Apple is facing rage from developers over the commission on the App Store
When people look at this issue they tend to fixate on the 30&#x2F;15% &#x27;tax&#x27;. Is it fair? Is it not?<p>The commission is not nothing, obviously, but misses a larger point.<p>Apple did to Hey what they did to our company. One day we submitted a minor upgrade for an app that had been on in the app store _for years_, a bugfix release, and they told us they would not publish it or any subsequent submission unless we add IAP to the app.<p>We would be happy to pay apple some fair fee to place our app in their store. We all understand that it&#x27;s not a charity. But that&#x27;s just not what apple is doing
here, or not the whole story.<p>They took an app that was _already_ in their store for years, and froze updates on it. That approach forced much of our company to stop whatever it was they were working on and implement IAP _now_. Mobile devs, backend devs, accounting, marketing analytics&#x2F;funnelling were all affected. There would be no bugfix releases until that feature was added.<p>The implementation of recurring payments in Apple&#x27;s IAP is quite different from that of other payment processors like Braintree or Stripe. As such it has added a lot of complexity to our backend services, and has sucked a huge amount of time from our developers, accounting, and from our analytics team. All so we can implement a feature we _already had in our products_ and were happy with, just their version of it.<p>We incorporated IAP in the fall of last year, but we are _still_ trying to digest it into our company, still refining how we handle their subs, still mitigating some mistakes we made in the our initial implementation. And their remain some unresolved question for us on the how best to do accounting and market funneling.<p>The media continue to fixate on the 30% commision, as do must of the comments in this thread. But the issue is that Apple does this by imposing the commission on apps that _already_ have huge sunk costs on there platform, going back years, that already have tens of thousands of users (at least in our case), and then one day send back a bugfix release with a letter that says &#x27;if you want to put an update to this app on our platform, add IAP to it. Now.&#x27;