Apple's "app revenue" is slightly in the black but really is designed to break even with costs to running the App Store (trivially verifiable from profit reports and other extensive analyses, including comments from Tim Cook on earning calls). Apple makes money on hardware, and to a much much lesser extent on media: apps exist to make their hardware enticing, nothing more. So maybe "if I were Apple I would be very worried about web pages undermining the platform lock in achieved through my leading native app platform", but poking at revenues just repeats a falsehood (which as was pointed out in the article here yesterday is how false information becomes engrained).
> is designed to break even with costs to running the App Store
They've paid out 50 billion USD to app developers since the beginning of the app stores (1).
Since they are taking 30% of the profits, are you saying it has cost them around 21 billion USD to run the appstore?
So they've made $3bn per year from the App Store (averaged). There are certainly development costs, personnel, bandwidth, etc.
Apple suggested last week they expect around a 40% profit margin, and sold 45m phones last quarter. Assume an ASP of $500 that's $200/phone profit. Multiply it out you get $9bn in the quarter (not their strongest, they expect winter to go better.
But that's a quarter. So take a quarter of 3bn and you get $750 million, which is only 8.3% of the phone profit.
They make some money on the App Store, but it's not like it's 30% of their busines.
