[vineyardmike]

> Walmart, Costco, et al wish they had a 30% profit on everything the sold.

Is the work the same for them too? They all charge a percentage of sticker price. Oh and none of those stickers say free.

The tension I see is that Apple’s work is correlated with number of developers and number of users. They very much have a long tail of developers and apps with effectively no users or income, but who still cost Apple money. Maybe this is actually covered by the $99/yr fee but maybe not. Then at the other end, the top 0.001% of apps get so much use (downloads, IAP api calls, support requests) that account for the majority of App Store costs. Apple runs a CDN just for apps like facebook and YouTube to make the downloads faster. Support staff will tell you how many people blame Apple for what happens in apps - famously when Snapchat was A/B testing videos Apple support was swamped with FOMO’d teenagers wondering why they couldn’t download the latest update. Apple probably loses money on the facebook app (ignoring downstream revenue).

My point is that Walmart costs are pretty linear with the number of boxes on the shelf, and none of them are “free”. As long as we have free apps and it’s cheap to be a developer, companies will need to over compensate by using higher fees.

Edit: Spotify is the collateral damages caused by Apple needing Snapchat, but also needing to fund that support costs somehow.

Also Spotify - the company in question - has a terrible price structure where they give their first margin to Apple and the rest of their money - and then some - to record labels. That basically means they’ll always lose money to record labels but they also can’t win if they pick a fight with them - just ask Taylor Swift.

[ecshafer]

I shouldn't be as surprised as I am that people contact apple support for issues in apps.

[whywhywhywhy]

This would all make sense but why doesn’t Apple get 30% of software subscriptions on MacOS or subscriptions initiated through the Safari browser.

The dev work is the same for building those thing as iOS and Apple fields support questions about those things from naive users like the Snapchat users you described.

If the iOS 30% cut is justified then it makes no sense not to charge say Notion or OpenAI for subscriptions transacted from Safari. If that seems ridiculous then maybe it’s time to question the iOS cut because it’s inconsistent.

[vineyardmike]

Genuinely, the answer is that Apple can’t enforce it. They totally would if they could but website makers don’t sign contracts with the browser companies.