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…
Cynical is an understatement, this is pure evil. Locking in developers to only use their AppStore and not anything else, taking %15 of small businesses revenue for payment processing, and all this in the middle of a pandemic and still taking credit for being "generous" and "industry leading". All this while the average payment processor take around %3. And don't forget the reason they're doing it is to diffuse critic…
If you sell 100 installs on the App Store as a small developer. How many would you sell if there wasn’t an App Store? You’d have to advertise — people just don’t show up at your website. PPC is expensive. And you have to learn how to do it. It’s hard for someone that doesn’t spend their time learning about PPC. It’s hard to get good ROIs even when you do know what you are doing. If you spend $0.50 per click and you sell your app for $3, and you have a 25% conversion rate (which is extremely high,) how much did it cost you to get that sale?
Then once they do get to your website, they have to pay. Ok, 2.9% + $0.30. Now they have to securely download the app. Where is your app hosted? Apparently that’s free and doesn’t cost you anything? Who maintains that system? How pays for that electricity? And updates? And security? Apparently all of that is free and takes zero time?
Chargeback? Uh oh. That’s a $20 fee while you have to fight and document the dispute. Maybe that takes 20 minutes, but more like 45 minutes by the time you write the challenge letter. Digital products, especially games, have a high rate of fraud compared to many industries.
Then there are sales taxes. Are you collecting and remitting the precise amounts to the various jurisdictions where you are selling? How about a sales tax permit? Do you have that?
And trust? I’ll buy an App Store app, but installing an app from some random developer without any assurances I am not installing something nefarious?
If you sold 200 downloads from your website but 300 downloads from the App Store but pay the 15-30%. What makes you more money?
Have you ever sold a product to a retail store? A $10 product in a retail store is purchased from the manufacturer at $5. If there is a distributor involved, that $10 product is purchased from the manufacturer at $2.50. Physical products are obviously different than digital, but the product distribution model for any product has markup across the chain. A manufacturer selling DTC has to have the infrastructure to sell to consumers, thus they aren’t selling at $2.50 anymore. Shipping 100 cases of a product to a distributor is a lot less work than shipping that same volume to individual customers. If you think of the App Store as a distributor — 30% is a bargain.
I think that many app developers don’t realize what things actually cost — when they do, they’d quickly realize they make far more money from the App Store than they would make selling it directly.