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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%?

If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure.

Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers.

That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.

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Do they claim to promote you? Honest question, I don't know.

I'd expect Apple to provide three things in exchange for the 30%:

Access to a huge audience, payment processing, and the administrative/technical stuff like download servers and bandwidth.

How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?

> How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps?

I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.

> Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access.

From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find."

> Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?

They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.

Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front.

But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/

I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.

So what platform has 4.5 million products and can showcase them all?

They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.

So some products get showcased and some languish in obscurity. Apple also showcases a few apps....

And those products that get showcased on the end cap pay extra. You can also (sadly) pay extra to run search based ads in the App Store.

You keep saying the same irrelevant thing. It doesn’t matter how hard it is to showcase 5M apps, /if you’re taking 30% of the cut from all of them, in exchange for promoting them/.

Fraud at scale is still fraud. This isn’t a difficult concept.

So does that mean retail stores that take more than a 30% cut are also committing fraud?

They aren't taking a 30% cut to "promote" you. They are taking the cut and providing billing services like credit card processing. They also provide access to your app and apis for you to connect and use phone features. They also host your app binary and provide update services. But the main reason they charge 30% is because they can. If they offered no value for that 30%, then no one would pay for it.

I agree it's too much. But they do offer something for that 30%.

I don't expect them to promote anything, back in the day a good app could get some initial traction, make it to the top 1000 apps in a category and move up the charts based on usage and good reviews.

That's not possible anymore. It's a known fact that the only way to make it on the app store these days is to blow half a million dollars on a burst ad campaign to get a large initial volume of downloads. Other option is to have the number of "App Store Managers", who decide what gets featured, and that option is only really available to top VC firms and large companies.

Again there is an existence proof that isn’t true. Marco Arment and David “Underscore” Smith are well known indie developers who are often featured on the App Store.

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