And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer. This is a huge part of why native apps even emerged as a major phenomenon on mobile, against the tide of webification that's swept the desktop over the last 20 years.
> And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer.
Plenty of companies will charge 5% or less for low-friction high-trust payment processing, and the auto-install is trivial.
If Apple opened up the platform, developers wouldn't be paying 5% to Uncle Bob's Discount App Store instead of 30% to Apple, selling just as many units, and pocketing the difference as profit. They'd quickly discover that users preferred to buy from one or two trusted app stores, and that the better move was to pay whatever they had to pay to be present in those stores.
Apple could easily charge $100 for an app to be reviewed the first time and $50 an update to cover review, and the rest is very marginal. What Apple is doing is rent seeking on other people's work, plain and simple... it isn't even based on the profit margin against that work.
Not every application is a game on a console that will see millions in sales to make up for development costs. Consoles only see dozens of games as competition, the Apple store sees thousands. It's not an Apples to Apples comparison (pun intended).
This is exactly where most of the cost of operating the app store comes from. I'm not going to comment on how much of Apple's fees go to paying this, but testing software to release standards is expensive.
I remember 20 years ago, just to get started on a PS2 title, you had to pay sony a crazy dev fee just to get your SLUS code (I remember someone telling me it was about USD$50k). Then all of the devkits cost about USD$20k, and then sony still took a big chunk of your sales price.
How exactly would you like Apple to handle free apps, which still need to be tested and vetted? What if there was a $10k dev charge for each round of testing? How many free apps do you think there would be in the app store? Its true - all of the paid apps are subsidizing the free apps in the app store. If Apple didn't squeeze out other payment processors, every paid app would turn free, they'd use Square or something to sell people in-app purchases instead, and then the whole ecosystem would fall apart.
I guess another question we can ask is what are they testing for? Sony was exacting - there were strict rules about stability and content that had to be met. Your title couldn't stall on a waiting screen for longer than a period of time (I remember having to optimize our start-up on one title to meet this requirement). Even the terminology you used had to be correct - there was a list of acceptable names you could use to refer to the console parts like the controller - like you could call it "PlayStation 2 Dualshock Controller" but not "PS2 Dualshock" and stuff like that.
On the one hand, Apple isn't as exacting, but on the other hand presumably they're testing for other things you wouldn't have to worry about on a PS2 like calling dlopen on forbidden dylibs or sending the addressbook contents to a server. I'm sure that a lot of this is automated, but some of it will require a human to interact with.
Personally, I'd be okay if Apple charged a nominal fee ($100) to do an initial review to add to the app store, another fee for updates ($50) and say 5-10% of margins on a sliding scale... that would hinder some indie dev, but not be outrageous and cover some of that review cost, while not squeezing everyone out like a cartel.
I’m not saying that 30% is the right number - it’s probably way too high (maybe?) - but if you want free apps, you can’t let anyone use their own payment processors because it’s a revenue hole and you literally won’t have any revenue that doesn’t go down it.
And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no?
> Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created.
The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
A coupe of years after the App Store launched I’m pretty sure one of Apples execs said it cost over a $billion a year to operate. That will only have gone up since then.
That's nonsense - your app may not get presented on the front page of the app store but it appears in search results, in similar apps and depending on your category can appear in top 100 lists. I've published apps that got consistent downloads from a little App Store SEO - far more than any internet SEO and marketing did.
I disagree. As a user, Apple has, over the last decade-plus, earned my trust that the software I decide to run on my device won't...
* brick the device * stay on the device in any manner if I delete it * access my private data without my consent * intrude upon the experience of any other app(s) except by way of easily-managed notifications
... etc.
As a developer, the App Store is how you explicitly inherit that inbuilt trust from users. One can't put a price on that, because there's no fungibility in trust. It must be earned.
Apple can, and does, however put a price on sharing that trust, as well as the ongoing infrastructure, tooling, and processes needed to maintain it: a flat cut of revenue.
There is a rich tradition of extracting private information off of mobile devices. It's one reason why free apps are pushed more than equivalent websites all the time (ex: reddit, imgur) , because the dataset for adtech is far more richer. Some databases and system APIs are under a user alerted permission, but that isn't unique to an app store or review, it's an OS implementation detail. Same with sandboxing apps.
You have little access over running a network filter on iOS devices, and apple has had a history of rejecting VPNs that act as so.
You can still have all that you put on your list, but without an app store.
it does, but via restricting others' reach due to the barrier of the app store.
It's like a lottery ticket - if apple decides to feature your app, you will get a lot of business and have a lot of success (provided your app is actually any good).
And Apple has thousands of highly paid employees providing all those services to us, it’s misguided to assert its just the cost of bandwidth and servers.
The $100 is a screaming deal for us iOS developers.
Very few apps do that.
> it’s misguided to assert its just the cost of bandwidth and servers.
Good thing they didn't make that argument.
We don't know Apple's investment in the app store, from maintaining it to enhancing it. To blow it off as marginal is disingenuous at best.
I take no issue with app developers creating and selling an app off the app store. I don't think Apple should be able to interfere with that. I do believe they have the right to restrict another app distributed within the app store from being able to sell apps itself. That would be like Steam allowing Epic to install from its app to sell additional games/apps through the Epic store.
99.999% of apps don't get any marketing from Apple at all. Apps get lost in the crowd and the poor search that still struggles with obvious keyword spamming and rip-offs. Actual app ads are charged separately.
Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product.
I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut. It's not about recouping Apple's costs, but increasing Apple's profit.