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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked the App store was not a significant revenue source for Apple. My guess is the review process is expensive and most apps are a net negative from Apples perspective.

One way around this would be if apple reserved a portion of sales, but with the number of 'free' apps out there this would probably not work. And for near breakeven apps it would probably result in similar numbers. (EX: 100% of the first 10k, 10% after that.)

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I'm not sure when the last time you checked but $10 billion [1] in revenue is significant. That's only 2013.

[1] https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/01/07App-Store-Sales-T...

Plus the fact that if there was no App store Apple wouldn't have as high of hardware sales so it has intrinsic value just being there.

That's the 100% of revenue, Apple's take would be $3B. Still not insignificant...

That's the iOS App Store, not the Mac App Store. The app store on iOS is significantly different in that you can't choose to just sell apps directly.

The Unreal development kit has an interesting pricing method. The first $50k you make is completely royalty free, and after that Unreal takes a 25% cut. Now that I think about it, Apple's approach seems incredibly lazy considering its size and the size of the market. I guess there's enough demand for apps that developers are willing to put up with shitty terms.

I can't link directly to the answer, but it's the last FAQ, 'Can you explain the UDK commercial license terms'. https://www.unrealengine.com/previous-versions/udk-licensing...

For Apple the review process is more about offering a clean user experience for their users to sell more phones/tablets/macs.

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