[rejhgadellaa]

Businesses tend to relay costs onto their customers (someone has to pay the bills).

- The app store tax

- The extra work of maintaining at least 2 separate apps (iOS, Android, optionally(?) desktop web app)

- Dealing with app store rules

Some of these are not just costs. I have experience with native apps that have to make things worse for users (compared to the web app) or risk getting booted off the app store.

[otterley]

What outcomes are worse for users that arise out of you offering native apps?

[rejhgadellaa]

I thought this was obvious, but higher costs for building and maintaining an app (vs a web app) means higher prices for users. I think people would love to pay less, and would hate to pay more.

[otterley]

How much is the incremental cost per user?

[rejhgadellaa]

Building the same app for iOS, Android and desktop: up to 2-5 times the costs (for businesses, how they cover those costs depends)

App tax: 15-30%, which can drive the price for consumers up by up to 44%

https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#negativ...

[otterley]

What I’m looking for is an answer from you as it relates to your specific business, not speculation from an advocacy org that can gin up any hypothetical numbers they want.

I asked in the start of the thread: how does it impact you, or your customers?

[rejhgadellaa]

Right. So I don't know the costs of the hoops we need to jump through for our app to be granted a place on the app store. I'm not the guy who does the spreadsheets :). I do know that we've spent considerable time to make changes to pass app store review.

For example, our platform requires a subscription, but we can't link to the page where you subscribe anywhere. That means that if our FAQ page links to the subscribe page, and we have a link to the FAQ anywhere, we have to block that from happening. This isn't just extra work (to prevent users from ending up on that subscription page), it actually prevents us from offering users a way to subscribe or even change their subscription from within the app. This directly hurts our business model (subscriptions) and UX (users have to change their subscription by manually visiting our site in a browser).

All of this work means we either have to charge the user extra money (increased costs for consumers) or do less with the money we have (decreased value for the consumers).

I know this doesn't fully answer your question, but I hope it sheds a bit of light on what these extra costs are and how consumers end up paying for it.

[Levitating]

Native app development needs work on all major platforms. But in the long term I don't think web apps are the way out.