I think it’s similar to why Walmart deserves a third (or more) from manufacturers selling stuff in their store. Or Amazon. Or any store.
Physical goods have about a 100% markup between manufacturer and what a customer pays.
I think it should be less for digital goods, but you wanted a good argument. Apple charges because they are between you and the app makers, like Walmart and target and stuff.
Products sold in wallmart can then provide extra external services which walmart gets no cut of. If I buy an air purifier in Walmart, they get a cut on that initial sale. But the purifier company can tell me they sell filters on their website, Walmart gets no cut of that. On mobile, Apple does get a cut on that sale which they did not facilitate.
The difference is Walmart holds so much less power. It would be like if Walmart owned the exclusive ability to delivery packages to 50% of houses in the world, and then no matter what the filter company does, they can't avoid this fee because Walmart holds their huge captive market and is able to extract these fees without adding much if anything to the transaction.
Walmart does have competition across town, unlike apple store. I can got to Target, Costco, Safeway, et c. Unless they collude to price fix, they will indeed have to compete by driving down their margin.
Moving "across town" from the apple store involves an IT project and hundreds of dollars in order to save dozens of dollars.
Moving from Walmart to target requires lots of supply chain logistics. I suspect it’s actually easier to move apps to new App Stores than work out how to get products into completely different vendors.
Also for IT, Walmart requires IT interfaces from its suppliers.
If I buy a bread maker from Walmart, they aren't entitled to a cut of my revenue should I sell the bread I make. Similarly, if I buy a tablet at Walmart, that doesn't mean they're entitled to a cut of all the purchases I make using it.
Great example! In retail it’s bad if there isn’t a 300%+ markup.
The fascination with making Apple a boogey man on this is bizarre. Your local corner store — which you should very much support! — has a markup that makes Apple look lazy.
Retail provides a necessary service of managing a large inventory of vetted goods readily available under reasonable terms 5-10 minutes from most everywhere america.
There is no way I'm flying to South America for a banana or to Taiwan for a toaster. Their profit is payment for this service.
Your oem provided you a device which is perfectly capable via your ISP and your vendors infrastructure of arranging products and services. Your oem is only an essential part because they insist on it.
FedEx and ford could have in theory done the same or Dell and Verizon.
Sideloading is not allowed per Apple rules and requires jailbreaking which comes with a list of caveats. So technically yes as a user I can side load but as a company providing apps it's not a realistic method of app delivery for the vast majority of use cases.
This is the second time you've made this claim on the thread. Nobody knows what you're talking about. What side loading are you referring to? You mean taking advantage of the dev loophole by asking users to build and sign your code every 7 days?
Physical goods have about a 100% markup between manufacturer and what a customer pays.
I think it should be less for digital goods, but you wanted a good argument. Apple charges because they are between you and the app makers, like Walmart and target and stuff.