To those who complain about the "Apple Tax"
What a crock. The App store was created out of whole cloth by Apple. The devs were invited to come play after the foundation was laid, and provided all of the tools they needed to make money. Apple said, "You want a safe place to build your products, come on in. Just pay us for the fact that we developed the concept, and we built the infrastructure." A mobster comes in after the fact, when you have already built your business, and offers you "protection" to stay in business.
How much money would most of these devs be making if Apple hadn't started the App store? I suppose that eBay was a "mob" idea, too?
This is the mentality that has this country on the brink of ruin. The thought that companies like Apple, who build the infrastructure to make money for their shareholders are somehow less for doing so.
Grow up.
Apparently some people complain a out an Apple Tax without realizing what the typical requirements are for a developer who wants to make create an app and sell it on his own:
- Buy Visual Studio (or alternative product) and every upgrade that comes out.
- Create your own website and pay for hosting every month.
- Implement a software delivery engine with a Key generator or other mechanism to protect your app against piracy.
- Implement a Shopping Cart for your Website
- Pay monthly fees to take credit cards (the higher the volume, the lower the fees, so make sure to sell enough).
- Protect your site, maintain (upgrades, fixes, patches, etc.) it and monitor it to make sure it doesn't get hacked.
- Pay to advertise your website and push it up on the Search Engines for people to find it.
- Build a reputation for your website so people wouldn't be afraid to enter their credit card number and personal information each time they need to make a payment.
- if you don't know how to do some of the steps above, you'll need to pay someone to do them for you (a college boy may do these starting at $30.00/hr hopefully he knows how to do these tasks right).
- Hope your clients don't bail out during the lengthy Checkout Process.
- Make a sale, get paid sale price minus 2-3% for Credit Card fees.
- Find time to write more apps and grow your business.
- The a part-time job to pay for monthly expenses.
Considering the above, I wouldn't mind paying 30% Apple Tax at all if all I got to do is:
- Pay $100.00 Developer Program fee
- Develop App with free tools provided by Apple, free upgrades.
- Submit App to Apple.
- Get paid minus 30% commission to Apple.
- Keep writing more apps.
