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I’m using Paddle for my MacOS app, Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) and in my opinion they are serious enough about privacy.

For example when you buy a license you are by default opted-out of marketing or update emails [0]

And the upsell feature isn’t functional by default for everyone, you need to contact them to discuss a “moving upmarket” strategy. [1]

[0] https://cln.sh/llVLV2

[1] https://cln.sh/6lqYc1

I used Paddle once, many years ago, with a unique "+" address, and still get spam to that address to this day. These days I don't buy software if Paddle is the only option. I always thought the name Paddle was something to do with the flood of spam you can expect.

I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through.

Until now, I’ve used Stripe, Paypal, Paddle and some local Romanian company and all of them provided me the email of the customer where it was available.

It’s up to the seller to abide by the rules, the platform isn’t at fault here.

The payment processor could have insulated your data. But with paddle it sounds like sharing your data with the vendor is one of their selling points

Unrelated spam from thousands of "companies".

> I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through.

Except, of course, it has NEVER happened with the thousands of apps I've bought through Apple's official stores. Not once.

Yes, you won’t see that happening when buying on Apple app store because they don’t share your email.

I was mostly talking about avoiding Paddle as a payment processor, the app store isn’t a payment processor so we can’t really compare them.

I’d still say the spam came from a seller sharing your address, or leaking it by mistake, not from how Paddle works.

If your issue would be Paddle related and recurrent, I don’t think they would still be in the business as trust is very important when handling money and customer data and soon no one would choose them anymore.

The fundamental issue here is that developers, at scale, cannot be trusted. You can trust specific ones to do the right thing but you can’t trust them all. Apple sees themselves as responsible for protecting all of their customers from this reality. Others call them “gatekeepers”. The example here is sharing an email address with developers. There are other examples like “no background processes”. Developers hate this becuase they see _themselves_ as trustworthy but the reality still stands: developers at scale cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

Now let me add my opinion on this: Should we have a platform that allows consumers to make a single choice ie) choose Apple, and by proxy never needs to trust developers at scale? Absolutely. Many people, especially developers, would rather trade some developer flexibility (multiple payment processors) and push some responsibility onto Apple’s users to continue making an opt-in choice for Apple. I choose them for my phone. I just them again for in-app purchases. Continue making choices in support of Apple for each layer of the system. I am not really sure what this buys the consumer. What is Apple blocking from you by forcing you to make that choice once, and then being forced to “never trust developers at scale” for the remainder of being an iPhone customer. Is it blocking “innovation”? Some people think that. I don’t see it. I see a company that pushes the hardware envelope with sensors, battery, operating system, etc, and works hard to give developers access to THOSE things. Maybe not a users email address, but is that really innovation anyway? I looked at this Paddle payment processor and they have some things like “pause subscription”. Is pause really an innovation that is being blocked by only using Apple’s system? Google has supported pause for a long time. Users want it, but to developers really want users pausing their subs? probably not.

> Should we have a platform that allows consumers to make a single choice ie) choose Apple, and by proxy never needs to trust developers at scale? Absolutely.

I view any attempt at using regulation to prevent or block or eliminate this valid choice as the actually anti-competitive play.

110%. Glad to see someone out there also finds this super ironic

That’s the thing though, I use apple IAP in my app and I don’t have any clue what the user’s email is. They keep it secret. It’s to the point where I actually advertise that as a benefit of my app, and people mention it in reviews as a reason they chose my app over others. People are tired of their information being sold up the river.

As a user I would say the platform is at fault, because the seller shouldn't be trusted with the information.

>I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through

Except for Apple who would not have shared my address. Bad sellers on the platform is the platforms problem.

> Except for Apple who would not have shared my address.

Can you prove this?

>Can you prove this?

If you implement IAP with Apple's billing system, Apple doesn't share your credentials with the seller. There's nothing to prove, you can implement it yourself if you like.

How does that prove that they aren't retaining or sharing that info with others?

Except the platform can help enforce the rules, as Apple does.

And the platform can help the customer gain additional privacy from the seller, by offering them “burner” style e-mail addresses for their purchase.

I would submit that any platform which doesn’t do these things is “at fault”, at least from the customer point of view.

Precisely. I saw that and was instantly glad Apple is a middleman for that particular point. For all their criticisms, they seem to be one of the companies that gets that.

If it's a service I use enough to possibly consider an upsell opportunity, I'll be aware of that opportunity through organically discovering it during my use of the service or through broader community discussion regarding the service. In all other cases, I don't want unsolicited contact.

> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam.

I thought the same initially - but come on, this is the situation when you buy anything from anywhere else except the AppStore and we all get on with it just fine. You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.

Saying that - I just received an email from Apple reminding me that two of my subscriptions are coming up in a month and letting me know i could cancel them before that - so there are big benefits to having someone in your corner, in the middle.

I want sellers to be able to reach me when I buy from them. If something goes wrong, or something happens, it is absolutely essential that they are able to contact me.

That’s why Apple’s proxy system is a good solution. Sellers can get in contact with you, but don’t have your real email address.

No, that lets the sellers contact apple who may or may not choose to forward the message to me. I want the sellers to contact me, since I'm doing business with them. What happens when apples proxy server goes down, or they start charging money for it? Very problematic for everyone involved if apple can keep the contact information of your customers hostage.

It’s very problematic for businesses 365 days a year, yes — but for your customers, it’s problematic no more than 1 day a year at most. And that is a huge win for us customers.

Having had an app in the top #10 for a year or so, I can say this is very important, and very difficult with the current model.

Them contacting you isn't the issue though, you can put that in the app - but if you want to contact them because you messed something up, much harder.

Another annoyance is refunds. Sometimes you just want to refund someone. Maybe because you messed up somehow, or just to be nice. All you can do is send them to beg apple for one which makes for crap customer service.

>, this is the situation when you buy anything from anywhere else except the AppStore and we all get on with it just fine.

No it isn't in my case because I don't use my Apple email anywhere else but Apple. It stays clean with zero spam in the inbox. Many services hide email addresses from sellers including ebay, Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, etc.

The key is that the granularity and quantity of managing email spam is reduced when all those intermediary platforms shield customer email addresses. I do have my own email domain and I can create throwaway email addresses which I use with many other websites but that's irrelevant if Apple decided to share my email with App Store developers.

>You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.

Why would I want the additional "mental tax" and decision tree of trust/distrust potential seller and then do extra digital housekeeping of blocking future spam? I'm still not paying any less (the court ruling said Apple is still entitled to 30% even with non-Apple payments) -- so what exactly do I gain? It looks like Paddle offers more benefits the seller but no compelling advantages to the buyer.

Paddle is not two way marketplace like ebay. It's a payment gateway focused on digital products. It's like Stripe and it's even harder to get in to use paddle because there are human checks where you have to prove what you are selling is allowed.

What companies do with the emails is... up to them. But that goes for any payment processor.

>Paddle is not two way marketplace like ebay.

Yes I know that but that's not relevant to my point. My point is to emphasize the "hide the email" advantages.

I should have wrote my sentence like this:

- Many services (including many non-payment processor gateways) hide email addresses from sellers including ebay, Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, etc.

>What companies do with the emails is... up to them. But that goes for any payment processor.

Not it does not for _any_ payment processor. E.g. Apple payment system does not reveal email addresses while PayPal does. Buyers then complain about followup spam because they paid via PayPal.

The assertion of "what companies do with the emails is up to them" is true and yet it is missing the crucial point of the conversation. The distinction is a layer above that: systems that don't give the companies email addresses at all.

The later text revision by Paddle that "sharing email is opt-in" is still suboptimal for consumers because that's just one more tedious item to doublecheck. I.e. is there a UI dark pattern that was silently switch from off to on. Apple payment eliminates that mental tax.

There's a world where I imagine apple tries to compete here, and says "yes, you pay a bit more through apple, but we don't give away your email address" etc, etc. Consumers could vote with their wallet what they care about.

In practice, my bet is that Apple uses their opaque app approval process and ability to change the rules at any time to make it arbitrarily hard for apps that use paddle to stay in the app store.

I don't know if I'd characterize a price that's 10-25% more expensive than the alternative as just "a bit more."

Right, I mean you know Apple could make the case to consumers that the premium is worth it, or maybe drop the price a bit. You know, normal competition things.

I guess my point is that I doubt they'll do anything of the sort.

> Access to customer data See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for upsells, offers and product news.

It looks like they've updated the text since this comment. That bullet point now says:

> Access to customer email for support

> See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for billing support.

Harvesting emails from purchases for pure marketing is GDPR-dubious at best, and Paddle's main market is the EU (because it handles EU VAT in a way that Stripe cannot), so I suspect they're backing away from any implication that you could ever actually send marketing to IAP customers legally.

The subscription section also seems wrong. Apple has subscription support. I can start and end my subscriptions at any time.

Additionally, Paddle is completely ignoring that Apple's 30% doesn't only include payments. It includes everything required to make those in-app purchases function - hosting, downloads, updates, management, reviews, localization, etc. All this would mean is that Apple will get to collect that money from 2 sources instead of one which complicates the situation for both developers and for customers.

Until a judge rules that Apple doesn't have control over its own App Store (which the Epic ruling explicitly reaffirmed that it does), this is only going to get silly and bloated.

The hosting, downloads, updates, reviews are all covered already by the $99/yr developer fee, because this is what is charged for that to free apps without IAPs.

Apple is just using their anticompetitive stance to charge 10x more than the standard industry rate for payment card processing.

No it's not... In-app purchases also require hosting, download, and update services. The apps themselves do but the purchases do also. The $99/yr only covers the license to develop an app.

> …deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy…

Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? As a consumer, I sure hope apple forces some kind of privacy standards compliance.

> Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs?

I read through the decision when it first came down, and while Apple was blocked from restricting third-party payment systems, there was no language preventing Apple from mandating their own payment system alongside third-party options.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple dropped their 30% cut for their own system, but kept a 30% commission for third-party systems.

How would Apple know the volume charged via 3rd party systems?

Spam? Who cares outlook will learn to ditch that in a few weeks.

Apple is just another parasite middle man and the defenders are sounding like brainwashed fan boys.

After I supported an Indiegogo/Kickstarter campaign somehow my email has been sold on to other campaigns. I now get hundreds of emails a year promoting other campaigns. None of which Outlook can block since it’s from unique companies and all of which I have to manually unsubscribe from.

That kind of spam is insidious and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what companies do with your data.

That is already illegal. Report the companies. Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this.

You can engage in transactions using their proxy service so the company the company doesn’t get your real email address. “Report the companies” to who? Where? I’d rather not be in that situation in the first place, it’s a huge waste of my time.

So you'd really rather hide behind Apple's goodwill instead of simply having the government regulate things, as they're already doing? Simply contact the relevant watchdog in your country.

Why would I let someone continuously dump garbage into my life while I wait for a government regulator to respond to my complaint? I would rather not have the problem in the first place.

I'm also not comfortable about the sharing of my email AND other data. I like using REvolut/Apple pay for this very reasons.

Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ?

Seems they've just branded off the back of the Epic // Apple ruling ?

> Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ?

Paddle is an established company, they've just added a new mobile checkout feature.

Okay fair enough, so it still doesn't seem that newsworthy imo as they will all be doing the same if not already

> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam

You make it seems like, this is an issue. But every service that you use today has your email, Amazon, your ISP, Apple, .. everyone.

If you don't want to receive email, use a secondary email to subscribe to services and you will not be annoyed with unsolicited emails

Yeah, or we could just keep things exactly the way they are and not fuck with it because it's actually better for me as a consumer.

Paying 30 percent extra is not unilaterally better for the consumer.

It is if I get all the benefits of paying what that 30% covers.

Nope, to take a current exemple which many people loathe for one reason or another, even EPIC Games Store does not transfer your email to the seller by default, and the checkbox do to do so in checkout is left unchecked by default.

Paddle et al. can implement an email forwarder so the emails go to user3492@proxy.paddle.com if privacy is truly a concern. Plus paddle has arguably much less info on yourself to be worried. I don't think the situation with record labels is even remotely comparable -- apple & google do very little to help devs.