That’s not really true. Consumers have a fixed willingness to pay and professional app publishers are good at discovering that number, so there really isn’t much passing costs onto the consumer.
Um, no, cost of doing business affects the equilibrium market price. There's no Apple tax outside of Apple's walled garden, so everyone competing outside of it has lower costs and can thus offer lower prices (outside of the walled garden). If you don't, your competitors will, and you'll lose customers.
So yes, in the broadest possible abstract, sure. But we're talking about the sale of digital goods here. What market for game coins, app features, digital content w/e is so intensely price sensitive, apparently fungible enough that switching apps doesn't matter, but then also not at all actually price sensitive since the mostly arbitrary distinction to the consumer "what brand is your phone" means you can charge 30% more?
Like I totally believe you, I'm actually just interested.
> then also not at all actually price sensitive since the mostly arbitrary distinction to the consumer "what brand is your phone" means you can charge 30% more
This distinction isn't arbitrary at all. They're effectively different markets. iPhone owners make more money and spend more money than Android users.
There have been a number of surveys that have shown this, here's one:
If you live in a jurisdiction where you need to pay sales tax, you will pay that sales tax, it will be on top of anything that the seller would normally charge you. You can't escape this tax by going to a different seller in your same jurisdiction. You can choose to move to a different jurisdiction if you don't like paying that tax, but a seller who sells in both will charge you the same subtotal (+ different tax).
Same with Apple's 30% fee - it's unavoidable on their platform so it acts as a private sales tax on their platform. Some developers might choose to essentially subsidize their apple users by charging them the same price on Apple and on tax-free platforms like the web. That may be out of fear for Apple or out of cultural inertia or whatever, but it doesn't make sense, they're the ones leaving money on the table, not the ones who charge people taking into account the cost of doing business with those people on their preferred platform. They could get more profit selling their app for cheaper when not subject to the 30% platform tax, if they think that their pricing with that tax is optimal.
This implies the business is setting the price, which if so, sure I guess. But "creator economy" applications as one example also fall under "digital goods", which means a user is setting the price on a platform to provide a service for $X, the platform takes $Y cut, and then pays the user $X - $Y, but then Apple wants 30% of $X. It's absolutely insane because most platforms out there don't even charge a fee that high so in order to cover the Apple tax they either have to make $0 per transaction and also pay creators less, or just charge consumers $X + 30% up front.
> Consumers have a fixed willingness to pay and professional app publishers are good at discovering that number, so there really isn’t much passing costs onto the consumer.
Prices are set by supply and demand. If you take a 30% cut out of the supplier's revenue, you get fewer suppliers and the price each one can charge goes up because the customer can't switch to a competitor who was driven out of business by the high fees.
