Microsoft’s New Fee Structure for App Developers ⇥ blogs.windows.com

Microsoft:

Starting later this year, consumer applications (not including games) sold in Microsoft Store will deliver to developers 95% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application, when a customer uses a deep link to get to and purchase your application. When Microsoft delivers you a customer through any other method, such as in a collection on Microsoft Store or any other owned Microsoft properties, and purchases your application, you will receive 85% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application.

This kind of arrangement doesn’t necessarily mean that developing for one platform is necessarily more lucrative than another. However, it might be a pretty good incentive for major developers to submit their apps to the store, as Microsoft isn’t garnering a third of their earnings.

I wonder if we’ll see anything about App Store fee structures at WWDC. I’d like to see Apple adopt something more like a progressive tax rate: for example, the first thousand downloads of an app could be at a 0% rate, then 5% for the next 10,000 downloads, then 10% for another 25,000, and so on. Their current 30% cut looks comparatively antiquated on the back of Microsoft’s announcement.