[chris_dcosta]

The point is not whether Apple makes money on its "apple tax", but how that affects us developers. In fact it is a pure transaction fee, and if you compare that to paypal or credit card, or even affiliate commission payments, it's way too high.

In the long run where does the App developer get to make any money? On app sales alone? You cannot survive by making a one off sale to your customers, and apps that seek to generate more income through in-app purchases need to pay fees that are equivalent to what they would do through credit cards or whatever.

[jahewson]

But it's manifestly not just a transaction fee, it pays for the curation of the store, server storage space, bandwidth, royalty payments for patents which Apple have been shaken-down for, advertising on the Apple website, and finally the actual fee to MasterCard/Visa is all covered in that. It's a store, that's what stores do, provide some value-added and charge a markup.

[saurik]

No, the point was, quite specifically in fact, determining what "Apple's thinking" was and whether it included "we'll add more to our bottomline" as a concern, primary or otherwise, for why they are choosing to "squeeze every 3rd party service to adopt our 30% cut".

Please read the post to which I was responding to undersand the context; the only way in which we care how it affects developers is if that effect is one Apple wants (enough to have caused them to effect such an affect): the primary question is precisely whether Apple makes money.

[aidenn0]

It's also a subsidy for delivery of all the free apps.