Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by athirnuaimi on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @04:03AM (#26487810)

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

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by vishnumohandas on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:26AM (#26488503)

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?

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by SomeHacker44 on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @04:22AM (#26487911)

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

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by supermatt on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @08:32AM (#26490142)

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

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by deergomoo on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @04:18AM (#26487892)

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.

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by bogwog on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @10:09AM (#26491439)

> 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.

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by himujjal on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @07:09AM (#26489388)

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

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by Sebb767 on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @07:45AM (#26489712)

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.

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Re:Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/... by oblio on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @09:03AM (#26490523)

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 :-)

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