[jsjohnst]

This isn’t an Apples to Apples comparison (no pun intended), but all the folks who think 30% is high, I question if they’ve ever sold physical goods via a store/marketplace.

Say I want to sell my sprocket I designed, built, packaged, and marketed 100% on my own on Amazon. Anybody want to guess how much Amazon takes? I’ll give you a hint, many companies selling on Amazon would kill for 30%.

Think it’s better in brick and mortar land? Try again! Say you go buy a new TV from a major electronics store like Best Buy. Their effective margins are usually 50% or more. It gets even worse in other categories. Take shoes for example, in some cases 80% of the purchase price goes to the middleman.

Let’s also not forget that getting into the App Store, while us developers (myself included) whine about it like it’s the worst abuse, is far far easier than retailers like Amazon, Walmart, etc. Of course staying in the store is important too, talk to any businesses who were pulled due to low sales volume for their not even niche product. When has Apple really done that?

In conclusion, do I think what Apple is doing is fair, maybe, maybe not. I do however wish everyone would get out of their bubble though and realize as much as we like to complain, it’s really been a disruption to what was the status quo before.

[rasteau]

What you describe could also be used to argue that prices are higher than they would be in a competitive market, i.e., that for the 30% ratio it's not that the numerator is too small, but that the denominator is too large.

[cm2187]

When is the last time you bought a software in a brick and mortar store? Every software is now downloadable, including video games. There are no cost other than hosting.

I don't think the "it could have been distributed at much greater cost with a horse carriage a century ago" argument is very compelling.

[jasode]

>There are no cost other than hosting.

If one is trying to sell non-free software, it requires a payment processor like PayPal, Stripe, DigitalRiver, or paying a bank a monthly maintenance fee for a full-blown merchant account to accept credit-cards. A cursory google of Steam says they charge 5% fees for video games. They all have fees based on a percentage of the sales price. Even something outside of traditional payments infrastructure such as Bitcoin has fees.

If the cost is truly $0 like a sibling comment mentioned, how are people selling software for money without paying any fees to any intermediaries?

[cm2187]

Agreed. Add hosting and the fair cost is probably in the region of 7%. That's still very far from 30%.

[jsjohnst]

When was the last time I bought software in a brick and mortar store? It's been so long I can't remember. I have bought software on Amazon in the past year though.

That still doesn't negate my point though, Gamestop shelves are covered in video games, electronic stores sell software of all types. Do you legitimately think they would be on the shelves if they didn't sell? My root point was to step outside of your bubble and understand that many folks have different experiences than you. In those less optimal environments for selling software, the markups for the store are far greater than the 30%. Do I think the 30% is warranted? I don't have the financial figures to say one way or another (and neither do you), but the fact many think 30% is exorbitant and it should be 3-8% is a bit absurd and really isn't reflective of reality for the costs involved.

[cm2187]

Well, keeping in mind the reason why video games are still sold in physical format is that they require enormous binaries which downloading is very problematic for people in remote locations (plus it gives a physical object to wrap for a gift). But even that is going away. There are rumors of a disc-less xbox [1]. This binaries size problem isn't really relevant to anything that is meant to run on a smartphone.

https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/192184/microsofts-building-a-d...

[jsjohnst]

There's games in the App Store which are > 2gb in size for initial download. It is very much still a problem for folks not in cities in the US.

[chipotle_coyote]

I think it's worth asking whether Apple's 30% cut is too high, and worth asking whether they would still be able to have that cut if there were official ways to load commercial apps onto iOS devices other than the App Store. (By "commercial" I'm explicitly excluding enterprise software and TestFlight.) But I don't think it's the question that's going to be answered by this court case, whether or not that was the original intent of the plaintiffs.

[Jyaif]

Like you said, your comparison is worthless. A better comparison is the web, where the fee is 0%.

[jsjohnst]

Guess I should’ve expected such a quality response to my factual and detailed comment. But I’ll bite.

0% you say? What about the overhead of hosting the site? The cost to develop it? Drive traffic to it? Credit card processing fees? Managing fraud on payments? Etc etc.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you prefer one avenue’s cost basis over another’s, feel free to use it. But don’t make bogus claims to justify your choice.

[Jyaif]

Whether you like it or not, the fee is 0%.

Regarding the other costs:

> What about the overhead of hosting the site?

Hosting a static bag of bytes (e.g. a mobile app) costs nearly nothing. Just the cost of apple developer program (99$/year) would cover a huge amount of downloads.

> The cost to develop it?

Those are the same when developing an iOS app, except that with the web you would be able to target a much bigger market... if Safari was not actively slowing down the web.

> Drive traffic to it?

Breaking news, you also have to drive traffic to your app.

> Credit card processing fees? Managing fraud on payments?

Other people mentioned 2.9% on stripe. And if you are feeling adventurous, nothing spots you from creating your own payment system.