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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | 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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jmull ◴[18 Nov 20 15:15 UTC] No.25137627[source]▶
> purely a cynical piece of PR

Well, this is a big change to a core part of their App Store business model.

It’s hard to reduce that to a PR move.

Consider the revenue at stake here.

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1. nhumrich ◴[18 Nov 20 15:27 UTC] No.25137790[source]▶
The revenue at stake for apple is likely almost nothing. As soon as a company (not app) makes over 1 million in purchases via apple, then they start paying the full amount. So, apple is losing 50% of the revenue from companies that dont make at least that much. Which is small potatoes to apple.
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2. jmull ◴[18 Nov 20 18:08 UTC] No.25140124[source]▶
According to this App Store revenue is around $50B and developers affected by this[1] make ~5% of that revenue, or around $2.5B Cutting that in half, we're talking $1B+.

Indeed, that's small potatoes for Apple. But then, everything is small potatoes compared to iPhone sales.

But far, far bigger than even a big PR stunt. Orders of magnitude bigger.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...