Part of the issue is that many current developers never dealt with that system AND they're being squeezed by a population of users that believe software should free as "has no value".
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Apple in 2011 Considered Collecting a 40% Fee From Some Subscription Apps
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I'm not sure about books, but Audible, an Amazon sub, does take 60% of sales across the board. Perhaps bigger publisher have better deals but that's across the board for the indie/small/mid size publishers.
Also, you're kind of making the point by adding that Amazon's LOWEST cut is 30% and it only goes up from there.
Ah, so once Apple execs realized how much money they could make from it that became the goal.
In Tim Cook’s prepared testimony he said:
Can anyone honestly say this applies to everything the company does with the App Store? Is not being able to buy books in the Kindle app (because Amazon rightly doesn’t believe Apple deserves a cut of every book sale) the best user experience? Or how about apps that don’t have sign-ups in app but aren’t allowed to mention where you go to sign up? Or game apps that are all about getting people addicted so they spend more and more buying coins, dice rolls etc. Or some of the scammy apps that charge you $10/week and you sign up without realizing you’re spending over $500/year on something definitely not worth that. Are these things that make Apple proud?
Sneaky subscriptions are plaguing the App Store | TechCrunch
Subscriptions have turned into a booming business for app developers, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend on the App Store in 2017, and are
techcrunch.com
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It depends, I guess.
Paying 30% of your income to get to work means having work, which in turn means that you are still able to keep 70% of your salary.
Vs not even having a road to use to get to work at all, in which case I would have to find another job (which may not pay as much, or at all). 70% of something is still better than 100% of nothing.
What this also means is that if my job doesn’t pay me anything, or has some alternative means of monetisation (such as ads), I effectively get to use the road for free. Not forgetting that the road is being maintained by a third party, which also entails time and resources.
The point I am trying to make is not so much that 30% is the one right amount, but more that I feel Apple does deserve compensation for the work they have put into growing the App Store. We can debate until the cows come home about what the right amount ought to be, but the arguments I am seeing so far all tend to be very binary. They all seem to revolve around the argument that developers should get to keep 100% of their earnings, Apple should simply absorb the costs of running the App Store and operate it at a loss, just because they make insane profits from the iPhone and should absolutely use this money to give everything else away for free.
You make some good points but as a counter to your "Apple is greedy and evil" subtext, as a user I'd rather give my payment into to as few people as possible. This is for convenience and safety reasons.
Makes my life a LOT easier. If it weren't a requirement, you're right far fewer devs would do it, but it would also mean far fewer subscriptions period because I think fewer user would be willing to put up with the hassle/risk.
So it may not work out directly in the devs favor but that doesn't mean Apple is just being greedy. They're also taking care of their customer, me.
Good grief much ado about nothing. Don't like this? Go run your own business like myself and many others on this thread. Every time with every job you anguish over the correct price for your services/products. Charge too much it won't sell, too little you leave money on the table. Internal business discussions like this are common and every day occurrences in any business. Sorry but profit is not a dirty word. That is what pays employee's salaries, taxes, health insurance, capital equipment, office space, etc. Other than Milo Minderbinder in the book Catch 22, buying eggs for 7 cents a piece and selling them for 5 cents a piece, you don't make it up in volume.
30 percent or 40 percent (first year) and 15 percent there after, what is the complaint? Apple is a business. Tech & software ain’t cheap and its a platform, opportunity for a tech giant to give you a chance to prosper. 30 or 40 percent is not a robbery - its a risk. Like any thing, especially start ups, you take risks. Apps have been successful since the start of the App store. People download them & rely on them. If it was such a problem we wouldn’t see over a million apps in the app store , today
When you consider taxes into the equation, 30% is horrendously high already. More than half of what developers charge their customers is either going directly to the government, or a trillion dollar company that doesn't even pay its own taxes. It's no wonder why most developers never turn a profit from the app store.
I'm also in publishing and the whole anything above $9.99 Amazon gets a 65% cut is crazy yet completely ignored.
For anyone not aware, it's $0.99 to $1.99 they get 65%, $2.99 to $9.99 they get 30%*, and anything after that it goes back to 65% again. This makes pricing awkward since you make less money selling a book in the range of $10.00 to $20.00, than if you just sell it for $9.99. I set the pricing, so I set all our books that list for $13.00 to around $22.00, at $9.99. However, when a book lists more than that, say $29.99, I usually set it around $24.99. Even though we net more money than a $9.99 price point, I hate doing it because it makes Amazon the big winner. All that's happen is the customer pays Amazon $16.24 and us $8.75. I would have much rather sold it for half of list at $14.99 and save the customer money and we would still net $8.75, but that only works if they took a flat 30%. For reference, the Apple Books does a flat 30%, but we sell far less on there. Oh and we're not allowed to set the price of that same $29.99 book to $14.99 on Apple Books or Amazon sends us an email telling us we are not allowed to do that...
I understand their strategy, though. They want to sell Kindles and the sales of those devices may not have taken off if the prices of eBooks were the same as paper/hardback. However, like I said before, we'd gladly be reducing our prices if it weren't for the $10 or more policy.
* They actually charge a digital delivery fee so they're technically still taking more than 30%. They do not charge the delivery fee if your book falls in the 65% range of pricing.
Capitalism.
Business.
Anti-trust.
Monopoly.
All of these things exist in the same world. The conversation starts when a business crosses over a line. That line is when a business becomes so large that they not only dominate a market, they are the market, and then every move they make drastically affects the market.
Yes, ultimately you are punished for doing too well, if you're not cognizant enough to change your practices when you get that big.
Of course you can, but they are still available to you and I'm sure most of the iOS developers actually use those tools. But this isn't just about Xcode, it's also about stuff like CloudKit. Obviously you could do database stuff yourself, probably cheaper, but you need to look at it from a SaaS perspective. It's completely free for anyone to use, that needs to be paid by someone and they've decided that the earner apps pay for the free ones in that regard.
For sure on that. It's called "kicking around ideas," which is what always happens.
Nevertheless, many here will get super frothed-up.
Not sure how considering different pricing (almost a decade ago) crosses any lines, or is something new or surprising in some way.
Of course those who defend Apple on this issue will say "But there IS competition! Buy a different phone."
Which (as usual, when it comes to fanatic fans) completely misses the point. We need to be thinking long term. Apple's success with the App Store has led others to follow their lead. Left unchecked, it's very likely that, in the future, you will need to go to the Apple App Store for iOS and Mac apps, the Windows App Store for Windows apps, the Google App Store for Android apps, etc.
There are many potentially chilling implications to each hardware/OS vendor being the only way to purchase software. It makes collusion much easier. It makes suppression of ideas and information easier. Developers will have no choice but to accept whatever terms each of these app stores put in front of them. If the App Store is the ONLY way to get your software on to a device, you are held hostage.
Personally I'm less bothered by the 30% commission than I am by the thought of a world where only a few app stores exist and developers and consumers alike must have their software blessed by a corporate overlord before being allowed to install it.
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Eddy must have dirt on Tim or something. Nothing else explains how such a complete nincompoop who never gets it right STILL has a job.
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An app is worth what value it gives. I'll pay $50 or more for certain value. I'll reject paying $0.99 for garbage.
The that people don’t understand is that this question of apple’s commission has little to do with app makers’ income.
Since the first App stores on Pam Pilot and Symbian platform decades ago now, app makers have been weak on the whole. There are too many of them chasing same customers. And is not really any differentthis oversupply in the era when content is delivered via apps. Still oversupply!
So whether Apple or any other platform sets 10%, 20 30 or 40, mainly that’s really about how much can the platform bleed their own users for cash. The app makers were never going to get much. It’s a part of the value chain with inherent oversupply, low entry costs - and weak profitability. In fact Apple limiting entry probably makes for a healthier app economy.
Since the first App stores on Pam Pilot and Symbian platform decades ago now, app makers have been weak on the whole. There are too many of them chasing same customers. And is not really any differentthis oversupply in the era when content is delivered via apps. Still oversupply!
So whether Apple or any other platform sets 10%, 20 30 or 40, mainly that’s really about how much can the platform bleed their own users for cash. The app makers were never going to get much. It’s a part of the value chain with inherent oversupply, low entry costs - and weak profitability. In fact Apple limiting entry probably makes for a healthier app economy.
No. 30/70 split is a huge improvement over physical copies and gives instant global distribution and it's been like this way before the App Store (2003 is the earliest instance I can find). Given the investment that Apple has made into developers from the cut they receive, 30/70 is perfectly reasonable. I am a developer and I enjoy seeing huge amounts of fresh new features and APIs every year. Can't say the same about Google's SDK.
If I wanted "likes", I'd quickly post something bad about Apple the moment a new MacRumors article goes live. People generally look at the first page of comments and "like" anything that makes fun of Apple. Then they leave. It's not hard to get "likes". I actually did some of this 1-2 years ago (you can search for my old posts) where I had the top likes just for being first poster and posting something bad about Apple.
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PS4 and Xbox One, sure. Nintendo Switch however was sold at a profit from day one.
Regardless, the shelf life of a console product is about a decade so generally the initial sales are sold at a loss but then overtime, the console sells at a profit. Apple generally refreshes yearly so it wouldn't make sense to sell at a loss initially.
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It's not. I don't know why some people keep making this about the wrong thing.
The lines are crossed when they give special discounts and exceptions to Amazon and Netflix, and tell other less important players they need to pay up or better still, can't exist at all.
The App Store was Apple's private property. Was. Past tense. Now that they dominate the entire market, it doesn't belong to them anymore. This is how it works. It may sound like entitled nonsense, but it's really just a line. A line in the sand that protects consumers and businesses everywhere.
Rather odd choice to highlight the pharmaceutical industry as a paragon of equitable and 'fair' pricing, when everything that is revealed about their business practices tend to be an affront to business ethics...
Not all, maybe not even most. Alex Lindsay makes a great argument on MacBreak Weekly. The real event portion is at 1:45:00 and goes for about 2 minuteshe discusión goes for about 10 minutes.
I will add, when the App Store was announced, and Jobs said they would only take 30%, there was a loud audible gasp in the room. Everyone was shocked that the fee was so low.
All that might be involved in one capacity or another, but that's not really what this particular article or most of the commentary is about.
Title case is rather outdated (eg, see here Cambridge University style guide.)
But, ignoring that, it is a quote so it should just be quoted.
Thats my view anyway.
To be clear, this is sharing between two pharmaceutical companies. The ratio reflects the value that large sophisticated parties negotiating at arm's length place on a distribution network.
I think you may be reading things that i didnt write.