However to be clear, that percent is in the same area that game consoles and I believe Steam (someone correct me?) charge. And we accept that. When the 30% rule for the App Store came down, our smart phones were basically the same as a game console. Most people did not expect these devices to become the central part of all of our lives. At least not in this way.
Now that it has, than sure the percent needs to be lowered and I am not arguing that (I said in another comment the 30% is worth it for me personally but doesn't mean I am ok with it).
Steam isn't a monopoly like Apple and Google are with their respective marketplaces so it doesn't make sense to compare the two. If I want to publish or play a game there are a lot of different ways to do so that don't involve Steam.
Why should software get a free pass?
The only viable path towards finding a fair price for this service (apparently deemed essential and basically a steal by Apple and Google, but worth less than nothing by many app developers) would seem to be competition.
Why not offer both, explicitly allowing for different prices, special deals only for non-store subscriptions etc.?
In Australia, the Reserve Bank regulates interchange fees and requires the end user to be made aware of card processing fees which can't exceed a percentage/value of the transaction.
Similar regulation applies in the EU.
There's no reason why Google/Apple/etc stores can't be similarly regulated.
Of course it would also be possible to do both, i.e. to mandate either a fixed rate or alternatively allowing out-of-band payments.
Though there is fair-use policy that Steam users shouldn't be given worse deal. E.g you're not allowed to only run 30%-off discount exclusively on your store without offering same discount for Steam store users sometime later.
This isn't an Apple/Google/Spotify thing, it's a service thing.
An app store costs money too - the creation and maintenance of the billing platform/API, bandwidth, human curation, cross-device storage of saved configurations, user acquisition, etc.
What makes musicians so different from software developers that it's perfectly acceptable for Spotify to take such a large share of the revenue their music has earned?
(To make my own position clear, I don't think any of them deserve 30%)
If 30% is too much, publish your content as a web app. If you want to play in the walled garden, pay the cover charge.
What’s the difference?
I dont think that is the correct way of looking at it. As you stated at the end, you think it is worth it.
The question is value delivery. Not percentage. I could argue in cases where even 90% is acceptable. The question is how much value is delivered and how much of those 90% are used, or was it pure profits, i.e rent seeking. For some categories of Apps, 30% doesn't make sense.
A noble position but it seems to have been going other way unfortunately. Not sure how you would do that … further regulation or introducing artificial competition in the market. I think the most pro-business approach is to quash the monopoly and open up the market.
Likewise would you be equally OK if the dollar figures involved were much larger for example your cable subscription?
You do. I certainly don’t. And you’re just doing that because it’s the status quo, not out of any analysis.
Yes to 0% and any percentage of revenue should be made illegal. Google and Apple can charge whatever fixed values they want or even charge based on a wide variety of vectors but a % of revenue should be explicitly illegal that kind of blatant rent seeking is a quintessential example of something the government needs to stamp out.
To be clear, 30% is too much, but aside from payment handling and taking on fraud risk as a result of that (3-4% is generally the industry standard for card not present transactions), they provide a subscription management/payment API for IAPs, as well as app packaging and distribution, reviews, etc.
That certainly is worth more than 0%.
There is a definite cost to all these so 0% is unreasonable. Epic is trying to be the "good" games distribution store and they reportedly take a 12% cut. Something around there, maybe down to 10% would be a reasonable place for Apple/Google to be.
I think we can legitimately talk about the costs of maintaining the app-store as a marketplace, and we can talk about the future costs of providing updates free of charge in perpetuity and orchestrating the infrastructure to host those various downloads... but that's about where their service offering ends. App review is a joke, the rating systems on both platforms as absolute trash and often gamed by publishers (remember Uber's in app prompt about how many stars you'd give them that forwarded you to the app-store if you gave them 5 and otherwise just offered you an internal complaint form if you gave them anything else? Everyone does that).
I'd question whether Apple and Google are really providing a service or just exploiting a captive market.
30% is between 10 and 20 times a reasonable fee.
For example, a smalltime dev isn't going to see hardly any refunds, but a dev on the scale of Epic Games is going to be seeing something on the order of tens or hundreds per minute. Should that not be accounted for?
That said, this could be accomplished with tiered fixed fees. An indie dev would probably land in a low rung where costs are tiny, where a triple-A game studio would get charged substantially more.
The revenue from paid services covers that support.
Would I prefer the cut was lower, but at the same time the 15% (for most)-30% cut seems to match every other platform
