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Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

toyg wrote: post #95
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around. WebApps at the time would have been a complete joke since mobile browsers were so limited. At least that's how I understand it. He just didn't want any third party apps. He wanted to make every app in-house. (For example the original YouTube app was an in-house project.) It sounds crazy but at the time the wild west of apps on the desktop meant that the user experience was pretty poor and a…

> It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. Nah, what drove web development was 100% ease of deployment. No more dealing with installers that don't work and people who don't know how to use them, the browser is already there; no more dealing with the pain of rolling out updates, you push to your own server and it's done. And you don't have to care…

Nah, what drove web development was the business interest: the core code stays on your servers and is never shipped to users, making piracy impossible and allowing to make users pay you in perpetuity for what otherwise would be a one-time-paid product. Previous attempts at forcing this business model on users involved "licensing servers", but those still left the software vulnerable to cracking.

The whole "we can fix a bug and deploy new version to everyone while still on the phone with the customer who reported the problem" thing was just a bait.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#212

Post by fredestine »

concinds wrote: post #3

I don't see the point. Spotify's not willing to give up 10% of their Android revenue, they'll still use their own payment. Epic won't give up 15%. South Korea mandated that apps be allowed to have custom payment methods within apps. Why would any big company, whether Netflix, Epic or Spotify, still give Android 10%? It just seems that the "app store pay toll" is getting less and less justifiable; and it seems outrage…

u live in a country where people give more than 50% their revenue to rent seeking liberals that praise themselves of being for equity, fairness, diversity while living off those people work.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#213

Post by f1refly »

krferriter wrote: post #66
anxrn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that Jobs initially did not support having an app store at all for the original iPhone, IIRC for reasons of maintaining the bar on experience. His proposal was to build "apps" for use in Safari. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...

We're now at the point where writing web-first apps that can get optionally also get compiled into "native" apps that run in a js/wasm runtime on any platform and act like native apps might get popular again.

I read that more like

We're now at the point where a chat program that does nothing more than one from 1995 is using 300mb ram minimum, basic animations lag and no style mathes the other because nothing even tries to adhere to any centrally defined theme, only to what that projects specific ui designer thinks looks best.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#214

Post by concinds »

oblio wrote: post #194
concinds wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the OP and I just compared what Apple gets from the App Store (around $21.7m estimated in 2020 which I saw in Barron's, but it's probably an overestimation since I don't think it takes into account the 15% rate below $1m) to Apple's 2020 profits ($57.4m). It's really a back-of-napkin thing, just meant to show the similarity in scale, and how damaging it would be to companies if this revenue went away.

Both those numbers should be billions.

Indeed

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#215

Post by concinds »

realityking wrote: post #200
concinds wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the OP and I just compared what Apple gets from the App Store (around $21.7m estimated in 2020 which I saw in Barron's, but it's probably an overestimation since I don't think it takes into account the 15% rate below $1m) to Apple's 2020 profits ($57.4m). It's really a back-of-napkin thing, just meant to show the similarity in scale, and how damaging it would be to companies if this revenue went away.

That also ignores the cost of running the App Store. While certainly not costing 20 billion, storage, bandwidth, credit card fees, payout cost, tax handling (Apple takes care of VAT in Europe), app reviewers and engineering cost will add up. The other thing I fee that‘s often overlooked is that paid app subsidize free apps.

Yeah, that's why I didn't care to correct the Barron's overestimation with an estimation of my own. Apple's still going to spend tons on the App Store even if its revenues dry up.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#216

Post by nextaccountic »

metagame wrote: post #181
tomnipotent wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the cost for the channel. Except it's not. People don't download Uber or Netflix because of the app stores. Epic demonstrated unequivocally they could get installs without Google involved as an intermediary. The app store value at this point is singularly it their platform-specific monopolies, and the fact that you have no choice but to play ball to do business on mobile. > The real world equivalent is superma…

That's not actually the truth. You can go to F-Droid, or Cydia, Amazon or one of the dozens of SEA app stores that exist. You have plenty of options. Your argument is basically that Wal-Mart is everywhere, so Wal-Mart should be forced to serve you on your terms.

> Your argument is basically that Wal-Mart is everywhere, so Wal-Mart should be forced to serve you on your terms.

If Wal-Mart had nearly the prevalence of Google Play (on Android) and the App Store (on iOS), it should probably have some cap on its cut, too.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#217

Post by toyg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211
toyg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. Nah, what drove web development was 100% ease of deployment. No more dealing with installers that don't work and people who don't know how to use them, the browser is already there; no more dealing with the pain of rolling out updates, you push to your own server and it's done. And you don't have to care…

Nah, what drove web development was the business interest: the core code stays on your servers and is never shipped to users, making piracy impossible and allowing to make users pay you in perpetuity for what otherwise would be a one-time-paid product. Previous attempts at forcing this business model on users involved "licensing servers", but those still left the software vulnerable to cracking. The whole "we can fix…

That's still an element of deployment, and I'd argue not even the most relevant. Web dev was picked up also by tons of "hobbyists" who had no interest in any of that. For a long while there were quite a few companies selling web products to install on customers' servers (and there are still so many). In the '90s we built loads of intranet apps who did not care about licensing requirements, but cared deeply about ease of deployment towards employees. The SaaS explosion came much later.

There is no need to be always cynically focused on "evil money", often it's just pragmatism.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#218

Post by f1refly »

judge2020 wrote: post #163
johnny35 wrote: post #150

This seems like a significant milestone in what I really hope is the path toward the app ecosystem opening up to the level of freedom we’ve enjoyed in the web and desktop software space for decades now. Needing the recurring approval from two mega-corps scrutinizing whatever details of your business and customer relationships they wish, forcing their way in between… feels terrible compared to hooking up to a standard…

Even if this came to fruition, someone is still the gatekeeper. Many often forget that safe browsing gates access to every domain you type in and will throw up an error page if it's been flagged as malware. The same already happens for side-loading apps via Play Protect[0], iOS would surely have a similar system with Apple collecting samples of side-loaded apps and continuously scanning & expanding their blocklist of…

Even this system would be a huge leap forward, because we'd go from a whitelist model controlled by a monopoly to a blacklist model controlled by a monopoly. The sheer effort of keeping up to maintain the absolute user abuse by apple and google is infintitely higher than what we have now.

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#219

Post by KptMarchewa »

realityking wrote: post #200
concinds wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the OP and I just compared what Apple gets from the App Store (around $21.7m estimated in 2020 which I saw in Barron's, but it's probably an overestimation since I don't think it takes into account the 15% rate below $1m) to Apple's 2020 profits ($57.4m). It's really a back-of-napkin thing, just meant to show the similarity in scale, and how damaging it would be to companies if this revenue went away.

That also ignores the cost of running the App Store. While certainly not costing 20 billion, storage, bandwidth, credit card fees, payout cost, tax handling (Apple takes care of VAT in Europe), app reviewers and engineering cost will add up. The other thing I fee that‘s often overlooked is that paid app subsidize free apps.

The costs are low.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...

Re: Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

#220

Post by KptMarchewa »

beojan wrote: post #9
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card transactions take far less, and they deal in legitimate risk (chargebacks, stolen cards, fraud, etc). As developers, we don't even need app stores. They're an artifice that got shoved down our throat by trillion dollar mega corporations. A taxation clearinghouse. You can distribute the same program bytes from anywhere, most notably the web. It's Steve Ballmer's old dream of taxing all software. There's ju…

From a user's perspective, the review is absolutely necessary and really needs to be much better on Android. Proactive vetoing of malware from distribution is much better than reactive malware scanning against a signature library. That doesn't really justify a slice of subscription revenue though.

The review focuses at potential damage to Apple (their "guidelines"), not for user.
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