[SilverBirch]

To be honest it sounds like you've swallowed an econ 101 textbook along with a few libertarian talking points. I was just waiting for you wheel out Deadweight loss.

The problem with modelling this as a tax is that... it's not a tax in a pure sense. Apple has partly built the product that you're selling. You're building on their hardware with their libraries and their APIs and their servers and their quality control. They want compensation for that.

Now you can argue what level of compensation is fair, and as you point out, its a free market and you even have an option to use a different technology to build you product. The alternative is that Apple doesn't collect this cut of the profits and you have to actually engage in what that means.

Why would they build APIs for you? Why would they distribute your app at all. What happens for example if we pass a law tomorrow saying "Sorry Apple, you can only collect enough for credit card fees".

Well one option is Apple just closes the store, hires a couple hundred high quality developers and builds out their own library of Apps, take 100% of the revenue. No tax in that situation! But I'm not sure it's a better outcome for developers.

[msm_]

>Well one option is Apple just closes the store, hires a couple hundred high quality developers and builds out their own library of Apps, take 100% of the revenue. No tax in that situation! But I'm not sure it's a better outcome for developers.

It's also not better for Apple, quite obviously, or they'd already do this. People want and expect their favourite apps to work on their phones.

[SilverBirch]

They don't do this right now because they get revenue from Apps built using their SDKs. If they can no longer get that revenue they may well decide they'd rather just build their own versions and get 100% of the revenue instead, and for everything else just push developers into a web view.

Hell, without the revenue they could just turn around and say "We're not going to charge a 30% fee. But you need to pay us $10m per quarter to license our SDK". There's tonnes of options that Apple can use to squeeze developers for something that genuinely is hugely valuable.

I think people lose sight of the fact that before the App Store the way applications got onto phones was far far more favourable to the hardware vendor.

[evandale]

> Why would they build APIs for you? Why would they distribute your app at all. What happens for example if we pass a law tomorrow saying "Sorry Apple, you can only collect enough for credit card fees".

They would do it because they make massive margins off hardware. Apple can't build good software and third party iOS devs are a major reason why the iPhone is successful.