I don't understand why the App Store, this small "side business" in the grand scheme of things, is something Apple is worth fighting and dying over. It's literally, a small fraction of their revenue, and yet it grabs 80% of the bad PR and is now under investigation and proposed legislation in the US, UK, EU, Korea, and I think Australia. If I'm Apple, shouldn't it be obvious at this point that losing the App Store mo…
- We need to monopolize control over who can publish software for our platforms, so we can enforce our security guidelines.
(This includes banning third-party app stores, emulators, virtualization, alternative browser engines, and all the other fun things Android users chuckle at iPhone users about.)
- Hiring reviewers to check all the apps we ship for problems costs money, so we need to get paid for that review.
- However, we can't just charge developers money for review, as it would be prohibitively expensive and encourage developers to not fix broken software.
(At this point we need to review what Apple's competition was in this space at the time of the App Store launch. That is, game consoles, which have been universally locked down and monopolized since 1985. The companies that owned those platforms generally charged per software build submitted for review. The cost per submission was somewhere in the 5 figure range and could take up to a month to approve. Nintendo was extra spiteful, and would actually refuse to pay you after you updated your game, until you sold another 1000 units. Steam didn't really bother reviewing software submissions, not because it was a free-for-all, but because partnering with them used to be a legitimate challenge involving bugging several different Valve employees.)
- Therefore, we need to bundle how we get paid for reviewing software into the cost structure of apps. That way, we get paid when developers get paid.
- Thus, we can't have third-party billing, because that would let developers evade payment for our software review.