Comment by freedomben
2 years ago
> I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?
I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.
I don’t know where this idea that 30% is an unreasonable monopoly-sustained fee comes from. Stripe’s fee is 2.9% plus 0.30, so it would be way more than 3% on small purchases, which I assume are a lot of App Store transactions. Steams is 30% even though there’s compition (Discord tried to run a store with a 90/10 split and shut it down very quickly). Google Play is the same as Apple’s, and they allow other payment processors (for non-games). On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).
Most App developers aren’t even paying 30%, they’re paying the lower 15%.
> On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).
Amazon seems to inexplicably get away with a lot of anti-competitive behavior. I don't know why.
They do have some competition, and we should be supporting them. See: https://libro.fm
I was actually thinking about that - the number of paid non-game apps on my phone that I actually use? It's zero.
Most apps are free and are things like 2fa, chat apps, kindle, etc.
Would I be sad if the entire App Store shut down? Probably. Would it be enough to move me to Android? Uncertain, probably not.
> Who is arguing it should be free?
I'm not, I'm pointing out for the first 50 years of computing it literally was free.
Why hasn’t Android, with it’s support for alternative app stores and side loading eaten the world anyway?
>> the status quo (30%)
Why is this number so bad? Steam: 30% https://medium.com/@koneteo.stories/how-much-money-does-stea...
>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?
Thanks that is a great question.
The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.
>> So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware)
I can buy android devices that are as good as the iPhone or better in their own way and have all those features (side loading other app stores). Is that not the free market in action?
That would be an interesting way for Apple to side-step the whole question: unlock the bootloaders and make it clear how you could do whatever you wanted with it (except run hacked iOS).
The number of people buying iPhones to run even a slick version of Android would probably be quite small.