| Here I give my analysis of what the best solution could be. Would like to know your thoughts too. 0. Lower rate from 30% to 15% -Apple still has monopoly, nothing changes. 1. Side loading apps: Not good! malicious apps can run amok, eg. $BIG_CORP$ will say - you will get 20$ credits if you sideload our app, and then surveil everything that is possible on the device. Here, we expect an average user to give all the permission that the app requests for. 2. allow secondary app stores: -not good as it depends on the quality of enforcement in secondary app store. For Apple, it is in their interest to maintain app quality in their appstore to maintain overall good user experience in their device, but motivations are not same for secondary app store. May allow malicious apps which deteriorate the user experience/privacy similar to 1. And there will be a state where you will have to install 10s of app store just to install specific programs which is also not ideal. 3. Allow secondary payment methods: -Average user will have to give up their payment info to everyone who asks for it. Most of them will not be trustworthy nor we can expect all of them to maintain good security standards for saving payment info. The biggest culprit of all this drama is Apple does not allow secondary payment inside apps AND also, if you have secondary payment outside of app, they do not allow that price to be lower. There is no competition, thus Apple can get away with whatever it chooses to. Thus the monopoly. 4. SOLUTION: a) charge a flat fee for reviewing/serving apps. If necessary, linearly increase it based on daily active users if they need more resource to support that app. b) allow whitelisted secondary payment providers. Only whitelisting few payment methods which are trustable eg applepay, googlepay, paypal, stripe, etc will maintain security of payment data. c) allow secondary payment price to be lower than Apple. With this solution, there will be competition between payment providers which will drive the price down. |