I'm really hoping someone wakes up and realizes the problem is not the fees but that consumers don't know about them. Let the consumer be informed about Google and Apple's rake on all their in-app charges. The outrage will take care of the rest. Not sure about Google, but Apple has deliberately prohibited developers from itemizing the 30% fee for consumers. That simple rule is what keeps their money pipe flowing. Market forces don't work when pricing is opaque.
I strongly disagree, the problem is that the users and developers don't have any other (viable) option for distributing their mobile apps on these platforms (iOS and Android).
I cannot practically create my "Awesome Store" where I have the best ranking system and I ask 0.1% for fees.
As a consumer, I don't care if the fee is 30%. I have no idea of that's a lot or just the right amount of money for the services that the stores provide. I don't know if it makes the app devs life much harder or if it's just a slight inconvenience.
Do you know or do you care who is making the profits (and how much) when you buy a coke in your local grocery shop? I don't, and no matter of math and public information could make me care about it as a consumer.
>> Not sure about Google, but Apple has deliberately prohibited developers from itemizing the 30% fee for consumers.
> As a consumer, I don't care if the fee is 30%. I have no idea if that's a lot
I think you're right about this particular example. But that's because rebelos identified the wrong problem. I would identify a different gag as the problem -- Apple prohibits you from directing your customers to other payment methods.
"Make your in-app purchase as conveniently as possible, right here and right now" vs "Pay 25% less by visiting our website" would kneecap Apple's app store revenue. Itemizing the fee is pointless.
> I think you're right about this particular example. But that's because rebelos identified the wrong problem. I would identify a different gag as the problem -- Apple prohibits you from directing your customers to other payment methods.
You're absolutely right that this is another angle that could be looked at. A third argument, particular to Apple, is simply that there is substantial harm to the consumer when a company maintains a stranglehold on software distribution for what might reasonably be considered a general purpose computer.
However, I vehemently disagree with the insinuation that disclosing the fee wouldn't provoke market forces to lower it to some more reasonable percent above cost. Sure it's a duopoly at present, but I suspect that might be enough to get competitive forces working properly.
> I vehemently disagree with the insinuation that disclosing the fee wouldn't provoke market forces to lower it to some more reasonable percent above cost.
100% is a fairly normal markup "above cost" for each step in a supply chain; it also makes Apple's 43% markup look modest.
And then you get into unresolvable arguments about what is and what isn't a cost.
Normally that supply chain involves many physical steps, manipulation, storage, inventory, loss prevention, etc.. here the supply chain is trivial and cheap. Comparing those as equivalent is not exactly honest.
So Apple's doing much less work and taking a much smaller markup.
You're absolutely correct that Apple is adding no value, which is a bigger reduction in value added than the reduction in their markup. But the problem isn't that they're applying an objectively high markup. They aren't. The problem is that there's no reason for them to be involved at all.
"Google and etc won't even let us tell you about how insane their tax is" is a much easier fight to win than "...also please legally mandate they allow us to run whatever we want on their phones, thanks" and both fights will probably lead to the same outcome.
Is this true for Android? I guess rooting is a _bit_ of a problem, but otherwise you could do run alternative stores? I mean it's hard to actually make money off of that, of course.
For iOS it's essentially impossible, from my understanding. But there's stuff on android to let you install apps, after all?
Sure! But your notifications are liable to be killed off in the background, as you shouldn't be relying on Google Play Services while shipping on Super-Awesome-Store.
And if you want your users to install your app store, they'll have to know where to go and tell the OS "I want this installed, it's not malware".
And every time any single app through there requires an update, it must be manually approved and installed by the user. Google's evergreen background updates are exclusive to them.
And if Google Play Protect decides you store is malware because it distributes apps that Google thinks harms users, any user with (the heavily pushed) Google Play Protect turned on likely won't be using your store for long.
Why would consumers care? Maybe for an indie developer they think is getting screwed, but if an app costs a dollar, the consumer's price point is a dollar. They know that if the developer makes more money they aren't going to decrease the price of the app.
Market forces produced consolidation, as they always do. Consolidation and capture of distribution, which happens in most industries, sets the pricing of products using cartel and gangster tactics. App stores aren't any different from the railroads of the 1800s or Walmart or Amazon inflicting all kinds of pricing tricks on suppliers.
The question we should be asking is: Why should the owner of a distribution network get to retain all that power to themselves? Distribution networks should be highly regulated, price controlled, or state owned. All else just yields completely unaccountable power to an unelected private entity that gets to control the material state of the world.
At risk of sounding idiot and down votes. Can you explain me when was the last time you saw the itemized breakdown of a toy, or a T-Shirt you bought in Target/Walmart? Same is true for Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox systems. Why do we think it's fair for Walmart to not show exact breakdown on how much commission they are charging for keeping something on shelf and Google is wrong about it?
I strongly believe that Nintendo, Sony, & Xbox should also disclose their rake. However, it's also well understood that they take heavy losses on consoles that are made up on game margins. The same cannot be said for Google and Apple.
Retailers have substantial costs associated with distributing products and physical shelf space is a scarce resource. There are, by comparison, no limits to the number of apps on Apple and Google's "stores" and we know that the costs of maintaining them are quite low because the respective business units are wildly profitable.
The points you raised are the rather beguiling false equivalencies that have been propagated largely by people with a vested interest in preserving this system and averting scrutiny.
Who said anything about a requirement? It suffices to make it illegal to prohibit disclosing the fee. Businesses can decide if they want to do so. The point is that this 'invisible rake' model is being exploited to nullify free market forces in service of obscene profit. Many businesses (not just Apple and Google) have realized they can leverage this to make considerably more money than they otherwise might.
>I strongly believe that Nintendo, Sony, & Xbox should also disclose their rake.
Sorry, between this line and not realizing you were also the GP commenter, I assumed you were suggesting the markets be forced to disclose the rake pro-actively themselves.
Making it illegal to prohibit disclosing the fee is great, and at that point I don't even think you need to make the case that the industry is different than others. It's not the same as the cost, but plenty of items have an msrp listed on their packaging. You know if your Arizona Iced Tea is being sold at a higher than usual mark-up because it's not $1.
(Disclosure: I live in San Francisco and have no idea whether Arizona is actually still a dollar in other places.)
The analogy doesn't work. A more apt analogy would be to compare Google and Apple to car manufacturers who charge you a 30% markup on anything you buy from a store you drive to... But the stores have to charge you that automatically, and they're not allowed to tell you that they charged it.
For your analogy to make sense, when you drive to that store, every product you buy must interoperate with your car. Every product on the shelf was built using tools and systems developed by your car's manufacturer; every product contains a decent number of parts and ingredients supplied by your car's manufacturer.
Oh, and the Apple car has an extra trick up its sleeve: it makes it nearly impossible to shoplift, which allows products to be sold at a dramatically lower price. Potentially far less than if shoplifting were as commonplace as it is among drivers of Windows cars.
Of course the producer of the product always decides how much the customer pays. It's up to them to decide whether to reduce prices in response to the elimination of shoplifting.
Yeah, you're right that it's not a perfect analogy, but I think mine is closer to reality than OP's... There are plenty of apps (stores, in the analogy) out there that are actually designed to work on many platforms (with many cars, in the analogy), but still have to pay the store %.
The broader point is that just saying "oh, it's like X, therefore we should treat it like X!" just isn't enough for app stores. There is no perfect analogue. Apple and Google call them "stores" because they really want them to be thought of that way, but there are important features of phyiscal stores that the app stores lack, and important features of app stores that physical stores lack.
How we, as a nation and a society, decide to treat app stores for purposes of consumer protection laws is up to us... so let's be careful just blindly trusting the way these companies want us to think about them.
You say "we, as a nation and a society" except that we're most likely not a member of the same nation and I really don't have much enthusiasm for other nations deciding they know better than Apple how my iPhone should work.
Why do you think your analogy is better than the parent post? The parent post makes more sense to me. People to go stores, and the stores charge a markup. In your analogy, the mode of transportation charges the markup, which in the app store case would be the ISP charging a markup.
> Wallmart does not prohibit your product from listing its wholesale price on the label.
Are you sure that they don't? I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Walmart does have clear policies around prices of any kind being printed on packaging. And it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that if they have a policy, it would disallow printing of any price which is less than the highest price Walmart intend to charge at retail.
Unless you can show such a policy, it is reasonable to assume it does not exist. I surely have no way to prove otherwise short of finding complete list of all policies. A good indication is that neither of us heard about it so far.
If we have no evidence, it is not "reasonable to assume" anything.
Meanwhile, I'm merely saying that it wouldn't surprise me if such a policy exists, whether formally or informally. The distinct lack of any product on Walmart shelves which has a below-RRP price printed on its packaging is strong circumstantial evidence at the very least.
The fact that you mentioned is an extremely weak evidence in the light of very thin margins Walmart has (under 3%), which is more than 10 times less than the old store tax, with probably even smaller incentive to combat.
Listing wholesale prices on the product is vanishingly rare, possibly nonexistent. I wouldn't be surprised if it infuriated retailers to the point that they refused to stock your product.
Printing MSRP on the product happens all the time. Arizona Iced Tea is a prominent example.
This is an interesting point but it would apply to almost every line of business. Retail charges 60% markup. Imagine the outrage.
30% is a gross margin and doesn't take into consideration a lot of thigns.
It'd be nice if Americans were exposed to the margins of everything but I'm not sure how much would change.
The 'end price' for consumers is fair enough - the issue is one of competitiveness and that Android phones are oriented towards Google's stores is the root of the problem.
I tend to agree that most people wouldn't care about Google's cut. The only way to bring the fee down is to create more 'stores' where developers can sell their apps. Then the margin will completely collapse from 30% to near 0.
You're assuming that if Apple and Google forcibly lost the ability to profit off app sales through the stores, they would continue to offer access to their commercially licensed software development platforms for free. If Google and Apple are forced to give away what they used to sell, they will simply change the mechanism by which they extract payment and developers will need to prepare for e.g. licence fees to access platform features.
And to some extent, controversially, I ask why not? If Epic can take a percentage of revenues if you use Unreal Engine, Apple can rejigger the way they structure their libraries and demand a percentage of revenues from apps which use Metal. I realise that there are intellectually satisfying arguments for why UE and Metal shouldn't be treated the same, but I'm not so sure it's so easy to disentangle them in a legally satisfying way.
My prediction is that Apple will lower their fee to 5% at some point. However, using ANY of their IP will cost 25% of your revenue. Want to access Healthkit? ARKit? Etc.. 25% of revenue from both the app and in-app purchases.
Apple won't do that unless they're forced to by regulators. But if the regulators force it, that's certainly an option available to them.
(Though there's no way Apple would ever go below 10%. I would eat my hat if Apple could even cover hard costs of running the store at 10%. Even at 15% they'd already be subsidising purchases made using gift cards purchased at retail.)
All in the credit processing and transactional costs and overhead (i.e. charge-backs) will be pushing 5%. If there is remotely any manual intervention for support, or even validating apps, that's going to be real money for any entity, then there's cost there. Then business overhead, marketing support, campaigns etc.. And then profit margins. I suggest a normal markup is going to look something like 8-12% for digital distribution. That's where I think the fee would sit if there were no Google Play and maybe 4 or 5 major competitors all specializing a little bit differently.
Precisely. Epic hasn't even demonstrated that they can run their own digital store profitably with a 12% commission—and the Epic Store isn't exactly the most sophisticated bit of infrastructure. Barely more than a half-baked Windows downloader with DRM.
Google and Apple now offer a 15% rate to the overwhelming majority of developers. Whether you call it a response to the market or a cynical ploy to stave off Government intervention, it means small and medium developers can no longer be seen as a profit centre for these mega corporations.
Apple actually has an additional compelling argument, which is the near-total elimination of software piracy on the iOS platform. I don't know what the real-world numbers are, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if iOS developers ended up earning substantially more from the absence of piracy than they lost paying a 30% commission to Apple.
Firstly, you're assuming that app store sales number would have been equally successful if iOS was a fully open platform. Apple did a damn good job of converting iPhone customers into iOS software customers when compared to Android. Without the App Store, rates of conversion wouldn't be as high.
Secondly, you're assuming that Apple would have put nearly as much effort into the iOS platform, developer tools, software support and encouraging its customers to buy apps, if Apple wasn't seeing a revenue stream from it. No revenue stream, no incentive to build that marketplace, fewer sales.
Third, you cannot make assumptions about how prevalent piracy would be on iOS if the platform was open like macOS, and how many sales would have been lost as a result of piracy being widespread. Historically, levels of piracy in PC games have been in the order of 85 and 95 percent.[1] On Android, piracy has been estimated anywhere between 50 and 90 percent.[2] Of course we know that the vast majority of pirates wouldn't have paid if that was the only option. But assuming a piracy rate of 85%, it doesn't take many pirates being turned into paying customers to net more revenue than Apple takes in App Store fees.
Scenario one, "fully open iOS":
85% Pirated
15% Purchased
Scenario two, "zero piracy iOS":
80% Didn't purchase
20% Purchased
Notice how only 5% of the user base had to shift from being a pirate to a purchaser, yet developer revenues go up by 33%, enough to fully offset the entire "cost" of Apple's margin and then some.
So the first premise isn't true because iPhone sales depends on Apps as a 'pillar' of the offer. No great app-platform, no fat iPhone revenue. So a 1/2 decent platform would still exist.
Second, we have Java based, side-loadable Android universe as a reference point to determine rates of piracy. We also have desktop.
While piracy is always some kind of problem, it's generally not a problem that has wiped out companies. Adobe does just fine, in fact, the piracy threshold might be a reasonable 'valve' for people who don't actually have the ability to pay, to use the app. Adobe benefits from this. So long as people are truly 'not going to be customers' then people using the software is mostly good.
30% is nowhere near approaching a reasonable fee to 'defend from piracy'. It's not really even part of the equation frankly.
You are making the bold assumption that piracy is predominantly tied to affordability. The example of rampant music piracy transitioning to digital music sales proves that piracy is often disassociated with economics. Many people who pirated Photoshop could have easily afforded it, but piracy was chosen because the option to pay nothing was available and convenient.
As for justifications, you've completely misunderstood my point. I'm not claiming that Apple should justify its 30% on piracy. Let me put it another way. I reject the assertion that an alternative universe where the iOS marketplace wasn't a walled garden would have reliably resulted in higher overall revenues for developers.
Obviously, if you wanted to propose a situation where everything was exactly the same but Apple took a smaller share of revenue, developers would make more revenue. But for most developers this hypothetical is now real, since all but the largest developers can now receive 85% of gross revenues.
There is one area where I disagree with Apple's policies, which is how they only allow in-app purchasing for multiplatform "reader" content. Companies like Netflix and Spotify should be allowed to subscribe customers using their own merchant system within their app, so long as the subscription is entirely multiplatform "reader" content.
The reason why I disagree with Apple on the above is because it's simply too dangerous to stand this ground. If Apple wants to be in the business of selling music and television, they need to suck it up and compete on a level field. Their current stance looks too much like penalties for Spotify and Netflix as protectionism for Apple Music and Apple TV+.
I agree with this a lot, even with other markets. Price transparency doesn't solve all issues, but I fail to see how it would ever hurt the consumer. That, and it feels like a much easier win to fight for than most anti-competition issues.
Absolutely. Let consumers have the choice of paying for the convenience of paying via Apple/Google or paying another way. People still buy games on steam even if it's cheaper elsewhere and they know they're paying for convenience.
The prices aren't invisible to the companies putting the app on the Google store. In principle they could try and use a different store with lower fees and reduce their prices for the same margins couldn't they?
Meh. For a consumer with historical context it seems like an incredible value. Apps used to cost $49.95 at Egghead, and Egghead was certainly taking a bigger cut than 30 cents. Apple fucked ISVs by dramatically driving down the cost of apps, not by taking a cut for distribution.
It's bad value for a few big actors who sell enough to be able to bulk aggregate a lot of international transactions. It's great value for most small developers, as far as I can see.
Imagine you release your app, and you expect to hit a few thousands users... except those users are world-wide. Now imagine attempting to figure out how to process credit cards from 100 different countries, register your business enough to be able to file tax records for those 100 countries, actually file taxes for those 100 countries every year, etc. Sure $3,000 of your $10,000 went to Apple, Google Play or whatever, but it would have gone towards a huge number of other costs if you'd tried to go at it alone.
Reality -- nobody cares. The consumer is paying $1 in that scenario no matter what. If the Apple fee goes away, then the developer is going to keep the price at $1.
I care. For the same price I buy CD Projekt red games on gog, and I buy games on epic store rather than steam because I know more money goes to those who did the real work.
I think both Apple and Google did that. It's a desperate attempt to avoid regulation IMO. I think both should be forced to facilitate competing app stores. There should be no mercy for them after a decade of anti-competitive price gouging.
This article [0] says the Play Store takes 15% from the first million but Apple's store takes 30% of everything once you pass one million/year. But it also makes it clear that only a very small percentage of apps in either store make more than one million/year.
Another article [1] says 98% of developers in the Apple store would be below one million/year but also that that long tail generates only 5% of the store's revenue. There are a tiny number of apps that are enormous winners, games I assume, and there's everything else.
Google does a 15% progressive fee for the first $1mil. Apple sorta does the same, though once you cross the $1mil threshold, you pay a 30% cut next year on all your sales.
In principle, yes, but in reality, you can't use a different app store or payment provider.
If you buy a Google Android phone, you have the Google Play Store. That's it. Maybe you can install some other store but 99% of consumers will never do that.
On Apple, you have to use the App Store. It's the only game in town.
This is why its a monopoly. They could charge 50% and devs would still be forced to do it. The developers and people who complain about this just want to be able to use other payment providers in their apps. They don't want to be forced to use Google Play or Apple. Let other payment providers in so they can compete on fees, customer satisfaction, chargebacks, security, etc.
If the states decided to sue pharmaceutical companies for extravagant profits on life saving medicines, people would benefit a lot more. May be there a political motive behind Google being targeted.
> If the states decided to sue pharmaceutical companies for extravagant profits on life saving medicines, people would benefit a lot more. May be there a political motive behind Google being targeted.
There is no clear law against "extravagant profits." There is antitrust law. The winnable case is being pursued.
Because Google and Apple are providing a service to host developer's applications and charging a fee for it. The fee is quite high but they're charging it for the service. Nobody is dying because of their actions.
This is the kind of thing that makes me confident CEOs, etc. are over paid by a ton. How good of a job are you doing if everyone hates your brand so much that a ton of governments are suing you? How valuable was all that JiT manufacturing bullshit that’s going to cost the car companies $100 billion this year. How good is the leadership that’s taken the brand image of companies that used to be respected (ex: GE appliances) and flushed a (literal) century of good will down the toilet for a few years of huge profits due to cost cutting?
The internet never forgets and people will always remember. We’re seeing a time in history where I think the leaders will be looked back on and viewed as absolute failures.
> How good of a job are you doing if everyone hates your brand
People love Google. It's only behind Apple as a brand people love.
> How valuable was all that JiT manufacturing bullshit
It's not BS. It's saying 99% uptime is good enough, and the cost of 99.8% isn't worth the added inventory. It may or may not be the right call, but for automakers who make a durable product that isn't as critical in an emergency as N95 respirators, it's a reasonable call.
> GE appliances
GE was definitely mismanaged. Management got distracted looking for growth and went into all sorts of side businesses. Appliances aren't exactly GE's core business, though. They became commoditized, and it's hard to justify premium prices or investment on a commodity. You're better off making jet engines and MRIs. GE actually sold off its appliance business because it's better at other things, and if people want to pay a premium for a microwave with a GE badge, go for it. GE isn't a consumer company anymore, so a bad experience with a microwave they didn't make isn't going to stop you from using their turbines.
> People love Google. It's only behind Apple as a brand people love.
Stepping back: what is the definition of "love" here, and do you have some data to back this up? I think you might be conflating brand awareness with brand loyalty or "brand love", because while Google is basically in the English lexicon for searching on a search engine now an it has a really high brand awareness I don't think I've ever heard people say they "love" Google or anything along those lines, while I have heard sentiments like this for an Apple product.
JIT is really complex. I work in automotive and it’s actually really impressive on a deployment level.
However, yea, no one saw Covid coming. And, the whole 2008-Carpocalypse was extra bad because it wasn’t GM and Chrysler, it was literally everyone down the line. If GM went under, Johnson Controls goes under, and since they make every Toyota and Hyundai seat (IDK, figuratively, but probably) they struggle and go under too. It’s a fascinating deadlock / race condition of sales and profits and shipping.
I think it’s cool to see seats made two hours ago show up on the line at the exact second this body is on the line, installed, than a chassis that was made one a different line happens to line up and everything came together in seconds… but yes, there are some downsides.
> If GM went under, Johnson Controls goes under, and since they make every Toyota and Hyundai seat...
Toyota et al. would bail out Johnson Controls. JC Penney was as good as dead. It got bought by two major mall operators because mall tenants have clauses in their leases that would lower their rent if an anchor tenant leaves. It was cheaper for Brookfield and Simon to pickup JCP for scrap and run a minimally viable department store just to keep up rents (and hopefully foot traffic) for smaller tenants.
Cool thought. Completely skips over the reality of 2008, and the auto industry though.
Johnson was one example. I highly doubt Toyota or anyone could carry them at the time alone.
What about ContinentalTevis? What about Bosch Automotive? Delphi? Packard? Amphenol? Yazaki? New Venture? Dana? Allison? Vector? ETAS? How about the literally thousands of suppliers that all make one or two things or exist only to certify this or that? This wasn’t just these companies but a large portion of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois.
You missed the entire point of the interconnectedness of the automotive industry.
I could be wrong, but it sure seems like there are a couple of upcoming generations that can’t afford houses that will “cancel” some of these companies at the drop of a hat. I think we’ll eventually hit a tipping point where the economic realities of what’s been going on for the last 3-4 decades will suddenly become the focus of the majority and big companies will have no good will to defend themselves.
Or how AT&T was broken up and has successfully acquired most of that back and then some. People don’t remember, and let these things continue to happen.
In the 90s they price gouged us. This time they're price gouging us AND trying to eliminate our ability to own anything.
30 years ago you could keep your head down, go to work, and today you own a house. It's not the same this time. In 20 more years there'll be 2+ generations of people that have worked for over 20 years and don't own any assets.
Sorry, but this is totally counterfactual. Public opinion holds God, the Post Office, and Google in a three-way tie for first place in trustworthiness.
Apple recently changed their fee to 15% for the first million (with some complications for making over a million in subsequent years). This covers like 95% of developers (maybe more?).
Looks like Apple just barely squeaked by with the right moves.
Google Play is ostensibly optional on Android. App Store is not on iOS. As such, Google Play has identifiable, harmed competition. Apple does not; its harm in fact falls not on competitors or consumers, but on developers--its suppliers. That bolster's the judicial merits of the Google actions as antitrust reviewable.
For Apple, one must create a novel expansion of antitrust rules and definitions. As we saw with Facebook, where a similar group of state AGs got their case thrown out for failing at the shockingly basic question of "what's the market they're alleged to have monopolized?"
TL; DR Pursuing Apple comes closer to a political question than a judicial one. Google, and to a lesser degree Facebook, may be judicially addressable.
Seems like they are both getting legal attention, just separately. I wonder if the magnitude of these cases is better handled by 2 teams at once to speed them up?
There are two very different scenarios and companies that both happen to be about exorbitant fees. I'm not sure about this but I think you can't really do the suit at once with two companies. You would require legislation for that, I think.
Apple also has a tighter hold on the app ecosystem, as well as the developer fee, xcode, no third party app stores, "entitlement" apis, etc.
It looks to me like there's a couple of things. Many of the claims are similar to the Epic vs Apple case. Perhaps they figure Epic already did the work there?
Second, many of these claims have nothing to do with what Apple does. They are more similar to the old Microsoft case. Trying to stop competition, forcing OEM's to not have their own App store, etc...
The obvious answer is that the this kind of lawsuit is inherently to score political points, and for whatever reason the AGs saw more upside in suing Google than Apple.
Yes, Apple is much more "clean." Apple and Google are both potentially abusing is market dominance in areas but Google is also in the slimy business of selling ads (and the tracking that goes with it). Google also catches anti-social media heat because they own YouTube which is criticized for not taking down bad stuff fast enough, taking down OK stuff in error, and radicalizing impressionable people through their algorithmic recommendations.
If States sue a company for ‘extravagant’ costs, should they follow-up in other industries?
One can claim that oil monopolies request extravagant fees. Health industry in the USA is riddled with extravagant fees.
I am not sure that the motivation by these States are well-intentioned.
Its a bit sad its comes to states suing because Federal governments all over the world seem to have become reluctant to address oligopolistic markets in their various forms.
The obvious answer when players dominate a market like this is government 1) force competition or 2) add regulation.
The easy solution here is to rule that 1) app stores can control how payments are made/received by apps. And then they are forced to put a offering that works vs other payment provider. 2) Possibly, though would have challenges, force Apple/Google app stores to become interoperable over some longer term period.
For the wider market I think a big part is platforms with significant market share need to be either distributors or product owners. For example Amazon should not have amazon products and they are a distributer, this stops them watching some business become profitable on their platform than just replace with their own products or changing search result to favour their own product etc. The same with a company like Netflix, otherwise we are going to see a very small group of streaming companies and it will be near impossible for anyone else to step into that space.
Something else Id also consider though is a bit mixed with pros/cons is make a rule suppliers have to offer standard prices. So I can offer Walmart my pens at $0.05 because they buy 50 million of them and charge $0.40 to the small business that buys 10,000. This would also be great for healthcare such as hospitals having the insurance price vs cash price vs negotiated price etc.
I think people often forget a core role of capitalism of government is to maintain a level playing field. This helps ongoing innovation and to put pressure on entrenched market segments for a more efficient system.
> App store commissions — typically 30% — are charged to developers, who then usually pass the cost off to consumers who are buying apps or making purchases in things like mobile games.
Both Apple and Google now take 15% commission.
I am not a fan of neither companies, plus I am an app developer for both. I don't have a problem with the 15% fee from Apple as it's quite fair for the services and human interaction they provide. Though a case can be made that the $135 CAD developer license fee per year should take care of that. Google on the other hand will ban your app for strange reasons (look at the recent DroidScript app debacle) and won't even let you talk to a human unless you are big enough to get some tech sites to write about it. On the other hand Google at least allowed side loading apps something which Apple doesn't let you do easily. But then Google doesn't allow competitive app stores on their play store which is a problem. I think overall, both companies need to be reigned in but in my opinion, going after the 15% is not the right way.
Depends on what you're counting. Very few apps in the Apple store are charged 30% but they're the ones that bring in most of the revenue. Therefore, the average app is charged 15% but the average app transaction is charged 30%.
The average app with near zero or zero transactions wouldn't be affected very much if the fee was 30% or 0%. In terms of antitrust what matters is the transactions.
