It's a 30% cut for Apple; for a price of x, the underlying cost, excluding the cut, is 0.7 * x. But you're paying x, which is 100% - x / (0.7 * x) more, or 42.8%.
If that 30% take goes away, you think prices will come down by 30%? Or do you think companies will get 30% more profit?
Software and other similar goods occupy an interesting space. They obviously take time, effort, and other resources to produce. People should be compensated for that. And people who want to enjoy what's been created should be the ones to compensate for that enjoyment, i.e. if I watch a movie, I should pay to watch that movie in some manner. If I use software, I should pay to use that software.
Subscription models, purchase of physical media, etc. are all valid options and each has their place.
However, and here's the point, there comes a point where you've collected enough compensation to cover the cost of producing that item. Everything after that is pure profit. And if you're selling at pure profit, the only reason you're looking to avoid that 30% is to claim it yourself. Because you could just give away the product at this point.
And if you want to bring in overhead into this, Apple has overhead as well. And they do deserve to be compensated for what they bring to the table.
"You're overpaying by 30%" feels like an argument the competing large corporations want to convince people of as to have the populace on their side. When the reality is that, if that 30% goes away, their profit just increases by 30%.
This depends on the product. Some of them will have strong competition and therefore a direct relationship between costs and prices, so if you lower costs (fees), you lower prices.
Others won't lower prices because their customers aren't as price sensitive. But then they get more revenue, which causes more competitors to enter the market, which, if it doesn't push down prices, increases quality and choice.
Whereas if the money goes to Apple, they add it to their undifferentiated enterprise-wide cash mountain and the customer sees no discernible benefit of any kind.
> And if you want to bring in overhead into this, Apple has overhead as well.
We know what the overhead of processing payments and hosting apps is. It's not 30%. That's a monopoly rent.
In the land of hypotheticals it may work like that.
But in reality, once a customer is used to paying a price, and is willing to pay a price, prices don't decrease.
And we already have a metric ton of Clash clones, To Do lists, and whatevers. The amount of choice on the platform is already pretty large.
And once again, if people are paying for the item already, what incentive is there to dump more money into the product? No, you capture that as more profit.
As to "it's not 30%". It's not for a single app. But Apple works at a large scale. They have to host even the apps that are pure costs for them. There aren't many companies that operate at that scale. And of them: Valve takes 30%, Sony takes 30%, Microsoft took 30%, Google took 30%. Google and Microsoft are only now looking to reduce their percentage.
And while it's probably not 30%, it's definitely not 0%.
> Instead of monetizing users by selling their data (facebook / google etc) they simple charge high actual fees.
The amount of money companies get from selling data is equivalent to low fees. Like low enough that the main reason it's advertising is that collecting amounts of money that low end up dominated by processing fees and cognitive friction.
> The idea that apple is a monopoly is laughable if you like at any historic definition of a monopoly.
Have you actually looked at any historic definition of a market power? "Market with only two players" meets pretty much all of them, to say nothing of the fact that the market for iOS and Android apps are different because they have almost entirely non-overlapping sets of customers.
The existence of geographic monopolies is not controversial, but customers can cross the border to buy from a competitor - the barrier that prevents competition is the cost of travel.
So why is it hard to understand that cost of leaving the Apple ecosystem creates a barrier that effectively makes the Apple App Store a monopoly for the distribution of iOS apps?
The existence of alternatives on another platform doesn't help customers who can't afford the costs of switching or (worse) owning multiple platforms.
