Then by all means, please charge me separately for these things. Because I don’t need them. Apple doesn’t do marketing for me, never promoted my app. People find my app through my own marketing channels.
Charge me roughly 2 % for In App Purchases just like Stripe and PayPal.
Charge me a traffic fee for whatever download traffic I cause. This way, I at least benefit from my app being only like 5 MB in size.
If I want to be featured on the App Store, charge me.
The rest like App Store listing? Covered by my $100 developer fee.
This, maybe it was different in the early days but they do literally nothing to help you market your app until you've already driven enough traffic to it yourself for them to take notice.
If you do get featured you get an email indicating that you might get featured and need to design and submit app store banner artwork with a whole list of things that you're not allowed to display.
This is so disingenuous and I'm so tired of seeing Apple's fee pegged at 30% (even though it 15% for the VAST majority of developers) and then turn around and pretend Stripe/PP offer anything close to 2%.
Paypal is 3.5% + $0.49
Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30
At low price points (you know, the price points that almost all IAP/Paid App are at save for longer, like annual, subscriptions) your fee is still substantial.
If you are lucky Apple will create a special provision for 3rd party payment providers that will provide subscription/cancellation/refund/etc infrastructure. If they don't do that then you can expect the above rates to be even higher. 2% is only obtainable with a more bare-bones payment processor so you will have to build quite a bit up and any company providing full "app payment services" is going to charge more than Stripe/PayPal. Heck, even the prices I listed for Stripe are the lowest they go (unless you are doing over 1.5M annually and qualify for bulk/volume pricing) and if you want things like fraud protection that's extra. Oh you want to calculate tax? Extra .5%. Fraud protections? $.05 or $.07/per transaction extra. Chargeback protection? Extra .4%, and the list goes on.
- Stripe is cheaper in the EU for EU cards. 1.4% plus €0.25
- Apple didn’t even notify me about individual refunds for what? 10 years? And it’s still unreliable and annoying so that I don’t even bother, because I get like 3 refunds per month. You could actually get a refund and still keep the app for a long time.
- People complain to me if they want a refund, but Apple gives me no control. I have to redirect them to Apple customer support. I am perceived as the bad person and this costs me money in terms of customer support and I can’t even help people, because Apple wants to own the relationship between app devs and customers.
There are so many silly things about the App Store that your quotation of 15% as a generous service is laughable.
Edit: but yes, Stripe and PayPal are more than 2% in reality, but far from 15% or even 30%, except for micro transactions.
No one is forcing you to go through Walmart. The problem with IOS is that you are forced to go through Apple. A user cannot pay, download and install the app directly from a developers website.
Apple is a minority player in mobile.
The major difference here is that while I don't own the Walmart store, I do own my phone. What is allowed to be sold in the store is determined by Walmart, just as what's installed on my phone should be determined by me, the owner.
The commission fee that Apple charges, 30% is partially to cover operating/marketing etc. Obviously, Apple makes a good profit off the App Store these days, even though Jobs said he'd be happy if it was break even at best.
Here's an analogy I've been thinking on about this whole thing. The iPhone (or whatever phone you want) is the equivalent of a Walmart store. If you want your product to be sold in Walmart, you have to send it to their distribution center (ie App Store) and Walmart will handle sending that product out, etc. Walmart will handle the credit card transactions, etc and pay you the negotiated rate for your product (Yes, odds are Walmart buys your product first, then sells it, but with credit lines, etc it's almost the same thing).
Does Walmart allow you to go in, put your product in the store and sit there with a square device and sell your stuff? Amazon is more analogous of physical to app in the sense that Amazon is the transaction point but may or may not actually maintain control of the product.
So what's the end game? I suspect if Apple/Google has to allow developers to collect their own fees, Apple will start charging paid apps to be in the App store.
They will continue to allow free apps to be shown, but if you want to charge for your App either one time or subscription, you'll have to pay an upfront fee to be listed.
And that charge may depend on the number of downloads.