When a customer gets refunded for an app they purchased, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut they took from the developer, says developer Simeon Saens of Two Lives Left. While [online] payment processors generally don’t refund fees on refunded payments, “the App Store doesn’t position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one,” writes HN user chadlavi. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says in a tweet: This is a critical consideration in these 30% store fees. They come off the top, before funding any developer costs. As a result, Apple and Google make more profit from most developers’ games than the developers themselves. That is terribly unfair and exploitative. “If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that would put them right in line with other payment processors,” adds chadlavi. “It would also still net them billions of dollars, I think!”
Aside from that, 30% is an insane amount of cut to steal off someone with no other option but to use your marketplace.
Robin Edgar
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