Second, the fees actually benefit the customer. They're there to protect the customer from fraud, and to provide perks. I have no idea how I benefit from Apple's fees. Seriously.
Comically, I think Apple should adapt Epic's model for unreal: free for the first $1MM of revenue, only then they start to take a cut.
And you're free to choose another phone vendor. Apple isn't holding a gun to your head.
> I know many sellers simply adjust their prices if you're paying credit -- see almost every gas station in the US. You can't do that with Apple.
You can't do that with PayPal, either.
> I have no idea how I benefit from Apple's fees. Seriously.
The host the AppStore for you; allow you to search, access and download all apps and provide an infrastructure for updates and payment. Plus, they're doing basic fraud checking [0] and check that apps adhere to a basic quality and usability standard.
It's a very different topic whether the 30% cut is too much, but its not like Apple does not provide anything in return.
[0] Other comments pointed out that they failed quite badly in a case, but there's a difference between bad service and no service.
You're "free" to choose one side of the same coin, because Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile app distribution market. They both abuse that market dominance to prevent competition in the mobile app distribution market from offering consumers better, more efficient and cheaper options.
Google prevents mobile app distribution competitors from competing with the Play Store on feature parity because user installable 3rd party mobile app stores cannot implement automatic upgrades, background installation of apps, or batch installs of apps like the Play Store can.
They're halfway there. Apple only takes 15% (instead of 30%) if your annual app store revenue is under $1M.
This system coincidentally punishes non-subscription products like non-IAP games, where your "launch" produces a big revenue spike and then you have a much smaller long tail of revenue. To avoid getting punished by this, you'd have to optimize for a lower-revenue launch and more stable long-term revenue... i.e. a subscription.
I always thought debit was a fixed fee. I just looked up one of the most common processors in Canada and it says the max fee is $0.035 going as low as $0.02 if you fall into a market segment that skews towards less than $20 per transaction.
I intentionally pay debit for everything and keep a low fee, low interest credit card with no perks.
The processor fees for credit card rails exist primarily nowadays to support two things: fraud and perks.
With a debit transaction, your fraud protection is usually much, much lower (often non-existent). It's usually equivalent to handing over cash. With a credit card, you can call them up and get the transaction reversed pretty trivially.
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> It's ridiculous that it doesn't matter if my app has a 5$ sub or a 50$ sub, I owe them 30% anyway. What they provided is the same in both cases, they should be able to price it out to me. Their current pricing structure is not setup like a fee for services and infrastructure usage, it's setup like a tax.
I'm curious if you've ever made the same argument for credit cards, debit cards and the like. All of them charge a percentage to the seller too (and many a times it's a fixed fee plus a percentage).
I do believe that 30% is quite high for Apple's poorer management of the App Store with respect to scams and other aspects (see the lawsuit against Apple by the developer of FlickType, Kosta Eleftheriou). And it's not just the 30% or 15% alone that the developer bears, but also the annual $99 developer program membership fee.