There are plenty of nuances to the guidance that might apply to you or your business, but the basic outcome is most developers will be paying less and developers of free apps will continue to pay nothing at all. Fee-based apps with fewer than 1 million downloads (which is most of them) will pay just 5% Store Services Fee, or 7% for developers remaining in the App Store ecosystem.
How much is fair?
For all the complexity, it seems reasonable to believe Apple’s problems with regulators will inevitably coalesce around the question of how much is appropriate to charge for access to its ecosystem. It’s not as if globally accepted and used computing platforms create themselves; they are the sum of decades of work, investment, and effort that requires reward. Otherwise, why bother trying?
Apple’s biggest critic, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, doesn’t see it that way, arguing that Apple’s top rate 15% fee is an “illegal junk fee.” But it is difficult within that argument to discern any recognition for the value provided by Apple’s platforms. It can’t be that Sweeney doesn’t understand this intrinsic value. After all, Epic charges application developers using Unreal Engine 5% of revenue after the first $1 million. Is that a “junk fee?”
