Regarding the 30% cut. I know a few developers and have read some posts on blogs of others.
Say you are an indie developer. You sell on your web page for $25.00 You get 100% of that minus your overhead.
You sell on Apple for $25 and you get $16.75 with no overhead.
As an indie develoepr you have to get people to your web site. Convince them you are legit and offer a real value to the process. Then you have to accept payments and again convince the customer you can manager their credit card data securely.
Speaking from experience, my web site acdepts credit cards and I utilize the service as provided by my ISP and there is a PayPal options as well. Between the credit card fees, paypal fees, ISP fees I am loosing 7 to 14% immediately myself.
In addition, for an indie programmer to get market share and brand awareness they have to advertise and have word of mouth. That costs moeny. Being on the app store does not eliminate this marketing need, but does change it up a bit.
The audience on the App store is huge. An indoe developer may have 20 to 50 unique visitors a day on their web site with an even lower conversion to a sale. They pay and advertise and try to get mentioned in blogs and magazones in positive light to drive sales and traffic to their site. They may heavily discount their product and get bundled and get exposure that way. In other words their bigegs issue is getting eyes on their product.
Add in their processing and hosting costs and Apple's audience, legitimacy, and cut of 33% is not so bad after all.
If I have to market a product an I have to convince you to buy and go to a web site and finalize the purchase it is a lot of convincing. Data supports that many purchases on the app Store are more impulse buys.
I could pay for simpler ads and get yo to look at my app and buy from a trusted source far easier than I could on a web site.
That brings up price. To put food on the table I need to sel lproduct X at $25.00. Or do i? If I sell 500 copies a month on my site I do. That is a gross of $12,500, say my overhead for marketing and processing and hosting is 20%. I net about $9500.
On the App Store my audience is larger. I could price my app at $9.99. I sell 1500 copies a month for $14,985 minus Apple's cut of $4950 and I get just over $10,000. Sightly better.
How can I sell three tiems the number of apps on the AppStore? Agian look at the factors you have to overcome as an indie developer. Legitimacy, traffic to a point of purchase, and closing the deal. Add in some piracy and demos and such as well. I write an app that I feel is useful I have to work my read end off to market it and hope someone sees my info when they need my app. If I have a demo it has to be enough to show them I'm worth it yet not give the farm away. Take a disk utility. It can't undelete the term paper they just trashed for free as that is a lost sale. But it can't not show what it is capable of.
Once they are at my site, they have to follow through on the sale. Be honest, how often have you checked out third party apps, shareware, etc. and dowloaded the demo, researched the app but never bought the product? It is more common than you think. Plus, even with name brand stores people get weirded out with credit cards and payments. Many stores that require you to input your credit card with each order loos up to 50% of the potential sales at the last critical step. Stores liek Amazon that save credits cards for future use, and I am guessing the AppStore have a much high follow through. The saved credit card abstracts the purchase. Plus using a vendor liek Apple there is less worry than an indie web site that may bounce the web to a payment processing site.
In my experience the best strategy is to be on both, charge less on the app store and make all of your marketing point there. For additional proof so to speak, look at Steam. Many games are on Steam for less than their own develoeprs web page. Steam is an audience primed for gaming. In other words by being on Steam you cater to gamers. Half your batle is won. Price less than $9.99 and you are impulse buy price range. Advertise and you get a steam suer, where payment info is stored and they can make a very convenient click from a trusted vendor and you have made a sale.
This is all moot for large developers. Companies liek Autodesk and Micosoft have no need to drive traffic and have the payment procsing of Apple support them. They will be beter off selling direct. But few indoe developers have that luxury.
I think that is less of an issue compared to the fact that on the App Store Apple takes a 30% cut. Items purchased elsewhere either don't have that markup or if they do, someone else collected that money already.
For an import license scheme to work they'd likely need a "pay X Amount" to transfer the license similar to what they did with iTunes Plus tracks a while back to remove DRM. That then gets complicated by the above mentioned different costs per an app (different apps or apps changing price over time) and license restrictions between stores. Ohh and I doubt they could just expect developers to shoulder it...I doubt too many will want to hand over 30% of their already earned revenue to provide customers access access to a product they can already download from the developers own site anyway.
I'd love to see it happen, but it sounds a bit ambitious.
