It's interesting that you cited retail. In retail, there's an actual cost to stocking items, especially in areas visible to the customer. No such cost exists on the app store, in fact Apple makes you pay extra to advertise for what retailers offer for their 30%.
App stores and retailers are different. There's almost no cost to list an app (for Apple, Google) and yet they charge a 30% fee. Apple, especially, is a text book anti competitive, monopoly in their terms and it's enforcement.
Also, the app store would be just as successful if not for their draconian rules, Mac is proof that ecosystems can thrive without Apple's stranglehold. The app store choke hold is all about the money
Around 1.5%. Probably even cheaper for the big fish.
> - Hosting the content (yes minimal but can't be ignored)
S3 charges $0.0007/GB and $0.00000004/request for downloads as their baseline. Assuming a typical app size of ~50MB, each download would cost $0.00003504. Updates would be even cheaper, since they are usually tiny delta packages.
> - Approval process (the people)
A problem that they imposed in the first place.
> - "Editors" that create the curated lists every day
See above.
> - Developer support hours (technically you get with the yearly subscription but I doubt that actually covers the cost of those hours).
Then charge the actual cost for support, or improve the documentation? It doesn't exactly seem fair to make the competent developers subsidize the people who bog down the support department. (Or, if it's actually common to use these, to use their monopoly to force devs to use a platform so awful that they actually need to call the support.)
> - The engineers building the developer tools (Xcode, the developer portal, TestFlight, etc)
Which are self-imposed problems and/or inferior to free third-party tools.
You may not see any of the behind-the-scenes costs that Apple has to pay for in supporting the ecosystem, but it is a well-known fact that Apple intentionally prices their software and services pretty close to cost, because they make their real profit on hardware sold and the software and services are just used to try to help drive hardware sales.
So, that 30% cost is really just the price of doing business in this ecosystem. It is entirely your choice as to whether or not you participate in this ecosystem.
That's wildly inaccurate. It's easily disprovable: Apple's costs aren't proportional to the pricing of software sold through it's stores. Does your refrigerator maker charge you as 30% premium on groceries stored in the fridge, or are there limitations on what groceries you can stock there?
The app store is wildly profitable, and Apple admits as much. While I have no objection to profits, we're all here discussing the issue because it's a tool used to unfairly thwart competition, impose monopolistic & unfair trade practices, which is why the EU and supreme Court, and possibly FTC are all involved in various complaints against Apple. If your fridge maker isn't allowed to regulate your groceries, Apple shouldn't be arbitrarily blocking and price gouging apps on their platform.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but in retail it's not unusual for the producer to pay the retailer for the space. Next time you're at the supermarket take a look at how many units of something are lined up on the shelf and notice the height of them. It's not random or an accident, it's all by contract.
If Apple were like Safeway then you'd have to pay them a few hundred grand to even be in the store, AND you will pay the 30% markup, AND guarantee a certain level of marketing spend out of your pocket (a portion of which will go to vendors/services they specify), AND if you don't make certain sales numbers they simply delete your app.
So there is no cost to maintaining a digital store, payments, employing reviewers (who actually work for Apple and are not outside contractors), developing an SDK, etc.?
The Mac software ecosystem isn’t exactly “thriving”. That’s most of the reason that Apple is trying to bring iOS developers to the Mac.
App stores and retailers are different. There's almost no cost to list an app (for Apple, Google) and yet they charge a 30% fee. Apple, especially, is a text book anti competitive, monopoly in their terms and it's enforcement.
Also, the app store would be just as successful if not for their draconian rules, Mac is proof that ecosystems can thrive without Apple's stranglehold. The app store choke hold is all about the money