On Feb 17, 2011, at 4:43 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > Imagine if Microsoft charged a 30% tax on all products people bought while > using Windows. Would you as a consumer continue using Windows? Forcing > developers to cater to them?
Let's look at what that 30% gets you, the developer/publisher, for selling your wares via the Apple stores. 1) Apple is the payee of record. This is *very* important for most developers, especially indie developers, for one simple reason: fraud. When someone commits fraud, you (the developer) aren't responsible for dealing with it. You're not responsible for PCI compliance. A lot of things can go wrong when dealing with financial transactions, especially online, and Apple's 30% cut means you don't need to deal with any of it. 2) Apple is providing all the hosting and distribution via CDNs for your application. All you have to do is upload your content. You don't have to worry about running your own servers. You don't have to worry about bandwidth bills, or ensuring your hosting provider can handle spiky/peaky bandwidth loads, or that your webserver isn't going to crash when suddenly 100,000 people decide your app/content is the best thing since sliced bread. 3) Apple provides a built-in mechanism to handle licensing for your applications and/or content. You don't need to maintain a license database. You don't need to manage a registration database. You don't need to come up with a key generation system yourself. That's just off the top of my head. If you were selling your wares outside of the Apple market/device ecosystem, you'd have to come up with your own ways of handling those (and more) problems. Point being, it's not like Apple is doing *nothing* and charging 30%. You do actually get something for it. And, like everyone else has pointed out, you don't *have* to sell to Apple's users, and you don't *have* to buy Apple devices. Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[email protected]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
