Comment by lallysingh
4 years ago
IIRC 50% (60%) was the rate for the app distributor I used for selling my PalmOS app. It was digital download, too.
For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely.
AFAIK physical boxes are way above 50%.
There were a couple of stores that were more expensive.
But there's 2 reasons the comparisons aren't valid:
1) The revolution Apple brought to mobile phones was making them personal computers. So the relevant comparison really should be with personal computers and I doubt any of them had stores that took as much of a cut.
2) More relevant, the vast majority of such app stores which charged 40-50% were optional marketplaces. A customer didn't need to go through them to install an app on their phone (I believe Palm was like this. I'm pretty sure the likes of WinMo allowed many different ways to install apps). So if a marketplace was charging 40-70% it was entirely for the fact that they were bringing a customer to you. If you were able to acquire a customer by yourself, you didn't need to pay anyone any cut.
The big problem with Apple's 30% cut has always been that they charge you that amount just for having a user, even if you did all the work to get that user to use and pay for your app. Outside of the maybe 3% credit card fees, Apple provides 0 value.
One may argue (as many Apple folks do) that they charge for the frameworks, etc., but that argument is absolutely backwards. Apple creates the frameworks and APIs because they need the apps, not because the apps need them. If Apple was to get rid of its 3rd party APIs and frameworks, so there were no 3rd party apps, it's not the app developers who would suffer because all those users would migrate to Android. It's the iDevices and Apple that would basically disappear.
In fact, App developers would be thrilled because now they only need to support 1 Operating system.
1) That’s extremely revisionist thinking, the original iPhone didn’t allow any third party apps.
The iPhone was never sold as a computer it was very much just a better UI on a traditional cellphone.
2) Again no, most cellphones at the time where extremely locked down flip phones. Hell, selling ringtones used to be a thing because of how locked down phones where back in the day. Look up what kind of a cut musicians got of that fad.
My phone can’t run an IDE or compile code, can’t run solid works, can’t be shared with multiple people, can’t render CGI, can’t mine BTC, and can’t run office, etc.
If this is a personal computer, solely because it runs a browser, then the goalposts have shifted dramatically.
It can run Microsoft Office. You can program in a Python IDE and run code (Pythonista). You can create CGI on an iPhone.
Most of the limitations you mention like compiling are completely arbitrary and added by Apple. The devices are powerful enough and it's easy enough to do everything on a $300 Android phone.
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Your phone likely has an order of magnitude more computational power than the machines that were used to code and build some of the programs you mentioned.
The fact that iOS/Android prevents you from installing gcc does not mean it is unable to do so.
You could use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and output HDMI over the usb/lightning port and have a super portable dev machine if the OS was so inclined.
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