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>Apple makes a profit on every iDevice sold, every iApp sold, through iAds and on the $99/year developer fee. What evidence do you have to support the allegati

>Apple makes a profit on every iDevice sold, every iApp sold, through iAds and on the $99/year developer fee. What evidence do you have to support the allegation that Apple makes a profit on every App sold? Firstly, there's the cost of having the application tested, approved, uploaded and categorised. There's also the cost of hosting the app as well as the credit card processing fees. Users have the right to re-download any app they've purchased in the past. What about a 99c app that weighs in at 2GB? Does Apple really make a profit after credit card processing fees and bandwidth costs? As for the $99/year developer fee, there are costs involved in providing support, moderating forums, and approving applications.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
You mean it cost millions to approve and sell Angry Birds? Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and most apps are quite small. >As for the $99/year developer fee, there are costs involved in providing support, moderating forums, and approving applications I am sure Xcode costs a lot to develop etc. But Apple still gives it away to developers and has free documentation, examples, forums etc. Why? You're excluding the benefit of the Apps which make the iPhone more valuable to the users and are a big reason that people buy iPhones. No wonder Jobs like to tout the 300k+ app number every chance he gets.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  My assumption has always been the primary reason for the $99 cost is the code signing, similar to buying an SSL cert. There may also be a bit of a filter-function involved: if you aren't willing to spend $99, they don't want you in the playground. Honestly, I really doubt they are making much money on developer tools (unlike, say, Microsoft). Remember, you only need to pay the $99 to publish (not to develop) and only one person per company has to pay it, so of those 300k+ apps, the actual number of developer subscriptions is a lot lower.
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    >My assumption has always been the primary reason for the $99 cost is the code signing. It costs so much to run a program to sign a binary file with your private key? Am I missing something here? >similar to buying an SSL cert These people must be having a lot of cash to burn through then. http://www.startssl.com/?app=1 http://www.startssl.com/?app=1
  - nlogn 16y ago
    Apple may not make money on developer tools wrt software, but they certainly sell plenty of macs to developers as a requirement to develop for their platform.

recoiledsnake 16y ago

You mean it cost millions to approve and sell Angry Birds? Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and most apps are quite small. >As for the $99/year developer fee, there are costs involved in providing support, moderating forums, and approving applications I am sure Xcode costs a lot to develop etc. But Apple still gives it away to developers and has free documentation, examples, forums etc. Why? You're excluding the benefit of the Apps which make the iPhone more valuable to the users and are a big reason that people buy iPhones. No wonder Jobs like to tout the 300k+ app number every chance he gets.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
My assumption has always been the primary reason for the $99 cost is the code signing, similar to buying an SSL cert. There may also be a bit of a filter-function involved: if you aren't willing to spend $99, they don't want you in the playground. Honestly, I really doubt they are making much money on developer tools (unlike, say, Microsoft). Remember, you only need to pay the $99 to publish (not to develop) and only one person per company has to pay it, so of those 300k+ apps, the actual number of developer subscriptions is a lot lower.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  >My assumption has always been the primary reason for the $99 cost is the code signing. It costs so much to run a program to sign a binary file with your private key? Am I missing something here? >similar to buying an SSL cert These people must be having a lot of cash to burn through then. http://www.startssl.com/?app=1 http://www.startssl.com/?app=1
- nlogn 16y ago
  Apple may not make money on developer tools wrt software, but they certainly sell plenty of macs to developers as a requirement to develop for their platform.