Re:Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give ...
by fbelzile on Thursday June 10, 2021 @10:06AM
(#27460931)
I'm all about pricing for value without regulation. But did the App Store lose half of it's value to developers when Apple decided to slash fees from 30% to 15% (for smaller companies)? I don't think so. Did a competitor to the App Store appear to try and compete for lower fees? No.
This is just the behaviour of a company that can change prices on a whim because they don't need to compete with other app stores after having established a large share in the market and controlling 100% of all third party app distribution.
Re:Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give ...
by eitland on Thursday June 10, 2021 @10:01AM
(#27460877)
> Fees aren’t about costs, they are about value.
Correct.
The problem is the value is artifically high because it is basically extortion.
It is basically a protection racket: "you pay us and nothing bad happens to your app that you spent x years and y thousand dollars creating".
This is all over the place.
Even with credit cards, it doesn’t cost 3% of something to process the fee. A $100 purchase yields $3 to the credit card and a $1000 purchase yields $30. It’s literally the same size data transfer. There’s some minimal additional cost for fraud/insurance but they don’t base their fees on direct costs.
Also, generally speaking, when there is some regulation forcing cost plus fees it makes things suck more (eg, water and power).