When the App Store was new, the web hosting for my indie shareware games was about 30% of their net revenue after the payment processor and marketplace fees.
The payment processor (cheapest PayPal (U.S. Accounts), most expensive American Express/Optima International[0]) and marketplace (Kagi[0]) fees were on top of that hosting fee, and cost anywhere from (1.9 to 5.0)% + $0.30 (payment provider) plus 2.5% + $1 (market place for ≤$25), which makes those two items combined also more than 30% for any item sold for less than $5.08-5.77.
Hosting fees are of course cheaper today, more so when bulk bought (I think more than enough to compensate for games today getting into the 100GB range when my shareware was 10s of MB).
I don't understand what hosting fees have to do with apps. The app store seemed to be more or less a ripoff of Facebook's (now long defunct) app store, back when Facebook was a web-based app-of-apps, and AFAIK Facebook apps were free plugins.
> I don't understand what hosting fees have to do with apps.
Apple hosts the apps, doesn't charge devs or customers anything for bandwidth used when downloading them. At the time the store launched, this was a big part of my overall costs, which Apple covered in full from their take.
> The app store seemed to be more or less a ripoff of Facebook's (now long defunct) app store, back when Facebook was a web-based app-of-apps, and AFAIK Facebook apps were free plugins.
I forgot that ever existed, so I searched for it. Looks like FB's was announced about 4 years after Apple's App Store?
Need is the wrong word there, developers absolutely need it. They may well be able to do better value for money with their own choices, and I appreciate the argument that everything bundled together isn't great, but unlike e.g. the CloudKid data sync Apple also provides at no extra cost, app download bandwidth is mandatory and unavoidable.
I could also go the other way and say that being tax-like is good for the same reason actual taxes are good: that it gets spent on building up an economic environment from which others can profit (at this point one would then want to retort something about democratic values).
But as I'm not hugely interested in defending a trillion dollar company (just giving a historical perspective that 30% was, when it was first announced, an improvement over the status quo), I say that if anyone feels the world has changed enough this is no longer good, it is good to call for change — companies may not be democracies, but the nations they operate in generally are.
Most developers are already using a platform like GitHub, which allows them to publish releases for free. There is no point in paying for that service other that being forced to.
GitHub Pages sites are subject to the following usage limits:
* GitHub Pages source repositories have a recommended limit of 1 GB. For more information, see "About large files on GitHub"
* Published GitHub Pages sites may be no larger than 1 GB.
* GitHub Pages deployments will timeout if they take longer than 10 minutes.
* GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month.
* GitHub Pages sites have a soft limit of 10 builds per hour. This limit does not apply if you build and publish your site with a custom GitHub Actions workflow
In order to provide consistent quality of service for all GitHub Pages sites, rate limits may apply. These rate limits are not intended to interfere with legitimate uses of GitHub Pages. If your request triggers rate limiting, you will receive an appropriate response with an HTTP status code of 429, along with an informative HTML body.
If your site exceeds these usage quotas, we may not be able to serve your site, or you may receive a polite email from GitHub Support suggesting strategies for reducing your site's impact on our servers, including putting a third-party content distribution network (CDN) in front of your site, making use of other GitHub features such as releases, or moving to a different hosting service that might better fit your needs."""
I managed to use 25 GB in a month for games that were less than 5 MB(!) each (shareware model, so more downloads than sales), and that was for something generating mere hobby-level income, not full time job replacement income.
I was talking about the “Releases” feature of GitHub (which the document you quoted recommends using for large downloads), not GitHub Pages. And specifically for games, there is Itch.
A quick look at the App Store games section suggests about half of the "top" games exceed the default file size limits for both of those.
(But this is rather beside the point, I've been trying to repeatedly make it clear that I was defending the initial value proposition when the App Store was new and shiny and Apple were mere upstarts, not the ongoing one where the corporation's market cap is approximately the same as the net value of the entire country I was born in).
At the time it was low compared to any retail software distribution. If (a big if) a developer could get on a carrier App Store (they existed) it was much more than 30%.
Go back and watch the keynote. Developers cheered because 30% was so much lower than any other stores available at the time.
30% is low compared to what? Mafia extortion rates?