For all of the flak Apple gets for charging a 30% cut of regular iPhone app purchases, in-app purchases, and subscriptions, they apparently don’t pull in much actual profit. CFO Peter Oppenheimer said at an Apple shareholder meeting said “We run the App Store just a little over breakeven,” after fielding a question about how subscription fees were being handled.
Even without Oppenheimer commenting on the matter, it’s a tough call on whether or not one can find fault in Apple’s pricing policy for developers. Competing app stores, including BlackBerry’s and Android’s also have a 30/70 revenue split (including in-app purchases), and they aren’t nearly as well-trafficked platforms. Whether or not Apple’s infrastracture maintenance costs for the App Store are grossly inflated is another issue altogether, and open to interpretation. I’m not even going to try to pretend to know how much something like the App Store takes to keep running, but I do know that Apple supports a ton of free apps, and given the volume they’re dealing with, that can’t be cheap.
That being said, I can’t help but wonder if the competing stores can claim to be breaking even too if they’re selling so many fewer apps. Android and BlackBerry are a bit more open in that they allow third-party stores, which must offset at least some of the traffic (and the associated expenses) that they would have to deal with. Any app developers in the house care to weigh in on the issue?
[via Mac Observer]