> but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.

are there any estimates on how much apple is costed in server costs because of apple app store and if there are, can that be considered with the 30% that they are leeching and compare the two of them and compare that estimate with the retail example you brought.

So there are 2 million apps in app store. Assume average to be 100 MB so that is 2 million * 100 /(1024* 1024) = 190.734863 TB using $0.015 / GB-month Cf r2 with 0 egress costs I get the price as 2929.6128$ per month or 3 Grand/month ie. 36 Grand an year

Heck, consider the average app size to be FOUR times the cost. Then you get the salary of 1 apple engineer and that's STILL less than the average salary of 1 apple engineer.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E11...

And we are forgetting the 99$ something which apple app devs have to pay iirc at sometimes. I am an android guy and actually android has similar number of apps so the estimate is same actually.

But I would assume that the engineers aren't the bottleneck either. I assume that both apple/android stores aren't so complex to build to deserve 30% of transaction.

Some might be interesting about the malware/static-analysis but there was this hn post made recently about instagram blackhole which uncovered an malicious apple app which was available in app store so :/

The only reason one might think so is maybe considering the development cost of apple but I think that is an hardware decision and when we buy apple devices, it should be used to recoup the costs not trying to cash cow either. Its a trillion $ company trying to extract 3$ from a 10$ transaction you might do to anybody's patreon from the app :/ Yeah.

TLDR: No. I don't think a 30% transaction is justified.

Hope this helps.