One other case where imo the 5% should apply: if someone goes to the store and searches for your app by exact name.

Ie if I go to the store and search "Netflix", the store hasn't helped me discover that product.

That makes sense on paper, but in a world of instant search, search completion and search suggestion, doesn't it become a bit murky?

They have, in a way, by providing the index you use to find it. They're your portal to apps in a sense. Frankly it makes more sense to me to charge more when people find your app through the app store. It makes less sense to me that they take 15% if someone Googles your app to get the app store link. They didn't even use the app store search to find it.

That's a nice fee structure, but honestly I don't care if Google and Apple increase the fee to 90% as long as there are alternative stores that can realistically compete against GPlay and the App Store.

That means no scary warnings and endless dialogs filled with FUD about malware and stealing personal data, or requiring non-technical users to understand and enable a checkbox hidden deep inside the settings app, or dedicating full-time teams of security researchers to finding and irresponsibly disclosing vulnerabilities in competing stores, among other things.

Because when there's competition, a fee structure like what the Microsoft Store has will naturally appear.

> 5%

That’s less than the Stripe tax!

Stripe is 2.9% + 30¢, isn't it? What am I missing? I guess you're implying that these transactions are normally so small that the 30¢ raises it to above 5%? I think it really depends on your price structure.

It depends on where you are. International payments to India could cost up to 6.3% including currency conversion charges.

https://stripe.com/en-in/pricing

Stripe has real costs because it has to interact with the visa and MasterCard networks. The app stores basically have zero incremental costs. They just let you download a file from a directory of listings

In addition to the bandwidth costs for serving the binaries, don’t app stores have to deal with the same networks too for processing their in app payments? How are those any different from Stripe?

These credit card fees are likely under 3% in the US. So taking 5% adds about 2% for convenience.

Interchange fees for credit cards are about 1.5% + 10c. For debit cards its even less.

They host the files and pay for the traffic, that's not insignificant at the scale of Google and Apple, even considering their enormous size.

There was a story a couple of years back about how Apple's AWS bill was $30 million/month, I'd bet a large chunk of that is the App Store.

> They host the files and pay for the traffic

That's BS because they don't give you the option to host it yourself and avoid the fee, plus it costs them nearly nothing. $30 million/year dollars might seem like a lot until you realize Apple makes over $70 BILLION/year from app store revenues alone.

Also, what traffic? Organic traffic on app stores has always been terrible. In most cases, you can't even find an app by searching for it directly unless it's well-known like Netflix or Amazon. Even developers who have been "featured" over the years have reported a huge spike in traffic followed by an immediate fall-off and return to the same traffic numbers before the feature.

only 30 million? considering how much apple makes in profits from their app store thats a lot less

That's only servers - they still need developers, managers, reviewers etc.. Apple surely does not make a loss, but the server bill is probably a negligible part of the cost.

Poor Apple:

> In 2020, customers spent an estimated 72.3 billion U.S. dollars on on in-app purchases, subscriptions, and premium apps in the Apple App Store.

The App Store is a money printer for Apple, that's how low their operating expenses are. It's rent-seeking at its best, abusive landlords would be proud of them :-)