Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

Same model as Unreal Engine. I wonder if this scaling model works out for most marketplaces or only specific ones.

Except Unreal Engine actually delivers some value for their cut.

The operating system isn’t valuable from your perspective? The payment processing? The IDE? The language?

The Apple software/hardware ecosystem delivers no value?

I would argue the only fees that should be based on revenue are payment processor fees, and maybe distribution/CDN costs (althouth these should be instead charged per byte carried). And even then, these are astronomically low compared to the current 15%/30% cut.

Everything else is paid for already by the end user of the device (who consciously pay a premium to use Apple's ecosystem), and has no reason to scale linearly with developer revenue.

Why should developers also pay for this, when end users already do? Apple is double dipping like a world-class monopolist (see: ISPs who charge both peers and customers).

Apple provides value to both end-users and developers. It does not seem unreasonable to charge them both. And if Apple did not charge developers, that would suggest they’d have to raise prices on end-users to make up the difference, which does not seem fair to the users.

If that is the case, are we going to see device price hikes after this cut decrease?

Apple can afford to not make 15%/30% off of developers. They are just greedy for short-term profit, as any publicly traded company is. The only reason this cut happened is because they started getting threatened with lawsuits, so they had to slightly slow down their free money printer.

But developers provide value to Apple and users as well, and of course already "pay" by writing software for the platform.

They are valued, the consumer pays for the value by purchasing the hardware

This aurgument is the same as Comcast claiming Netflix is a "free loader" on their network because Netflix was not paying Comcast...

hello, Comcast's customers pay comcast for the use of the network

In the same way, Apples hardware and iOS software are paid for by the END USER of the phone, users pay a HUGE and Excessive cost for these phones, why on earth then should Devs pay a second time

Like with last mile broadband, this is double dipping, in other contexts that would be considered fraud

The operating system is paid by every customer.

The payment processing? That's usualy 3% for credit card operators.

The IDE and language? That's the $100 per year per developer account.

The operating system is valuable to the people who buy it, as in, the people who buy iPhones. This is why they pay a hefty price for it. Asking developers to pay for the OS is just double-dipping.

Thats fair but kinda like saying a food product producer is already providing value to a store by producing goods but not paying the store any money to host their product.

It doesn't really make sense.

Most importantly it's the marketing and distribution that you're paying for.

To Apple developers are disposable, if you don’t want to make software in their garden someone else will clone your app there. They seem themselves as the ones providing value to you.

It won’t be long till they make more changes to make sure they get that value out of you on the desktop too.

I am not sure what you said makes any sense...

The food product producer is not selling to me directly, they sell to the store, who then sells to me.

Apple is not selling me the app, they are very clear about this, my relationship is with the App Developer, they are just a "payment processor"

So comparing the App Store to traditional retail store is no where near a proper analogy

Of course, as we all know, the cost of distributing 1 million digital goods is the same, and scales the same way, as distributing 1 million physical goods.

There is a moral imperative that copying of software, which costs almost 0, is taxed per unit, just like physical goods, where there is a storage cost, a transport cost, etc.

I'm being ironic, obviously. Apple's App Store profits show that they're basically just sharecropping developers. Their operating costs are minimal and the fact that they're allowed to charge per unit, like they're Walmart and have to stock actual shelves, is quite ridiculous.

Just because they can afford not to take it doesn't mean it's free

It is more like a market than a store. I buy from the stall / seller rather than the Market, but Market stalls still pay rent to the market to set up shop.