Prior to the App Store, indie software developers using turnkey online solutions from eSellerate, Kagi and others were typically only paying around 10% - and this included all the VAT/TAX handling for the EU and different US states.
>Apple/Google, who leverage OS API control into a tax on all activity, do nothing and get $1.50.
Except they offer you a channel for distribution, discoverability, promotion, rating and monetization of your app.
On Android you don't have to serve your app over Google Play you can distribute .apk file elsewhere and pay 0% fee but on iOS unfortunately you can not do that.
Heh. Seriously, this is (at least for me, and presumably for every other tiny indie developer) one of the huge attractions of storefronts like Steam and the iOS App Store: I'll just give you a license to sell my works, and you send me the royalties. I'll gladly give them a 30% cut to avoid all that bullshit.
Incidentally, the Google Play store does not do this. Each developer is the merchant of record. I can only imagine that nearly every smaller business selling through Google has neglected to pay at least some sales taxes that they owe.
One reason they are charging is to weed out bad actors or people not serious enough about publishing apps on their stores. That said they could do this as a one off like Google, and make it cheaper too.
It was really hard to believe the developers spent 50 euro cents to escape Apple’s restrictions. But that new Apple tax fee could add up quickly and make the opportunity for third-party app stores hard to bear this new upcoming trend.
A good regulatory trend. This is what governments are supposed to do to support what I would call “safe and efficient capitalism.”
That said, Apple did cut in half the fee for almost all developers and I installed Netflix, HBO, Prime, and Hulu apps that work fine with my existing streaming media plans that are direct to the providers. I forget, did Google also recently reduce developer fees? It may be as simple as both companies seeing the writing in the wall and are trying to get in front of this.
The tax ensures that any app developer has costs to recover. It thus drives them to do so in ways that reduce quality. At the same time it pushes away the hobbyists who may have decided to develop non-monetized versions of an app at higher quality.
I think your point is valid. However, I am wondering what is the alternative? Other paid apps developers will make their apps free and charge subscription fee instead to avoid paying any Apple tax.
Good grief, what a loaded headline. It's not a "tax" for a start. It's a fee. And what does the fee cover? PCI DSS Credit card processing services, secure web hosting, worldwide CDN-cached downloads, sales and download analytics, listing in the premier app catalog with many millions of users, marketing exposure for popular/successful apps, and more.
How much would it cost for developers to do all this themselves? Every single individual developer? People seem to forget what things were like before the App Store.
Now one could question the percentage itself, and ask if it is a reasonable number, but when you consider the time and effort and investment that would otherwise be required,
Having a developer calculate tax seems odd. Does this mean every single developer who puts a paid app on android store needs to figure out the intricacies of digital download tax for every single state / country? Sure big companies can hire someone to do it but that seems excessive for an individual developer.
App Store & Google Play charging this fee is like Google charging your website in order to show up in Google results. The app stores are not great due to their investments, they are great due to the awesome apps developers have built
This is very interesting, because, for years, there have been fan boys that justified Apple and Google apps store rackets by saying that it is normal for them to have high charges to be able to fund the expensive work of providing the service.
I wonder what the cost of building and running the app store is? Apart from the engineering costs and costs to run the servers, there are reviewers to be paid, marketing, gift cards to be distributed, various tax and legal problems that are hidden from app developers and the like.
And of course there's Apple's profit margin, which as capitalists I don't think many people are denying outright.
It's very hard to separate this from the costs of the iPhone, but ofc since all financial details are private anyway all we have is speculation.
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