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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

"I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame... The average consumer is extremely ill-informed."

This is very unfair - the average cobsumer is purposefully mislead on a daily basis, for example applle forbids apps from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken.

With industrial goods, there is a whole department who's job is proqurement and to know what they are buying. And lets not pretent no funny business ever happens there either.

But lastly, some consumer good are better - DSLR's beat any industrial cameras, and commercial dishwashers are a toally different beast, unsuitable and dangerous to a naive user.

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I was surprised that the App Store would take a cut of charity donations, so I looked it up and pretty much every forum post I found says that you’re actually forbidden from collecting donations using in app purchases, and have to do so through out of band methods to get through App Review? [1]

Kind of difficult to take a cut of payments you explicitly don’t allow on your platform, isn’t it?

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/136983/would-apple...

https://socialimpact.facebook.com/charitable-giving/live-don...

I don't use Facebook so I don't know if that page is misleading, but it certainly looks like you can donate money (in the legal meaning!) through Facebook's iOS app.

I think most of the recent takes were about Twitter's tip jar that would potentially let you send money to nonprofits. But, Twitter so far has avoided using the word "donate" and its legal implications.

Yeah, that's Apple's excuse as it is very difficult to set up out-of-band payment methods on an Apple system.

It's extremely easy. The controversy is about not being able to mention it in your app.

Exactly, that's part of what I mean by "set up".

Stripe would like to sell you a solution: https://stripe.com/docs/terminal/sdk/ios

The same applies to Google Play. Can't take donations without giving Google a cut.

> from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken

For me the biggest concern is that people want this to happen and even would go as far as say that people get a perverse sense of satisfaction from Apple's unfair behavior. Because it validates the widespread pessimism and 'everything is broken' mentality that is normalized nowadays

I agree consumers are misled but Apple is a poor example here. I know the App Store fee is a popular topic right now but they are one of the few companies making a consumer product that is bounds ahead of military or industrial versions.

They are a perfect example of a company that purposefully misleads, and forces other companies they work with to mislead, for example on the subject of repairs - to be authorised repair shop for apple, you have to lie to a customer that recovering their data is impossible, and is my view that shoupd be illegal.

They products might be good, but their methods are ruthless - they are wanna-be like mexican cartels.

Does the us army or ISS use apple products?

Last I checked, NASA issues Blackberries and iPhones: https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY14/IG-14-015.pdf

On the laptop side, they're using ThinkPads.

Watching the SpaceX Crew Dragon launch, I've seen iPads on board both Dragon and ISS. They're used for checklists at least.

According to Sam.gov they do.

NASA does

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