Not defending Apple, but offering forever-services for one-time fees is a great way to go out of business. I would not expect the App Store to be subsidized by hardware sales.
Also, assuming you accept the premise in the first place, it makes sense to charge the developer, who is the one generating work for reviewers.
For instance, why not charge for the services used and a low payment processing fee? If developers bring associated costs, they should pay for it. It just seems 30% is overshooting quite a bit. They want to treat developers like regular customers with regular margins, when they are more like partners bringing them nearly free revenue.
I guess I'm too ignorant to understand how building, maintaining and securing the App Store is 10x more expensive than doing the same for something like Mastercard.
Perhaps I should find a better way to communicate that - making it literally the first words of my post didn't work.
As someone currently building an app-like website – https://wormhole.app – let me tell you that Apple's neglect and underinvestment in the web platform definitely precludes websites or "PWAs" from having the "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". Safari suffers from the twin effects of (1) limitations that Apple has intentionally put in place and (2) intentional under-staffing of the Safari team. Here's how it's affected us:
- Apple recently broke our website by adding support for a new API `blob.stream()` in Safari 14.1 (which we correctly feature-detected) but when you call the function you get a null pointer exception which crashes the renderer process [2]. Worse, the bugs was fixed on `master` several months before Safari was released but it wasn't included in the release.
- IndexedDB has been full of bugs for years and shows very slow signs of improvement. We have no other storage options on Safari, so we're stuck using their buggy implementation.
- Safari limits websites to using 1GB of temporary space after which the app must prompt the user for an additional allocation, each 200MB at a time. So if the app needs 5GB of space (for example, a video editing application, or in our case a P2P-enabled file sending app), then the user will need to click "okay" on twenty prompts for 200MB more space each to make the app work. Needless to say, this is totally ridiculous and definitely not an API that Apple would ever find acceptable to ship for native iOS apps.
- If we choose to use in-memory storage then Safari warns the user that our website is using lots of RAM. So that's not a real option.
- We can't offer streaming download + decryption from our servers because Safari's ServiceWorker implementation doesn't allow intercepting HTTP requests for file downloads.
- Missing many APIs that would actually let websites truly compete with native apps. Just a few that we use:
* Web Share Target API (https://web.dev/web-share-target)
* File System Access API (https://web.dev/file-system-access)
It's hard to see Apple's decisions here as anything but outright hostile to the web and designed to push developers into making native apps.
[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...
Apple 30% cut is for developer access to the Apple cultivated and exclusive selection of customers.
They built the platform, infrastructure, distribution channel and trust of the users, creating a market where there was none.
One can argue that a 30% margin may be too fat, but considering other industry margin and that Apple consolidates in that margin logistic, distributionship and dealership I haven't yet seen a convincing case comparing it fairly to other industries
But still, exclusive distribution rights are neither unheard of nor have scores of people up in arms about them restriction people from of choice, so why is Apple singled out and targeted?
Didn't customers pay a premium for Apple hardware because of the unified ecosystem and superior security to begin with? And developers also pay a premium to be on the App Store ($99+30%) because it costs them money to create the infrastructure and ensure safety?
I'm pretty ignorant on the whole situation, but it does sound nice to be Apple. Raking in hundreds of billions while charging premiums on both sides, convincing them it's for their own good. Meanwhile, customers and developers descend into a feedback loop of even heavier dependence on Apple: the more customers there are, the more devs have a financial necessity to publish apps on the platform, the more value the platform has, the more customers they get.
People are quick to point out Apple is the one providing for developers, who should be honored to be able to get on the App Store for a 30% cut. But, really, how many users would Apple have without those apps? They do deserve their cut, but at some point it went from a symbiotic relationship to "oil the Apple machine." The economies of scale simply work in their favor here.