> Retail margins are famously low (very low single digits).

The margins and costs include more than the wholesale price of the product. The correct question is how much does a farmer get paid for a gallon/liter of milk and how much is that same gallon/liter sold for at the shop. Farmers in the US are getting roughly $1.00 per gallon for whole milk. How much is it selling in the store? Roughly $3.50.

Anytime people talk about “greed,” I tune out because that’s the sign of a person who doesn’t actually know what goes into running the thing they claim a company is greedy with. Take the Apple 30% fee for example. If you ran payment processing yourself through Stripe, you might pay 3%. So let’s take Apple’s remainder to 27%. Apple handles chargebacks/disputes for you. So each dispute using Stripe would cost you $15 unless you win the dispute. We also have fraud prevention and management, which Apple provides. An app developer never has to deal with fraud on the App Store. An fraud is a significant issue, especially selling globally.[1] How much is fraud worth? I would say that it’s worth at least 5% to never have to deal with it. So now the App Store commission is 23%.

Next you have to deal with a CDN for delivery of the purchased app. Where do you store the file? How do you secure it? Who pays for the bandwidth of distributing it? Who maintains that system? With the App Store you don’t have to deal with any of that. I would say that’s worth at least 5%. You can’t have any downtime or you lose money. You can’t have casual security or you’ll lose product. So that system has to be well maintained, robust, and able to handle scale, and be fast and easy for your customer.

Now we are at 18% of Apple’s commission remaining. For every product you sell worldwide, you have tax consequences worldwide, assuming you care about following the law. For every sale you get, you potentially have to remit taxes, taxes that vary by individual jurisdiction. Apple does all of that for you. They also provide a localized and internationalized store front for almost any country in the world. Want to sell your App in Vietnam? Is your infrastructure set up to reach those customers? How about your Vietnamese skills when a potential customer has a purchasing issue? How about your payment processor? Are they set up to handle how Vietnamese people like to pay for things? Can a Vietnamese person go buy a gift card and use it on their device to buy your product? With the App Store, you get all of that capability built-in. And you get that capability for pretty much every connected country. Including market exposure via App Store search and discovery. Let’s combine this point with the next, a product website. If you want to sell on your own you have to build and maintain a website to sell your app. You need to integrate payment processing, the download, security, and maintain it. While most of us have the skills to do that, you also have to ensure it’s updated, you have to pay to host it, translate it into worldwide languages (or not.) However if you actually want to sell your app, you’ll also need to worry about SEO, online marketing and attracting users to your app. Just a simple webpage isn’t going to make a dent in search results from the open web since your “premium music player” keyword will take years to rank.

So the App Store gives you the ordering system, access to many more markets than you’d likely normally be able to handle yourself as well as the aforementioned search and discovery. There is also the trust factor: why would I download some random music player from some random site off the internet? That concern is going to create a high barrier to getting large numbers of people to download the app. Not so on the App Store.

I would say all of that is worth at least 8%.

So that leaves our “greed percentage” at 10%. However, we have another aspect as well. Not only do you sell a paid version, you also have a free version you use as a marketing tool to expose people to how great your app is. That free version has ads that you insert while people are listening to music on your music player. You get 100% of the revenue from the ads, Apple has nothing to do with that. However, all of the stuff we’ve described above — Apple gets 0% for free apps — and your free users download and use the store infrastructure by the millions. Millions of downloads that never touch your system. Who pays for that bandwidth? Not you, at least not directly. So Apple has 10% of that fee unaccounted for. Handling all of your free users is probably worth at least 5%. Also we haven’t talked about an update. If you release an update, how do all of your millions of users get the update? Apple handles that for you as well.

On your second year of a subscription, the commission drops to 15% because many of those above listed expenses aren’t as relevant. However, taxes, update infrastructure, payments, declined cards, collections, etc.. that’s still being handled.

Making an argument that Apple is “greedy” is ill-informed. Besides, you don’t even have to pay Apple 30%. Users could go to your website and pay there. Then Apple is handling all of you download/update infrastructure for practically free. That 30% is only applicable when users pay within the App Store context. So Apple handles the distribution of potentially millions of downloads even though they aren’t necessarily making much money from your subscriptions you sell outside the store. Maybe it’s greedy to expect Apple to manage millions of your downloads for just a $99 per year developer fee? Apple expecting a cut of transactions they manage isn’t unreasonable.

[1] https://stripe.com/guides/2017-global-fraud-report