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Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

The initial model itself started off pretty clear. Where the in app purchase is secured and delivered purely by Apple, it’s acting as a publisher. This is the unlock special functions in the calculator type purchase, or buy a book where the package is hosted in Apple infra itself. Here is the app has no backend, and Apple is a publisher. 30% is fine.

In the scenarios where a user is paying for something that is delivered or executed by the app developer’s infrastructure, digital or not, Apple is a payment gateway, not a publisher. They can either match Stripe or go to Paddle’s rate of 5% because they handle taxes and VAT etc. But either way they are and should act as payment gateway and merchant of record, not publisher.

This distinction already exists for on digital goods. No one expects to pay 30% when selling food or groceries, for example. But digital services are the same thing.

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You haven't said why the initial model —where you surrender 30% to Apple— is acceptable, when you pay them nothing for an app that lets you buy other things. They're both apps with potentially similar overhead costs for Apple.

I don't think we're talking about drastically different things when we're comparing the Amazon app, or some client application for SaaS. Apple doesn't force Amazon to use it as a card processor, does it? It seems the only distinguishing feature is that Amazon is massive. You could say that there's a distinguishing digital delivery divide here but Amazon gets out of that too these days.

The initial model was ok because Apple was handling promotion and marketing as well for you. There was a time where there weren't that many apps on the App store, so Apple would push and advertise apps after you submitted them. Even today, they do still feature apps, explain them and even make nice artwork about your app. This is all publisher work, and easily worth the money if you really have zero marginal cost. They can make you millions by talking about your app, that's worth a commission.

>In the scenarios where a user is paying for something that is delivered or executed by the app developer’s infrastructure, digital or not, Apple is a payment gateway, not a publisher. They can either match Stripe or go to Paddle’s rate of 5% because they handle taxes and VAT etc. But either way they are and should act as payment gateway and merchant of record, not publisher.

Your product and associated costs might have changed, but your relationship with Apple hasn't. You aren't paying them for payment processing, you're paying for access to the user base that is magnitudes bigger than when the App Store launched.

But that's your and the users' only choice for app distribution, unlike on Android where you can make your own "app store" like Epic did. Is it reasonable for all company<->user transactions to be forced through Apple's 30% cut, when the value is primarily driven by a company-hosted backend server, and the user has already paid upwards of $1500 for the device?

So that’s the crux of the issue, but I don’t see how it’ll stand because maybe Apple is paying me to make apps that make their platform popular.

And the distinction is even weirder for hardware - this is like Tesla allowing you to only carry passengers that also own Teslas or pay Musk a fee.

If a store is a enforced monopoly, then it seems like there’s a moral and ethical requirement for it to operate at cost / not for profit. If the government required you to file all your taxes on a portal with a fee, for example, this fee would have to be not for profit to be ethical and moral.

I don’t think Apple is stuck on these grounds, because Spotify and Netflix are on the App Store and don’t pay 30%. They need to formalise the rules under which these apps exist, and let others freely exist under those rules as well.

This isn't that complicated. Apple is free to operate a closed system, just like the video game consoles.

I don't understand how the comparison to government makes any sense. This is a private business and you want to sell on their marketplace. You agreed to their terms in order to do so. If those terms suck you can avoid the platform altogether, as many people do.

When you reach essential product status, this is no longer similar to video game console.

This is more like, back when Ma Bell made you pay rent to use a handset and there was no way that you could own one.

If enough people/companies don’t like the situation we can change it. If there’s no law to make things happen the way we want, we’ll make one.

This is 100% correct

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