Comment by inputmice
10 hours ago
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
Yep, I'd hypothetically economically gladly build an alternative app store charging "only" 5% on app revenue. The blocker would be that Google has a hold on what store is installed by default on Android. Apple even more so. This is hardly a fair market.
There are other app stores on Android, e.g. OEM ones like the Galaxy store. The latter doesn't really compete on price though - 20% cut of one time payments and 15% of subscriptions. I think the Android app stores anchor to the iOS app store prices to piggy back on Apple's monopoly power - devs are used to having to pay Apple that much, so they will not resist if you charge the same.
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That would work because someone else "Google" is doing all the development of Android etc etc. Of course you can create a parasitic service for less.
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It is rent extraction which always feels like bullshit because it is. Competition is supposed to be the counterbalancing force but it barely exists here.
It doesn't exist because it can't:
The basic services Google provides can effectively only be consumed by humans individually, creating an inevitable bottleneck.
Such bottlenecks impede interchangeability of goods, as you can't reasonably entertain multiple suppliers simultaneously there. And that means, you cannot have a free market, because you can't really have meaningful competition.
Google has captured services that really are public utilities. Them being "new" doesn't play a role.
Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
8% for Stripe? Why would anyone have to pay that when my tiny company pays 1.5%?
It's a level of service above their payment processing, where they also collect and remit certain taxes which I believe is built-in to that ~8%. This is the same service that Google and Apple provide for in-app payments.
https://stripe.com/managed-payments
This is what Apple said about it:
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
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They also develop the OS and development platforms that the apps are built upon. The apps don’t exist on islands.