Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
9 tactics from John Gruber
The Past, Present, and Future of Building on Apple
Watch the full episode“The two things that were scarring to Apple were the near bankruptcy. They're still thinking of themselves as underdogs who want to assert at least 51% of the power over developers — they've lost sight of the fact that they've actually got like 95% of the power.”
Apple's tight platform control traces directly to near-bankruptcy in the '90s
The three executives who control Apple's App Store relationships — Jaws, Schiller, and Eddie Q — all joined Apple in the late 1980s and lived through the company's near-collapse when developer leverage almost pulled the platform under. That existential scare became institutional memory: never let third parties hold majority power again. Understanding this history is essential context for any developer trying to read Apple's behaviour.
“They open up subscriptions to all apps — which obviously working at RevenueCat and now all my apps are subscription. That was Revolution. That was App Store 2.0 — to empower developers to better monetize apps.”
App Store 2.0 in 2016 unlocked subscriptions for all apps and powered a decade of growth
Before 2016, subscriptions were restricted to narrow app categories. Phil Schiller's App Store 2.0 overhaul opened them to every app, sped up review from 14 days to under 48 hours, introduced the 15% renewal rate, and launched Search Ads. Each change would have been meaningful on its own. Together they powered an entire decade of subscription app growth — a reminder of how much platform policy shapes the economics of every app built on top of it.
“The original Macintosh in 1984 was $2,500 — inflation adjusted that's like $7,200 today. It sold so poorly it was the impetus for driving Jobs out of the company. And yet. The Mac was the right idea for the future of personal computing. It needed at least four or five years before you're like holy shit this is a thriving platform.”
Vision Pro follows the 1984 Mac playbook: expensive first version building toward a mass platform
Apple's Vision Pro is not the iPhone — it is closer to the 1984 Mac: an expensive enthusiast device building a platform ecosystem years before the mass-market hardware is ready. The 1984 Mac was considered a flop; the press called the GUI a gimmick. Apple's patient pattern of replaying this arc means Vision Pro's weak early sales do not signal failure — they signal phase one of a long arc that developers building for the platform today can get ahead of.
“Early Android they just couldn't do it. There was no other platform. It was impossible to make anything that was like 'just look at it — just look at this app and look how cool it looks.' Nobody had the skill set.”
Mac-era design culture gave the iPhone App Store an ecosystem advantage no rival could match
The passionate Mac developer community of the early 2000s — Delicious Library, Panic, Omni Group, Rogue Amoeba — had spent years cultivating the craft of delightful native software. When the App Store opened in 2008 that skill set transferred immediately to iOS while Android and Windows Mobile had no equivalent talent pool. Platform quality at launch was not just about Apple's APIs — it was about the design culture a decade of Mac development had built.
“There's a Steve Jobs quote: if you do something and it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. And I think with the app store in particular boy does that really resonate.”
Apple is dwelling too long on App Store revenue instead of building what's next
Jobs' own plaque outside the Infinite Loop campus reads 'if you do something and it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else wonderful.' Gruber argues Apple has violated that principle by clinging to 30% commission structures and anti-steering rules long past the point where those innovations matured into pure rent extraction. The App Store's success should be the foundation for something new — not a fortress to defend.
“Vision OS today is nowhere near as vibrant a third party developer ecosystem as the Mac was in 1985 or 1986. Resentment — numbers 1, 2, and 3 on the list of reasons why developer relations are strained with Apple — has to do with money.”
Developer fee resentment is the single biggest threat to Vision OS ecosystem adoption
The 1984 Mac, despite poor consumer sales, had a blossoming third-party app ecosystem driven by developer enthusiasm. Vision OS in 2025 does not — and Gruber argues this is primarily a financial resentment problem, not a technology problem. If Apple enters its next hardware platform cycle with reluctant rather than enthusiastic developers, it will lose the ecosystem advantage that made the iPhone unstoppable.
“Here I am — indie developers supporting my family — I've paid Apple over a million dollars. And Meta has paid Apple $100 a year for 17 years. When you just look at it as a logical person in 2025, that just seems bananas.”
The free-app loophole means indie developers subsidise Meta's billion-dollar iOS business
Apple's 70/30 model was designed for paid apps — it was never supposed to handle an ecosystem where companies like Meta, Airbnb, and Uber make billions from iOS without paying a cent in commissions. The result is a structurally inverted fee system where small subscription developers carry the burden and trillion-dollar corporations do not. This asymmetry is now a mainstream developer grievance that will shape every App Store policy debate of the next decade.
“Netflix did some experiments — their number was somewhere around 12 to 13% where if the fee had been dropped that low it would still be more profitable to operate in the app store than outside the app store.”
Dropping App Store fees would likely increase total revenue by pulling transactions back in-app
Major publishers like Netflix actively steer users to the web to avoid Apple's commission — meaning Apple earns nothing on millions of transactions it could be facilitating. The leaked Netflix data suggests there is a threshold around 12-13% below which in-app purchases become the more profitable channel again. A lower fee could paradoxically grow total App Store revenue by reversing the web-diversion trend that currently costs Apple far more than it saves.
“The app store was genuinely a revolution in software. Bandwidth was expensive, working with third-party payment platforms was a hassle. On phones the only software was carrier-billed and they took 50% of everything.”
The original App Store was a genuine revolution — free distribution replaced 50% carrier cuts
In 2008, distributing software required self-hosted servers, payment infrastructure, and often carrier deals that took 50% of revenue. The App Store collapsed that to a $99/year developer account and a 70/30 split — genuinely transformative at the time. Understanding that original context matters: it explains both why Apple feels entitled to its commission and why modern developers, who have grown up with Stripe and Vercel, find that entitlement increasingly hard to justify.