Watchout for Apple Services

Apple's future profit growth will likely come from their services business, where they charge app developers a percentage of any in-app purchase. Their argument is that they provide a safe platform, and a massive user base. However, Apple has lost a few court cases about their app store payment arrangements being anti-competitive, and it may well be forced to open things up.

Previously, all purchases done inside an app would have to be done through Apple's payment platform. Now, Apple has to allow apps to direct users to external payment gateways, thus bypassing Apple's commission. This is a bit of a worry for Apple's future growth, but as anyone in retail will tell you, the harder that you make the payment process, the fewer sales get processed - think of Amazon's 1-click buy function.

RevenueCat, a company which helps with online purchases, has been running the data since Apple opened up to allow external payments. As you can imagine, many more sales happen when users can do a quick and easy in-app purchase. It is painful for a user to go to an external payment page and complete their payment details.

You can read RevenueCat's early findings here - Apple opened the door to web paywalls.

Apps will need to decide if having higher sales is worth paying Apple's commissions. I suspect it will vary from industry to industry and app to app. For example, I would happily go to the online Netflix webpage and sign up. For something like a cellphone game though, it would be an in-app purchase or nothing.