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I suppose that would only happen if Apple were very uncompetitive in price. In the example above, the options would be equivalent to the company if Apple only dropped their cut to 25% and the competition was free.

Assume Apple dropped to 15% and the competition was 10% - then it would be 9.99 IAP, 9.63 on Amaozon/Stripe/Netflix, which probably wouldn't be worth the consumer confusion.



~USD$70 B AppStore revenue (yearly, 2020), so simplistic estimates:

5% price cut: -$3.5 B

15% price cut: -$10.5 B

... I think all bets are on the table as to how Apple will respond, given the magnitude of what we're talking about.


Doing some back of the envelope "what would it take to do micropayments with PayPal"

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

A micropayment is 5% + $0.09. For a $0.99 purchase, this is about 15%.

I would expect other payment processors to be similar.

This also leads to the question of "how do you maintain the in app purchases?" Is it an account on a website that has 100% uptime? Does it work for solo games when there's no network connectivity?

This works for Epic (big company, lots of payment processing already). It doesn't work for SmallGamerInc that would find that they'd need to do a bunch of other stuff to get it working that incurs more costs than what Apple offers.


> I would expect other payment processors to be similar

SumUp wants just 1.95% flat for online payments. I would expect other payment processors to do even better with some shopping around.


In the UK and in person transactions that appears to be correct. For card not present (online) transactions its 2.50% ( https://help.sumup.com/en-GB/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3... )

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For the US ( https://support.sumup.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008338687-Pri... )

> When you take payments over the phone or via payment link, you’ll pay 3.25% + $0.15 per remote transaction.


In Poland it's 1.95% for pay-by-link and 1.49% for card-present. https://support.sumup.com/hc/pl/articles/115008338687-Op%C5%... The card-present fee is actually on the high side for but there is no monthly fee, the usual rates are around 0.7%.




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