I'm not the person you responded to, but I'd also include stuff like developing the APIs developers use, Swift and SwiftUI, Xcode, developer docs, etc. Basically everything that Apple does that makes it possible for a developer to produce a high quality app on their phone. Apple has to pay for all that somehow, and that revenue has to come from somewhere. Product sales are one place, but it's a one time purchase and so there's even less incentive to support old phones. Charging per app install is a pretty easy way to do it, aligns the incentives decently well, and a cost to the developer proportional to how much users/benefit they get.
They could also just charge a large cost for access to the SDK a la console systems, or not actually track the downloads but have a license agreement where you pay based on your user base like other ecosystems (Unity?).
> Apple does that makes it possible for a developer to produce a high quality app on their phone
This is not one sided at all. Historically generally Apple benefited more from developers releasing apps on their platforms than the other way around. Arguably that's still the case.
> Apple has to pay for all that somehow
So by selling devices? How did they pay for developing OSX/macOS and their APIs and tools for decades?
> They could also just charge a large cost for access to the SDK a la console systems,
There are many exploitative and unfair things they could do because of their dominant positions in the market, yes that's correct.
1. Apple and Microsoft have both developed these things for 40 years without the fees and restrictions. They do it for the health of their ecosystem to sell devices/OSes.
2. The only reason there are two mobile OSes with significant marketshare (instead of more than two) is the app library. WinMo never took off because even though it was a wonderful OS, they couldn't get developers to make apps. It's hard to imagine now that any party, even one with practically infinite money like Amazon or Apple or Samsung, could develop a successful mobile OS because they'd be launching with two million fewer apps.
Chromebooks have been selling briskly with a relatively new OS because people no longer cared about apps on desktops when everything started working in a browser. This is the obvious attack vector for phones. If you can do everything in a browser you can do in an app, the door is open for another OS. That's why Apple doesn't want third-party browsers.
> Apple doesn't develop those SDKs and tools in order to make money selling them to developers; Apple develops that stuff in order to sell iPhones.
Nobody buys an iPhone because of the SDK.
Nobody… except perhaps developers.
Apple makes those things so that developers make more apps for their phones, which they want to support in order that people continue to buy new phones.
> Apple charges 30% simply because they can, and nobody has stopped them.
Yes.
And unless the government says "the thing we don't like is specifically the price", what you're going to get from demanding side-loading and other app stores is going to look like the same price charged in a more complex way that's distributed differently over all the developers.
This also means that it's likely some app providers will suddenly discover their costs go up.
As a consumer, I'm fine with however this shakes out: I spend almost nothing on apps anyway, and the selection is too large for me to care about the size and diversity within the marketplace.
As an iOS app developer, I have no idea how any of these options may or may not affect the demand for my skills on the job market, but I still don't care much because GenAI is a much bigger change than all of these options combined.
As an investor, I've been expecting Apple to hit the upper limit for corporation size before monopoly lawsuits 2 trillion dollars of market cap ago, which is one reason why I bought S&P 500 instead of APPL (the other being I'd like my income and my investments to avoid too many correlated failures).
To add to this historically Apple charged for OS updates. Windows still does. With iOS Apple switched their model to making the updates free and charging developers on the backend to monetize their software.
But most companies have some plan to monetize their software even if they also make money on the hardware.
They could also just charge a large cost for access to the SDK a la console systems, or not actually track the downloads but have a license agreement where you pay based on your user base like other ecosystems (Unity?).