camber

I let most articles like this go by. It seems to me that many people, including our government officials have mush for brains these days. For example:

Antitrust
The article indicates that it took Indian government officials three years to determine that Apple was using antitrust behaviours. With Apple only having a 0-5% market segment in India, there cannot be, by definition, be any antitrust issues. Antitrust relates to having a dominant market position and 0-5% cannot qualify under any thinking persons analysis.

Together We Fight Society
The name itself suggests that this group feels powerless and wants someone who has more power to come along and bail them out of the situation they find so abhorrent. This aspect is not surprising since one of the primary roles of government is to protect the powerless. The fact that they can lay such charges speaks well of the Indian governmental system even if if it also speaks not so well of the official's thinking. 

Apple's Unfair Terms
That Apple App Store terms are inherently unfair appears to be a common consensus across the planet at this time. That is not correct! It would be useful to recall that Apple created and pays for the App Store. It also created, at its own expense, the APIs which underly Xcode, whether one programs in Swift, Objective-C our any other programming language. It is not Apple's, nor anybody elses, responsibility to create a cross platform system whereby a programmer can write one app to rule them all, and then dispense it to all phones or computers. Even those cross--platform systems which do exist, work by only enabling the lowest common denominator of the respective devices making the resulting program performance rather mediocre. If a programmer wants a great program he or she writes it for the specific platform they are targeting. 

It is not by accident that many of the most successful apps are written first for iOS, and secondly for Android, and rarely for any other platform.

Fees
This one is getting extremely tiresome. Prior to the App stores, of which Apple's was the first, the marketing of software, was by the developer. They produced their programs and then tried to persuade potential customers to buy their software. This involved not only a lot of expensive advertising but also a chain of organizations, and the breakdown was approximately as follows: developers sold their software to a Jobber who marked it up 5-10% and sold it the a wholesaler. The wholesaler market it up another 10-15% and sold it to retail stores. The retail store marked it up by at least 40% and put it on its shelves, hoping it would sell. All of these mark ups add up to around 60% of the retail price so the developer was only receiving about 40% of the retail price for their product. There was also packaging to consider, under that system it was absolutely necessary and the cost came out of the developer's pocket. 

Apple introduces their App Store in 2008 and stated that they will only take 30% of the retail price. This jumps the developers cut from 40% (or less) to 70% of the retail price. I am well aware that this all happened sixteen years ago. That means that anyone born since then is not familiar with the old state of affairs. But anyone over the age of 25-30 is old enough to know and unless they are naive or ignorant of these facts, there are valid reasons for not knowing, they should be aware that developers have never had it so good!

None of this should be taken as justification for a 30% fee. However, Google, Microsoft and many others also levy the same 30% gee. Some are making the argument that 30% is too much, but this discussion should be between those paying the fee and those levying the fee. Any attempt to arouse public sentiment against those charging the 30% fee is simply an attempt to create outrage and thereby leverage against the App stores owners. If this is their purpose may I recommend you first recognize it and then perhaps you should study the actions of Spotify and Epic. Those two companies and their CEOs have almost raised such behaviour to an art-form. I was going to add fine as a qualifier but there is nothing fine about the actions of those two despicable CEOs or their contemptible organizations.

I expect such thinking of individuals who have not seriously thought about why things are thee way they are, but government officials should be held to a higher standard both here in North America and around the world.

The paragraph: "For this specific case, US District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco does not have the required legal standing to pursue the case. That ruling was based in part on Apple's argument against the suit's claim of it artificially increasing prices." needs some work.

I seriously doubt that a California judge does not have the required legal standing for the case. I presume it meant to say the litigants do not have the required legal standing.

Sorry to get nit-pikky William, I do enjoy reading your articles!

This is another of those delusional lawsuits. No one forces me or any other iPhone/Apple Watch owner to use Apple Pay! This, in part at least, has occurred because of the excess number of ambulance chasers (lawyers) in the US who lay in wait to seduce naive and foolish consumers into a lawsuit whose fees will only be paid if they "win". There are more lawyers per capita in the US than in any other country in the world and Apple, because of its success, has the biggest target painted on its back that any company has ever had!. Any payment system that collects and remits payments deserves to earn a small fee. The idea that because Apple has made such large profits that anything it does MUST be anticompetitive and a violation of Sherman antitrust laws - a law that is so out of date for the times that it ought to be repealed or at least modernized - is delusional. I am not sure the same doesn't apply to the judge who was foolish enough to allow the suit to proceed. It is absolutely disgusting!

It would be helpful of this story explained what 'trader status' is!

I don't know what it is lately but large groups of people appear to have lost their ability to even think logically. When the App Store debuted, we went from a  situation where the developer received 40% of the retail price for their product. The rest went to the retailer - 40%, the wholesaler - 10%, and the jobber - 10%.

Now software, and many software services, are marketed directly to the consumer  through App Stores. The only people who receive any money are the developer: 70% to 85%, and the stores who, for the privilege of using their platform charge between 15% - 30%. In fact  those who operate App stores all charge the same  - 15% - 30%. Common examples are both Microsoft and Google. Since when os the company that operates the store not entitled to anything? None of the App store companies set the prices, the developers set them! Accusations that Apple (being picked on because they are the biggest) is gouging the consumer is rhetoric promulgates by those who have an agenda such as activists, and  lawyers, to justify their unreasonable demands. As to the law suits Apple is well able to take care  of their own affairs unless the judges have all fallen victim to this sloppy thinking.

There has been a lot in the industry press lately about the 30% that Apple, Google, Microsoft and many many others charge to sell software and services through their electronic stores. While the past is not always the best way to view things, developers used to pay 70-80% or more to move their software from their premises to the end customer. The chain was: customer buys from retailer (40% margin) buys from wholesaler (30% margin) buys from jobber (10% margin) buys from developer. The electronic stores cut out all the middle men but notice that they did not try to keep the whole historical fee for themselves. 

I am sure EPIC, Spotify and others want to pay nothing but that is NOT reasonable. I also doubt very much that EPIC or Spotify want to create their own store, and I doubt that they could do so for that same 30% fee because there are many many developers who are jointly sharing the cost of marketing their products. We should be talking about what is reasonable rather than what we "want", because there is no mechanism other than supply and demand to reconcile the "cost of service" supplier approach and the "what is it worth" market approach.

Until Apple's recent drop in from 30% to 15% for small businesses, those who have the electronic stores have displayed a uniform front in charging 30%. Viewed historically 30% is a whole lot better than the 70-80% that it used to be. Could it be less? Possibly. It is likely that the companies needed 30% in the early stages of setting up electronic stores since setting something up is always more expensive  than running it on a ongoing basis. Could the stores take a smaller cut now that the stores are operating routinely? Possibly. Notice what Apple did in reducing their standard fee from 30% to 15% for smaller developers who constitute most of their developers. Now they have been followed by Google who have also dropped their fee to 15% on the first million in sales. It is interesting that Google will charge 15% on the first million and reset the fee back to 15% for the start of the following year whereas Apple fee is not automatically reset and developer sales has to drop back below the million dollar cut off and the developer has to reapply for the fee to be reduced back to 15%. At this point it looks like Google offers the better financial package to developers.

It will be interesting to see where all of this leads.

From the excellent article: "Trump cited a "lack of respect" from China" Let me get this straight. The schoolyard bully got called out, and he says that is disrespectful? He should hope he never finds out what disrespectful really is!

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