[ancorevard]

Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software.

People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers.

It's also not about the developers, the success of the App Store comes from Apple's users. They trust the App Store because they trust Apple's curation/privacy/security. That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. Trust doesn't come cheap.

[_qulr]

> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers.

People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed.

>That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers.

No, that was caused by a billion people buying shiny new mobile computers. They would have bought a lot of software in any case, even without an App Store. New platform, new software.

[ben_w]

> People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed.

I did that. Kagi.com was my payment… handler?

https://web.archive.org/web/20100303221537/http://www.kagi.c...

$0.75 + (5…8)%

So any transaction less than or equal to the $2.99 tier would be just as bad (as in, it costs you at least 30% of the list price), even if hosting was free.

I’m also old enough to remember Apple getting involved in the fight over the In App Purchases patent: https://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/08/lodsys-offers-update-on...

[_qulr]

> So any transaction less than or equal to the $2.99 tier would be just as bad (as in, it costs you at least 30% of the list price), even if hosting was free.

It's true that App Store has the best deal for payment processing for very low-priced apps.

But that's not truly a win for developers when the App Store itself caused the "race to the bottom". Who was selling 99 cent apps before the crap store?

[colejohnson66]

I remember that if I wanted to play anything other than Snake on my Nokia, I had to pay like $5 a game. And those games were even worse than the majority of 99¢ games on the store.

You can argue lower prices lead to more crap, but it also encourages people to spend more. Most people would debate a $4.99 purchase, but think nothing of 5 99¢ purchases if done separately.

[chipotle_coyote]

I think I agree with Lap Cat here. There's a place for cheap apps, but the problem comes for people developing productivity (or worse, vertical market) software that's going to sell "mere" thousands of copies, or tens of thousands at best, rather than hundreds of thousands or more. If you sell 10,000 copies at $50 a copy, you've grossed well over a quarter-million even subtracting Apple's 30% -- but if you're selling on a platform where it's hard to price anything over $5, you may have a problem, because one-tenth the price is probably not going to translate to ten times the sales.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Those kinds of apps today tend to be part of a SaaS service and listed as Free in the App Store. Provided it’s B2B and not B2C - and you do signups and payments on your own website - then you’re exempt from the self-service signup (and 30% tax) requirements.

The catch is that as you get bigger and seem more B2C than B2B then Apple might start to take notice (see: Hey e-mail).

[reaperducer]

People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed.

He's talking about when you used to have to pay $50 to $500 for software in a store, but the author was lucky to see $5-$10 of that.

[ethbr0]

True, but today is mostly certainly not 1998.

[x0x0]

And now Apple generously gives you up to 85% of $1 to $5!

[grumple]

What do you mean? Microsoft was certainly seeing more than 5-10$ per product sold.

[hn_check]

"People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed."

Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic.

Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year).

Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing.

As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.

[_qulr]

> Independent software development was an absolute wasteland.

I had a 10 year career in that "wasteland".

> we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms

Citation? From what I've seen, that's not actually true.

> Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is.

For a time, the Windows version of our product was my company's biggest money-maker. It seems that in recent years though Microsoft as a company has pivoted away from Windows as their primary product. Away from desktop, toward "the cloud". I personally find that unfortunate, but I'm not a stockholder.

> The whole torch mob anti-Apple angle seems entirely detached from actual reality.

I'm not anti-Apple, I'm pro-Macintosh.

[j-pb]

Thanks for having been a part of this golden age of computing. There's not a day that goes by where I don't reminiscent about the time when companies like "rogue amoeba", "made by sofa", "monster", or "Strange Flavour" and people like Alexander Repty, Austin Sarner and Brian Ball made really great mac software.

There was so much community, and such an optimistic mood with things like the Appsterdam movement.

And then it all crashed and burned, because Apple decided to get greedy, and that 99cents was going to be the default App price, with 30cents going to Apple.

Those are scraps, and nobody who wants to make an artisanal niche app to scratch their own itch, and maybe sell it, can live from that money. It was either win the lottery, or starve.

Apple killed its own ecosystem, most app store apps suck nowadays. It's ironic that they were the ones with an ad saying "we mistake abundance with choice".

I wish all the old mac devs would get together and collaboratively write a good GUI-toolkit for linux and a new Userland. Right now there is not a single good operating system. Having all those apps on linux would be a dream come true. But a dream it is...

[TedDoesntTalk]

> Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos

Utter nonsense. Shrink-wrapped and downloadable software in the Windows world was all over the place using activation/serial codes either thru email or on a CD.

Two examples:

VueScan https://www.hamrick.com/

SnagIt screen capture (which is now cloud based, I think. I still use an old version)

[pier25]

> we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms

Almost 80% of Fortnite players are on console, so I very much doubt that's even remotely true.

https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoos-battle-royale-s...

[monadic2]

Not sure why you're downvoted.

It seems like the unavoidable conclusion is that there are no longer any good places to make or find decent consumer software without having a corporate entity get their undeserving cut.

[xtracto]

Tell that to John Carmack or Lord British or even Microsoft. The wasteland of the 80s / 90s surely ended up their careers.

[dragonwriter]

> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software.

Zero %.

Retail used to buy boxed software and sell it at risk. Were Apple buying units of software/service up front and the taking a risk reselling it, it would be valid to compare the split of end-user cost with classic retail, but Apple's not doing that, so it isn't.

[setpatchaddress]

That is a historically inaccurate take. s/retail/distributor/ if it helps. The point is that a software developer would have been very lucky to earn a significant fraction of the retail price. 70%? Not even close. The App Store completely reversed this model.

That said, it's valid to acknowledge this history and still think 30% is too much for distribution overhead in 2020. I do not have an opinion on the latter.

[mthoms]

What the parent said is 100% accurate.

They pointed out that retailers would buy the software up front (at wholesale price), and assume the rest of the risk for "promoting, distributing, and selling" themselves. Thus, the retailer did not "charge developers" for those things[0].

I realize this is a bit pedantic but it's not fair to say the parent has said something "historically inaccurate".

[0] There were special marketing or buyback arrangements in some cases, but what's described above is the default retail model.

[pkaye]

> Retail used to buy boxed software and sell it at risk.

I though they just returned unsold boxes back to the vendor?

[dragonwriter]

> I thought they just returned unsold boxes back to the vendor?

Even in the cases where the vendor/distributor allowed that (and discount bins were a thing because they often did not, at least at no restocking fee), the retailer still accepted the risk that the vendor or distributor would be defunct. If they had a consignment model where they only paid contingent on a retail sale, that was different, but (at least AFAIK) that was never the norm for boxed software.

[reaperducer]

The discount bins you mention illustrate the previous poster's point: That developers used to get far less before the App Store existed.

If Electronics Boutique can dump a $50.00 game in a discount bin for $3.00, how much do you think it paid for that game in the first place? And how much of that amount went to the author?

[lenzm]

The amount they spent in the first place is irrelevant, that's the sunk cost fallacy. They sell it for three dollars because that's their best expected return (weighing in factors like opportunity cost of keeping the box on the shelf).

[dmitriid]

They may have meant mobile marketplaces before AppStore. Those charged anywhere up to 90%.

And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products, or they would go out of business. Logistics, distribution, and store markup all add up to the final price of the product on the shelf.

[dragonwriter]

> And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products

Yes, they do, unless it's consignment model, which wasn't usually the case for boxed software. The retail sale happens after retail has made the purchase. It’s obviously usually at a higher price than the retailer paid, but they don't take a cut of what the vendor is asking for the software. They pay whatever the vendor (or, often in real retail, a distributor that sits in between) is offering to sell the product for, in advance, and takes a risk that they will be able to sell the units they have purchased at a higher price.

It's structurally not at all the same as what an app store does, where it pays no one, anything (indeed, often charges an access fee up front to the seller) before a sale is made, and then pockets a share of the sale at no risk.

[setpatchaddress]

You seem to be getting stuck on the word "retail" referring to point-of-sale-to-end-user, where other people are using it to refer to the cost of the entire retail model, which is the comparable thing in this discussion.

[nodamage]

This seems like splitting hairs. At the end of the day, if the consumer buys an app for $10, the developer gets some portion of that, and the retail store gets the other.

Whether that happens in one simultaneous transaction or two different ones doesn't really make a difference to how much the developer gets paid in the end, which is less with the retail store model compared to the current digital storefront model.

Let's also not forget that Steam launched with a 30% cut a full 5 years before the App Store ever existed, so it's not like Apple dictated this price, they were following industry norms at the time.

[onion2k]

Stores buy products wholesale and sell them on, and accept the risk of the products not selling.

Apple act as a middleman and and add on their fees, with absolutely no risk to themselves.

They're very different business models.

[thewebcount]

Right, but stores buy from distributors who take 50%+ of the amount they make. So the developer is still getting less than the App Store.

[srtjstjsj]

That's not how IP publishing works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-out_(recording_industry)

[mthoms]

The idea that you can return unsold product to the supplier is a relatively new idea for most industries. When retail boxed software was at its peak (in the 90's), it wasn't very common at all.

I can't find anything current for boxed software (for obvious reasons), but boxed video and board games cannot be returned unless the retailer has a special deal with the publisher (rare).

https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/17/15974096/what-it-costs-to-...

https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/05/inside-the-secret-wo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/6asinu/can_reta...

[dragonwriter]

It's not how the mass market book and (I assumw from your other link title) at least popular recording industries work, but it's how lots of the rest of the physical retail industries, including IP-based ones, work and have worked, and a big part of why (for instance), TSR (the original publishers of D&D), who sold IP-based products (including books) outside of the mass book trade was completely unprepared for the “success” of getting it's books into the mass book trade, where failing to adequately account for costs of remaindering almost drove them out of business before Wizards of the Coast bought them for the IP.

[antibuddy]

Apple does just the distribution. The promotion is still on the developer and you may not even promote your own services in your own app. It is also save to say that a lot of developers would like to do the selling themselves. Apple is not supposed to do the distribution for free, but 30% is really a lot, especially when they do unwanted stuff for you (the payment).

Also the App Store really is the only way to get apps on an iOS-device, so the user has no real choice anyway.

[reaperducer]

The promotion is still on the developer

Apple does plenty of app promotion, from promotions inside its own store to multi-million dollar television campaigns showcasing all the cool apps that are available inside the App Store.

[cgriswald]

Is it really promotion if you pay the same 30% cut as your competitor, but their app ends up on national TV and yours doesn't?

[srtjstjsj]

People are confused because promotion is a separate service that Apple charges separately from publishing.

[wvenable]

Wait till you learn how much Apple charges for app promotion -- which the 30% cut has nothing to do with. App promotion is a $500 million to $2 billion dollar industry for Apple.

[lostlogin]

> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers.

We do, but at the same time, physical stores selling software are now rare or non-existent. Apple is not competing with them.

[thewebcount]

Right and that’s partly because online store like Apple's out-competed then on price by taking less than traditional distributors.

[biktor_gj]

More because the Inetrnet came and allowed every vendor to sell directly from their webpage instead of going through the distribution channel, making retail software stores obsolete

There are two platforms that drive 100% of the mobile phone industry. One (Android) allows other distributors in the platform (even if they have to go through loops like sideloading an app and then allowing that app to install other apps). The other will kick and try to destroy you if you try to do something like that. Is that legal or anti-competitive in the US & Europe? We'll find out...

[ksk]

>They trust the App Store because they trust Apple's curation/privacy/security. That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers. Trust doesn't come cheap.

People buy way more on Amazon, and Amazon doesn't rob 30% of your sales.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> Just wait until you learn what % retail used to charge developers for promoting, distributing, and selling software.

Well, that was before the Internet era, wasn't it. Personally I'm buying macOS software outside of the AppStore and I'm very happy with it. I also feel good that I support the developers directly.

[ryanbrunner]

Do you think the marginal cost of distributing software for Apple even begins to approach the cost of housing it in a retail store?