Apple App Store Fees

Apple is pushing people to the App Store to create a better user experience, but they also have made decisions that protect their 30% cut at the expense of that same experience (for recent examples, see the Dropbox API rejection and the inability to buy a book through the Kindle app). If the money wasn't at all important to them, they'd drop their cut down to a level closer to a payment processor.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/08/apples-app-store-had-gross-s...App store had revenues of 64 billion in 2020. Its a pure profit center.There are means Apple can take to help make this experience better, but it all requires them to do some effort and spend some money. Which in turn will drive down profits.

Depends on how you think about monopolies and bundling. For the most part Apple's devices and products face a pretty competitive landscape. But there are some areas where they have a very strong market position. The revenue for paid apps in America skews very heavily to the Apple App Store (people make apps for iOS only in the US but never Android only). The alternatives to going through the App Store are really not viable. The switching costs to consumers are very high and people buy phone

Absolutely. What Apple is or isn't doing isn't the real issue. The issue is, do you want to put yourself in a position where they could do things to you and you'd have no recourse?As a corporation, Apple is obligated to maximize profit for their investors. That means if they could raise their take to 40% or 70%, and make more net money by doing it- they are supposed to do it. Corporations are not charities. If Google could do it, they would do it. If Softie could do it, they wo

Apple makes peanuts from the App Store relative to phone sales. After they upped the cut for developers to between 70% and 85% and CC companies still get their cut, add customer service and app reviews and it simply isn’t that profitable.What they benefit from is selling 1,000$ phones at a 30+% profit margin, because for the average consumer they simply work better. Which actually aligns incentives between customers and Apple quite well.

Imagine Apple even got paid by developers and not pay them

> Why should software makers share their revenue with Apple?Why should Apple care what software makers want?I get that it's a pain to develop software for the iPhone and then have to pay rent to Apple to get it to users; but that's not Apple's problem unless enough users either complain or switch hardware to cut into Apple's revenue. That doesn't seem to be happening. Sure, there are plenty of users (I'm one of them) who refuse to buy an Apple device

Because Apple probably loses money reviewing my app and needs the bigger players to cover the costs :)

Developers wouldn't leave, the apple app store generates so much revenue that it would be much more profitable than android even if they lost half of it. What would happen is that governments all over the world would quickly rush to regulate Apples power away, that is what Apple is worried about and why they lowered it for small developers to 15% already, they aren't worried about competition here.

Bear in mind that Apple keeps 30% of App Store revenue, which is tens of billions of dollars a year. If they just sold the hardware they wouldn't care at all how much users use it, but if users are on their phones for hours on end it's more likely they'll spend money on apps.