Stripe is 2.9% + 30¢, isn't it? What am I missing? I guess you're implying that these transactions are normally so small that the 30¢ raises it to above 5%? I think it really depends on your price structure.
Stripe has real costs because it has to interact with the visa and MasterCard networks. The app stores basically have zero incremental costs. They just let you download a file from a directory of listings
In addition to the bandwidth costs for serving the binaries, don’t app stores have to deal with the same networks too for processing their in app payments? How are those any different from Stripe?
That's BS because they don't give you the option to host it yourself and avoid the fee, plus it costs them nearly nothing. $30 million/year dollars might seem like a lot until you realize Apple makes over $70 BILLION/year from app store revenues alone.
Also, what traffic? Organic traffic on app stores has always been terrible. In most cases, you can't even find an app by searching for it directly unless it's well-known like Netflix or Amazon. Even developers who have been "featured" over the years have reported a huge spike in traffic followed by an immediate fall-off and return to the same traffic numbers before the feature.
That's only servers - they still need developers, managers, reviewers etc.. Apple surely does not make a loss, but the server bill is probably a negligible part of the cost.
> In 2020, customers spent an estimated 72.3 billion U.S. dollars on on in-app purchases, subscriptions, and premium apps in the Apple App Store.
The App Store is a money printer for Apple, that's how low their operating expenses are. It's rent-seeking at its best, abusive landlords would be proud of them :-)
That’s less than the Stripe tax!