[ericmay]

If you sign up for Spotify outside of the app then Apple sees 0 of that revenue. And yet they are then also hosting and distributing apps for these companies.

I think they’ll probably start charging companies like Spotify a banana amount of money to be on the App Store or on iOS at all if they lose these legal battles. I think the pull of the iPhone is far stronger than any app and there are many developers waiting for their chance to reach the iOS audience.

[defaultname]

Every major app that iOS missed would be a significant dollar amount of sales that Apple would lose. If Netflix or Spotify or PrimeVideo wasn't available on iOS, not only would that be a marketing disaster, it would yield sales consequences. This ignores the catastrophic regulatory consequences they are already poised to incur.

Apple runs the app store for users (people like me who in aggregate have made it the most valuable company in the world), and it is simply bizarre seeing these claims like it's some enormous expense that they're doing because they're benevolent (which is quite clearly the foundation of your comment, given the claim that Apple could charge "banana" amounts just for being on the app store, contrary to reality where they're already under enormous scrutiny for claiming these fees as a payment processor).

There is an argument that Apple could charge some fee for their expenses of operating the app repository. Those fees, to avoid the regulatory hammer, would be absolutely tiny compared to what they are currently getting from their take.

[ericmay]

> it is simply bizarre seeing these claims like it's some enormous expense that they're doing because they're benevolent.

That's not a claim I've made in any way, shape, or form. Please don't misrepresent things I've written based on your own self-projections.

[defaultname]

Predicting that they're going to charge a "bananas" amount for "hosting and distributing apps" -- ostensibly on the basis of the cost of all of these "free" users (where free means paid enormous amounts for devices based upon this service) -- certainly does seem to make that claim.

[ericmay]

Well, I can tell you with certainty that wasn't the claim that was made.

> ostensibly on the basis

Is where you begin to separate from my comment.

But in the spirit of good conversation, my point was that Apple will collect some fee for companies to be on the App Store, especially the large ones (Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, etc.). They're not going to just say well I guess we won't charge developers anymore. I think the idea with the percentage of revenue was to have the amount taken grow in proportion with the value of the user base and number of users using a particular app, especially if they might have discovered that app on the iOS platform (i.e. lead generation).

If that goes away, there's no reason that I can see that Apple won't say, well we charged you X last year, we estimate that you're deriving Y amount of revenue from the App Store so we're going to charge an annual fee of Z to be on the App Store.

[withinboredom]

Hah, I’d rather just host my own infrastructure if they’ll start charging for hosting… oh wait…

[ericmay]

What infrastructure would you host?