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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

> Yet they're now threatening to make a number of their more > popular apps economically unviable according to their > creators.

How's that? Or are we again talking pandora and netflix there? In that case I couldn't care less: these are not available in my country, and most likely never will be. Heck, even iTunes Music is not available, only apps.

Now imagine you are a new company just going to start selling subscriptions in iOS app. I'd say you get a lot of convenience with this Apple offering.

As for end user, there is no loss there: just a convenient way to buy subscription with one tap.

All this sounds once again blown out of proportion, everyone is shouting without any effort to really understand what they are shouting about.

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Seems like you are defending Apple's behavior without any effort to really understand what other people are shouting about.

It's nice that you don't care about Pandora and Netflix. A lot of people do. If those apps were to disappear or mark up their offering by the 40% required to compensate for Apple's take consumers would by definition be worse off.

If Apple's in-app purchasing turns out to be really convenient and worth a 30% cut then that's great for app developers, and they will use it. But I really fail to see how forcing people down that path is at all a good thing.

It's not just that they're taking 30%. It's that they're disallowing authors to charge any more than they do anywhere else, and then taking 30%. So to make the same amount of money on iPhone, you would have to increase your prices everywhere else.

Not allowing to charge more anywhere else is a win for me. Authors who don't like this are free to skip iOS entirely, no?

They probably will. Which was probably the point :P

> As for end user, there is no loss there: just a convenient way to buy subscription with one tap.

What about the [potential] loss of apps like Netflix, Pandora and Kindle? Sounds like a pretty big loss for a possible future convenience.

As for the first two I am not a customer for them and will never be. Losing kindle would suck a bit though.

> I'd say you get a lot of convenience with this Apple offering

Question is, is that convenience worth 30%? I'd say most companies wouldn't think so.

Most? Ok, those who don't like it are free to setup worldwide payment processing, and get customers to submit their CC details.

But every app developer who has a subscription model for their iOS app already has this in place. And they can do it for a 3% fee from PayPal, where is the other 27% of value?

Ask the guy who made a million dollars off Pixelmator in the first week because his was the featured app on the Mac App Store

That's an app with a one off payment, we're talking subscriptions here. The point being, do you get that 30% (ok 27%) value from Apple when they take it every month. Also, note that I'm not saying I disagree with Apple taking a cut of subscription fees, I just think 30% is insanely high, it should be around 5%. Also, I don't think it should be mandatory.

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