When there's a duopoly in smartphone OS market, being the only marketplace on the majority platform doesn't really help this case.
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Telegram CEO Accuses Apple of Destroying Dreams and Crushing Entrepreneurs
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Don't equate Apple's commission to a transaction fee, they are not one and the same. The 15-30% is what the developer shares with Apple. Apple takes care of transaction processing, taxes in every jurisdiction and cuts the developer a "cheque" at the end of the billing period.
You bought an iPhone knowing the rules. Most users want the simplicity of the App Store. They have proven that buy buying 95% of all apps through either the App Store or Google Play Store.
Per App Store rules, you can use your credit card directly (and bypass Apple's payment system) on apps that deliver physical goods or services - like Amazon or food delivery apps. You can't use the credit card directly for digital goods like music on Spotify, videos on Netflix, and so on and you have to use Apple's payment system for those.
I would argue that for games that feature IAPs at least, prices will stay the same regardless of whether there is a 30% App Store cut or not.
This is because these IAPs do not have any marginal cost at all, and are priced to maximise revenue. This is also why I had little sympathy for Epic when Apple blocked Fortnite from the App Store, not necessarily because I agreed with Apple, but because I felt that Epic was the wrong person to fight this sort of battle.
It was clear right from the start that Epic had started the fight, rather than being some victimised developer. Their goal was always to be able to launch their own App Store on iOS, where they can host their own apps while also charging other developers a fee to host theirs. This, to me, made the case lose a lot of its legitimacy. You are not battling for survival. You are fighting to wrest control of the App Store away from Apple, and I am not sure Epic will be a better steward in this scenario.
Not to mention, consumers don’t actually dislike closed, sandbox app ecosystems, and they don’t care about a 30% fee they will never see. Plus the consumer pressure Epic hoped would cause Apple to capitulate never materialised.
And as Apple proceeds to win each legal battle, they feel emboldened by each victory and double down on their practices. Apple will have no incentive to make concessions to developers because its legal victory will stand as a symbol of its unassailable authority on iOS.
But to answer your original question, yes, I believe that developers would have simply absorbed the difference for gems and IAPs.
Crushing? Results show iOS is the most profitable choice for developers. They need some cheese with that whine.
If Apple is soo hell-bent on security then why doesn't Apple put a stop to downloading outside the Mac App store?
What if Apple never created the App Store or the iPhone to begin with? Count your blessings and shutup! Many of you third party devs just want this to become the next cesspool for porn and all the other crap. You have 2 billion on Android go make a life there if the App Store is not meeting your needs.
Then the iPhone would have probably remained a pretty decent product with a far smaller user base and way more competition.
Apple gave developers a huge opportunity, but the apps really made the iPhone. Without them Apple would not be what it is today.
Even now, and I'm definitely not saying this is likely, it would probably only take a few big companies pulling their services to severely tank the platform.
If the App Store had come with the first Mac, rather than be introduced long after, I believe that's what Apple would likely have done.
What if apple had a free version of their app store. Free of apples evil protection and guards. Then we could download every app we want. Like takbok, faceboink, telefram, sellapan or other great ones. I mean if you dont want to pay for that protection, you shouldn’t have to. And apple would be free of worry. Every app would just come with a warning pop up so people know that apple isn’t taking their free will from them. Let’s make it happen!!!
Amazon runs their own servers and platform. The service works without apple and they are not dependent on Apple to find customers. Their app is just for convenience. These complainers want to extract customers Apple worked to acquire and build trust with at the same time they don’t have their own platform and servers so their app working depends 75-80% on Apple tech.
That’s the difference.
Apple's requirements for the last 13 years:
1) requires if you sell goods and services consumed within your app (or offer them via other options like a subscription), that you offer people to play for them with in-app purchases
2) In-app purchasing is the only option offered in-app - you don't for instance give the option to take a credit card directly, or a link to external payments (possibly advertising that you charge a slightly lower price on your website).
This, along with apps that cost money up-front, is the revenue model for the App Store. The preference is to force apps to take money in-app in certain ways through Apple's service, so they don't need to do other things like service commissions. Where they have been forced to do so by local regulations, they have wound up mandating revenue shares instead.
There are exceptions, which have grown over time. Reader apps that play/view certain kinds of media could skip in-app purchase, and recently could offer external linking instead of in-app purchasing.
Enterprise apps where someone purchases services on your behalf also weren't covered.
Finally, there is a tvOS media partnership program that a few companies have qualified for and opted into. This lets you use billing on an existing account, as long as you do offer sign-up and payment for services via in-app purchasing if someone does not have an account.
And of course, there's no requirement that prevents you from taking payment for anything outside the app - from kindle book purchases to skin packs in fortnight back in the day. The friction is that Apple's cut is a big slice of an in-app purchase, and the convenience means a good portion of people use that option. I suspect there has been more than one service caught by surprise by how actively people seek to have the subscription managed by Apple for ease of cancelation.
Notably, Apple doesn't negotiate better rates with large companies like Microsoft or Epic - so they may wind up putting tons of money into the system, while apps which do not sell services (like Facebook) consume a lot of hosting (compute and bandwidth) as well as app review without putting any money in - 30% of zero is zero.
Your question about amazon is of course rather broad, as they have many apps, but I'll do a run-down:
1. Kindle is a reader app for ebooks, and can choose to not offer in app purchasing. More recently they may have added a link to purchase directly from Amazon - in the past, the Kindle app just had no storefront feature, and you would go to Amazon's site. Other apps like Audible are in the same bucket.
2. The main Amazon app sells real-world goods and services, not items consumed in-app. Because of this, they aren't just excluded from a requirement to use in-app purchasing, they actually are forbidden to do so.
3. The Amazon Video app falls under the media partnership program, so you can actually purchase premium movies if you are signed into an existing amazon account. If you do not have an existing account, there is an option to sign up for a new one, which sets the prime subscription and any video purchases to use in-app purchasing. I haven't tried to sign up for this program so I don't know the limitations - for instance, what Amazon is allowed to do if the credit card has a hold or is expired.
What hosting does Apple do for apps like Facebook, or any cloud enabled app that’s able to build their cloud outside of apple services, like AWS, GCP, Azure?
They pretty much only host the binary to install the app, and that size is small. Anyone that has done AdHoc installation knows that hosting an app on a website for people to install is cheap, and a nearly one time bandwidth cost when users download and update - not an ongoing expense except the cheap hosting for a tiny binary (GBs at most). People saying a variable 30% commission on all digital sales is to pay for Apple hosting is bonkers to me as it’s grossly well in excess of those costs.
LOL, ensuring profiteering is nearer the truth
Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams
The App Store has a scam problem
www.theverge.com
Nah. Jobs didn't even want the App Store on iOS initially.
Some people really just have no idea how this kind of software is built and maintained.
It absolutely would. Why do you think Facebook get away with what they do? No Instagram? No Whatsapp? Apple couldn't risk that.
That's nonsense. There is no difference between what Amazon do and what Telegram, Spotfiy or Epic are doing all of their services are non dependent on Apple.
All are conducting their own marketing, very few people heard of these service the first time through the app store.
They absolutely do have captive markets, and it is not reasonable to expect users to be able to shift platforms readily or easily for every minor abuse of their power position. Monopoly laws have been asleep at the wheel during the digital takeover; they’re everywhere and its only the Tim Cook’s and the super wealthy laughing all the way to the bank at the rest of our expense.
Your point is well taken! It is still true that these monopolies enrich their loaded shareholders at the expense of everyone else with monopolistic business practices.
Wrong. Telegram is a platform, and it will exist even if Apple bans it. Apple is not the world just like the US is not the world.
Apple can go poud sand with its 30% fee.....HOWEVER.....this guy is acting like he is losing money on a feature that cost $0 and is 100% profit. Sounds like someone looking for a soapbox to stand on.
Trillion dollar companies get to be trillion dollar companies from building their own platforms and technology. They may partner with others but they invest in developing their own infrastructure. 25 years ago Apple was nearly bankrupt because they failed to embrace this concept. They changed their focus and now they are worth trillions! Don’t complain about having to pay fees and commissions when your shop is in someone else’s store. For instance, when Apple sets up Apple Shops in Target, Target gets a cut of the revenue they generate.
If telegram was a platform they wouldn’t need Apple or Google play tech to function or rely on their customers to exist. There are two simple ways to tell if a platform is really a platform. Can you access it via a browser or web app they control, or do they have an self contained hardware they’ve developed to access their solution.
If neither of these is true, it’s not a platform, their service lives on someone else’s platform. Apple could easily charge a much higher annual rate just to be on the platform. They could require a significant startup investment to be on the platform.
This is what the bigger companies really want to force Apple into. It would kill off 80% of the App competitors because many small independent developers would be locked out of market.
You build it on third party developers. Without their apps, what is the point of your platform?