80% of devs chafe at Apple's App Store cash split
Thank you, Steve. May I have another?
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Eighty per cent of North American developers believe that the iPhone App Store's revenue split is unfair, according to a new study from research outfit Evans Data.
The Evans Data Spring North American Developer Survey polled more than 400 developers across the continent, and about 320 of them said they should receive more than the 70 per cent revenue split offered by Apple and all the other mobile app stores that mimicked the Cupertino cult. As a result, app stores are the preferred distribution model for only 15 per cent of those polled.
"Virtually all of the best known app stores have fallen in line directly with the 30 / 70 revenue split that Apple introduced, but there could be a big upside for any vendor bold enough to deviate,” reads a canned statement from Janel Garvin, the CEO of Evans Data.
"If the app store is more a strategic asset than a revenue center, then providing the developer with a better revenue share model could go a long way toward promotion of that particular distribution channel and thus growth of market share for a technology.”
Most of those polled are also peeved about app store restrictions on application price and content. Seventy per cent said there should be no restrictions on price, and fifty per cent chafed at Jobsian app store police barring certain content. A third, however, said they had no problem with content restrictions.
The survey also indicates that 10 per cent of North American developers use Objective C, the language Steve Jobs imposes on iPhone developers, and this is expected to grow to nearly 12 per cent next year. Thirty-six per cent plan to use services that communicate with XML Schema, and two-thirds use so-called "agile" techniques for collaborative development at least some of the time. ®
COMMENTS
What a bunch of morons
Well the people complaining about this have never had to sell software before have they.
Back in the bad old days of J2ME the split was 60:40 ... to start with then 50:50. Unless you were on Orange in which case the split was 30:70 (that's right 30% to the developer 70% to Orange).
Let alone that the operators stitched up preferred supplier agreements so you'd end up (if you were lucky) with 50% of 50% ... i.e. 25% of the agreed price.
If you compare the AppStore to premium retail space then you should compare with the 70% of retail price that the retailer takes.
Apple's deal is looking pretty darn good.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/badgers_32.png Cos badgers have more sense than 80% of the surveyed whingers.
They should use Cobol, not C
I object to the word "developer" in relation to people who make crApple Apps, I've been writing Cobol programs for 38 years and I've never had write a Cobol program that makes fart sounds.
But that's the trouble with the youf of today, they come out of collage and think because they know some fancy language like C or Java that they think they can make a living writing programs that make fart sounds or applications that track a woman’s menstrual cycle, all this drag and drop etch-a-sketch programming is not real programming I tell you, I remember back in 1972 I had to write a program using only ones and zeroes and blah blah blah blah blah blah……..
Signed
Concerned developer
Upper Mainframe
IBMLand
Retail without the middle man.
I'd estimate the split is fairly normal if you take the Apple Store price to be the "retail" price. If they were selling boxed copies in a shop, they'd probably get far less than 70% offered by Apple.
Of course the other complaint about over-restrictive policies is very true. I was all set to buy an iPhone 3G when they first released, but just before they came out, there were a series of grumbles from developers about being rejected or having apps take months to get approved... I couldn't bring myself to buy a device that restricts 3rd party apps that way (and it's worse now than it was then).
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