Many folks criticize Apple for taking commissions on the sale of digital content on iOS devices, saying that the company doesn’t do anything in the sale process to deserve the commission. I disagree. I outlined my thoughts on the criticisms of the App Store. In the latest filing as part of its legal battle against Epic Games, Apple provided some data points on what they spent on the App Store and the impact. Because these excerpts come from a legal document submitted to a court, it’s unlikely that Apple made them up. Have a read and decide for yourself if it’s reasonable to ask a company not to benefit from the servers it renders and investments it makes. Also, would you do the same if you were Tim Cook running the company?
Investment in data centers and staff maintaining the App Store
Apple has spent billions of dollars to develop and maintain the App Store. The data centers alone that Apple has established to facilitate the App Store have cost Apple many billions of dollars, and Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year to employ the engineers who contribute to the App Store’s success.
Services that Apple provides under the License Agreement include handling more than 25 million customer support cases a year with a dedicated team of over 5,000 full-time AppleCare advisors; verification of customer accounts to maintain the integrity of the marketplace, including removal of hundreds of millions of fraudulent customer accounts each year; and implementing other measures to combat fraud and refund abuse.
Apple contracts with third-party payment settlement providers to facilitate Apple’s own ability to accept customer payments. During this process, transactions are verified and payments authorized, but this function is just one part of the process and is outsourced to third parties to whom Apple itself pays a fee.
Source: Apple’s filing
The App Store removes administrative hurdles for developers such as cross-country taxes
While expanding developers’ ability to monetize their apps, IAP also removes administrative burdens and allows developers to effortlessly sell their services to, and receive payments from, customers in the 175 countries where the App Store operates. This support includes collecting and managing payment information from around one billion potential customers around the globe; handling conversions to 45 currencies; and ensuring compliance with local tax laws, and handling tax withholding in scores of countries. Moreover, the records maintained through IAP help Apple provide both routine and customized business analytics to app developers. For many developers, it would be prohibitively complex and costly to carry out these tasks on a similar scale. Yet Apple’s infrastructure makes it effortless for them.
Source: Apple’s filing
The App Store shields consumers from potentially harmful apps
Since January 1, 2020, Apple has processed more than four million app submissions, approving approximately two thirds of them and rejecting approximately one third for noncompliance with the Guidelines and/or the agreements. For example, more than 100,000 app submissions are rejected each year for data collection and storage practices that run afoul of Apple’s strict requirements for consumer privacy protection. Most of these developers whose apps are rejected make changes to their apps to address Apple’s concerns, and ultimately have their apps published to the App Store.
Source: Apple’s filing
Since 2017, Apple has terminated:
more than 75,000 accounts of developers for introducing new features to their apps without going through App Review, i.e., bait-and-switch conduct, in which a developer makes changes post-review to circumvent the app review process, also referred to as Illicit Concept Changes (ICC);
more than 2,000 developer accounts for introduction of a non-IAP payment method for in-app sales of digital content;
more than 60,000 developer accounts for inclusion of hidden features or obfuscated code or for facilitating the download or installation of executable code; and
more than 175,000 developer accounts for other fraudulent conduct.
Source: Apple’s filing
Disclaimer: I own Apple stocks in my portfolio
Minh Quang Duong 