I’m okay with paying 30% where the return on investment is worth it. Both the Appstore and Google Play do literally nothing for you, except distribution. These really don’t deserve to take such a big cut, and I don’t really want to hear any more excuses in their favor

Both the Appstore and Google Play do literally nothing for you, except distribution.

I mean distribution is not “nothing”. They have to maintain the app store, and process payments, and filter (most) malicious software.

It’s just not worth anywhere near 30%, not to mention the flurry of ads all over the place.

At least with Android it’s completely possible to have a third-party app or app store and charge using their own payment processes without ever touching the Google Play store.

Apple is a whole other level of control and anti-competitiveness, and they’ve been profiting off of it for decades with no intervention in sight.

I’ll still say that when it comes to developers, Apple is a much better experience than the Google Play.

On Apple you can appeal if your app is rejected and you have an actual human on the other side to explain you what are the issues.

On the Google Play, anything goes usually, but later if your account gets flagged by their automated system, you might 1) get a generic email with no explanation and a threat that you should fix it or the app will be taken down and your account get 1 out of 3 warnings; 2) get your account simply banned without explanation, losing all your services associated with Google forever with no appeal or anything you can do; 3) have your Google account simply disabled for supposedly being “associated” with some other account that was banned.

Many of these horror stories can be found on the Android development subreddits and I suspect this is the result of the Play Store being a big target of malicious or scam apps constantly.