That appreciation ought to be reciprocal though. Apple can't develop all the software users demand on their own.

There hasn't been a lot of push-back on the 30% cut that Apple gets on app sales because that's easy to scope to the App Store.

This same rigid structure doesn't make sense for a lot of subscription based businesses. That's Apple's prerogative, but we (the users) just lost Readability, and you can bet there will be a long line of other great apps that won't make it to the iOS platform because of that stance. I'm having a really hard time being thankful for that.

This point would be great, were it not for the fact that it isn't possible to not depend on the App Store due to how Apple uses their ownership of the hardware to lock out alternative software deployment on their devices: even if you are large enough to market and distribute and do all of the "heavy lifting" of getting your product into the hands of end users without ever talking to Apple, Apple won't actually let you, and treats you like some random indie developer.

Right now there is an entire billions-of-dollars market (mobile applications) that happens to be almost entirely dominated by the whims of a single company (Apple) due to there not being viable competing platforms on which to operate that market (#include all of the articles posted to HN this week despite Android growing 8x faster, it isn't treated as an apps platform by its users): this is starting to look like a clear-cut monopoly situation.

Thats not so.

Lets assume that 5% of the people use your offering because there is an ios option. A lot more may use it, but they would have paid you anyway so you didn't get those as a customer and a lot of them is going to choose your ios sign-up because its a lot more convinient.

Now you have to pay 30% on everybody's signup fees, even if your offering is much larger than just the ios.

You also depend on electricity, computers, safety and security, a server OS, the internet, etc, etc to have a Saas business - do they also deserve 30%?

I thought you only had to pay 30% of the iOS users that subscribed using IAP, and not 30% of everybody. So lets say those 5% all used IAP, you would have to pay 30% of 5% of your total.

Now if your margin is less than 30% you could eat the loss of those 5% of users or increase your prices for the other 95% (and hopefully not lose more customers). Or somewhere in between where you up the price, but not enough to cover the loss of the iOS cut.

This is correct. You only pay 30% on subscriptions purchased through the IAP. Apple have expressly stated that they take nothing from subscriptions taken out through any other means.

So if I take out a magazine subscription through the IAP option in the magazine app, they pay 30%. If I take out the same subscription through the magazine's website they pay nothing, even if I then access it exclusively through the app.

The caveats are that I must have the choice of taking out the subscription through IAP, and must be able to get the same (or better) price through IAP. They're basically assuming that so long as there is no price difference they'll do well from the convenience of IAP for the consumer.

>"You only pay 30% on subscriptions purchased through the IAP."

Because the developer must offer IAP, Apple - with their 30% cut - gets first crack at the developer's customers and furthermore gets to put the best available pricing in front of the developer's customers as well.

To put it simply, Apple now requires the developer to deliver convenience for their customers and not only to forgo charging a premium for convenience but to actually withstand a revenue reduction because they are providing the convenience.

Yes, I don't disagree with any of that but the point I was refuting was the suggestion in the post above the one I replied to that you had to pay 30% on all subscriptions, whether purchased through the IAP model or elsewhere.

I'm not defending Apple (as it goes I think they have the right to make money this way but I do think the model needs some fairly heavy tweaking to address some valid concerns in certain areas) but I do think if we're going to have a discussion about it we should do so on the basis of correct information.

Quoting myself:

>but they would have paid you anyway so you didn't get those as a customer and a lot of them is going to choose your ios sign-up because its a lot more convinient.

In other words: absent a convinient one-click button, they would have gone through with their signup but given the convinient sign-up, they would use that.

In other words, their preference is:

    sign-up using apple convenient button >sign-up manually > not using the app at all

which is going to cost you 30%.

And almost all of them is going to be in this group.

So 95% of them would have purchased it even if there was no iOS version (as per your original post), but as there is an iOS version 100% of them will now make their purchase using the IAP model (as per the post above)?

That seems a pretty unlikely scenario to me. If they're all purchasing in app, then it's an indication that that's where they're using the subscription and that's where a significant value is being added. That provides in some part a justification for Apple's involvement.

You pay an electric bill, an internet bill, pay for your servers, and probably pay people to keep them safe and secure.

And you pay a yearly fee to develop for the iPhone, do you not?