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.
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.)