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Comment by cesher | Hacker News Reader

I love Stratechery, but I think this one gets it wrong. Think of App Store as three products:

1. App quality screening

2. App promotion/distribution

3. In app purchasing

Ask any reasonable dev if they are willing to foot a fixed cost to get their app screened, a fixed cost per app download (bandwidth), and variable cost to get their app promoted in the store (not everyone needs this) and they would agree. What pisses people off is Apple’s entitlement to the revenue of a company when there is no value add from Apple after the customer has gotten the app. So Apple is using their monopoly to force #3 on developers at no less than 30% of revenue.

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> App promotion

In my experience with the App Store this is not true for the vast majority of apps.

Only a very minor subset of apps actually get promotion on the App Store, everything else is so undiscoverable that searching the store with the app name verbatim isn't guaranteed to show it.

I am considering building some paid apps for the App Store. If I had to deal with payment processors, handling subscriptions, etc. myself there is zero chances I'd do that.

Have you had bad experiences with other payment processors in the past? Honestly curious. I’ve used Stripe, and they are amazing in terms of product quality and customer service.

There are quite a few providers that make this very easy to do. Apple isn't one of them.

There are plenty of payment processor platforms other than Apple, if the mobile market was opened, you could checkout if Stripe better suits your needs.

I agree, Apple's approach forces one kind of value capture through in-app purchases, then they do a value capture on that value capture with the 30% take.

I'm paraphrasing Byrne Hobart here, but if they beefed up their App Store discoverability and had proper search functionality and a self-serve ad engine like Alibaba, their revenue model would reflect demand and then, finally, the Ubers and Facebooks would have to start paying significant amounts for all the free App Store support they've had this entire time.

The fact that digital content services like Spotify are expected to subsidise other companies with different business models like Facebook or Uber is indefensible IMO.

I think you have totally wrong expectation about developers.

- Ask any reasonable dev if they are willing to foot a fixed cost to get their app screened

I don’t think most devs will support this, considering the constant arguments about IOS development requiring yearly $100 fee.

Read Job’s quote in the article, someone has to foot the bill to ensure the quality of Apps on the store. $100 a year seems reasonable to me for unlimited App screenings imho.

$100/year is peanuts. It’s a relatively token amount, designed to discourage “non-serious” players, like a minimum bet.

It certainly doesn’t make them money. It just helps to ensure that the people who do use their developer services are ones more likely to generate the revenue that does make them money.

This is something that Apple’s development community is known for. There’s fewer of them, but they do make money.

I’m not weighing in on the issue on either side. They each have quite valid arguments, and I’ll deal with whatever comes out of the scrum.

I agree, screening happens every time you submit an update, that's likely to be hundreds of dollars a time so thousands a year for many devs. Waiving this for free apps won't work because whether or not an app should be free is part of what this is all about. It will kill most genuinely free apps.

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