How do I help people understand that for an indie app store, taking only a 30% cut of each app purchase is literally not even sustainable on its own?
And suggesting that 10% is too high and that it should be 5% for proprietary apps and 0% for FOSS apps is just… literally impossible??
We’re not talking Apple or Google here—we’re talking a small, indie open source app store that doesn’t collect personal data, respects and protects privacy, prioritizes FOSS apps, and does everything openly.
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Let’s compare.
Apple sells expensive, luxury tech products with massive marketshare that can largely only use apps from their store. The app store rakes in $100 billion/yr of revenue, meaning they can dictate lower transaction fees w/payment processors than anyone else.
Apple charges every app developer $100/yr—including for free apps—plus 15–30% of every app purchase and in-app transaction. They dictate what apps are and aren’t allowed to do, including what copy they can put in their apps.
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Google is the world’s largest advertising company with hundreds of billions in annual revenue—about $50 billion from their Google Play Store, the only practical option to get apps on Android, the world’s most widely-used consumer OS. They charge every developer $25 to be able to publish apps, and then similarly take a 15–30% cut of every paid app purchase and in-app transaction. They dictate a lot about what apps are allowed to do, and are able to negotiate paying lower payment processing fees.
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@cassidy I suspect a flat-rate yearly for developers who wish to sell games and apps would be seen more favorably than a model that takes a cut of every purchase.
(yes, I know how that math boils down, but yeah.)
If this is abt future potential changes to Flathub, my personal input is that i'd probably be willing to pay a yearly rate (u have to understand that a looot of poor ppl like linux, like me :3) if it was reasonable.
I would throw it out there, maybe don't allow in-app purchases?
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@cassidy one argument against flathub having "high" fees: since it's going to face a lot more competition than those proprietary stores do on their proprietary platforms (because fragmentation and openness), it should have low fees to be attractive. Now that doesn't mean it's sustainable.
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@sgued @cassidy their fee should be dynamic and based entirely on infra and management costs plus a tiny bit extra as a buffer for rainy days and development. It should be completely transparent on funds going in and out.
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@cassidy I'm curious if this suggests that centralized app stores simply aren't viable businesses without monopolization. I'm not suggesting that monopolization is good, just that there are some models that work with bad practices that might not reasonably work without them.
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@ryan @cassidy I'd argue many if not most things big companies do would be unsustainable without being evil. That's the reason so many companies do the uber thing: start out with unreasonably low pricing, attract millions of users, basically kill all competition. All of this is done at a loss, out of investor money. THEN, now that you're a monopoly, you can raise prices to be sustainable. THAT'S part of why Netflix, uber, etc are all increasing cost. It was the plan all along. Enshittification.
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@elkowar @cassidy I agree, but I'm not sure about the "many if not most" part. For many VC backed companies in the last 20 years, sure, because that's the VC play book, but that's a small blip in the history of business. There are many businesses that have been around for a long time not being evil, and I believe that's still possible, but the greed of the last 35 years overshadows that, and even many of those companies are getting overrun with it. So maybe I do agree, after all.
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@elkowar @cassidy That being said, I do feel like even that is a cultural blip. Unfortunately I think we've not got a whole generation that's never known different, so has a hard time imagining a world where profit != virtue, and doing any and all things for shareholder return, no matter how evil, is even feasible. I'm hoping that we can start to swing the pendulum the other way, but that will take this kind of consideration of whether some models were ever feasible to begin with.
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@ryan @cassidy In a marked distorted by monopolies, it's hard to start a new business.
I don't think you should extrapolate this experience to guess what it would be without these monopolies.
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@mesebrec @cassidy Thank you. That's a totally fair point.
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@cassidy Is #Fdroid a counterexample to this (to your first statement)?
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@WebCoder49 do they sell paid apps?
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@cassidy No (they only link to Liberapay/OpenCollective/Ko-Fi donation pages) - that's a good point. Do you have any idea why not selling paid apps makes them feasible - is it because it makes them become a charity people are more willing to donate to?
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@cassidy and flathub provides build infrastructure for free. Not very familiar with proprietary app stores but I don't think they do.
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@cassidy ...and that's exactly why most FOSS developers won't even consider putting their software in the Apple store.
So unless we want to go all FOSS apps heavily commercial, the FOSS store simply needs to do better.
Make the storage infrastructure decentralized to cut cost, allow donations, allow voluntary extra cuts set by developers, allow users to select dynamic pricing... whatever.
I refuse to believe FOSS needs to settle for Apples low standards.
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@cassidy people might be thinking of the itch.io example that, as far as I understand, used to take no cut at all, and now developers themselves choose what % they want to give itch.io
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@YaLTeR @cassidy from own personal experience, interactivity regarding who gets what cut of my payment always had a rewarding effect on me as a customer. Gives me a sense of control, even if e.g. its just a min-max slider.
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@cassidy I think the best way to help people understand that is to show the actual costs involved.
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