Comment by virgilp
4 years ago
Facebook, Netflix, Youtube/Google would be in similar positions even without Apple. They are not "app developers", they are software developers. Snapchat and Tiktok are good examples, but, what are their market caps? Add them all together and I think they won't be $930 bln (whereas e.g. if you add together all companies that depend on Amazon, the valuation would most likely be much higher than Amazon's; that should be the normal, for a platform).
Apple absolutely attempted to commoditize apps/ establish 1-to-5$ as the "normal" prices.
When the iPad launched all of Apples own unbundled productivity apps were listed at $10 each so we know for a fact that this is not true. They tried very hard to establish a market with sustainable prices for premium apps.
I think it’s just unreasonable to try to do that with the phones back in 2008 though, with the small screen size and relatively low resources of the very early devices high prices for phone apps just wasn’t going to fly.
Whether or not $10 is "sustainable premium price" is more than questionable. They tried so much, that they don't yet have free trials and paid upgrades for apps.... (like, true support, not the in-app-purchase workarounds)