Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

How Apple Gamed App Pricing

A Supreme Court antitrust case will decide if Apple is responsible for increased pass-through of costs to customers locked into the App Store

December 11, 2018 at 5:30 PM UTC

By Scott Duke Kominers

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

One-stop app shopping.
Photographer: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The appeal of Apple’s iPhone isn’t just the aesthetically pleasing marriage of form and function — it’s also all the apps specially designed for the iPhone’s software.

Apple has a lot of control over those apps. The company requires that they all be sold through the official App Store,1and it charges app developers a 30 percent commission on sales. These restrictions and fees are pretty high, and have led to multiple class-action lawsuits. But it wasn’t developers who sued Apple — it was iPhone owners.