If your take is true we wouldn’t have had 15yrs of the App Store! It’s been an unmitigated success and paid out billions to developers and started thousands of devs shops etc. if they were all so impeded by this 30% (15% I think it’s is now right?) then no one would have survived.
The reality is we are here because the big boys (epic et al) went freemium and destroyed the concept of normal devs making a decent margin from their sales. It’s literally called “a race to the bottom”. Where the big boys in a market undercut the normal pricing because they use their profits from elsewhere and subsidise their business activity.
Freemium gaming forced everyone into giving away apps for free and forcing games to be divided in a way where the money was made outside of the App Store but used the AppStore to gain the customer. Which is why Apple put the anti steering thing in the first place to prevent companies gaming the system.
Apples policies literally created the indie game dev scene as a viable entity. Big game companies destroyed it. And now people blame Apple. Everyone forgets how we got to where we are.
Im not going to pretend that i understand or know everything regarding the gaming industry or how much money apple developers earned and how much they paid.
But one thing is for certain, the only reason Apple has managed to charge 30% is because they had 0 competition inside of their OS, no competitive app stores, web browsers were same as safari with their unique UI Skin on top, so again they could not be better than Safari only same or worse in some cases.
If you are the only game in town that does not leave your developers or users any wiggle room or effective choice.. you either pay up or dont access billion + people that have apple devices.
From a business perspective thats foolish as you effectively reduce your revenue.
Paying apple 30% still gives you 70% of the revenue you would have not had.
But as an example, i am a web developer and we sometimes develop progressive web apps that function more less the same as native apps in the apple/google store.
On Android/Windows/Google Chrome when you install the web app it offers roughly 90-95% of the functionality you would get from the native app in their respective stores.
Apple has refused to enable full functionality that Progressive Web apps can provide to their users so currently Apple/Safari offer between 80% of the full functionality because they intentionally gimp it so it can not compete with their app store.
also, its important to mention that Progressive web apps are excluded from apple/google tax and only thing you pay is 3-5% for payment processor of your choice which is amazing for developers and companies that decide to take that route. However most companies know that apple userbase are simple people who dont know how to install/enable/use progressive web app so they launch their native app and eat up the 30% tax just to get access to larger userbase.
Over the last 3 years we have developed roughly 10-13 web apps that act as native ones and that number is on the rise, so more and more small/medium sized companies chose this route, and EU rules might make it easier, but it remains to be seen
It will be a long year with lots of re-adjustments for both Big Tech and developers/users.
