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.

I think it’s neither cynical nor doing the right thing. It’s small positive move, but I don’t expect it to change anything for most developers.

The 30% is really not the elephant in the room.

What makes it so hard to make money on the App Store is the speed at which knock offs can appear.

The App Store supports deep work that is hard to copy and work where there is a backend with network effects.

For everything else it’s just a lottery.

30% isn’t the issue.

If someone is submitting something that can be knocked off really quickly, maybe the problem is that they're submitting something that there isn't a good market for.