Apple makes it sound like they are doing the small app developers, startups & creators a favour.
Let’s be clear, this isn’t money “Apple has paid” to developers. It is the money that consumers, the customers of the developers/startups/creators, have paid because they enjoyed their app/service/content.
Put another way, I’d say Apple has made over $100 billion dollars in profit from the small developers/startups/creators who had no choice but to use Apple’s walled-garden App Store to distribute their work to their customers.
With decades of standardisation and protocol development, why is it that iOS does not allow simple 3rd party app installs (side-loading) or competing app stores?
Here’s an idea:
Apple should be limited to charging an MDR-like 2% for being a processing gateway. Maybe also a one-time fee by developer to upload the apps/quality check. But beyond that, why pay 30% per download?!!!
I’d bet thousands of startups could thrive and benefit from an open ecosystem.
We should think deeply about this and have serious conversations around this topic.