Comment Not 30% (Score 2) 9
I develop apps on the side as a hobby. Apple takes 15% if your annual income is under 1 million. They also provide a lot of infrastructure and good development tools. I would say it's a bargain.
I remember my company developing BREW apps (Verizon's Get It Now), which was basically the only way to make apps for the majority of US phone users. I have forgotten the cut Verizon took, it was over 30% IIRC, but what's worse you could not just publish an app, it had to be "selected". For it to be eligible for selection, you needed to support the majority of their devices (you needed about 40 phones). To "support" a phone you needed to submit extensive documentation (we had to write programs to generate them) and pay $1000 PER DEVICE. So you made a $40k payment FOR A CHANCE to be in the app store, where Verizon would take a 40% cut or something. And programming for BREW was horrible too.
I am sorry, I was never an Apple fan, especially in the pre-Apple Silicon days, but the App Store is like a utopia for developers compared to the past...