It pays for the development of system apis, update infrastructure, software deployment infrastructure, software development sdks and toolkits, among a bunch of other very expensive to maintain infrastructure. There’s the argument to be made to force them to allow competition, but I don’t think you can call it robbery from an informed 10000 foot view because everything they provide is extremely expensive and extensively technical to host/construct on your own.
I don’t believe you can say that without adequately providing evidence and financial breakdowns. Not saying you’re wrong, but given that developers even in the EU where alternative app markets are allowed still publish to the apple app store, I think that it’s likely more fair than you realize. The cost to do all of what they provide for a $100/yr dev license + 30% pro-bono is immense. Even the least used applications with the smallest budgets receive state of the art infrastructure, toolkits, and security review as well as a bevy of other apple provided resources. It’s the same for other marketplaces as well. Steam for example provides marketing, development guidance, server hosting, and a wide variety of other non-trivial non-free to provide services for their share of the cut.
It pays for the development of system apis, update infrastructure, software deployment infrastructure, software development sdks and toolkits, among a bunch of other very expensive to maintain infrastructure. There’s the argument to be made to force them to allow competition, but I don’t think you can call it robbery from an informed 10000 foot view because everything they provide is extremely expensive and extensively technical to host/construct on your own.
Which doesn’t justify a cut of a 30%. I’m not saying they shouldn’t charge anything, but this is at usurious levels.
I don’t believe you can say that without adequately providing evidence and financial breakdowns. Not saying you’re wrong, but given that developers even in the EU where alternative app markets are allowed still publish to the apple app store, I think that it’s likely more fair than you realize. The cost to do all of what they provide for a $100/yr dev license + 30% pro-bono is immense. Even the least used applications with the smallest budgets receive state of the art infrastructure, toolkits, and security review as well as a bevy of other apple provided resources. It’s the same for other marketplaces as well. Steam for example provides marketing, development guidance, server hosting, and a wide variety of other non-trivial non-free to provide services for their share of the cut.