[saurik]

No: these examples are much better explained by control over their competition (or even "user experience", which is arguable in both fact and morality), something which is much more easily evident when you stop using the irritatingly misleading term "their 30% cut".

Remember: Apple has costs in terms of payment processing, handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages): they are left with a fraction of "their 30% cut", which is quite clear from their public financial reports.

So, to Apple, the amount of money they can make off of companies like Dropbox is effectively zero. Even their entire App Store ecosystem (representing tens of billions of dollars in revenue) nets them a profit but a few percent what they make off their hardware sales.

(Also, btw, as much as I disagree with Apple's decisions with respect to their platform, you are wrong about the experience issue: normal users would much rather have a single billing and support channel for all of their payments, and they get horribly confused when some of their purchases are direct to a developer and some aren't. It does not harm the experience of using an iPhone to have Dropbox bill through their App Store; it may harm Dropbox's experience, but that is irrelevant to Apple, as to them Dropbox's insistence to support multiple platforms is itself a mistake that will lead to poor customer experience of Dropbox.)

[mikeash]

Does Apple deal with substantially more than other payment processors do, who charge far, far less than 30% for their services?

[saurik]

I will copy/paste the paragraph from my comment that you seem to have ignored :( where I already explicitly listed the things that Apple does which, for example, PayPal does not:

"handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages)"

The App Store is a retail store: you hand them product and give them a general price point, and they handle the rest. All you need to do is develop your product and (hopefully) handle support directly related to the product itself. Otherwise, your abstraction is you are just sent a check every month.

If you choose to sell a product yourself, I hope you have a good grounding in sales tax law. For an example, did you realize that you cannot legally sell digital products to the EU, no matter what country you are a resident of, without registering for and collecting VAT?

You also will be dealing with a drastically different kind of support request, as there will be people claiming that you stole money from their credit card, that they didn't intend to make purchases, that they thought the price was different, that they made a payment to you with one credit card but now wish they had used a different one... some of these people are lying, some of them had their credit card number stolen, some of them don't realize that a member of their family uses their PayPal account to make purchases online, and all of them are much angrier than your normal support request. You can build systems that make these issues come up less often, but honestly then you end up spending much more of your time on payment processing than your application, so you should just pay someone else to take care of it for you.

[nikster]

+1

Awesome explanation. Can we stop with the outrage over the "30% cut" now?