So the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee finally put out its report yesterday. Fifteen months of work, something like 449 pages, and the headline everyone's running with is "Amazon Apple Facebook Google Have Monopoly Power, Democrats Say." Fine. Sure. I skimmed a chunk of it over coffee this morning instead of doing literally anything productive, and honestly the part that got me wasn't the sweeping stuff about breaking companies up. It was one line about the App Store commission structure. Thirty percent. Just sitting there in a congressional document like its a normal, defensible number.
I have a very specific, very small grudge here so bear with me.
Back in 2016 I built a little iOS app. Nothing fancy, it converted between a bunch of obscure unit systems for a hobby I had at the time (don't ask), and I priced it at $2.99 because that felt fair for something I'd poured maybe four months of nights and weekends into. Sold a few hundred copies over about a year, which felt genuinely great until I did the math and realized Apple had taken almost a thousand dollars of that for doing, what exactly? Hosting a binary and running a payment form? I'm not saying that's worth nothing. I'm saying 30 cents on every dollar is a wild toll for it, and there was no alternative toll booth to use instead. You want your app on iPhones, you pay Apple's number, full stop. Thats the entire complaint in one sentence and its apparently taken the US government a year and a half and 449 pages to arrive at roughly the same sentence.
The report goes further than my little gripe obviously, it gets into self-preferencing on Amazon's marketplace, Google burying competitors in search results, Facebook buying up anything that looked like a threat before it could grow into one (Instagram, WhatsApp, the works). All of that's real and all of that matters more than my unit converter app. But I think the App Store commission stuff resonates with me specifically because its the one part of this whole ecosystem where I personally handed over cash and watched it disappear into a rate I had zero say in and zero ability to negotiate. Everything else in the report is abstract market power. This part was a literal invoice.
Whether anything actually happens because of this report is a different question entirely, and I'm not holding my breath. Congress writes reports, companies issue statements about how the findings "mischaracterize" their business, and six months from now this is a citation in some law review article nobody reads outside of law school. Apple already put out a response basically saying the App Store is fine actually, developers love it, look at all the success stories. Which, sure, some developers do great. I know a guy who cleared six figures on a puzzle game. But survivorship bias is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument and everyone in this space knows it.
What I actually did after that first app, for what its worth, is I stopped building for app stores almost entirely. Everything I've shipped since is just a web app. No 30% toll, no review process where some contractor decides your app icon looks too similar to a system icon and rejects you for it (that happened to a friend, took him three weeks to get resolved). I just build it, point a domain at it and host it myself, and I've been doing that through Tricknowtech for the last couple projects since it lets me register the domain and stand up the VPS and push code to it without dealing with any of that. Not glamorous. Nobody discovers your web app browsing a curated storefront the way they might stumble into an app store listing. But nobody's taking a third of my $2.99 either.
Anyway. Read the report if you've got an hour to kill, or don't, honestly the tweets summarizing it hit the same notes. I just wanted to note that somewhere in those 449 pages is a number that cost me about a grand four years ago, and it took the government this long to say it out loud.