For my apps, I used the affiliate program to get back some of the Apple tax.<p>So from my perspective, this is just the latest in a long line of developer hostile developments from Apple.<p>Sidenote- I tried deploying an app to testers on Testflight for the first time, and the app was rejected. What a complete waste of time. It was rejected for not running on iPad properly and not working with ipv6. Not exactly too frickin helpful when I needed to get the app out to testers/stakeholders asap. Fortunately Tryouts.io don't want to waste my time.
> If Apple drastically cuts this revenue stream, the company could end up alienating people writing for those sites.<p>Isn't this, in some ways, good for the consumer? While some legitimate review sites may be impacted, this would imaginably help cut down on the number of illegitimate spammy review sites that are pushing ad-ridden and malware-ish apps.
"The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." - <i>Adam Smith</i><p>The App Store developers are now farmers on Apple's domain, and their landlord has figured out they can pay more.
As a consumer, I strongly dislike the direction Apple has taken since Tim Cook assumed CEO. When I bought the new iPhone 7, the previous plastic headphones case was changed to be made of disposable, thin paper. You could argue it was an environmental move, but Apple now seems to care more about maximizing profit and cutting costs in every possible area than providing a good customer experience. I mean, the original iPhone even included a microfiber cloth to clean the screen. And iPhone's seriously still come in 32GB for the base model?<p>The company has an excess of over $250B in liquid cash but it decides to stiffen its products to revolve around pleasing shareholders, not consumers. Let's not even get started on the disaster of catering to professionals using their MacBook "Pro" or Mac Pro line.
Affiliate commissions generate a lot of fake reviews. I think this is a good move by Apple; although I believe they should simply shut down the entire program.
<i>Starting on May 1st 2017, commissions for all app and in-app content will be reduced from 7% to 2.5% globally. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) will remain at the current 7% commission rate in all markets.</i><p>So, the sites promoting Hollywood get to keep the 7%, but the sites promoting Apple's developers get tanked?
A lot of comments seem to think this effects developers. It doesn't - just the many sub par app review sites that make money with affiliate links. As an iOS developer I wouldn't be sad to see these die out.<p>Some comments have mentioned the 30% cut that Apple takes. From my point of view, I'd be making $0 without the App Store, so a 30% cut I was aware of from square one doesn't seem unreasonable. Apple have never raised the figure, and I don't think they're likely to in the near future.
Is it time for a developer's guild?<p>Like if most iOS developers were part of the guild, and if Apple made too drastic a cut like this, the guild would disable all of the apps in the store for some number of days until a compromise could be reached between Apple and the guild. Not to single Apple out - we seem to be seeing a lot of these unilateral decisions in tech lately.
Who would want to promote something for $0.025 commission on a $1 sale?<p>The volume needed for that to be any sort of business model seems extraordinarily high.
IDK. I feel bad for the devs but I hate being punted from safari to the app store. If this cuts it down 66percent that would be awesome ux. Really sick of the huge green button that says "proceed" and the tiny "no thanks" that takes you to the actual site. Reddit is a perfect example
Also, you can look forward to the day when apple raises it's tax from 30% to 50%. I suspect this is coming. They're certainly powerful enough to pull it off. Developers won't like it but there's nothing devs can really do about it.