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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

Why call it "tax" if it is a fee?

The article shows numbers based on a 30% fee when it explicitly says it is actually 15%.

"meaning Apple was making around $700,000 by doing nothing other than allowing Netflix to offer subscriptions in its app"

It seems a bit unfair also.

I have no horse in this race, but the author seems to have

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"Apple Tax" is a well defined colloquial term to refer to the markup Apple makes on its products because of their company branding and product reputation. I wouldn't credit the author with inventing this term—rather they are borrowing it for something that is actually more like a tax. When there's a transaction in the Apple domain, Apple levies a tax/fee/toll/duty. This isn't going away, and it's going to be heavy hitters like Netflix which pressure them to change. Let's hope the change takes a form other than an exemption specifically for Netflix.

I'd consider it a tax. You can't support billing in your app for digital services unless you're willing to pay that a percentage of your revenue. So the workaround is to push people to the safari app to enter in their credit card info.

Apple policies explicitly forbid this. While you can use subscriptions from on the website, the app cannot in any way suggest that you do that, nor can it link to a page that directly (one click away) lets you do it.

Wow, that's interesting. Suddenly the class action lawsuit against Apple claiming they've abused their monopoly makes a lot more sense (not saying I agree with it, just that it makes more sense. I neither agree nor disagree: I'm way too ill informed to have an opinion).

this is precisely why apple gets these tax complaints. their platform is hostile to users trying to have choice on their platform. players like netflix are the only ones able and willing to stand up to apples practices in running a hyper controlling app store with bizzare monetary policies.

Any provider can have subscriptions outside of the store and still distribute on the platform.

This is completely false in practice. Especially in the last 12 months.

Again we have an existence proof that this is true. DirectvNow, Amazon, Google Play, Sling, ACloudGuru....

If you had a stronger grasp on the IAP rules you'd understand that many of those services don't fall under the IAP requirement because they exist 'outside of the app' or are real world products being sold. No, you don't have to pay Apple 30% on the 12 pack of toilet paper you bought on Amazon, or the Uber, or a Cable TV subscription. So this isn't the correct comparison central to your argument.

Yes I do understand the rules.

Amazon Video - subscription outside of the app that lets you play prime movies or you can purchase or rent a movie from Amazon’s website and watch it on the app.

Amazon Kindle - you can buy a book on Amazon’s website and download it to the app.

Coxmixology - again, you can buy a comic on the website and use it on the app.

SlingTV - you buy a subscription on the website and stream video on the app.

DirecTVNow - same as above.

Google Play Video - same as Amazon Video.

Spotify - subscription you buy on the website and stream music on the app.

Should I continue?

This needs to goto the Supreme Court, hopefully sooner rather than later.

For Apple to abuse their monopoly they should have one to begin with.

What monopoly does Apple have? They don’t have a majority share of any platform.

Any app makers not happy should boycott the platform and just release Android apps. Of course, they’d also need to avoid the Google Play store as they have pretty similar rates to the App store[0]

[0]https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

AFAIK that's not how it works. For example go look up Microsoft's monopoly. The commonly held believe is Microsoft was declared to have a monopoly on personal computer OSes but that is false. Microsoft was found to have a monopoly on OSes for Intel based machines. So by that same logic Apple has a monopoly on OSes for A series (A10, A11, A12) based smartphones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Can a company have a monopoly over its own products? That doesn't make sense.

iOS apps aren't Apple's products.

I was talking about the processor series.

A-series chips are just (very good) ARMs. I don’t buy that equivalence at all.

As I mentioned I'm not following this case really at all, but some initial thoughts from your comment are that while Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smart phones, they do have a monopoly on what software users can run on the phones and tablets they make (so if you define platform as "smartphones" then no monopoly, if platform is "iOS" then yes monopoly).

On the Android side of things, Google doesn't have near the same level of control, so that is false equivalence. One can easily side load apps, and people do all the time (Fortnite for example, couldn't happen on iOS but did on Android). There's also competing app stores (F-Droid, Amazon App store), so a very different situation. You can also run any OS you want on your device if Google's Android flavor isn't to your liking. Google also doesn't make/sell most of the hardware.

Microsoft got in trouble for simply making it very easy for people to use IE instead of Netscape and Word instead of WordPerfect. Imagine if they had gone a step further and mandated that only apps that pass a Microsoft review process could even be installed at all?

Microsoft got into trouble because Windows had a very dominant market position (80%+)

iOS does not because there are more Android devices than iOS devices.

Regarding your first part about apple having a monopoly on what runs on an iPhone: so does Samsung on fridges/washing machines/ovens, or almost any other embedded system for that matter. My router-maker also does not allow me to put different software on my router, and I can’t run software that hasn’t been allowed explicitly by Microsoft/Sony on an Xbox/Playstation.

This is ‘whataboutism’ but why is it only an issue for Apple devices but A-OK and ‘normal’ for every other example?

It sound weird to me as an Indian. Apple supports almost zero debit cards in India and no net banking. All the apps provide 10s of different ways to pay inside the app including amazon, uber, zomato(food delivery app) and their competitors. I don’t know about Netflix but still I can bet we can add credit card inside app.

Apple allows physical items or services to be purchased without Apple's payment infrastructure. The strict rules and 30% fee apply to "digital" subscriptions/items only.

apples “tax” is for digital items sold for use in the app itself; for physical things or download codes for game consoles etc, then apples “tax” doesn’t apply (yet heh)

technically it’s called “in-app purchase” [1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/in-app-purchase/

It's just an informal term, used in the US (and likely elsewhere) to refers to a fee that is a regularly recurring % of a sale amount. The idea is that in this sense, the fee is similar to a sales tax.

15% after a year of subscription. Many people will cancel within their first year (perhaps not forever)

> Why call it "tax" if it is a fee?

Tax instead of a fee because it's unavoidable to do business on the platform. Akin to a sales tax to sell items in an area. Terms are fungible but it's a reasonable term.

> I have no horse in this race, but the author seems to have

Assuming the author has bias repeating a commonly used term indicates more about bias on the assumer than the one using common terms.

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