Apple charges developers 30% of revenues generated on the iOS market.
Facebook charges developers 30% of revenues as well.
Google recently launched its own In-App payment service and revealed they’ll be charging only 5%. This is big news. If they stick with a similar fee structure for developers on its new gaming platform, Google Games, there could be a shift in the platform wars.
The online publishing arena has seen many developers bypassing Apple’s 30% revenue cut on iOS publications by utilizing web-standard HTML5 functionality. This allows them to publish to the web and consumed on any HTML5 compatible platform – a nearly universal standard. What they lose in exposure on the iOS marketplace, hopefully they can make up for with increased consumability on other platforms.
Recent HTML5 publishers include The Financial Times, Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader and Walmart’s VUDU.
