Apple releases study defending App Store's 30% cut ahead of testimony
One can have a range of perspectives on this.<p>30% of nothing is nothing.  Seriously, for a large number of developers the App Store is a big pile of nothingness.<p>Apple accelerated a race to the unprofitable bottom rather than to create a bottom that could actually deliver a financial return for developers.  I mean, they could have established a $1 minimum price for apps, rather than $0.  They could have created minimum business models that would deliver benefits to both developers and users.  They chose to got to zero because a bunch of developers killing themselves to fill the app store with apps is good for Apple and users and developers are a dime a dozen (or at least that&#x27;s the level of importance Apple seems to assign to them).<p>App discovery has sucked for years, which means that having an app found and noticed requires either luck, a tremendous amount of external marketing, a very large pile of cash or all of the above.<p>We&#x27;ve had apps on the App Store, about a dozen of them, it was a big waste of time and resources.  Still, I am not holding that against Apple, they provided everyone with opportunities and many benefited from this greatly.<p>That said, I think they could have done a far better job of preventing the ecosystem from becoming a race to the bottom.  This is where the optimization of the hardware sales vs. number of apps for free curve likely drove a decision that was not favorable for developers and entrepreneurs.<p>Early in the day we worked on an app for a client.  Before they came to use they had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on the app.  They needed a large rewrite due to Apple forcing code updates on everyone.  This cost them a pile of cash.  They made nothing with the app before engaging with us and still made nothing after we got done.  They were in a segment dominated by the likes of Disney, who put millions of dollars into apps, gave them away for market share and, if that wasn&#x27;t enough, poured real money into marketing.<p>This is where app discovery challenges and the race to the bottom truly hurt a lot of entrepreneurs.  We abandoned all of our apps eventually.  It just didn&#x27;t make any sense to expend resources update code for zero return on investment.<p>I do think that 30% is high, yet that never really bothered me.  I&#x27;d be glad to pay 30% if there was a real shot at app discovery and the entire ecosystem wasn&#x27;t --using the term for dramatic emphasis-- tantamount to voluntary slavery for the benefit of Apple hardware sales.  Sorry to be so negative, I imagine a wide deep path of entrepreneurial destruction created by Apple as a result of what the App Store devolved into.  Apple sure made billions of dollars and lots of entrepreneurs did well.  However, nobody ever gets a peek at what lies beneath the portion of the iceberg that protrudes through the surface.  That portion, I am certain, is deep, wide and full of sad stories.<p>Put a different way:  You can go sell products on Amazon for about the same 30% cut and have a FAR better chance of your products being found and making a profit.