About Apple's commission fees

For a long time the voices objecting to Apple’s 30% commission on the App Store have grown louder. The highest profile are Spotify and Epic Games, makers of Fortnite who took Apple to court after they booted Fortnite from the App Store for circumventing App Store rules regarding alternative payment options.

I’m sure I even read somewhere that Spotify had complained that searching music on the App Store produced results featuring Apple Music ahead of Spotify. Amazingly searching Spotify resulted in Spotify being the top search result, weird I know.

To be honest I’ve always thought the whole notion of these complaints are bizarre. I mean if I owned a store and third parties wanted to place their products on the shelves, I would expect to take a percentage of the revenue. You wouldn’t complain if a Ford dealer prioritised the marketing of their own vehicles ahead of those offered by other manufacturers.

You wouldn’t buy a Playstation 5 and expect to be able to play Xbox games on it. There’s also plenty of platform exclusives these days which aren’t exactly great for the consumer. Microsoft had their Cloud Gaming service rejected because Apple insisted all games must be submitted for review individually.

Not to mention the fact that 30% is the industry standard across gaming platforms. Apple is clearly positioning itself as a gaming company with Apple Arcade and making a big deal of the gaming capabilities of the new iPhone models announced last week.

Fundamentally Apple has created a behemoth of a platform that has allowed a lot of developers to reach 100’s of millions of customers worldwide. Apple built the iPhone and their App Store and have marketed the ecosystem brilliantly. I may be missing something, I just don’t understand the mentality of Spotify, Epic etc. 70% of something is more than 100% of nothing, that should be obvious?

Let us know what you think in the comments section.