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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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

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?

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