Apple and third-party developers have grown so far apart, it’s difficult to tell when they’re talking about the same mobile app ecosystem.

For Apple, the iOS ecosystem is chugging along beautifully. The company’s Services revenue – the commissions it makes on in-app transactions and subscriptions – grew to $19.5 billion in Q4 2021, up by a quarter from the prior year (which was already a high water mark, because 2020 over-indexed in ecommerce sales rather than store-goers during the holiday).

苹果首席执行官蒂姆·库克（Tim Cook）在一周前在收入期间对投资者说：“该应用商店仍然是世界各地开发人员的经济奇迹，也是消费者发现自己喜欢的应用程序的安全和值得信赖的地方。”

App Store肯定是Apple的奇迹。该公司的服务收入利润率高达72.4％，这比以前的几个季度高。An additional 165 million paid subscriptions were purchased through the App Store last year, for a total of 785 million paid subscriptions, though Apple doesn’t disclose how many of those are for its own services (Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and Fitness+, to name a few) rather than third-party developers.

In 2021, Apple’s Services business earned $72 billion, making it big enough to be a Fortune 50 company in its own right, said Apple CFO Luca Maestri on the company earnings call.

但是，开发人员将对苹果在App Store Economics上的玫瑰色展望提出异议。

Consider Cook’s reference to the App Store as a place where users “discover their favorite apps.”

Apple’s description of its own user behavior is outdated, according to Eric Seufert, a mobile industry analyst and consultant.

“People go to the grocery store and browse around. They go to Amazon and browse around. Nobody goes to the App Store and browses around,” Seufert said during a RevenueCat virtual panel this month.

10年前，如果苹果推广了一个独立应用程序，那么新用户就会大量涌现，因为人们来App Store只是为了看看新的或有趣的东西，Revenuecat的开发人员倡导者David Barnard说，他也经营自己的天气和时间管理应用程序。

Nowadays, the app leader boards cannot be climbed organically because huge incumbents or Apple-owned services dominate the top of every category. A company must invest in a heavy paid App Store search strategy, alongside additional mobile and programmatic investments, Seufert said. Even then, reaching sustainable profitability is rare.

Aside from petrification atop the App Store charts, Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) rules severely handicap any app’s potential runway, said Thomas Petit, a mobile growth consultant on the same RevenueCat panel.

Petit说，增长到1000万用户的应用程序以前将设置更高的酒吧，例如1亿潜在用户，当他们筹集资金并设定公司估值时。这些预测似乎不再现实。

Without mobile growth marketing tools – like creating lookalike groups from your known users and targeting potential users aggressively based on tracking Apple device IDs – independent app developers can no longer “unlock that effect” to grow by an order of magnitude, Petit said.

Seufert said independent developers should be focused on a web-based approach: getting potential app users to sign up and submit info on the web, before shuttling them to the app as an already-signed-up user. That gives the app more data on its user base that can’t be blocked by ATT.

He also pointed out that this growing data hole isn’t an Apple-only issue. Android offers more mobile growth marketing, but is tracking Apple in policies that approach data privacy. In three more years, Android will offer a similar privacy-first environment that matches where Apple was just prior to ATT. And an ATT for Android may come shortly after that.

Apple is still the best and biggest show in town for mobile developers.

“Since its launch, we have paid developers selling digital goods and services more than $260 billion, with 2021 setting a new record for their earnings,” Cook said.

But even that “we have paid” line in Cook’s prepared remarks could stick in third-party developers’ craw. Developers consider the payment between themselves and the user, with the developer forking over Apple’s fee for being a middleman.

From Apple’s perspective, the user pays Apple, which, generously, passes along 70% or more cut to the developer. An “economic miracle” that all depends on your perspective.