Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

If 30% is ridiculous, what to say about J2ME, Symbian, Blackberry and PocketPC rates of former operators stores?

Can't speak for BB, but J2ME, Symbian, and PocketPC never had any centralized store that everything had to go through.

Well, I guess Symbian got N-Gage and the Ovi Store towards the end, but they never tried to lock it down against third party sources.

True, but my point was how much they charged developers for being there, not how many were available.

Wat? My point was that they weren't even in the equation. Who cares what they charged if everyone went straight to the source instead?

The source being the carriers shop and scummy online shops listed on newspapers getting paid via SMS codes, which one would need to pitch before they would even consider taking their royalties.

No, the source being the developer's website. Not everything has to be a walled garden.

Somehow I lived a different alternative universe regarding J2ME, Symbian, BlackBerry, PocketPC app stores.

I guess it may have been a regional thing. Or maybe you're thinking of Qualcomm's BREW?

Qualcomm wasn't available in Europe.

No the stores were run by the carriers. Sprint and Verizon had an App Store before the iPhone was introduced where they sold a third party J2ME apps. Those carriers took a 70% cut.

I suppose it might have been regional, but that was never the case here. You would just download the jars (or cabs) directly from the developer. The only cut would have been the ~2% credit card processing fee.

Well, the install base is way bigger for Android, and the general state of patching in 2019 is far more frequent than it was when older platforms were operating.

Hence why it is way cheaper than it used to be back then.

When Apple announced 30% cut, mobile devs where cheering, because many providers were charging way above 50%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com