Apple was just fine building all those platform SDKs for macOS without charging people to write apps for it. Why should iOS be any different?
The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
But none of that matters. Very few businesses set their prices based on how much it costs them to provide their goods or services. They charge what the market will bear. The problem is that there is no "iOS app distribution market"; Apple controls it, 100%, so they can set prices wherever they want, without regard to competition.
> The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
Specifically, the transfer cost to download a 50MB app is approximately $0.0005. That's 200,000 downloads per $100. Even assuming a low average revenue of $1 per download, that's a $60,000 take for Apple for maybe $105 worth of hosting.
That's not to say there aren't other costs involved in running the store. But we definitely shouldn't be pretending that hosting is even relevant to the conversation. Hosting costs haven't been relevant for over a decade.
It's probably orders of magnitude smaller than that, like 2e-7 dollars per MB.
People have gotten use to AWS/Azure/GCP pricing when bandwidth is essentially free at scale. You can rent a few 100Gb/s ports for ~$500 to ~$5000 per month depending on location.
But I guess this is best case scenario and not everyone will have the capital/clout to colocate at POPs.
This disregards side costs like storage, global distribution, retries, re-downloads, updates, backups and the likes. It's probably still cheaper than AWS outbound pricing in the end, but hosting apps is more than just the bandwidth used exactly once.
Late on the reply, but I don't think your argument matches reality.
1. Storage for 50MB is less than $0.001 per month. So, even if you're storing and backing up every every version of an app, and they update a very high 50 times per year, and they're storing on 12 different locales, that's less than $1 per year for the typical app.
2. "Global distribution" is a one time cost per app update at approximately $0.006 per 50MB per server. For 12 updates per year spread across 12 servers, that's less than $1 per year total. Over 75% of apps are updated less than once per month.
3. Retries, re-downloads and updates are already insignificant transfer costs, per my original comment. Even if you want to attribute 90% of those downloads to being updates from the same set of users, and keep the lifetime revenue per user at a very low estimate of $1, Apple is still taking $6,000 for approximately $105 of hosting costs.
All in all, that matches my original estimate of $100 per 200k downloads for transfer and $5 for server fees. So, as I said, hosting isn't relevant to the conversation, at all.
The original comment only listed bandwidth cost. Storage is also equally cheap, global distribution is equally cheap if you have your boxes at POPs. Someone that is at Apple's scale could very easily manage this.
We're looking at cents per app per user in lifetime costs.
The "Cloud" is disgustingly expensive at nearly any scale. It does require some capital investment and competent people to host your own however. Although there really is no alternative to the cloud if you are small scale but need presence globally.
I feel the App Store is one thing differentiating Apple from Android phone manufacturers.
Money from the App Store gets reinvested in the entire iPhone supply chain. Whereas in the case of Android, App Store money goes to Google only.
It also encourages Apple to support their phones long term as its preferred that you stay on your aging iPhone and keep spending at the App Store then risking you leaving the Apple ecosystem because Apple allows their older phones to become obsolete. Android manufacturers on the other hand have every incentive to obsolete your phone ASAP because you buying a new phone is the only way they make money.
Do you seriously believe this?
It's Apple that's blocking you from installing any apps or updates when you don't receive iOS Versions Updates anymore, while Google Play doesn't care about it, as long as the app itself is still developed for that version.
Also they make more than enough money from the Hardware itself, they just take the profits off the software purchases.
No, Xcode requires you to have an up-to-date MacOS to develop, not iOS.
However, developers are strongly encouraged to raise their apps' minimum iOS versions since Apple does not backport any APIs to older versions, any new thing presented at WWDC is only for the new iOS version. This also applies to bugfixes in some cases (SwiftUI).
So as a developer you either stagnate your knowledge or keep moving forward. Google does backport many APIs, so the issue isn't as problematic on that end.
The servers do not cost 30% of all sales on the platform. Not even close.
But none of that matters. Very few businesses set their prices based on how much it costs them to provide their goods or services. They charge what the market will bear. The problem is that there is no "iOS app distribution market"; Apple controls it, 100%, so they can set prices wherever they want, without regard to competition.