If so, then that implies no profit. If no profit, why bother?
No, the poster isn’t implying that all businesses should be capping their fees. That’s absurd. However, Apple is not all businesses and regulation is structured in a way that has a number of conditions. I for one am glad that the department of insurance makes my car insurance affordable and that when I purchase water it’s not from a private equity firm.
That’s literally what they said
>> "Well, you said the costs of payment processing is 3%, that's what we'll cap your commission at".
The issue in question isn't whether Apple should be allowed to profit, it's whether they should be allowed to abuse their effective monopoly position to set their commission a literal order of magnitude higher than any other processor.
The argument over alternative payment methods has always struck me as odd for precisely this reason--throughout the Epic case Apple has made it clear that if they allowed alternative payment methods they would still charge the 30% fee for the other services.
Is 30% (or 27%) too steep for what the App Store provides? Probably. But fighting over the 30% as a payment processing fee is a huge misstep, because regulators will always take Apple's side on that question.
No, they're providing a service and charging for it, just like anyone else.
What's changed here is that Apple has now set a number to the "payment processing" portion of their fee. This gives them a way to cave on alternative payments while still retaining the bulk of their profits.
apple never said 30% is just payment processing. they claim the infra, the testers, the approval etc etc costs a lot. so now we know it’s 27%. which is absolutely normal.
should any app use their proprietary apis, without their explicit approval? of course not. the phone might be yours, but the code running on it a hard no.
but at the end of the day it’s all politics so i normally assume the worst: a worse overall end-user experience because some companies spent more on lobbying than others.
Bah, we most certainly don't.
They pulled that number completely out of their ass, just like the previous 30%. The only rationale behind it is because they could get away with it.
As recently as 2019, 30% was pretty common:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...
what cost does apple incur per iap on somebody else's payments service?
The assumption that Apple only has to pay for infrastructure when people are downloading things is incorrect. Data centers still incur ongoing operations and maintenance costs even if they're fully paid for and nobody's downloading anything.
Why do people insist on acting like the platform commission is a payment processing fee? No one says that about the platform commissions by Xbox, Playstation, Twitch, Patreon, ...