Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

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.

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)

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.