[coob]

They’d snap your hands off for distribution and marketing costs as low as 30%.

Retail markups were much higher on physical software.

[msh]

For retail software yes, but distributing for next to nothing over the internet was also common (depending on the target group) 20 years ago.

[HatchedLake721]

You mean distributing .mob files on xda-developers and needing to speak with carriers to distribute your app?

There’s a reason most developers moved in droves to Apple ecosystem for amazing APIs, software and hardware, abandoned Symbian/blackberry/etc and had no issues with the 30% fee since they instantly got market access to millions of consumers.

30% was never an issue to begin with. People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.

[heavyset_go]

> 30% was never an issue to begin with

The confiscation of 30% of all revenue earned online has always been an issue for any company and developer here on planet Earth.

There are countless useful apps and companies that will never serve people's needs because it is not financially feasible to run a business where your total revenue is confiscated to the tune of 30%.

[msh]

Well there was no real mobile market 20 years ago, but for desktop software there was a huge industry of software you would download from websites.

[jncfhnb]

> People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free

Exactly

> often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.

Don’t give a fuck

[troupo]

>30% was never an issue to begin with.

It has always been an issue. It's just better than the status quo before the iPhone.

> People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.

1. It's not for free. Users (and developers) pay for it when they buy the iPhone. iPhone revenue is 3x Apple's R&D expenses. That is, iPhone sales alone cover the R&D on every single of Apple's products: from iPhone and iOS to Macs and MacOS, AppleTV, HomePods, Vision Pro, all of Apple's software running on those devices etc.

2. This market was built in no small part by the actual developers you now so snidely dismiss. iPhone is nothing without the app ecosystem.