Facebook trying to position itself as friendlier to small businesses than Apple | Hacker News Reader

Facebook trying to position itself as friendlier to small businesses than Apple

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72 pointsrurp56 comments

Wonder if an ulterior motive is to hit back at Apple fo Apple increasingly limiting the ability of Facebook and other ad companies to track iOS users.

I'd rephrase it slightly – it's a battle for who owns the concept of "identity", and Apple is about to destroy the Facebook Connect button on mobile (which is where most consumers are trending too).

I fight that thing, tooth and nail

> Apple is about to destroy the Facebook Connect button on mobile

Can you elaborate on what or how Apple is doing this? First time I'm hearing about this.

Maybe they are referring to the ‘Sign with Apple’ mandatory feature.

"Apps that use a third-party or social login service (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login) to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option."

But even if Apple were forced to allow alternative app stores and payment methods, the methods it uses to prevent tracking are built into the OS. So wouldn't they continue to work?

I thought the same thing. The new OS betas for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all have very strong non-tracking functionality.

This should hit Facebook's, Google's, and more companies' bottom lines.

I don't think it will. The only way advertisers stop spending on Facebook or Google is if something bigger and better comes along that'll provide a better return. Unfortunately only another platform will stop the money flowing in to this advertising duopoly. The only thing I think it might do is change the distribution of ad dollars between FB and Google.

Facebook thinks it will, and issued a warning about their future revenue as a result.

I don't think it is retributive. It could merely be that Facebook didn't think the risk was worth it while they were still easily monetizing Apple device users. Now that the main source of revenue is diminishing, Facebook has less to lose.

Facebook just had to warn that their future earnings would be impacted by iOS, so they definitely has motive.

Facebook's Oculus Store takes a 30% cut just like Apple, not just of initial sales but also in app purchases including presumably services like this, and one of their big goals is to be even more pervasive than smartphones in general purpose computing, through AR glasses. They also hold a bigger monopoly share of the VR market than Apple does of phones and have a monopoly in a secondary unrelated market (social networks) and major market shares in messaging services (monopoly share in some regions).

On the other hand you can play VR games from outside the Oculus Store on Oculus hardware, and I would guess the majority of VR games are actually bought on Steam, so there is clearly a choice for both consumers and developers.

Not for the standalone headsets

I don't know if there exist any other commercial store for Quest/Go than the Oculus Store, but for experimentations/betas, SideQuest is an example of how to play things that don't come from the store (https://sidequestvr.com/).

Sidequest currently requires a developer account which requires signing an NDA with Oculus/Facebook. It is basically sliding through the cracks at their mercy until they expand things (which they have announced but haven't fully detailed; they did say sideloaded apps will still go through a store approval censorship process, and I'm not sure about monetary cut).

Can anyone find anything official on this? Is it actually a lawsuit? Or what does "Go After" mean?

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/paid-online-events/

> We asked Apple to reduce its 30% App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so we could absorb all costs for businesses struggling during COVID-19. Unfortunately, they dismissed both our requests and SMBs will only be paid 70% of their hard-earned revenue. While Facebook is waiving fees for paid online events we will make other fees clear in the product.

Has anyone used Facebook pay for anything? I haven't ran into any instance of it. My main question is... can you buy a Facebook card with a balance on it and use that to pay? That would be enough to make me consider using Facebook to pay for things. I'm not giving them my debit / credit cards though.

How would you add a balance on facebook without a card?

I guess they are called Gamecards. I guess some people forget but Facebook has had games for ages. They sell cards to pay for in-game stuff.

Back to my initial point / question: I was asking if you could use those to fund your Facebook account to buy stuff through Facebook, sort of how you can do with Amazon gift cards. What I'm getting at is basically: another avenue to pay for things without (oh this is funny) exposing your personal finances to yet another website.

I bet that huge corporations will get their discount in the end, but all smaller players not locking users even further.

Facebook wants Apple to help them muscle their way into the lucrative online event planning market. Shocking. Even as they plan to use their monopoly to trash existing run by actual smaller services like EventBright...

Apparently all the billionaires are out looking for handouts.

If I would make the law, I would start with the operating system.

Why is there no market for operating systems that run on iPhones? Because Apple actively prevents it.

There are only downsides of this. Imagine paper could only be written on with pens from the same manufacturer. Imagine Microsoft would have actively prevented installing browsers other then Internet Explorer on Windows.

It might be a good idea to make active anticompetitive measures on hardware illegal.

If I would make the law, yeah, I would start with the operating system.

There would be no downside of this. Users who want the pure Apple experience would use iOS which is installed by default. And users who want a different OS would install that.

Would the PlayStation hardware that Sony spends millions on to design and build now must be able to support Xbox’s OS? There’s a lot wrong with such a proposal, much of it being way too onerous on the hardware developers and simply impractical for all the implications associated with requiring hardware be opened.

> Would the PlayStation hardware that Sony spends millions on to design

What? It's off-the-shelf PC parts designed by AMD! This made sense when the consoles were custom chips, but no longer.

FB and other companies are trying to get their slice of the 30% fee that Apple has enjoyed in the last few years.

> which Facebook suggests hurts small businesses struggling to get by during the pandemic.

I'm sure that's why.

Here's hoping Apple kicks FB off their app store. People are very loyal to their pricey Apple devices, and Facebook is well past cool these days.

I predict FB comes crawling back with their tail between their legs.

Here's hoping that Facebook pulls Instagram, too.

Now THAT would hurt, but I feel like it would lead to a similar lawsuit to the Epic Games Vs. Apple.

> hoping Apple kicks FB off their app store

If they start by kicking what you don't like, then next time they'll kick what you use every day, and nobody will be able to prevent it, because it already became norm.

Freedom (including market freedom) is much more important than personal preferences.

I find myself hoping that large tech behemoths will "go after" each other and tear each other apart, leaving smoking ruin.

Instead, they're fighting over who gets how much of the money. Of course.

in this case FB is fighting for the consumer to get all the money, which is a fight worth having regardless of what the cynic might say

> Hosts will be able to collect the full ticket price from Facebook users who attend their online events via the web or Android. Facebook says it is using its own payment system on Android and letting developers keep all the money.

Agreed!

I'll give 3 months before Facebook starts charging individuals, or starts tracking them.

well that's because FB in is the "growth stage" for its payment platform. Its common for tech companies to provide a service at a discount or free to get traction.

No doubt FB would be taking a large cut if it becomes the cash cow that the app store is.

If it does become the cash cow, is 30% the norm? Or would it settle on something closer to 10% or 5%

It should come down to the credit card/PayPal range I think. So probably 2-3% as at economies of scale these are huge amounts.

There are technologies like UPI of India which have a 0% charge but I don't understand who pays for maintaining the common infra and how do UPI apps like Whatsapp Payments/Google Pay earn money.

depends if it has platform lock-in.

They just launched the instagram shop a couple months ago. I could see that taking a 30% cut: https://business.instagram.com/blog/introducing-shops-on-ins...

It's still better for FB to take a cut than for both FB and Apple to take cuts.

> in this case FB is fighting for the consumer to get all the money, which is a fight worth having regardless of what the cynic might say

Sure, but that's not quite their goal. No doubt that the "Paid Online Events" feature will be exposing people to ads and generating revenue for FB.

While FB is claiming to be doing this for "small businesses", what it really wants is to get people to use their product. If people offering events had to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, they wouldn't bother using Facebook's event product. Instead, they would use a competing product that takes only a minor cut and no ads, even if it doesn't offer a mobile pay experience.

What FB is trying to do here isn't to help small business, it's to get ahead of the small companies that currently compete with their upcoming events platform by strongarming Apple into eliminating those small companies' edge. All while putting on a pro-small-business facade.

Have you read the article? FB is not taking any cut from these events and giving it all over to event organizers.

I did. I'm not sure how that affects what I said. They are still fighting over who gets how much of the money.

it's an odd way to frame Apple asking for a slice of a pie that's 100% consumers, I think that's where the disconnect is

Are they willing to write than on a contract for perpetuity? Is it not dereliction of duty they have to shareholders?

To keep in perspective how much money we're talking here, Oracle disclosed during the 2017 lawsuit with Google that Android had generated 31 billion in revenue (22 billion profit) since its inception in 2007. Google asked the court to place that disclosure under seal [0],

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-google-lawsuit/ora...

How does Google attribute a profit to Android specifically? Play Store cut? or do vendors have to pay for Google Apps which I doubt would be the case.

> or do vendors have to pay for Google Apps which I doubt would be the case.

They do: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/19/17999366/google-eu-andro...

Huh, that's surprising. $40 seems like a good price for getting the core Google Apps but then if I take the APK and install it on my non Google Play Android phone is it considered piracy?

> if I take the APK and install it on my non Google Play Android phone is it considered piracy?

Indeed. And meanwhile, the same apps are completely free on iOS.

I think that's what this will achieve to some extent. With big companies like Spotify, Epic turning the screw on say Apple. There will be regulation at least in EU on either allowing payment options, alternative install avenues etc.

My dream scenario would be if like the Microsoft ruling in EU, both iOS/Android have to give user an option to choose the core apps like browser, music player etc. This helps companies like Firefox survive which they are struggling to do right now.

Apple already provides a completely free portal for monetization - the safari browser. If Facebook is really hell bent on giving the owners all the royalties then redirect them to the webapp. Apple makes the fastest mobile browser to date. It won't be a bad experience.

There won't be notifications, there will be PWA limitations, there won't be background activity, you'll need to keep a tab open for it, but it won't be a bad experience.

How desperate are we to make sure one of the world's richest company continues to take an extortionate cut for the "privilege" of being on its platform? To be clear, yes, the app store adds value, exposure, payments, bandwidth. But not thirty per cent worth. Why not? For one, the MAS cut is only three per cent, ten times less.

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