no? Do you feel like that process improved how your app was presented to users?
Ideally, I would assume the creators of the app would know their customers well enough to choose.
Having worked with many creators in many mediums, that's often not the case. In the case of apps, independent developers who don't have a marketing person can often benefit from even the surface-level presentational help Apple was providing.
30% of your business is not a fee, it's more like a partnership. Apple is, in practice, a business partner to each and every iOS developer. Except that they have total and absolute control of the business. If they shut you down on the App Store, you're done. Your iOS app is worthless on any other platform.
I shit you not, I've personally had apps rejected by the review board because they didn't like the screenshots. Those were screenshots of the app itself.