[fauigerzigerk]

I am a small developer and I would very much welcome more competition between app stores.

I'll happily read the policies if that gives me a choice to not agree to everything and anything a global duopoly of digital overlords demands.

The imbalance of power in this broken market is stacked against us small developers in the most dystopian fashion imaginable.

[zepto]

Read the policies?

And maintain different versions to comply with the different stores requirements?

Upload in different ways to each store?

Deal with different liabilities that the stores allow to pass through to you?

Respond to bad reviews through all the different stores interfaces?

And for what? What percentage saving do you expect to see? Other stores will not be free.

Deal with when one of the stores gives your app away for free as part of a promotion that you agreed to without realizing it in the small print somewhere?

I don’t disagree that the current situation is bad for independent developers.

But competing stores will only makes that vastly worse.

I’d like to see people actually say what a competing store would do better to help indies.

[fauigerzigerk]

>And for what? What percentage saving do you expect to see?

I would expect roughly 10% to 15% revenue cut, far more favourable terms, less bullying, less paternalistic content restrictions and above all the option to say no to any individual app store that makes egregious demands.

They have us by the throat. One mistake and you're out. You can be banned for life without recourse. Your career may be over, your skills worthless.

This is completely unacceptable.

[zepto]

Ok - so assume a store opens with a 10% revenue cut, and ends up with 50% of sales.

You still have to support the Apple store otherwise you lose half your sales.

The effective commission is now 20%. So you pay 10% less commission but must deal with 2 stores.

That’s with just a single additional store taking 50% of the business, which is an unlikely scenario.

Consider that it is inevitable that new stores will not all be independent.

Google and Amazon will immediately open stores if Apple is forced to allow 3rd party stores.

Will their cut be lower than 30%? I see no reason for it to be. Google play is 30% right now. Maybe it will be 25%, but they have no reason to minimize the commission.

Will they get significant traffic? Yes - they both have the ability to push their stores via their giant advertising platforms. They will also use the opportunity to push browser based platforms that they control, and which will further fragment the user experience.

Why would they need to dramatically improve terms for developers?

Neither has any record of doing so.

Would they allow all kinds of App? No. They don’t right now. Why would they in future?

So you’re going to have to deal with all 3 of the big stores.

Now assume some independent stores get funded which actually do offer better terms for developers.

What percentage of the market will they realistically get?

And how can you benefit from their ‘less egregious demands‘?

If you want the percentage of revenue from the Apple store or from the Play or Amazon stores, you will have to meet their demands.

Therefore you will either make a lowest common denominator version that complies with the restrictions of all stores, or you will need to maintain multiple versions.

Requiring Apple to allow multiple stores will be more expensive and more restrictive and force developers to deal with even more rules.

It is in no way good for indie developers.

[fauigerzigerk]

>Will their cut be lower than 30%? I see no reason for it to be. Google play is 30% right now

Yes, I'm sure of it. For instance, Microsoft's fees are just 15% because they are less powerful right now. The more stores there are, the less powerful each of them would be and that would create an incentive for all of them, including the incumbants, to cut fees and offer fairer terms.

We might well see new entrants beyond Google and Amazon - people like Microsoft, Stripe, Puddle, Shopify, Valve, Facebook or startups that don't exist yet. Maybe the content side and the payment/billing side of stores would be run by different companies. Who knows.

As soon as you have credible alternative stores with equal visibility, the most profitable customers will leave the incumbants if they don't relent on fees. Small developers will be able to tag along, because everything else would be seen as obviously unfair.

If you claim that the balance of supply and demand has absolutely no bearing on prices and terms, then I will never be able to convince you. But you're going against every single historical example of how markets work.

[zepto]

I don’t claim that the balance of supply and demand has no bearing on prices and terms. That is clearly a straw man.

I agree that the balance will end up with some stores with reduced fees. Perhaps they will all be forced down to 15%, but you if you are denying that those with greater reach will have pricing power, then you are the one who is going against every single historical example of how markets work.

However unless there is another monopoly outcome - I claim that the result would be utterly destructive to independent developers.

You have now posited the requirement to support as many as 8 stores. That alone will easily offset the benefit of paying 15% less in commission for small developers.

Every app release will be more expensive, and that ignores the fact that the overall system will be less efficient, since every release will result 8 separate app reviews, etc.

Commissions will go down, but costs will go up.

All the benefit of the lower commission environment will be transferred from independent developers to larger corporations for whom the cost of releases is a smaller percentage of their total.

It’s also worth pointing out that Android already allows alternative stores, and yet Google somehow manages to keep charging 30% for the play store, and there are no common alternatives in the US.

How can your theory be correct when this clear counterexample exists? For that matter why hasn’t Google just reduced the commission to 15% or even lower to induce developers away from iOS? Surely they could have done so at any time.

[fauigerzigerk]

>You have now posited the requirement to support as many as 8 stores

That's a surprising read of what I said. I named a couple of companies that might be interested in running a store. I do not belive for a second that all of them will, nor did I suggest that that developers are required to support every single one of them.

I highly doubt that there will ever be more than three general purpose stores per platform, and perhaps some specialist ones that most developers don't use (e.g. for games, enterprise apps or to serve specific countries).

That and the threat of possible new market entrants will be enough for stores to compete a little bit more for developers and lower their fees from the current egregious rent seeking levels. It will also reduce the risk of getting banned outright from your target platform.

It seems the only point we really disagree on is the additional burden developers would face if there was a bit more choice. I understand what you're saying, but I believe your fear is grossly exaggerated.

Yes, reviews will cost a bit more overall. But that will easily come out of the incredible margins of current oligopolists.