It is more difficult than that. There are entire categories of apps where the 30% cut wouldn’t be a cut of the developers’ revenue. Should Apple get a 30% cut of a TV you purchase on Amazon? Well, obviously not. Something like Kindle? Well, probably not, but it’s not as obvious. It’s not a physical product, but it’s still a product that just happens to be purchased through an app in the store. Unlike, say, a one-time-purchase mobile game.
For the TV, why obviously not? If I bought the TV as an impulse while on the go then perhaps if I had had to wait to get to my computer I wouldn't have bought it. You can come up with all sorts of scenarios where these companies that sell physical goods
are benefitting from having Apps.
Spotify the 30% is coming out of not just Spotify's revenue but also the amount they pay artists.
The 30% cut is a cut of
creators revenue in the Patreon App, that did not stop Apple from forcing IAP on Patreon.
It is becoming clearer over time and the degree to which Tim Cook is fighting these changes that this is not about compensation for IP but about protecting services revenue which helps artificially prop up the stock price.
If Apple was providing better services that customers were actually wanting to pay for they wouldn't have to keep squeezing App Devs to try and prop up the services revenue stream.
Many different players contributed to the iPhone success, that doesn’t mean that the contribution was equal, even if it was necessary. Silly analogy: when I wrote my BSc thesis I used a bunch of Apple technologies (SceneKit, Swift, Metal…), and it wouldn’t have been possible for me to write it without using Apple technologies. Yet it wouldn’t be a fair assessment that Apple and I both contributed equally to my thesis, just because Apple’s technologies were instrumental.
Should you have had to pay Apple to obtain your thesis then? Would you have willingly paid 30% of your tuition to Apple for access to SceneKit/Metal/Swift in order to complete it? You were able to gain credentials (that likely helped in future job applications) by building off of Apple's IP without paying Apple anything, why do they not deserve compensation?
This is the problem with trying to tie the IP compensation to a commission and why a fairer version of the CTF would be a superior choice if you were really trying to get compensated for IP.
Would you buy an iPhone without third party apps?
I wouldn't but thats just me, which is why I think Apple is undervaluing the contribution of third party devs to the iPhones success.
Decision on which platform to prioritize is rarely based on the technical excellence of the platform, although it does factor into the equation. Just not as much as you think (in my experience, at least).
More importantly, if apps no longer need to pay Apple anything to use their APIs, you’re right that Apple still has an incentive to improve the APIs (as it indirectly results on more iPhone sales) but they have an even bigger incentive to simply release competing apps (which I assure you no developer wants). That way, the customer gets the same value (an app that does XYZ) and Apple gets some revenue back again.
Part of my complaint with this line of reasoning is that most big devs already pay nothing (other than the annual dev fee) to use Apple's APIs, its really only games and smaller devs who are funding this because they don't have the budget to advertise and go cross platform. For smaller devs I actually think the 15% cut makes perfect sense, use the Apple IAP system and save yourself the money of implementing it yourself.
However, some small-ish devs that want to be cross platform are not allowed to use something like Stripe to process payment because they aren't big enough to have gotten an exemption category created especially for them like Netflix or Spotify have. Again, I'll bring up Patreon because they clearly are a cross platform app that should be exempt from being required to offer IAP but aren't.
Apple may be comfortable with the 30% cut now, but if the cut starts being 0%, that’s a huge reason for Apple to keep APIs internal and release competing 1st party apps.
Sure, and they will then get hit even harder in the EU for anti-competitive practices. So long as Apple's APIs are the only way to release for the iPhone (ReactNative and game engines are built on top of UIKit/Metal and so still use Apple's APIs internally), they are going to have to worry about regulation.
There’s not been a single time where I’ve seen this pitched and it hadn’t been simply to save money. And I’ve seen attempts to do this in every company I’ve worked at as an iOS dev. It’s always the money. Even if it results in terrible UX.
That's fair and I'll concede that money does play a role.
I would say it's a bit of both money and API quality.
Apple's failings on UX in recent years means that some of the clients I work with have been pushing for more custom UI across their Apps and they are wondering why they are paying for a native App when we have to spend so much money replacing Apple's UX anyway. If we could just use a SwiftUI Button without customization sure it would be worth the time savings but we have to write just as much code to customize it as we would for a web app.
For example, I've had a client who absolutely hates how the Sidebar on iPad behaves in SwiftUI and UIKit these days, the way triple column is clumsy and hard to adapt, etc... so we ended up rolling our own sidebar/splitview system because it provided a much better UX than Apple's, if we have to do that sort of thing anyway, how beneficial are Apple's APIs really?
Maybe not as a percentage of revenue, but I’ve seen 3rd party frameworks (not UI frameworks) charge significant amounts per app installation.
My point however is that the vast majority of devs would go with Apple’s frameworks. It’s not feasible to replace them and just roll your own solution or find a suitable 3rd party framework, that would be way more costly than the 30% cut, and the only reason behind trying to get rid of this 30% cut is money.
If you could replace UIKit and Swift UI at the platform level then that incentivizes third party, cross platform UI frameworks that would undermine the power of Apple and Google.
For example, Microsoft could build something that allowed a low level replacement of UIKit/SwiftUI and also JetpackCompose and then sell it to both or even give it away to undermine Apple and Google.
If Apple and Google had allowed this low level replacement from day 1 it is possible Microsoft Phone could have succeeded by convincing more people to build cross platform.
