> Apple invests every day to ensure the App Store remains a safe and trusted place for users to find great apps.
Last quarter, gross margins on "Services" revenue were 75%. The App Store is almost pure profit, with relatively little investment.
See also: https://www.apple.com/app-store/ "Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps." Astonishingly, Apple appears to be bragging about these numbers, but if you do the math, 500 reviewers working 40 hours per week doing nothing except reviewing apps—no training, no meetings, no breaks, etc.—must spend an average of less than 10 minutes on each submission, to review the app and the App Store metadata (text, screenshots, etc.) for conformance with all guidelines, not only safety but also, more importantly to Apple, it seems, ensuring that the app doesn't somehow avoid giving Apple its cut of revenue. Not to mention that the salary of 500 reviewers is basically a drop in the bucket compared to App Store revenue.
My spouse tried out for the people who sub-contract the app store reviewing and it was very much as you surmise, they require you to do a very oddly specific number of reviews in an hour (29, IIRC) and do not pay very well. Pay and time per review might have gotten better if he'd stuck with it and climbed to a similar level as his previous position in a mapping company but we are not at that level of desperation yet.
The page does say, "100% of apps are automatically screened for known malware," but that's also true of Mac app notarization, which costs the developer only the $99 per year developer program fee.
Gross margin doesn't tell you much about their level of investment. Gross margin is only revenue minus COGS (i.e. hosting, support, potentially infra teams). To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
> To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
Total R&D for the entire corporation was $9 billion compared to $29 billion just in Services revenue. How much of that R&D do you think the crApp Store needs, compared to the hardware and the operating systems? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q4/FY25_Q4_Consol...
> SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
App Store is essentially an online retailer (or consignment store), not SaaS. Apple is selling software written by other developers.
Last quarter, gross margins on "Services" revenue were 75%. The App Store is almost pure profit, with relatively little investment.
See also: https://www.apple.com/app-store/ "Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps." Astonishingly, Apple appears to be bragging about these numbers, but if you do the math, 500 reviewers working 40 hours per week doing nothing except reviewing apps—no training, no meetings, no breaks, etc.—must spend an average of less than 10 minutes on each submission, to review the app and the App Store metadata (text, screenshots, etc.) for conformance with all guidelines, not only safety but also, more importantly to Apple, it seems, ensuring that the app doesn't somehow avoid giving Apple its cut of revenue. Not to mention that the salary of 500 reviewers is basically a drop in the bucket compared to App Store revenue.