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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

Under Apple's clarified guidelines, if a University put out a remote learning app to help students deal with the pandemic better than a browser solution, Apple would be entitled to 30% of each user's tuition.

Once they have a few slow quarters and pull the lever on taking a cut of app mediated real-world services, we may see 10-30% of each Taxi ride going to Apple.

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> Under Apple's clarified guidelines, if a University put out a remote learning app to help students deal with the pandemic better than a browser solution, Apple would be entitled to 30% of each user's tuition.

I think they have mechanisms for distributing apps within an organization.

That's within an organisation though via enterprise distribution, or managed devices

University students normally bring their own devices so don't fit into that model

Employee only:

https://developer.apple.com/business/custom-apps/

Would you care to clarify?

Do you mean that universities can distribute iOS apps to iOS devices without using the App Store?

Yeah that’s how companies like grocery stores that use iOS based devices for inventory management load their apps.

There is the Apple Developer Enterprise Program[0] but it suggests it's only for employees.

>Use the program only to create proprietary, in-house apps for internal use, and to distribute these apps privately and securely to employees within the organization.

Not sure if there is another programme that would work for universities

[0]https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/

Apple only extracts that revenue from apps if you want to directly take payment through the app. Both Netflix and Spotify work on iOS. They just are not collecting payments or doing new signups there. So in your analogy the student is presumably registered already with the school and Apple doesn’t take a cut at all, even today.

> Apple only extracts that revenue from apps if you want to directly take payment through the app.

Even if you take payment through your app that you built with your own payment processor.

Why is Apple standing between me and my school again? They made a profit off of the hardware that I purchased from them and now they’re just standing there stopping me from paying for what I want on the device that I bought.

That specific carve out is limited to consume-only media apps and wouldn't apply to an interactive remote learning app with more than just a library of prerecorded lectures.

HEY acquired customers outside of the app but still wasn't allowed.

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