I did that. Kagi.com was my payment… handler?
https://web.archive.org/web/20100303221537/http://www.kagi.c...
$0.75 + (5…8)%
So any transaction less than or equal to the $2.99 tier would be just as bad (as in, it costs you at least 30% of the list price), even if hosting was free.
I’m also old enough to remember Apple getting involved in the fight over the In App Purchases patent: https://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/08/lodsys-offers-update-on...
It's true that App Store has the best deal for payment processing for very low-priced apps.
But that's not truly a win for developers when the App Store itself caused the "race to the bottom". Who was selling 99 cent apps before the crap store?
You can argue lower prices lead to more crap, but it also encourages people to spend more. Most people would debate a $4.99 purchase, but think nothing of 5 99¢ purchases if done separately.
The catch is that as you get bigger and seem more B2C than B2B then Apple might start to take notice (see: Hey e-mail).
He's talking about when you used to have to pay $50 to $500 for software in a store, but the author was lucky to see $5-$10 of that.
Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic.
Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year).
Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing.
As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.
I had a 10 year career in that "wasteland".
> we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms
Citation? From what I've seen, that's not actually true.
> Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is.
For a time, the Windows version of our product was my company's biggest money-maker. It seems that in recent years though Microsoft as a company has pivoted away from Windows as their primary product. Away from desktop, toward "the cloud". I personally find that unfortunate, but I'm not a stockholder.
> The whole torch mob anti-Apple angle seems entirely detached from actual reality.
I'm not anti-Apple, I'm pro-Macintosh.
There was so much community, and such an optimistic mood with things like the Appsterdam movement.
And then it all crashed and burned, because Apple decided to get greedy, and that 99cents was going to be the default App price, with 30cents going to Apple.
Those are scraps, and nobody who wants to make an artisanal niche app to scratch their own itch, and maybe sell it, can live from that money. It was either win the lottery, or starve.
Apple killed its own ecosystem, most app store apps suck nowadays. It's ironic that they were the ones with an ad saying "we mistake abundance with choice".
I wish all the old mac devs would get together and collaboratively write a good GUI-toolkit for linux and a new Userland. Right now there is not a single good operating system. Having all those apps on linux would be a dream come true. But a dream it is...
"Sensor Tower puts iOS spending in Fortnite at $1.2 billion since it was launched on the App Store in early 2018." That was from a month ago. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/fortnite-ios-removal-hurt-e...
Fortnite total revenue was $2.4 billion in 2018, $1.8 billion in 2019. Not sure we have figures to date for 2020, but assuming it's approximately $1 billion, then iOS would be ~23% of total Fortnite revenue. Is that the largest platform? Maybe, maybe not.
Utter nonsense. Shrink-wrapped and downloadable software in the Windows world was all over the place using activation/serial codes either thru email or on a CD.
Two examples:
VueScan https://www.hamrick.com/
SnagIt screen capture (which is now cloud based, I think. I still use an old version)
Citation needed. Who are all those people attending the Microsoft developers conference every year? Who were all the people in the audience for Ballmer's infamous "Developers, developers, developers" chant?
You're claiming the nonexistence of something that clearly exists.
Please refrain from personal attacks.
As you noted in another comment, I'm primarily a Mac developer, and in my experience, the extent of the third-party Mac software market has often been vastly underestimated. Maybe it's just because people aren't familiar with it.
There are of course large numbers of users who never buy third-party software, but with any large platform, such as Mac or Windows, all it takes is a significant % of users to buy software for the market to really add up. Doesn't even have to be a majority of users.
I haven't been a regular Windows users for many years, but back when I was, there was a thriving consumer software market on Windows. Again, it doesn't even have to include the majority of users, because those who do buy software are willing to pay good money for it.
There's even a quote from Bill Gates in which he dismisses someone (Facebook?) as a platform, because the amount of revenue they skim is usurious.
He specifically cites Windows as a platform model because they could have absorbed far more rent from their developers, but chose not to.
"You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments"
> Tiny, micro-boutiques that are a little sliver of marginal prosperity in a desolate wasteland of failure.
I would rephrase this to say you're talking about small businesses, which are not sexy or well known, but are both widespread and crucial to the entire economic foundation of the United States.
Unfortunately, App Store revenue is very top-heavy. A few big players, such as Epic, do extremely well on the App Store, but small businesses tend to suffer in the App Store. The total software revenue may be higher now, but the distribution of revenue matters a lot. If the rich get richer, and the rest are stagnant or get poorer, that's only good for the rich, and I wouldn't call it a healthy market, regardless of the totals.
In the App Store era, it's "easier" than before to become a wild success, like Epic. But it's a lot harder for indie developers to make a living. You can't "make it up in volume", and you don't have a huge marketing budget to get to the top of the App Store charts, so you need to charge sustainable prices for software. The App Store "race to the bottom", as well as other business and technical limitations, have really hurt smaller developers. I'm not sure we can, or want to live in a world with only BigCos.
Remember how Apple temporarily shut down a lot of Facebook by revoking their enterprise certificate? We can quibble about whether Facebook "deserved" it, but why is internal software even subject to those restrictions in the first place. I certainly wouldn't call that "liberation".
Almost 80% of Fortnite players are on console, so I very much doubt that's even remotely true.
https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoos-battle-royale-s...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24087933
It seems like the unavoidable conclusion is that there are no longer any good places to make or find decent consumer software without having a corporate entity get their undeserving cut.
People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed.
>That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers.
No, that was caused by a billion people buying shiny new mobile computers. They would have bought a lot of software in any case, even without an App Store. New platform, new software.