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Everyone in this equation is to some extent greedy. Why we should call it out for developers but not Apple, or vice versa, is not really clear.

Either we judge people's motivations or not, but we can't have it both ways.
Sure we can have it one way: apples way. Dev entered into a voluntary agreement with apple. Dev agrees to the t&c. Dev profits, dev gets greedy.
 
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Sure we can have it one way: apples way. Dev entered into a voluntary agreement with apple. Dev agrees to the t&c. Dev profits, dev gets greedy.
Again, dominant position and ability to enforce certain policies because you either agree to unfavourable conditions or you don't exist. If you think that this is even and balanced relationship then I'm beyond speachless...
 
Again, dominant position and ability to enforce certain policies because you either agree to unfavourable conditions or you don't exist. If you think that this is even and balanced relationship then I'm beyond speachless...
I’m beyond speechless that you believe that party a who wants to enter into a contract with party b wants to have party b write a contract that party a believes is fair and balanced. There is probably no precedent for that. Nor has apple found to be guilty in a court of law of any charge related to dominant position.
 
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Sure. How much would those devs be without the App Store? It’s not chicken or egg. It’s apples app store and those devs opted in and signed the T&C. After a taste of success some got greedy. They could certainly opt out of their agreement with Apple.
They had a choice? With a walled garden? There are plenty of developers who had already made a name for themselves before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye but they still have to pay the Apple tax because sideloading is verboten.

Somehow, before appstores were a thing, people seemed quite adept at hunting out and finding software for their computers. Thanks to magazines with cover floppy/CD samplers, online news sites and trackers like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, finding new software was hardly hard work and word got around very quickly.
 
They had a choice? With a walled garden? There are plenty of developers who had already made a name for themselves before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye but they still have to pay the Apple tax because sideloading is verboten.

Somehow, before appstores were a thing, people seemed quite adept at hunting out and finding software for their computers. Thanks to magazines with cover floppy/CD samplers, online news sites and trackers like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, finding new software was hardly hard work and word got around very quickly.
Whereby "quite adept" you mean a small fraction of the people that use smartphones today installing a small fraction of the number of apps they use on their phone today while dealing with common malware infestations. I think you forget how bad things were in the before times. :)
 
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They had a choice? With a walled garden? There are plenty of developers who had already made a name for themselves before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye but they still have to pay the Apple tax because sideloading is verboten.
Sure, remember whose platform it is. It’s apples platform… not yours and not mine. When you bought the iPhone you had 14 days to return it if it didn’t function they way you wanted.
Somehow, before appstores were a thing, people seemed quite adept at hunting out and finding software for their computers. Thanks to magazines with cover floppy/CD samplers, online news sites and trackers like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, finding new software was hardly hard work and word got around very quickly.
Sure and devs didn’t have to enter into a voluntary agreement with apple regarding the App Store. For $99 and signing the t&c apple provides significant infrastructure without any distribution or accounting to worry about.

It just feels this conversation may have been had already in multiple threads by multiple posters.
 
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Whereby "quite adept" you mean a small fraction of the people that use smartphones today installing a small fraction of the number of apps they use on their phone today while dealing with common malware infestations. I think you forget how bad things were in the before times. :)
I hated those times. Even if iOS were to allow sideloading I would still stick to the App Store and signed apps.
 
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Sure, remember whose platform it is. It’s apples platform… not yours and not mine. When you bought the iPhone you had 14 days to return it if it didn’t function they way you wanted.

Sure and devs didn’t have to enter into a voluntary agreement with apple regarding the App Store. For $99 and signing the t&c apple provides significant infrastructure without any distribution or accounting to worry about.

It just feels this conversation may have been had already in multiple threads by multiple posters.

It seems to me no matter what terms Apple set, there will always be developers and others crying foul. If the commission were 20%, you'd probably have people complaining saying it should only be 10%, etc.
 
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Your comment just reminded me of the court case involving Dutch dating apps.

Apple has made it very clear that they don't consider those fees to be distribution fees, but rather platform fees. This means that even if third party app stores are allowed on iOS one day, Apple is still within their right to charge these App Store owners 27% of revenue (or whatever cut Apple feels entitled to).

Whether this will ultimately hold up to the numerous lawsuits that will surely ensue is up for debate, but suffice to say, Apple has had years to plan for the eventuality that their walled garden gets cracked open, and people hoping to create profitable 3rd party app stores are going to be disappointed.
This reminds me of what the console makers do. It doesn’t matter where I buy my games. SONY will get its cut.
 
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OK, correct me if I am wrong.
The App Store is a digital market place and has many overheads, servers, staff from admin to coders, buildings etc.
In other words, both capital and operating expenses. It must have a revenue stream and I do not think that can be argued. Google also charges up to 30% and M$ to 15%.
So all digital market places charge, surely the issue should be about the percentage, not about the payment its self.
I have no idea what it costs Apple to maintain their App store but it is most likely not inconsiderable. Before anyone go on ad on about greed and profit, it might be wise to justify the comments with actual facts and find out what the balance is first.
 
5% vs 30% ..
Another example perhaps? Epic did not remove the purchase fees from IAP's for their v-bucks when they decided to try and allow folk to buy direct from within the app, If I remember right they still charged around 15%. deduct what we now know is a 3% transaction fee and they were still making an additional 12% for buying from them direct.

They determine the "value" of their funny money and "Skins" in the first place. So a 112% profit and as much profit as they want depending on how they decide the exchange rate value of V-bucks to real money.
 
Nothing stopping any dev from setting up a website and going from there and even linking to their app.
There's nothing stopping developers from doing a web app (remember those? they still work!). There's nothing stopping a developer from posting source code for their apps on GitHub, and letting anybody (with a Mac) download and run them on their iOS device. If they don't like Apple's app store, they can figure out their own way to charge for usage of their apps via these deployment methods.
 
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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 provide massive storefront and app hosting bandwidth. The Facebook app is 296.3 MB according to the App Store, and that app sometimes has multiple updates a week.

Supposedly 80% of Facebook users access the service exclusively from the mobile app. Even with compressed deltas this is a monstrous amount of data transfer.

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).

Facebook has over two billion active monthly users of their mobile apps based on that 80% stat above. Even if they got 90% compressed deltas for updates, my napkin math says two billion users at 6 updates a month of a 300 MB app would still be on the order of hundreds of petabytes of data a month.

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.
It's not hosting. Its a marketplace.

They provide technical services like hosting and SDKs for sure, but they created a marketplace. If you go into a retail store and someone is trying to sell you to switch your phone provider or internet provider, you better believe that retail store is getting a cut of that service revenue. In fact, I've heard some telcos have been willing to go break-even for the first year for long-term customer acquisitions.

It's funny we never hear people talking about Google's trillion dollar valuation and ad business and say "I don't get how they justify charging so much - they are charging me tens of thousands of dollars just injecting my ad copy into search results and web pages. I could do that with perl."
 
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The guy made a gazillion of dollars because Apple and he complains. I bet he will not complain if Apple offers to buy his app. What an asshole. BTW, I will never use that app.
 
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Creator written/video/audio content feels in the same category as non-platform content and physical goods to me. It feels like rent seeking. Ultimately these sorts of decisions on the App Store are what will lead it to be regulated by governments. Maybe a better compromise is Apple taking only a cut of the service fee potion the app charges the creator or a much lower fee for certain types of content. For instance 5% should be low enough for pretty much any licensing model of this type of content.
 
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Creator written/video/audio content feels in the same category as non-platform content and physical goods to me. It feels like rent seeking. Ultimately these sorts of decisions on the App Store are what will lead it to be regulated by governments. Maybe a better compromise is Apple taking only a cut of the service fee potion the app charges the creator or a much lower fee for certain types of content. For instance 5% should be low enough for pretty much any licensing model of this type of content.
Do stock photo sites, or other content sites allow creators to keep more than even 50% of the listed price? (most are closer to 15%)

Would the sale have taken place at all if it were not for a simple, single click, impulse purchase via IAP?

Would there have been many abandoned carts if those customers had been redirected to a website to enter their credit card details instead?

In the case of Telegram, they only charge 5% comission, you propose less than .05% per transaction goes to Apple?

It appears that there is many more users of telegram on Android than iOS, but I'd guess alot of the paying ones are on Apple devices which will not be buying subscriptions to content on the platform.

The only losers in this are content creators, and they did not have a say in this mess. I'd take a wild stab in the dark that many would have either been happy to recieve 70% of sales vs 0% or have the App increase the sale price on Apple devices rather than lose those subscribers entirely.
 
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They had a choice? With a walled garden? There are plenty of developers who had already made a name for themselves before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye but they still have to pay the Apple tax because sideloading is verboten.

Somehow, before appstores were a thing, people seemed quite adept at hunting out and finding software for their computers. Thanks to magazines with cover floppy/CD samplers, online news sites and trackers like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, finding new software was hardly hard work and word got around very quickly.
No, there’s a difference between the Mac, and the iPhone. Two different platforms. This discussion is about the iPhone App Store and Telegram.
 
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Creator written/video/audio content feels in the same category as non-platform content and physical goods to me. It feels like rent seeking. Ultimately these sorts of decisions on the App Store are what will lead it to be regulated by governments. Maybe a better compromise is Apple taking only a cut of the service fee potion the app charges the creator or a much lower fee for certain types of content. For instance 5% should be low enough for pretty much any licensing model of this type of content.
you fail to understand that lowering the commission will just massively increase the developer's overall bill don't be Nieve and think that all the services included in that percentage are not more expensive 3rd party than via Apple.
 
No, there’s a difference between the Mac, and the iPhone. Two different platforms. This discussion is about the iPhone App Store and Telegram.
Try to follow the point I was making before gatekeeping. Thanks.
 
Try to follow the post. We’re talking about the iPhone and the App Store. Stay on topic.
I was, if you even bothered to read. You're just being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. Congrats on your success.
 
They provide massive storefront and app hosting bandwidth. The Facebook app is 296.3 MB according to the App Store, and that app sometimes has multiple updates a week.

Supposedly 80% of Facebook users access the service exclusively from the mobile app. Even with compressed deltas this is a monstrous amount of data transfer.



Facebook has over two billion active monthly users of their mobile apps based on that 80% stat above. Even if they got 90% compressed deltas for updates, my napkin math says two billion users at 6 updates a month of a 300 MB app would still be on the order of hundreds of petabytes of data a month.


It's not hosting. Its a marketplace.

They provide technical services like hosting and SDKs for sure, but they created a marketplace. If you go into a retail store and someone is trying to sell you to switch your phone provider or internet provider, you better believe that retail store is getting a cut of that service revenue. In fact, I've heard some telcos have been willing to go break-even for the first year for long-term customer acquisitions.

It's funny we never hear people talking about Google's trillion dollar valuation and ad business and say "I don't get how they justify charging so much - they are charging me tens of thousands of dollars just injecting my ad copy into search results and web pages. I could do that with perl."
But that telco doesn’t get a cut with every other digital asset you buy using that phone you purchased from them. Apple is taking ongoing revenue from every possible digital asset in perpetuity after the sale of the major asset has been done in the form of a tax that only impedes the digital businesses that actually created the novel valie. And they don’t allow alternatives to compete in the software world on their device to drive the prices down on their SDKs etc to really see how valuable they are
 
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