Gotta love the daily spin. Apple is the one making easy breezy beaucoup money on the App. store while poaching the best of the best ideas and integrating them into iOS. Believe me, when somebody is always talking daisies and sunshine you can bet they are planted in manure. It just really annoys me when somebody serves me a piece of cow pattie and tells me it's a brownie. Makes you want to slap the silly, disingenuous smile right off their cheeky face.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Says Developers Have Earned Over $70 Billion From App Store Since It Launched
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I totally agree. Before the App Store, the nearest equivalent was the web portals for games. The percentages were reversed there. The developer got around 30%, the store got 70%. Apple were very generous in the deal they set.
Please. Don't feel sorry for one of the world's biggest, richest company. Every time somebody uses iOS to do something it's doing them a favor. Besides, due to economies of scale & market share/ownership, Apple SHOULD NOT have a divine right to TROLL and TAX every freaking thing that happens on an iPhone. I'm sure if Apple could charge people a monthly plan "allowing" people just to use their phone so many hours a day they would. There are two sides of the coin and as good as Apple is there's definitely some nasty greedy grunge-hussle going on in Cupertino.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that the search from the App Store sucks and nobody can find any relevant app that matters to the keywords searched, this revenue is divided like this: 3% of the apps from companies that have a lot of money to advertise their apps outside the App Store, gets 97% of all the money. The other 97% of the developers, specially indie developers, get the remaining 3% of the money, that is virtually a crumb to everyone.
I think they should reduce their cut for those profiting below some threshold. Also they should provide hardware with a discount for those developers. Everything they give to a mass number of developers would revert in better apps and would be an incentive for indie developers.
Today, 97% of the developers on the App Store cannot make developing apps their main activity.
I think they should reduce their cut for those profiting below some threshold. Also they should provide hardware with a discount for those developers. Everything they give to a mass number of developers would revert in better apps and would be an incentive for indie developers.
Today, 97% of the developers on the App Store cannot make developing apps their main activity.
Do these companies have to pay Apple's annual fee to develop for their platform? If so, then Apple is out nothing.
Last edited:
So developers would be better going it alone or returning to the days of Handango? Not having a central repository and single shop?
Just a little primer to get the development community 'warmed up' for next week's main event, and of course it'll be mentioned there again.
You're using Opera as an example? Are you serious?
Your post is so factually incorrect as to be funny. For example:
"iOS global market share close to single digit percentage" is an outright lie and not based on any factual data from any reliable source. The reliable data we have is "just over 2 billion Android devices in use" from Google a month back and over 1 billion active iOS devices from 18 months back.
How is this "close to single digit percentages"?
How is that relevant to my post?
I'm not for one moment saying that an AppStore is a bad thing.
This. There's been a number of app features that Apple's poached over the years from developers as "New iPhone Features Only Apple Could Come Up With" then turned right around and rewritten their App Store rules to exclude those same developers from keeping the features Apple poached or having other developers implement them in new ways by using the "Can't copy Apple's built-in features for iPhone" bs. All the while Apple's able to falsely claim they brought "innovative" features to market when all they've done is follow their founder's motto "Good artists copy, great artists steal"
Jobs was against apps on the iPhone. He was for the App Store. Lots of people groused and thought it was a "walled garden." And then made their own. Windows 10S requires that you use only Windows apps from their App Store.
And that is why there are constantly less and less iOS apps and no one is interested in devoloping for iOS. I mean we've reached a point of there being no iOS apps at all long ago!
A couple things:
Market share is a percentage over a specific period of time. For instance:
There were 347 million smartphones sold last quarter... Apple was 51 million of that... which gave them 15% market share last quarter in smartphones.
There were 36 million tablet sold last quarter... Apple was 9 million of that... which gave them 24% market share last quarter in tablets.
Market share is a report card of the quarter. It doesn't say much else. (Note that neither of those numbers are single-digit percentages as you said.
)I understand the point you are trying to make. With iOS having such "low" market share... why would any developer even consider it?
Here's why:
Installed Base is the more important number... as it's the total number of devices out in the world.
There are more than a *billion* Apple devices out in the world... mostly iPhones and iPads running iOS.
If you were a developer... would you really ignore that?
As for Opera... they've had struggles their whole life. It's always been difficult for them to get attention against the other giant browsers on the PC... and now on mobile.
I don't see Opera as the example of developers abandoning iOS.
And did you read the article? They're not dropping iOS... they're just focusing more on Android right now.
But again... Opera has their own struggles. They are not the barometer for the health of the App Store.
Last edited:
I agree with your point; hasn't that been the "death" of windows phone according to these forums, no developer support. iPhone would be nothing without them.
[doublepost=1496335179][/doublepost]
...and the ability to sells 100's of millions of phones that wouldn't stand a chance without the apps.
Some other people at Apple looked beyond web apps, but Jobs had to be convinced it was the right path. From what I've read he was very resistant to the idea.
Devs selling online downloads existed well before the App Store did so it's not like Apple offered a previously unavailable alternative to B&M. While the App Store does put all apps in one place, which is supposed to help people find apps, it also has/had its own discovery problems such as 'free' apps and fake reviews topping the charts. Apple's policies have also pushed the market away from the traditional software business model of buying an application at full price and then being eligible for discounted upgrades to ad supported, freemium/micro-transactions, and/or subscriptions. Whether or not this is good in the long term is still up in the air.
That's not to say that there are no upsides to the App Store, but Devs that don't like it are stuck with it because there are no other distribution options. At least Devs making software for MacOS have the option of avoiding the Mac App Store if they choose.
Most of the apps these days are garbage. There are maybe 100-200 decent apps in the App Store, the rest are Chinese or Indian garbage.
Don't believe me? Try searching for photo apps. Snapseed, Filterloop, VSCO, Mextures and that's about it. The rest are just 'filter' apps that offer nothing and are emoji-laden junk.
Out of thousands of apps for all categories, free and paid, not many are worth having.
Don't believe me? Try searching for photo apps. Snapseed, Filterloop, VSCO, Mextures and that's about it. The rest are just 'filter' apps that offer nothing and are emoji-laden junk.
Out of thousands of apps for all categories, free and paid, not many are worth having.
I bet there are only 100-200 decent apps out of the millions of Windows programs ever made too.
This is normal... it's not just an Apple problem.
Before the iPhone, PalmGear made Palm Pilot app and game developers many millions, if not billions.
Those policies were at the strong behest of devs though. It's hard for devs to invest time, resources into an app that ultimately might sell for .99. But that is where the iOS app market was -- a race to the bottom. The change in policy was to keep devs from dropping iOS. Again, you see the same thing in the Android side. It's not just Apple. I'm not a fan of freemium or subscription but that is where the market is. Apple conformed to, not invented that model.
Apple puts some money into my personal account every month. More importantly, they put lots of money into my employer's account every month
They also distribute my app worldwide. I wouldn't even have a clue how to sell an app in Australia, and Apple just sends me money from those guys.
Which one is your app?
There were app stores at the time. Heck, every carrier had one. Plus there were some large vetted ones like Handango. Where do you think Apple got the idea from?
However, companies like Microsoft were not about to mandate that apps could only come from a store they curated... not only would that have caused screaming from users around the world, but probably have attracted the attention of anti-monopoly agencies. Apple users are different, and Apple was much smaller back then, and so the outcry was much more low key.
Once Apple did such a greedy thing though, that opened the door for other megacorporations to do the same.
That is correct. Jobs thought it was dangerous to allow third party apps, and also did not want people to think of the iPhone as a portable computer (which is directly opposite what many call it now). He said:
“You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
(Ironically, it was actually an official Apple OS update that brought down the AT&T 3G network for a while, because of a W-CDMA power output bug that ramped up iPhone transmitters until other users were pushed off a cell.)
Oh for goodness' sake. Every device / laptop / phone maker creates developer SDKs. How else do you get enough apps? And most SDKs are free.
Until Apple however, no smartphone maker forced their developers to only be able to use that maker's own store.
What Jobs did around 2005 was to make fun of the way that flip phones could only download vetted apps and ringtones from cellular carrier walled garden app stores. He mockingly called the carriers "orifices" for doing this.
Two years later he realized that was where the money was, and created his own even higher walled garden "orifice".
Seriously? Developers have NO CHOICE if they wish to access normal users, because Apple made it so that only apps from their own store could be bought and downloaded.
If there were more than one store available, then many smaller developers would be cool with going through a non-Apple, less greedy, perhaps far better vetted and advertised, alternative store.
Not to mention all the major app makers who would love to have their own stores, bypassing Apple's 30% grab.
Last I checked, over half the app store royalties go to about two dozen top (mostly game) makers.
There's actually too many developers. Besides the price race to the bottom that occurred so quickly, another thing that drives many developers crazy, is that even if they do come up with something cool and new, then within weeks there are tons of clones available for less / free.
Last edited:
"Oh for goodness' sake. Every device / laptop / phone maker creates developer SDKs. How else do you get enough apps? And most SDKs are free.
Until Apple however, no smartphone maker forced their developers to only be able to use that maker's own store."
Do Dell make SDKs? Do HTC? Or Toshiba? No.
Apple have created a complete end to end system that generates the lions share of revenue for app devs in the entire industry in less than a decade.
It's a mind blowing achievement that I don't think gets enough recognition.