Let's address these one by one.
- Apple built the device. Apple already profits handsomely on hardware sales with a margin of about 25–30%; there’s no reason whatsoever why developers should be expected to help pay for others’ iPhones.
Wrong. Apple provides many free services to developers that are critical to their apps as well as their users. One example: maps. Google Maps is EXTREMELY expensive to developers (and is one of Google's main revenue streams). Apple provides Apple Maps for free. Developers like Yelp switching to Apple Maps save them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year alone.
- Apple built the App Store. Sure. What if a developer doesn’t want to use the App Store?
Then they should switch to Android.
Multiple App stores mean
- Confusing UX for the user
- Third party stores running multiple services on background to keep apps updated, equating to lower performance and lower battery on device
- Users won't trust apps on iPhone in general anymore as they can't keep up with how third party handles app reviews (if any)
- Less "foot traffic" to the App Store for developers that prefer the App Store, which means less sales for them
I've never been fortunate enough to be featured on front page, but I do quite well for my personal apps.
BTW, majority of apps stick with Google Play despite the ability of third party stores (with the exception of China since Google doesn't really exist there). So what you're asking for already isn't popular on the worlds #1 smartphone platform.
- Apple built the developer APIs. What do you think Apple’s own software is built on at a fundamental level, rainbows and unicorns? No. Their apps depend heavily on the system frameworks that Apple built for themselves first; it costs nothing for them to open up the work they already did.
100% WRONG. I worked at Apple. There are MANY teams dedicated to developer frameworks. One example: they have a Maps team, and then there's a MapKit team. Maps team handles the core maps service while MapKit handles developer side of Maps. You think it's as simple as making a private function public? Nope. Not even close.
You have absolutely no idea on how much work it takes to make iOS APIs available to developers.
- Apple built the OS. When you buy an iOS device, are you buying the hardware only? No. You’re also buying a license to use iOS, so from an accounting perspective Apple’s already earning revenue on iOS. Where else do you think that money comes from? (In fact, this is the reason why Apple used to charge for then-iPhone OS updates on the iPod touch!) You’re just saying that they’re trying to double-dip, I take it?
No. Read my previous replies to other people. I've already mentioned a $399 iPhone SE pays for 4-5 years of new user OS features. A $399 device sale covers OS updates which covers some of the developer APIs, but it isn't going to make up the several hundred million dollars of investments into the App Store and developers. Could easily link you to my post.
- Apple built the platform. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this that isn’t covered in whole or in part by the others.
- Apple built the services. See above. If you’re maybe referring to payment processing, there’s no reason why a developer shouldn’t be able to choose to take on liability for any issues with that themselves or, more likely in most cases, just use another established payment processor like Stripe or PayPal, both of which run transactions at the far more reasonable 2.9% + 30¢. (Compared to Apple’s pricing, developers would save money on everything but $0.99 purchases.)
You're not thinking from the user perspective. If I made my users login to PayPal every time they want to do an IAP purchase, it would scare many users away from ever attempting an in app purchase. Just yesterday I downloaded Tastetea app and it asked me to type in my credit card number to order a drink from them. I deleted the app immediately after and just went to Starbucks. If this was a general experience by most apps, it would put users on alert before they even tap the "checkout" button which
would lower the total amount of money spent inside an app in general.
The fact that Apple made it incredibly easy and
made this process consistent across the platform plays a huge role in driving more revenue to developers and Apple. Would you want 100% of a small pie or 70% of a much bigger pie? You failed to take this into account.
- Apple built the CDNs. First, that’s not entirely true because the App Store runs in no small part on AWS. But also, the only party who decided not to bill free apps’ developers for the costs incurred upon Apple by their free app is, you guessed it, Apple. If free apps are such a burden on Apple, Apple can absolutely fix that by offsetting the costs associated with hosting free apps. What’s unfair is expecting paid/IAP developers to subsidize Apple’s own poor business model decisions.
Spinning up an EC2 server or enabling Cloudfront on AWS isn't what I call building a CDN. You do know that there's more to that right?
Example: The great China firewall prevents general AWS servers from connecting to users in China. So Apple needs to set up their servers within China which Apple chose GCBD (AWS China exists which has no correlation to servers in general AWS, but Apple chose GCBD). So what about people visiting China that need access to their iCloud data? You can't access servers outside of China if you're inside China. And China forced Apple to store iCloud data from Chinese customers within GCBD's servers. But you're an USA customer that doesn't have data stored in GCBD servers (to prevent the Chinese government from snooping in on your data), they're stored on servers outside of China that you can't connect to! What do you do then? Apple has to deal with this and made it transparent to users while it's up to Android users to figure this out when they need access to Google services. That's just one of many issues with dealing with CDNs around the world. Again, it's not as simple as just launching servers on AWS.
If Apple charged free app developers extra for hosting free apps, there would be far less free apps on the App Store. That would be a stupid move since free apps drive a lot of device sales. Lack of free apps would drive down the App Store "foot traffic"