Isn't it 15%? At least for companies in danger of not surviving, I mean.

Before "app stores" there were retail stores, and the cut was worse because there was a publisher involved.

But most apps, at least for me, were distributed as shareware. The developer got 100% of the cut because they sold it on their own website.

This is just an Apple PR talking point. You know what existed between the retail stores and the App Store? The internet

We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store. Companies could and still do sell through their own website and through other places.

You're forgetting all the licensing software attached to those apps, paid for and funneled through... a publishing company!

I am not forgetting the existence of licensing concerns, but they are not exactly relevant.

A) The presence of licensing software is irrelevant to the existence of something between a big box store and the App Store. Talking about the ecosystem as if people did not sell software electronically before the App Store is simply disingenuous.

B) Times have changed, it's easier to handle that stuff yourself using free software or with software packages that take less than a 30% cut.

C) You know what didn't need that licensing software? Free and/or OSS software. That simply isn't an option on iOS. Further, even if you wanted to enforce that on your paid software you may have used a publishing company, but you weren't artificially limited to a single one.

> We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store.

And it fucking sucked. Finding apps was hit or miss, there was no guarantee an app would run on your device model, and payments were ridiculous. Apple's App Store is far from perfect but it is vastly better than the absolute clown shoes of buying mobile apps for pre-iPhone mobile platforms.

This is changing the goal posts. Whatever the state of “pre-iPhone mobile platforms” is irrelevant. We are discussing about general software distribution.

iPhones nowadays are much closer to functionality and power to (or significantly eclipsing) normal PCs that people have.

And the distribution of software for normal PCs has none of the issue you describe.

What world are you coming from? The story for buying windows apps on the internet has been pretty fine for a long, long while; and, compatibility hasn't been any problem at all, in my experience.

Further, since most things were shareware, you could just _test_ the software on your machine ahead of time.

That is more because payment processing in general has come a long way. Buying mac or Windows software from a developer's site using Stripe or even Apple Pay or similar doesn't fucking suck much more than using the App Store.

There was a publisher, a distributor, and the retail outlet all taking their cuts.

Then you also had to pay into a marketing fund for those big full color inserts in the Sunday paper if your software was sold at the big box retailers.

You also had to eat the cost of returns of unsold inventory after you issued a new version.

It's true, Minecraft absolutely had like 4 layers of red tape Mojang had to go through to sell is program. Same with WinZip, WinRar, XSplit and many other applications.

Or do they mostly just support PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay or direct credit card billing?

Nobody paid for winrar

That’s false. If your business is fine with 12% processing fees (specifically in tech and more so in IAP style apps) and not with 30% - something is very wrong.

[Context] it is extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL. The business case if true and still viable should be unique and outside of a pure software play - which gets you squarely out of IAP.

Are you saying every non-iOS software company with a profit margin under 18% should go out of business?

Rule of thumb: yes.

Long story: it would be extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL.

Yeah exactly. I should be cheering for the option of paying less to Apple as a business, but realistically you will get sideloading, piracy and the “mobile users don’t spend money on apps” like it is “Android users don’t spend money on apps”