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by justwannasing 3962 days ago
Anyone who thinks the cost of selling software is remotely near zero should be ignored. Ads need to be produced and thought up and salesmen need to be paid and packaging still must be done and and someone has to be in charge of all that, along with all the people beneath him.
1 comments
mikeash 3962 days ago
Salesmen? Packaging? We may both be talking about "software" but you're talking about a completely different kind of product than what one finds in the App Store.
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replicatorblog 3962 days ago
One of the reasons why the Apple app store is so popular is that Apple spends billions on TV/BillBoard/Magazine/Web advertising for the store and apps within it. It's a massive marketing/sales/"packaging" cost.
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mikeash 3962 days ago
Which is great if you're one of the top apps and can get Apple's attention, but useless for 99.9% of developers.

I would also say that by far the main reason for the App Store's popularity is simply that it is the only channel for third-party apps on a massively popular platform. Apple could do nothing beyond making it available as an icon on the home screen and it would still be enormously popular.

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icebraining 3962 days ago
on a massively popular platform

And that's part of what you're paying for.

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mikeash 3962 days ago
If you want to say that you're paying for access, that Apple can charge what they like, and that 30% is good value for the money for that access, fine. I disagree, but I respect that argument.

But the person above was comparing Apple's 30% to retail's 50%, which is a bad comparison because retail's cut is largely based on the actual costs of selling.

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justwannasing 3962 days ago
Who creates what you see on the App Store? Who wrote all that and designed it? Who wrote the code for the App Store? Are you saying no professional sales people were involved in this? How does anyone in the world know when a new item shows up in the App Store? Who pays for all those ads you see on TV and in magazines and online?
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mikeash 3962 days ago
Is this just a terminology problem? "Salesmen" to me are the people in suits who you talk to when you want a piece of software that doesn't list a price and just says "Call for a quote." The people you're talking about are programmers.

How does anyone in the world know when a new item shows up in the app store? For 99.99% of apps, it's either word of mouth or marketing activities undertaken by the developer. Apple's own marketing is great if you're one of the favored few, but for everybody else it does nothing.

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