While getting featured is rare, you still need to pay the salaries of the editors who pick the best apps, the graphics artists who merchandise the collections, etc. To me, they are both horrible disadvantages that make the App Store a terrible place for developers.Īll your points are fair, but if Apple's value is just 3%, why don't we hear as many stories about other app stores? Android has a much larger userbase, but the common wisdom is that actual revenue in that store is much smaller.īeyond the 3% in transactions you're paying for the review process, which while imperfect, makes parents pretty comfortable letting their kids pay $1M/day to the Clash of Clans/Angry Birds folks. A sibling poster actually pointed to app review as an advantage. You're pointing to the submission process as an advantage. I think there's a big disconnect here in terms of how different people approach and prioritize things. And good luck if you want to actually test the build you submit to the store.Īny competent programmer should be able to set up a web store without a great deal of pain. Code signing, provisioning, verification, review, they do not make it easy at all. Selling on the App Store is a horrible mess. Having done both, in terms of effort I'd much rather set up my own store. No, I have no numbers to back it up, just talking with people who actually do it. Pretty much universally, if a product is available both through the Mac App Store and directly, the sales through the two channels are comparable. My source for the assertion is purely personal, from knowing a lot of developers who sell both in out of the store. On the Mac, there is a choice (for now) and the trend now seems to be to choose not to use the App Store there. If you want to sell, it's either Apple's 30% or nothing. You mention "massive exposure," but there's pretty much universal agreement among developers in the Apple world that the App Store's "marketing" bump is pretty much zero unless you're extremely lucky and get featured.īut hey, if it's worth it, then you should be able to let developers choose and they'll still go for it. What additional service does Apple provide for that additional 27% cut? The buying experience is easier, but this doesn't seem to translate into additional sales. If you sell software directly to users, the cost can be something like 3%, depending on which payment processor you want to use. Unlike retail's cut of your selling price, Apple's cut is completely arbitrary and rather unjustified. The cost of selling software is almost zero. In retail, you pay 50% because that's something like what it actually costs to sell stuff to people in a physical store.
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