$100 / dev is nominal. I am suggesting it only covers up to 1M users. And users beyond that cost either (A) $1 / user / month OR (B) current App Store cut.
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Spotify Submits iOS App Update With Out-of-App Purchase Options
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$100 / dev is nominal. I am suggesting it only covers up to 1M users. And users beyond that cost either (A) $1 / user / month OR (B) current App Store cut.
What do you count as a user? Am I user a if I have installed on a phone that is no longer receiving updates? I have an iPad 2 (still in use) that I use to access the MLB app, which I pay a yearly subscription fee. Would that count? How would Apple even know?
Developers paying per user is too nebulous.
And that yearly fee was priced with the idea that those monetizing their apps would also pay a percentage in addition to the fee. So assuming $99 totally covers the cost is ridiculous. Just the cost of providing Spotify's app to Apple's customers is probably hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Which is why a lot of us are worried the price for the developer membership is going to up significantly if developers are allowed to freeload.
This is a good question. I would probably keep it simple and count any apps installed on any actively used device. Event the apps that have not received any updates for years or even opened for years.
Mind you, the purpose of this $1 / user / year licensing fee is NOT to be the best business choise. It is to comply with laws.
I don't want Apple to have that data. What is installed, after the download, on my iPhone is my business, not theirs. How about a phone that doesn't connect to the net for some time? My brother, for example, spent three months in the desert with his phone in airplane mode.
I already firewall off a lot of Apple's tracking, and I would add this to it as well.
Oh it sucks FAR more than Apple Music.
The developers are not the freeloaders here. Apple is. They get a MASSIVE collection of apps for the iDevice platforms and aren't paying the developers a thing, and on top of that they're extorting the developers for even more money.
Without apps, the iPhone would never have been anything but a niche platform.
Spotify is owned by a whiny man-baby who doesn’t mind screwing the artists financially but wants to complain non-stop about Apple screwing him.
You think Apple does not know what is installed on your device from App Store?
I think you may want to use some Android fork without Google Play store or Google services; not an iPhone.
But the API access cannot be restricted. Without API access you can't run anything on your device
Just to be clear: you buy a smartphone and not a dumbphone. You pay for the OS including several years of upgrade including APIs. It is not a special service from Apple, this is part of any OS.
Apple's narrative "our API development costs billions blabla" does not change the fact that they have been paid for it by selling the device. How often do you want to pay for the same good?
You receive a non-commercial license to use iOS when you buy the phone. That doesn't give developers a license to use those APIs to create and sell applications.
Kind of like how if I buy a copy of Star Wars, that doesn't allow me to make a new Star Wars movie without paying Disney.
You think you could sell something in a physical store without paying a whack of the revenue to the store owners?
You think you could run a concession stall inside a large shop without paying some sort of rent or fee proportionate to your revenue?
Maybe Apple should be forced to allow sideloading and/or alternate App stores - if someone can prove a legal basis - so consumers could choose alternative sources for applications (as in the EU) - but letting people obtain products from the Apple store and then pay someone else is nonsensical, and is letting big players like Spotify and EA games have their cake and eat it. Odds are they'll only pass on a fraction of the savings to customers, and trouser the rest.
Remember that the consoles are sold at a loss with rev shares from game sales making up the loss.
Apple are already making around 40% profit on their hardware and they want more.
As far as I am aware, Nintendo has never sold consoles at a loss, and I think the PS5 has been breakeven for like 4 years now. I don't know about Xbox. And they have other ways to make up that money (first party sales, accessories, subscription services).
And that shouldn't matter anyway. Either 30% for serving a file is outrageous or it's not.
Ummmm don’t you think that Spotify and Netflix are hosting their app on the App Store because Apple makes them
Do so?
I mean look at the existing cloud capacity they both have. They could both easily host their own apps.
Fair enough. I’m not an expert on the console business tbh.
I’ll echo a few people here who have made the excellent point that smart phones are a different case to consoles because practically everyone has one in their pocket and they are general purpose computing platforms at a huge scale, so that need to be treated differently.
Spotify doesn't host their Android app on their site, just the PlayStore so I can't imagine they'd host their iOS one either.
I'm not an expert in this stuff but I asked ChatGPT to estimate (so take that with a massive grain of salt) and this is what it came up with:
Assumptions:
| Factor | Value |
|---|---|
| Spotify mobile users (total) | ~450 million (estimated) |
| iOS share | ~150–180 million users |
| Android share | ~270–300 million users |
| App size (Spotify) | ~100 MB (Android & iOS similar) |
| App updates per user/year | 6–12 (avg. monthly or bi-monthly) |
| CDN bandwidth cost estimate | $0.002–$0.01 per GB |
Cost
| Provider | Users (est.) | Annual Bandwidth | Cost Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 150M | ~120 PB | $250K–$1.2M |
| 300M | ~240 PB | $500K–$2.4M |
Apple already hosts Spotify, they have hosted apps for free since day 1.
Amazons apps have been there for years and years earning Apple zero dollars.
The idea that suddenly this ruling changes everything is ridiculous. If Apple wants to kill their store with hosting fees and other fees they’re welcome to do so. But the more they sabotage their platform the more they undermine their ability to get developers to buy into their next platform.
Spoiler alert: Sometimes. And that isn't a hypothetical. There are already apps that charge more in app than out of app.
I already gave the example of Twitch. If you buy a subscription to a Twitch streamer through the website, it costs $5.99. If you buy the same subscription through the app, it costs $7.99.
The streamer you are subscribed to gets the same dollar amount from each subscription. Twitch gets 40¢ less (though once you take credit card processing fees into account, it's probably close to equivalent). But with the $7.99 subscription, Apple is paid about $2.40.
There is a similar situation with Patreon.
If it wasn’t for app support Apple and Google would likely not have vanquished MS, BlackBerry and Symbian…
So Apple and google owe their own success just as much to the app makers as the app makers do to Apple and Google.
What you suggest would be terrible for Apple. They benefit when devs choose to use their tooling and APIs.
Take away the API lock in by forcing devs to pay for them and you will drive devs to third party APIs that likely work cross platform. This would undermine Apples ability to keep devs on their platform.
Part of why Apple won the smartphone wars was because of the free APIs, throwing that away to chase services revenue is a ridiculous idea.
As an iPhone owner I buy the phone including its OS and of course the APIs are part of it. So I am allowed to use them. The only purpose of OS APIs are to allow access to the phone that now belongs to me. They are there to be used. Without the APIs I wouldn't have bought the phone. It is my f.....g phone and I have paid already for the API. How can someone besides Apple itself argue that I should pay again indirectly through software licences for the API a second time, or actually basically for each App!
So you just cut out the rest of my post and comment based on part of it only?
Which, yes I read it, you intend Apple to waive only for developers that conduct all of their transactions for digital content through Apple.
Which, in effect, amounts to exactly the same as charging a new fee only to developers that use external purchase options.
Which is yet another anticompetitive barrier being put up.
Which couldn’t be more obviously anticompetitive - and an even more egregious violation of the ruling imposed on Apple IMO - when Apple charge it regardless of actual sales facilitated.
I’m going to quote your idea again:
Let’s assume a popular streaming app for iOS has
- 10 million users
- with an average of 2 app installations per user, so…
- 20 million apps installed on active user devices
- (20m - 1m “free” installations) * $1 / user * month = $19m “core garbage fee” per month.
- …which is only charged if the developer offers external purchase options.
👉 Here’s the the thing: the developer may only have 10, or a few hundreds of users having made use of that external purchase option. At which point the developer would have to pay $19m a month for just a few dozen users having bought elsewhere.
👉 It’s an obviously totally disproportionate charge, totally decoupled from any value (“or facilitation of sale”) Apple provide.
👍 Just yet another blatant attempt at malicious compliance.
But yeah, I’d love Apple doing it 😍 I’d grab my popcorn and watch.
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