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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pja ◴[18 Nov 20 12:43 UTC] No.25136113[source]▶
I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part.

They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.

Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.

Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.

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m463 ◴[18 Nov 20 12:53 UTC] No.25136180[source]▶
Apple/Google's 30% take is a tiny baby elephant in the room.

Apple and Google have a model where they make lots MORE money outside the system and if the price of software is ZERO they would be happy.

In Apple's case, even free software sells their phone.

In Google's case, even free software funnels users to their ad platform.

[1] "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements."

1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

(joel's a smart guy, he should write more often)

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_alex_ ◴[18 Nov 20 13:11 UTC] No.25136336[source]▶
Apple has no growth left in selling phones. They are now a “services” business. Their most lucrative service so far is the app store.

That 30% matters to them a lot.

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1. kevingadd ◴[18 Nov 20 13:34 UTC] No.25136506{3}[source]▶
"no growth left in selling phones" is kind of the wrong way to look at it. Even if their number of units sold per year never grows, it's a very healthy revenue stream because they manage to convince existing customers to buy new hardware. Considering the cost per phone the revenue per customer is pretty high just from selling phones if they can get them to buy every 2-3 years.

Naturally, the 30% take from the app store is bigger, but that's a matter of overall volume, not growth. The app store is a cash cow and will remain so even if its numbers start trending down.