> The Apple fee also drops to 15% after a year. It’s 30% for the first year because of the amount of fraud and chargebacks
You're referring to subscriptions, but at that point it's still outrageously high precisely because they no longer have to worry about that stuff and it's only a matter of transaction processing for which a 15% fee is still completely unreasonable.
> Do you have an actual point you are trying to articulate, or is it just trolling?
My point is that Apple is charging monopoly rents, which they can because they have a monopoly on iOS app distribution.
> Spotify pays 15% after a year, not 30% forever.
Spotify is a subscription service. All the non-subscription app developers are still paying 30% and 15% is still unreasonably high for a subscription service.
Moreover, for subscription services it's 15% after a year per subscriber, not after a year of the service existing. Every time they get a new customer it's back to 30% again. It's practically designed to suppress the growth of a competitor by siphoning off revenue as they're expanding. Even worse if they have a non-trivial churn rate.
> 15% isn't unreasonable at all. Many industries, from physical goods to digital subscriptions, work on a similar fee schedule.
15% is completely unreasonable for a service where all you need them to do is charge the customer's credit card once per subscription period.
> For example, you pay 15% forever for selling physical books, no matter how few chargebacks you get.
Because they're still physical goods, which are more expensive to handle in multiple ways.
> The rates for digital goods are often higher. For example, Amazon takes 30-65% for Kindle sales.
Amazon has the same kind of dominant position for Kindle books as Apple has for iOS apps, so the only thing you're really proving there is my point.
> Spotify can use Stripe if they want (and they do), at the lower rate.
Not from within their app.
> First you thought the rate was higher than it was.
You were the one talking about paper cups and Walmart. Paper cups aren't a subscription service, and they charge 30% for actual apps, without expiration.
> Then you thought that rate was unreasonable when compared to physical goods and it wasn't.
It continues to be unreasonable when compared to physical goods.
You chose an example (paper cups) where you know the percentage of the value that goes to the retailer is high, because the product is very inexpensive to produce and so it has a high ratio of retailing costs to production costs. Even so, the retailers have real competition, so even Walmart has overall net margins of only around 3%, because all that stuff the money you're talking about is paying for, actually gets paid for. It's real cost. And they're the successful ones -- there is a name for what happened to the others:
By comparison, digital distribution has trivial retailing costs. The cost of developing and operating a payment processing and digital distribution system amortized over each app purchase is negligible. It's basically 0%. Apple's net margins are almost the entire amount. About the only thing they really feel is the bite from that other monopoly, the credit card processors, and at their size even that is probably down around 2%. 15% is unreasonable. 30% is scandalous.
> 15% is too much… because it's possible to get that service somewhere cheaper, which they do, and that's how most customers pay?
15% is too much because it's possible to get that service somewhere cheaper and they purposely interfere with you doing that so that you are more likely to pay them the monopoly rents, to the point of an outright prohibition when your product is the app itself, at which point they still want 30%.
