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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

> Purchases possible without Apple?

> $99/year email service, of which Apple is rent-seeking $30

I'm wholly on Hey's side here, but I think this is a misleading way of putting it. Apple only wants 30% of in-app purchases, not purchases made outside of the app. The contention is that Hey thinks they shouldn't be required to accept in-app purchases, which given that either Hey or the user pays Apple an expensive tax on those purchases, makes sense to me.

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And Apple rejected the app because you can't buy that $99 service via IAP, meaning they have no ability to get their 30%.

Tie it to an API and break the API later?

Yeah, I imagine that's going to go down real well with Cupertino.

"We are having some problems with our servers today. We had to hire a cheap SRE."

Well, there __is__ In-App Purchase support, but it only works if your IP is in the 17.0.0.0/8 block. We put it in because we knew it was very important to Apple ;)

Ah yes, Volkswagen engineering.

That is exactly what it means. If it costs $100, Apple is taking a $30 cut.

If the purchase is made in the app, yes. The wording on the site makes it sound like Apple wants a cut of purchases made outside of the app.

well they kinda do, they're saying that they can't do the purchase outside the app and must do it instead in the app, and give them 30%

No, they allow you to have out-of-app sign ups as long as you also have in-app sign-ups, and you can't reference the out-of-app signups (e.g. link to them) from within the app.

My first thought was that it has been rejected because it's invite-only and there's no way to use the app unless you are on a special list.

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