261–270 of 671 posts
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So on Jan 1st every year your commission would suddenly fall from 30% to 15%, until you hit $1M and it jumps back up to 30%? That seems rather arbitrary.
You’ll probably find the actual rules even more arbitrary. In year 2, your January sales will still pay a 30% commission if you hit $1M the prior year.
I just feel that there's always this discussion about "X% isn't fair because $reason" (insert Apple's market cap, free cash flow, stock price, etc.) But what I'm yet to see is any kind of mindful analysis of what a "fair" fee is without the emotion attached to the discussion.
As a point of reference, HumbleBundle charges 5% for the Humble payment widget. They handle hosting your data, all the payment systems for taking payments from most of the world, handling chargebacks on your behalf etc etc.
If you want to sell your game on the Humble Store on the other hand, well then they take a 25% cut. That’s the value in being able to deliver a customer.
Apple’s fixed 30% cut is effectively saying: our brand is more important than yours in delivering customers to your App. The imprinteur of being in our App Store and bringing you a customer is worth 30% of your income. Your ability to deliver your own customers is irrelevant; we’re taking 30% either way. Unsurprisingly this sticks in the craw of some companies.
The fact that Apple’s systems make it almost impossible to effectively communicate with your own customer is an even bigger problem for a customer-focused company who’s income & branding depend on a close relationship with their customers: those companies are completely stuffed by the Apple App model & are the reason the App Store has not lead to the explosion of innovation some of us expected - it’s just not possible for a company to sustain themselves outside a very narrow set of income generation patterns.
That will lead to some wonky behaviors.
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I recently was in contact with someone who has written a menu-bar app to monitor Tesla Powerwall status. It's in the Mac App Store already -- but NOT the latest version, because Apple suddenly decided that they wanted written proof that accessing the Powerwall APIs was allowed (from whom?! It's MY hardware!). Apple will not allow the dev to update his Mac App in the MAS; yet they approved & continue to leave the orig…
he cannot withdraw the older version of the software from the app store? that is weird.
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At least review process is better than Google's because when we rejected on Play Store we can't get any feedback from Google. They send a template email which says the "problem maybe A or B, check what you have changed". Apple provides screenshots and human written explanation on rejection. I have even talked on the phone with review team several times to discuss the problem. Yes, it sucks that the update may be reje…
Feels a bit like whataboutism. Especially since Apple is worse than Google now.
Care to elaborate on that statement?
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It's along the same lines of what Microsoft did when they were being investigated as a monopoly: throw a bone to smaller developers (or in Microsoft's case, kids in school) which actually just grows their market share (in Microsoft's case, kids learn to use Microsoft products and take that to work, in Apple's case, more devs see profitability in the Mac garden). > Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive ele…
Should that work in that way on desktop also? With Microsoft/Apple being free to restrict apps to their store only, and taking a cut of every transaction made outside the browser? If not, what's the difference with phones/tablets?
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Appoogle are a duopoly. You can’t get significant sales on mobile phones without going through their respective App Stores, which both charge 30%. What a coincidence! Your comparisons with book publishers are specious: if I write a book today I can go to any of a number of publishers, none of whom have any kind of control over access to readers. Or I can even self-publish and sell direct. Jailbreaking is a complete i…
Google literally has multiple alternative app stores currently active.
I'm sure you can release niche apps on these stores, but the general market isn't moving away from the Play Store any time soon, and that's where the money is.
I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part. They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the rig…
It's along the same lines of what Microsoft did when they were being investigated as a monopoly: throw a bone to smaller developers (or in Microsoft's case, kids in school) which actually just grows their market share (in Microsoft's case, kids learn to use Microsoft products and take that to work, in Apple's case, more devs see profitability in the Mac garden). > Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive ele…
> Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute.
actually isn't always true - especially when it hurts consumers. of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does. remember that private doesn't mean unregulated.
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When Apple added Screen Time, they banned other competing apps.
If I recall correctly, the apps they banned were doing things like abusing the VPN function to capture all traffic from the phone, and using that as their mechanism for blocking certain websites (or maybe it was MDM they were abusing...?). It wasn't a simple matter of "Apple releases product that does X, then bans all products that do X from the App Store;" the products they banned had to use some seriously sketchy t…
Apple clearly thought they were valuable enough to customers to keep around before the release of Screen Time, even with the sketchy method they had to use.
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Appoogle are a duopoly. You can’t get significant sales on mobile phones without going through their respective App Stores, which both charge 30%. What a coincidence! Your comparisons with book publishers are specious: if I write a book today I can go to any of a number of publishers, none of whom have any kind of control over access to readers. Or I can even self-publish and sell direct. Jailbreaking is a complete i…
Google literally has multiple alternative app stores currently active.
What happens to a phone manufacturer who ships a phone with an alternate App store?