this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Apple argues that its opposition to 3rd party App Stores is that with only one App Store offering approved-only apps, it better serves customer's needs because Apple can oversee security and quality control. That sounds altruistic enough, but if that were genuinely true, Apple could minimise their fees to only cover these costs and no more. Instead, Apple takes a whopping 30% bite of not just the initial app purchase price, but every purchase made in the app. Apple are learning the hard way that the EU Commissioners weren't born yesterday.
So how would you pay for the ongoing development of developer tools, store infrastructure, backend development and upkeep of the ecosystem, etc.
People seem to grossly underestimate how big a chunk of development, maintenance, and distribution of software Apple provides - as a developer I can just mash together Apple-provided technologies with some business logic and start making money.
And it is this ease of implementation and freeing developers up to just focus on what their app should do vs spending time focusing on how they get to a point where they can make an app do anything that is of value.
They literally net a billion dollars a week profit just from selling the iPhone itself. On top of that they net another billion dollars a week profit from all their services and other hardware. If you subtract their profit from the App Store, in the unlikely event it was entirely wiped out by competition, they would still have 2/3 of that or about $1.4 billion a week profit after all expenses. They would be just fine, making massive profits off iPhones after all iPhone-related costs, even if they lost the App Store entirely.
Okay cool, them making tons of money on iPhone sales doesn’t mean they should run the App Store at a loss though