> Imagine paying 30% more for software on your computer.
That is not really hard to imagine. Most of what we purchase has markups.
That is not really hard to imagine. Most of what we purchase has markups.
BestBuy is always teetering on 'not making money' - their markups are a function of market competition.
Apple is leveraging it's market power on all sides i.e. consumers, suppliers, and 3rd party marketplace vendors.
The massive margins (after markup) are basically a measure of that power.
The alternative to an App store with a 30% cut on everything is a store without free apps and a complete ban of in app purchases.
I personally have never understood the selfish HN user arguments against any particular cut because if you followed those arguments through they would want Apple to give them a negative cut because they only care about themselves with no single though about the consequences of their wishes.
Where do I sign up for this dream store? I’d be pretty happy to see all the low effort skinner box trash disappear overnight.
Why can't people see that mobile phones are just a different form factor of a computer?
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/google-play-store-main-di...
But yes, there is a "supervision required" subset of users. Still, shouldn't calibrate the level of big brother involvement for everyone based on this.
Treating users like idiots that need to be placed in the "pillow room" and building these app platforms under the pretext of security and convenience/ease of use is the reason we're in this swamp where your awesome pocket hardware has been reduced to an ad client which you have 0 control and ownership over.
Everyone's parents have survived the earliest days of computing where security was as its lowest, lack of common knowledge at its highest.
No, absolutely not.
"I personally have never understood the selfish HN user arguments against any particular cut because if you followed those arguments through they would want Apple to give them a negative cut because they only care about themselves with no single though about the consequences of their wishes."
This is ridiculous.
Apple is printing money hand over fist, the richest company in all of history.
The 'alternative' to 30% cut is a 0% cut!
Developers would get 30 percent increase which is might probably 2-3x their profits.
Apple's profits wouldn't be hurt that much.
If they aren’t, what’s the difference?
If they are, then a markup isn’t a function of cost, it’s more accurately a function of pricing power, or how much your customers are willing to pay you over a competitor.
Best Buy can’t markup more because people will buy from Amazon or Walmart or Costco or Target or Aliexpress. Apple can markup more because people can’t get a similar product elsewhere for cheaper.
'Margin' is sometimes 'gross' and sometimes 'net'.
In competitive markets, price ends up being a function of cost: it's always cost + a little bit. That little bit is profit. Anyone who marks up more, gets lost sales.
The fact Apple can take 30% of a software sale, which is in many cases 80% of a companies revenue, and that it's all gravy (i.e. all net), is huge.
Best Buy takes 40% margin because they have underlying costs, meaning other competitors will have similar structures.
Apple takes 30% because they can and that's that.
I know little about the apple store but there is a lot of content on the play store with most of it bring drek and the search is terrible.
In all fairness, though, while a Store listing doesn't guarantee users, the absence of a Store listing does guarantee no users. Epic found this out with Fornite when they tried to get users to sideload via their own website. So a Store listing is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition.
The user funnel seems to be awareness via non-Store marketing channels -> search on Play/App Store -> install. Remove the second step and your funnel disintegrates.
On the other hand, it's also possible that Fortnite's Android woes were due to artificial hurdles (e.g. requiring users to first navigate menus to allow "unsafe" side-loading). I suspect they don't have this difficulty on PC where it's just a simple go to website->download->install.
I'm not sure how to account for that fairly, it seems wrong to charge for prominent listing, but on the other hand it seems wrong to charge small indie devs the same as the majors while shuffling them in deep in the catalogue. Maybe the discount for small publishers Apple announced recently will help with this, though that system does seem to have it's own flaws.
Major apps don't really need that anyways. One of the promotions on the iOS App Store is "If you love indoor plants". The first three apps in that story are "Get some inspiration: Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest". I sincerely doubt any of those three needed any additional promotion in order to get App Store downloads. The apps that actually would benefit from getting promoted, and also the Ebay app, are further down in the article.
I suspect this is a big part of it. I chickened out installing a 3rd party App Store once because Google’s warnings sort of make it sound like you’ll lose the permission prompts on individual apps. Even side loading a single app I think it might be a bit ambiguous.
No matter what the details are, side loading is always an intentionally degraded experience regardless of platform based on my experience.