What makes you think the 30% cut is to pay for the bandwidth of the file transfer?
The entire platform the app runs on was created by Apple. The hardware, the OS, the programming language, the SDKs.
Thousands of APIs used to build the apps, maybe a million pages of documentation on those APIs.
All the toolchain to develop, build, test, and deploy apps for purchase in hundreds of countries including customer profiles, billing, and support.
Billions of dollars of iCloud infrastructure for backend services to support everything from push notifications, data sync, backup, automatic updates, etc.
Then you get into the actual app store and you have all the work that went into the UX there for discovering, installing, buying and reviewing apps. In-app purchases and subscription services to support different business models. Family sharing, parental controls, parental approval requirements for kids’ phones.
I could go on for hours and probably still miss huge swaths of functionality that Apple invested millions of dollars into, just so that you could pull up chair and with a few lines of code start writing an app that can reach billions of devices.
Not to mention all the marketing and training and support Apple does to prime their customers to be big users of the App Store.
Yeah, and the bandwidth to download the app as well.
Personally I think 30% is a steal for what you get in return.
Oh, and I’ll just add one more thing; you can distribute your app for free and you pay Apple nothing (or nearly nothing) for the benefit of all their hard work and infrastructure and support.
The entire platform the app runs on was created by Apple. The hardware, the OS, the programming language, the SDKs.
Thousands of APIs used to build the apps, maybe a million pages of documentation on those APIs.
All the toolchain to develop, build, test, and deploy apps for purchase in hundreds of countries including customer profiles, billing, and support.
Billions of dollars of iCloud infrastructure for backend services to support everything from push notifications, data sync, backup, automatic updates, etc.
Then you get into the actual app store and you have all the work that went into the UX there for discovering, installing, buying and reviewing apps. In-app purchases and subscription services to support different business models. Family sharing, parental controls, parental approval requirements for kids’ phones.
I could go on for hours and probably still miss huge swaths of functionality that Apple invested millions of dollars into, just so that you could pull up chair and with a few lines of code start writing an app that can reach billions of devices.
Not to mention all the marketing and training and support Apple does to prime their customers to be big users of the App Store.
Yeah, and the bandwidth to download the app as well.
Personally I think 30% is a steal for what you get in return.
Oh, and I’ll just add one more thing; you can distribute your app for free and you pay Apple nothing (or nearly nothing) for the benefit of all their hard work and infrastructure and support.