Apple, Epic, and the App Store
&quot;But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money&quot;.  Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue.<p>Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would cost $2 billion.<p>Sorry, I&#x27;m not buying this excuse. OSX&#x2F;iOS is free for every piece of HW, and it surely has much much larger costs to staff.<p>A $1250 iPhone had a $450 cost to make, giving Apple a staggering 64% gross margin, and $800 gross profit.<p>The costs to run the Apple store should be <i>included</i> as a sunk platform cost of the phone just like OSX. The cost to run the store is <i>marginal</i>. The cost to serve up an additional developer app, to review an additional app, and to let someone buy one, is an insignificant fraction.<p>It should be <i>free</i> like the Web, or some extremely low cost to cover CC processing fees (~3%) and electricity to keep the lights on.<p>I&#x27;m shocked at the number of apologists who think this 30% cut is somehow necessary for poor little Apple, with a hole in the pocket, with living on their spare change. It&#x27;s egregious and unnecessary, and exists for one reason only: rent-seeking behavior. iPhones are reaching saturation, and Apple can either find ways to raise the price of the phone even more, lower the costs more, or increase service revenues, in order to keep their stock going up.<p>That&#x27;s why you see focus on service revenues, because they can&#x27;t really lower costs much to make the devices, and they can&#x27;t really increase the price much more.