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by HWR_14 1623 days ago
> its easy to say that if they're not grabbing 30% of sales from YOUR small business.

They're not grabbing 30% of the sales from ANY small business. They lowered their fees to 15% for the first million dollars (I think both per year and per app).
3 comments
heavyset_go 1623 days ago
There are plenty of small businesses that have $1 million in yearly revenue or more. A single restaurant can easily make that or more a year.

If you go with SBA definitions, they use a $1 million to about $40 million range for revenue, and a maximum of 100 to 1,500 employees depending on the industry[1].

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-sma...

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HWR_14 1622 days ago
I mean, I would imagine a single restaurant would have to make more revenue in a single year to no longer be a small business - their costs of goods are far higher.

Meanwhile, when someone says "small businesses" cannot afford something, and that small business is a 1,500 person software company with $40 million in revenue, I think more "that is no longer a small business" than "poor small business". And if it turns out I'm technically wrong about a legal definition of small business, that's not going to change how concerned I am about that 1,500 person company - it's going to make me specify my concern is around supersmall businesses or whatever. That is, me being wrong about terminology is primarily going to make me change the terms I use.

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jessikat 1623 days ago
They did not do this out of generosity or good will to small businesses. They did this for the PR, knowing that they're still rolling in the cash like Scrooge McDuck from all the years they've been milking it, and will continue to milk it, whilst looking like they're giving a handout. And it honestly looked like it worked from the comments of people defending their stance.
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HWR_14 1622 days ago
> They did not do this out of generosity or good will to small businesses. They did this for the PR

I doubt they did it for generosity or for PR. I do think there was some amount of goodwill. I think it's Apple's way of ensuring that more apps get made. That is, they are "subsidizing(ish)" the creation of many small apps they make almost no money off of anyway in the hopes more small apps will be created which might contain a breakout success. If lowering the revenue on all small apps leads someone to try to make an app and fall into viral like Candy Crush, well Apple is probably going to make more on that one app than they "lost" on all the small apps they charged 15% on combined.

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disgruntledphd2 1623 days ago
It's actually worse than that. The vast majority of IAP revenue comes from the bigger mobile game publishers.

Not only do Apple take 30% of this, they screwed over all those developers by removing their (ad platforms mostly) ability to track users, thus breaking the developers monetisation model.

I honestly find it hard to believe that they didn't realise that this was going to hit them hard with IAP revenue, but then I've always been surprised at the lack of joined up thinking in large companies.

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judge2020 1622 days ago
Apple's motto is screwing over developers in the name of customer satisfaction and decency. Usually they're in the right, including in this situation.
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disgruntledphd2 1617 days ago
Yeah, but this one actually hits their revenues. It's disguised for now because their ad platform is way up, but over the longer term this will absolutely crater their app store revenue.

Therefore, I suspect that this will be substantially weakened/rolled back over the next few years (this process has already started, btw).

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