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Comment by welcome_dragon | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "distributed thousands of terabytes of Spotify to iOS users for free"?

Apple doesn’t charge developers for providing worldwide distribution across hundreds of app stores. They take 30% of paid app revenues (15% of long term subscriptions).

Apple has distributed over 300M downloads of Spotify to iOS users, since Spotify is a free app it hasn’t paid a cent for over 30 Petabytes of bandwidth costs.

That's how the internet works ... and Apple is hosting the app only. It doesn't deal with the streaming

I don't have too much knowledge about how the delivery of apps in iOS store works, but I could infer that it is not only hosting files. They need at least to keep multiple versions and delivery the one that fits the proper iOS version of the device. And, based on my experience with delivering desktop apps I think there is much more to that. For example I was just delivering one single app to customers and still I needed to allocate time to infrastructure and versioning and automating some tasks and signing the code and much more.

I imagine that for an iOS store there is more.

The App store is one of Apples most profitable segments.

Let's not act like its philanthropy.

And they don't charge for distribution per se but their cut more than makes up for it.

> Apple doesn’t charge developers for providing worldwide distribution across hundreds of app stores.

Yes they do, publishing on the App Store isn't free. Also, they favor some apps they don't compete with, (Uber), while handicapping others, (Spotify). Hardly fair.

>Apple doesn’t charge developers for providing worldwide distribution across hundreds of app stores.

You have to pay every year to be in the appstore.

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