Or don't use Apple/iOS (and Google).
If you're selling services, just use the web, the web works fine.
If you say you need an app to compete (not just the web) then you are illustrating the value that the App Store is bringing you.
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Minnesota and Arizona Bills Aim to Let Developers Skirt Apple's In-App Purchase Rules
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If you're selling services, just use the web, the web works fine.
If you say you need an app to compete (not just the web) then you are illustrating the value that the App Store is bringing you.
And just like on a Mac or PC, if you use a web browser on iOS, Apple doesn't take a cut.
It's a hell of a lot more than storage and hosting. Apple collects and remits taxes on my behalf to more than 150 countries and they collect local and federal business taxes and remit them automatically to my government.
They also serve as the commerce front so I don't have to deal with business licensing, app discovery, or translations. Not to mention instant access to 1 billion ios users who have a 50% higher spend rate than Android because of the app store, not in spite of it.
The same app on Android required paying my accountant $10,000/year just to deal with this one app, but for some unknown reason (greed), Google takes the same 30%. I also had a 95% piracy rate, unlike the 5% on ios. If my app went viral, I would also be dealing with copy cats that destroy revenue.
To keep things in perspective, here's a fee chart so you know what's up.
Apple: 15%-30%
Google Play: 30%
Xbox: 30%
Playstation: 30%
Steam: 30%
Epic: 12%
Microsoft Windows Store: 5%
movie distributors: 30%
retailers: up to 60%
Amazon: up to 45%
eBay: 15%
If Target owned New York City, that would be completely reasonable because it would be their property.
I don't understand why everybody keeps acting like ios is a public platform that belongs to the people. It's private property and you don't have a right to make demands. If you don't like the fees or the app store or how things are run, there's the door.
Articles like this just prove one thing... The government is way too involved in everyone's life now.
We need to go back to the days where the government focused on its own job instead of micromanaging everyone. The government can't even do it's own job anymore. The government is here to establish ground rules for society and manage our tax dollars appropriately, not to overreach with everything. This here is a classic example of overreaching.
I'm trying not to get too political with here but this bill is ridiculous and another classic example of overreach. It's not the government's job to sidestep Apple's operations for them. Don't like Apple's policies? Don't develop for them or use their products... It's that simple.
We need to go back to the days where the government focused on its own job instead of micromanaging everyone. The government can't even do it's own job anymore. The government is here to establish ground rules for society and manage our tax dollars appropriately, not to overreach with everything. This here is a classic example of overreaching.
I'm trying not to get too political with here but this bill is ridiculous and another classic example of overreach. It's not the government's job to sidestep Apple's operations for them. Don't like Apple's policies? Don't develop for them or use their products... It's that simple.
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You don't have the right to do as you please because you own the property, you have operate within the confines of what is deemed legal.
The house Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee is proposing new law to govern this. The current 130 year old Antitrust law is inadequate to deal with the likes of Facebook/Google/Apple
Today what apple is doing is legal, thanks for pointing that out.
What gets passed, how much of it gets passed, how watered down it is if it gets passed is up in the air. Don’t assume any of it will get passed.
There's always a line both the government and the property owner shouldn't cross. Unfortunately neither ever know where the line is.
My apartment landlord thinks they can do whatever they want. Argue with the maintenance guy? You're evicted. Forget that you're the customer and shouldn't be able to get evicted because of that... You're just gone. Maybe the maintenance guy should be fired for arguing with the customer? Nah, doesn't happen.
The government thinks they can do whatever the want even though the citizens are supposed to run it. Apple doesn't have a monopoly for app stores... There is the Play Store, Amazon Store, and Apple Store. If you want to develop for someone else because you don't like Apple's policies? Then you're free to leave and develop for just Google.
But if I buy my stove at Walmart, I can still buy my food wherever I want. If my neighbor is selling tomatoes, she doesn't have to sell them to me through Walmart. I don't have to pay an extra 30% to Walmart just because I bought my stove there.
Walmart has store expenses for your bread because their store is the only place you are allowed to buy it.
It isn't that simple, duoplolies like the one Apple and Google have in the mobile space have huge influence over other businesses they have the power to hobble services that compete with their own.
The smartphone market isn't a duopoly, there must be a hundred cell phone vendors. Apple and google are not competitors in the main sphere of business. Where they intersect is both write software.
Sure, sitting on hundreds of billions gives Apple a lot of leeway, but they would have to be a reckless corporation to use their position to sink competitors. There are many companies that have the power to have a huge influence over their competitors. Those companies that use that power negatively usually gets what coming to them.
Then I guess Amazon better start expanding their phone/tablet options to better compete with Google and Apple. Now you'll have three competitors.
Apple doesn't provide *just* storage and hosting. And I'm saddened that you even think that...
You're forgetting that Apple is providing and supporting the entire platform. There wouldn't be an iOS App Store if it wasn't for Apple.
And they provide the tools for anyone to create apps and make money. And speaking of money... Apple handles all the transactions... including international taxes and credit card fees.
So you might call it a "magic beans" fee... but you're actually getting A LOT for that fee. And certainly less headaches.
Here's a list of things Apple provides... from user farewelwilliams on MacRumors:
- we developers get up to 1 petabyte of user storage via CloudKit 100% free. Bear notes app does this and they manage 0 servers for their subscription-paid users.
- we could submit 1000 app and app updates in a year which translates to Apple paying about 1000 man-hours worth of paychecks at about $30/hr or ~$30k for app review
- we have free access to using Apple Maps instead of paying Google tons of money to use their mapping API keys (for those high volume users). this saves Yelp and Facebook a ton of money as well as small developers.
- we get many more new features every single year via the SDK compared to Android (like ARKit, Core ML, SwiftUI, Vision, etc... just to name a few).
- we get global distribution for free (including China, you know, where Google Play doesn't exist. also developers generally have to setup their own servers in China because of the great firewall, but if you used CloudKit, it just works without any extra setup).
- we get app store curated editorial with a chance to reach front page in front of 500 million customers a week.
- we have no credit card fees or international taxes to worry about
- Apple provides support to customers asking for refund for an app and app store support in general
- Testflight service is free (for public and private testing)
- app store automatically creates many different binaries of our app and distributes device-optimized versions to each customer. a 1 gigabyte app with many different permutations of versions across hundreds of servers around the world means Apple is hosting about several terabytes in the cloud for us from one single app
- push notifications/push notification sandbox servers
- Web SDK version of cloudkit/mapkit so that you can use it for a web version of your app
- Apple sign in
- Mac notarization service which improves trust by the user for downloading an app from the web
- yearly major releases of Xcode with new features
- analytics dashboard and crash reporting
- and the list goes on and on.
You know, it's almost cute when people bring that line up. It's a nice attempt at confusing two entirely different issues. We're not talking about a phone monopoly. What we're talking about is an app distribution monopoly.
I have asked this question over and over and nobody has ever given me an answer to it:
1. Where can I get apps for my Android devices?
2. Where can I get apps for my iOS devices?
First, when you do that, it first presents the regular Apple ID screen, and then after a few seconds it transfers over to the Subscriptions view. My network connection isn’t the greatest, but it’s not that slow.
Plus, most apps don’t have most — if any — of their settings in the Settings app (except for privacy authorizations, which are also available elsewhere in the Settings app). Facebook, for example, has exactly two app settings in the Settings app — toggles for HD uploads for photos and HD uploads for videos. Of course, the Facebook app uses dozens more settings than that; they’re just in the app itself.
Again, not the first place most users would look.
Here's my thinking.
App Store profits is derived from two areas. The cost of running the App Store (which doesn't change, because the number of developers is assumed to be fairly constant), and the revenue from games and IAPs (which is variable in nature). We also know that about 85% of developers pay next to no money (in that their revenue has a negligible impact on App Store numbers, which is why Apple is willing to reduce their cut from 30% to 15%).
As such, reducing the App Store cut to 15% for everyone would result in gross margins decreasing by way more than 15%, because your costs don't change.
Apple's App Store revenue was estimated to be about $64 billion in 2020. This is close enough to Neil Cybart's own estimates, so we will roll with that. He also estimates that the App Store has around 40% gross margins. This is because Apple has margins of about 65% for services. This includes the money from Google (which is basically pure profit), and more lucrative ones like iCloud and AppleCare. So App Store margins would be lower to balance out.
Also,
Apple's App Store had gross sales around $64 billion last year and it's growing strongly again
The money that Apple makes from its App Store has become a flash point for critics of Apple that argue it has too much power.
I am not sure how many iOS developers there are. Let's go out on a limb and assume about 10 million of them actively develop for iOS. That's $1 billion a year, basically a rounding error here.
At 30%, Apple's own cut is about $19 billion (or 20 billion with developer fees). If we reduce it to 15%, Apple's cut gets reduced to about $10 billion, a 50% reduction. Assume 40% margins, Apple's costs are 11-12 billion, while their profits are about 7-7.6 billion.
So you can see that if Apple were to reduce their App Store cut to 15%, my estimates show that the App Store would effectively be run at a loss, which in turn means that Apple would be effectively subsidising it using profits from elsewhere. To break even, we take (12/64*100%) which gives us 18.75%.
TL;DR - 20% is the break-even point for the iOS App Store to be self-sustaining.
You see what would happen if developers were able to bypass iTunes and use their own payment system. Apple's earnings from the App Store would basically evaporate, and the money from developers don't even come close to covering the $11-12 billion necessary for operating costs, unless you tell me there are more than 100 million developers on iOS. The other option is to get each developer to pay $1000 a year, but this would massively disadvantage the smaller indie developers. Larger companies like Hey can easily take the hit, which is why they are the ones who ought to be paying that 30% of earnings to Apple (which gets reduced to 15% from the second year onwards).
It's not about equality, but equity. The App Store helps put every developer on an even playing field, which you lose the moment the App Store is opened up.
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I don’t know why I keep having to say this, but it’s obscure in that it “may not be common knowledge.” It’s not immediately obvious, and the immediately obvious path is to go to the app where you started the subscription. It shouldn’t take “a couple minutes” or any “logic.” If your UI requires thought from the user, reconsider your UI.
Yes, you can link to the account subscriptions page from an app — using a URL that can change at Apple’s whim (and has changed before), which can then render said link useless. The page you see when opening that link lists all active subscriptions, including those unrelated to the referring app. It’s an unnecessary added step, and the sluggish, non-native UI of the Subscriptions screen is a pain within itself. (It’s better than it used to be, but still awful.)
Here is my groundbreaking UI concept:
- Open the app where the subscription was started.
- Open the app’s settings.
- At the top, there is a “Cancel Subscription” button. A user wishing to cancel their subscription can press that.
- The user would then have an opportunity to either confirm or cancel the cancellation with a message indicating the date their subscription is active through.
- There is no step 5.
Take a look at the PeopleSoft case. You try to define the market as App distribution for iOS and that is your problem. The minimum relevant market is app distribution for mobile phones (and it might even be app distribution for phones, computers, tablets and gaming devices).
No, they give you an answer and you do not like it.
Many places including web apps.
The App Store and Web Apps. Again, both of those are one market. Just as there is no iPhone 12 Pro market even though there are applications that can only run on the 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max.
From a functional standpoint Android, Android OSP, iOS devices, and Linux phones are all the same. Any one can replace the other.
Fortnite has half a billion installations, every one of which required an initial download of 2 (mobile) to 90 (earlier PC versions) GB of data from their game servers. Then there are the updates, which can be several GBs. On top of that the game itself requires a massive infrastructure serving millions of players every day, about 30-50 billion hours in the past year at 50-100 MB per hour. They've served more data than Apple in the entire history of the mobile App Store, so I guess the answer to your question is: They don't plan to. They have done it already. Next stupid question?
You can also create a shortcut to access your subscriptions page directly.
App Store: Subscriptions
www.icloud.com
Then link it to siri.
The Shortcuts app is not a solution to deliberately poor UI, especially when installing third-party shortcuts requires one to enable the “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts” setting in the Settings app if they haven’t already done so, and then confirm with a huge red “Add Untrusted Shortcut” button.
Comical.
Step 5: When the user navigates to the app's settings again, the status (canceled + remaining through date) is shown along with a button to reactivate the subscription.
I created a shortcut to be able to quickly view my subscriptions via Siri, but that’s more for my own cheap thrill.
I personally don’t feel it’s any better to mange an app’s subscription directly via said app, because it assumes the user is able to recall every single subscription he has. It makes more sense to have all my subscriptions consolidated in one page, and my guess is that most people aren’t actively monitoring their subscriptions on daily basis the same way they monitor stock prices (since most subs are either monthly or yearly basis), so there is no need to dedicate a standalone tab to it.
As it stands, it’s 3 taps (App Store->purchases->subscriptions), which does not strike me as poor UI.
It's probably because some people have been providing bad analogies/comparisons.
Here it goes...
Walmart and Amazon provide their own processing and management systems with rules and limits for customers as well as sellers. As a customer, that means I can't use Apple Pay at Walmart -- related, though a discussion for another thread. If I were a seller, I need to link to or sign-up for a Payoneer account -- which doesn't appear to cost anything. Nevertheless, there are seller-related fees. One common to both Walmart and Amazon is a "referral fee." Essentially, what Apple charges except Amazon and Walmart vary the percentage based on product category. These percentages are generally less than Apple's, Google's, etc but that's also because those fees are not all encompassing like the former.
Walmart Marketplace Seller Fees: A Quick Breakdown
There is no annual fee to sell on Walmart Marketplace. Instead, Walmart charges a referral fee for each item sold. Here's how it works.
www.8thandwalton.com
Amazon Seller Fees 2024 - The Cost of Selling on Amazon
Explore the different types of fees associated with selling on Amazon. Understand listing fees, subscription costs & fulfillment charges.
www.repricerexpress.com
How Do Walmart Marketplace Payments Work?
The Walmart marketplace typically pays sellers every 14 days. But, there's a little more to it than that. This is how Walmart payouts work and how you can get paid early.
www.payability.com
Should others, government or not, step in and forcibly dictate/alter these fees? Do they have a right to?
But Amazon and Walmart are making billions from these fees! They make as much or more than the product provider but all they do is host the website, pay the credit card processing fee, provide a seller portal and a few other tools. How much can that really cost?
Sound familiar?
The point is Apple does make a profit on their fee(s), and they're allowed to. Additionally, the market/industry allows it -- put simply. Are their valid ethical criticism? Yes. However, it's also important to remind that the other companies, e.g., Epic, in the headlines about this are also being extremely well compensated financially by their customers, including possibly unethical ways. Basically, the scene/situation is greed vs. greed not good vs. evil or right vs. wrong.