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Comment by mindwok | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these marketplaces could maybe justify 30% on the purchase of an app up front, where there are clear benefits to the exposure and platform offered by them. But ongoing revenue is really attributable to the app itself and feels to me much harder to justify.

At this point I’d be happy if Apple just let me install apps outside their ecosystem, then they could at least defend themselves by saying if the developers aren’t happy with the terms of the App Store they can offer alternative methods.

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It's more than that: it's the fact that all of the payment info is there. Every step, field entry, hurdle you put infront of a consumer is usually associated a significant increase in "cart abandonment". By apple allowing you to just apple pay straight in and avoid CC, and billing address etc, they are decreasing the hurdles and increasing the conversion.

Is it worth 30%? In 2013? Maybe In 2021? Definitely not. It should be closer to 5%.

That being said I do like using Apple subscriptions because they make it REALLY easy to cancel them, all in one place, something that can't be said for a lot of other services.

Apple Pay isn't the only payment processor that's convenient like this. But of course, Apple has created a market where their processor is the only one allowed.

I mean I pay for shit on my iPhone with PayPal, "Shop Pay", "Amazon Pay", or direct CC entry -- not digital goods obviously but still it's a frame of reference. None are half as good as Apple Pay's "hit button, double click, FaceID, done" flow. Like I will actually switch to using my phone to make purchases because I don't want to enter my CC info on some random site.

If Apple wasn’t user-hostile this would all be an API that any payment provider could use.

Your experience with other payment processors on an iPhone are indeed not as good simply because they aren't allowed to be as good. Every single one of your experiences with these alternative payment processors was forced through a Safari browser.

Nothing is stopping the 'Shop' app or Amazon app from being used for any and all third-party (or fourth party, in this case) payments, as long as they're not selling purely digital goods.

I still prefer "hit button, tap TouchID, done".

I also wish Apple would make it easier to switch to a different credit card for a one-off purchase. And stop forcing everyone in a Family Sharing group to use the same credit card for all purchases

Argh, every day I consider going back to my iPhone 8 Plus purely because FaceID is so terrible. The point about switching cards easily is also absolutely right, plenty of places don’t accept American Express which is my default card.

If it's anything like Google Subscriptions, there's the danger of disputing charges leading to your Apple account being banned, so it's probably in the users' interests to avoid it.

But of course, when you've just come off of a plane at 2 AM and want to get a ride to your hotel so you can get a few hours of sleep before checkout time, this is probably not something users will think about.

It's not like google subscriptions

Yeah, one MAJOR issue I have with the folks complaining about apple. Many of them have HORRIBLE cancellation policies.

I had to fight NY Times like crazy (it was sign up online, call to cancel kind of thing).

Match is also in the "alliance" fighting apple with Facebook. They also have scummy practices (either tracking you or again duping you).

The other thing I like with Apple, the trial periods are REALLY clear. When you sign up with comcast it's like $29/month (and then in tiny tiny print 10 pages later you find out that after 6 months it's $69/month or whatever).

So until these folks clean things up where they ALREADY have full control (on the web) I'm willing to cut apple a ton of slack.

Apple will remind you to cancel a subscription when you delete a related app. It reminds you if a subscription will renew and you can cancel then. I willing spend money through the app store I'd not spend ANYWHERE else. For folks willing to spend money but who don't want to f'ed around with constantly apple is the place to be. And it is super easy these days. Double tap or touch and done.

Do virtualized credit card numbers address this problem? I have a free browser extension from my credit card company that generates virtual account numbers and when I pay for a service I create a new number for it. If it’s difficult to cancel the service I just delete the number instead.

It doesn't. That's for fraud protection, not just-on-the-right-side-of-the-law subscription sketchiness.

Legally it doesn't, but for practical purposes most recurring subscriptions probably won't pursue you over a declined payment and will just suspend your account. I don't advocate this, but I've heard that it works.

This shouldn't be on-the-right-side-of-the-law. You should be able to have your credit card send a "cancel" signal and that should be it. Further charges are theft.

In part.

Apple allows you to block the company from doing tracking of you and connecting that to other info. These things are hard to block technically sometimes.

I had a company threaten collections action over an unpaid subscription because they continued to provide the service (that I didn't want) and I hadn't paid. It doesn't matter that I had an email saying please cancel. You have to dial XXX.

On the business side we are seeing more deals where you have to provide written notice 60 days BEFORE the end of the 5 year term but not more than 90 days (check your copier lease agreements). All these are essentially tricks to force renewals in my view (and are totally allowed).

Absolutely not. That's the equivalent of just ignoring an invoice.

It addresses the problem in the same way that shoplifting addresses the problem of not having enough money for what you want. Technically, you're in the wrong. You're failing to pay a bill you signed up to pay. And no one will go after you for $4 (unless they really want to lose money, I guess.) But if you try the same thing on tens of thousands of dollars of subscriptions (say, as a business you make a decision to do that) you'll probably get sued.

Even with virtual credit cards, companies can still charge you and anything unpaid can just go to collections.

I understand your view, but the hilarious (or sad?) thing here is we are applauding a multi-trillion dollar company for the most basic functionality. This is like saying “this restaurant sucks, but hey, I am glad that I got at least something to eat!”

The bar has been set so low, that allowing customers to cancel easily is worthy of praise! This is a shitty situation for ordinary people to be in.

Another thing to think about - if Apple were a bit more nicer to developers, they can have the developer loyalty for ever and ever. But they are so big and their competition is so bad that they don’t think developers have a choice. Short term profits is apparently more important than long term goodwill. Of course, they aren’t alone in this.

The saddest part is - after all their shenanigans, they are still better than other companies:(

The issue is the policy makers / department of justices entire focus seems to be on fighting so that companies can make more money and/or scam users by getting outside of app store polices.

Why this level of DOJ involvement against apple (with very little CONSUMER harm) when your grandma is LITERALLY getting scammed by fake tech support etc and they do jake crap over any of that.

Millions of consumers get screwed over, in big ways and small, day in and day out. Crickets.

Apple creates a small ecosystem that is completely optional for consumers to use that does a few things right (little tracking, fights all these companies on everything from tracking to trial periods to cancellations and more). And now that is a crime. The App store is the LEAST of my consumer protection worries.

Most of the "alliance" of folks fighting apple run scammy business. Loot boxes for kids (Epic/Fornighte type folks) / Zynga / Facebook data exploiters / Match.com fake profile type players / NY Times impossible to cancel people.

Yes, all the players you mentioned suck, and they suck more than Apple probably. But that doesn’t mean we should not call out Apple’s bad behavior.

Also - Apple has infinite resources. They can be nice to everyone if they want. They choose to be arrogant, just because they can.

None of the companies you listed have a cult following, Apple does. Nobody gives Facebook or Zynga a tenth of the respect they give Apple (I think it is justified, those companies suck real bad).

Is it unfair to expect Apple to behave better than others? In my opinion, no. Others might disagree.

Here's the thing though.

What (businesses) say is "sucky" behavior I like.

CVS blocked apple pay forever. So did Walmart. They said Apple sucks for wanting control (and providing privacy etc). They launched their competitor CurrentC I think which was of course totally hacked:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/29/retailer-backed-apple-pay-...

The reality is that a lot of these startups have almost NO controls over user data relative to inside actor threats. So I'd much rather sign up and have all my details / home address etc on apple's servers. Is this walmart alliance designed with privacy in mind or to exploit my data? I'm serious?

Ny Times is a good example. My subscription let me use their app, but I couldn't cancel it inside the app. Instead its the phone call BS (maybe they've stopped that).

So as a user, I actually kind of want apple to have a ton of market power, because the folks like DOJ / SEC etc are toothless in these areas. The only thing these agencies seem good at is stupid cookie banners (which are pointless).

Apple pay is great!

Apple pay has a tiny fee.

Maybe they should let apps use Apple pay?

Apple doesn't have infinite resources.

> Is it unfair to expect Apple to behave better than others? In my opinion, no. Others might disagree.

Culturally, expect what every you want to expect. But legally, they should all have the same requirements.

The Apple ecosystem isn't "optional for consumers to use"; if you want iOS then you absolutely have to participate in the ecosystem. Same reason why the "buy an Android if you want to sideload" argument doesn't work for me: the platforms aren't interchangeable.

A lot of what you're describing here are things that absolutely should be illegal, and a properly-funded government should be investigating and prosecuting. What Apple has done is turn iOS into their own sovereign territory, written their own laws, and levied their own taxes. In other words, they are a digital warlord. If we are going to ban loot boxes or data exploitation, we should be passing actual laws in actual Congresses and Parliaments to ban loot boxes or data exploitation.

Yes, the consumer harm might be minimal, but the consumer is not the end-all, be-all of the economy[0]. Apple bossing developers around creates compliance costs and higher barriers to entry for smaller businesses. This is inherent to monopolies of any kind, pro-consumer or otherwise. Yes, I can absolutely point to scams that Apple has judiciously removed from the App Store; but for every one of those I can also find stories where Apple just absolutely dicked around with a smaller developer and held up their app for no reason. In contrast, large companies like Zynga, Facebook, or Match Group have dedicated staff for making the Apple warlords happy, and know exactly what they can get away with. This isn't an open and vibrant marketplace; it's a group of warlords negotiating who owns what.

[0] More generally, the "consumer welfare" standard that modern antitrust enforcement has adopted is effectively a tacit agreement to not prosecute antitrust violations.

+1 re: “”What Apple has done is turn iOS into their own sovereign territory, written their own laws, and levied their own taxes.””: a few of my friends think I am off the rails on this one, but I think a plausible future is similar to the cyber punk world of William Gibson novels that describe a future maintained and ruled by corporate interests that provide corporate enclaves for people to work and live - sort of replacing countries.

> What Apple has done is turn iOS into their own sovereign territory, written their own laws, and levied their own taxes.

Ah. You mean they did exactly what is expected of a business? And exactly what all businesses have been doing since the dawn of time?

DoJ goes after smaller fish too, but you don't hear much about that.

> I understand your view, but the hilarious (or sad?) thing here is we are applauding a multi-trillion dollar company for the most basic functionality. This is like saying “this restaurant sucks, but hey, I am glad that I got at least something to eat!”

It's not so much as applauding Apple for providing basic features to their users, but as saying that unlike a lot of other companies, they do provide those features. If things were _okay_ elsewhere, we wouldn't need Apple's ecosystem and they couldn't make billions with it.

Yes, they take as much advantage as possible of their position, but if they're where they are, its partly because nobody is providing what they do.

Don't get me wrong, I hate all that, but it's not worth a 30% tax on every recurring purchase to me. As Apple admits in the linked emails, this is a cost passed on to the customers.

The idea that these companies can't make 30% more per user on the app store is what is insane to me. On the app store customers have trust. My app store spend is many multiples of what I would spend otherwise.

For most business if you said, hey, I'll take 30% for marketing but get you 100% more revenue they would do that right away. Are Apple app store customers really that cheap relative to android? Androids marketshare is FAR FAR bigger, but apple has just sorted out the give us money safely story.

My own glance is that iOS users spend easily 4x as much as google play users AND are much less likely to steal apps. If that's not worth it to devs apple should be able to unlock and really give users freedom (including to download from anywhere online and install). I wonder if android has a bigger app piracy problem then iOS (which devs apparently don't care about).

> Androids marketshare is FAR FAR bigger

Not in the US. Apple has 60% of the mobile market compared to Google's 40%[1], and Apple's App Store is responsible for 100% more revenue than the Play Store.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

> I had to fight NY Times like crazy (it was sign up online, call to cancel kind of thing).

This is same with The Times. I would not expect such scammy practice from these companies.

I used to pay 7.50 then 8 bucks for the Times. But each year I had to call and threaten to cancel. One year they charged me 15-16 and I was pissed off and their phone guy not very helpful so instead of the retention route I just told him cancel no deal. Nothing.

Next day or week after expiry they offered me 4 bucks. I was happily paying 8 but they made me figure 4 was possible so now that's my bar.

You're missing the period of time. Per month?

> So until these folks clean things up where they ALREADY have full control (on the web) I'm willing to cut apple a ton of slack.

I spent years working at a place where apple wouldn't allow us to even link to a website to manage your account if the signup wasn't sourced by apple, so I feel like any marketing they have around being customer focused is really just window dressing.

This is a "class gets punished because of a few bad students" kinda thing. Without this rule everyone would and did just play the game of using their iOS app to drive people to their website to sign up to avoid paying Apple.

Apple, who charges for exposure and access to their users, I think is reasonably annoyed that people are trying to get that for free.

So let the apps opt out of "exposure", which tends to be very minimal. And "access" doesn't belong to them, they owe their users access to apps.

You can opt-out though. Just don't sell digital goods on your app and don't use your app as a funnel to direct people to your website where you sell them. Audible takes this approach and it seems to work fine enough for them. Boom! Apple will take 0% of your revenue.

That's a useful workaround when Apple allows it, which they haven't done consistently.

But that's not at all what I meant by opting out. I meant "If this is the price for 'exposure', just stop giving me 'exposure' and let me sell digital goods in my app."

Also it's not just 'digital goods', it applies to services too. You can currently manage a netflix subscription in the app, I think, but it's been unavailable a lot and netflix seems to have a special exception that doesn't apply to video services in general.

Audible and Netflix have exceptions given they are “reader” apps. For something like Roblox, they must have in app payments if they accept payment via the web, so the publisher would have to opt out of the platform completely to avoid the 30% surcharge for one of these types of apps.

No one is trying to get it for free. They are trying to get it for [significantly] less than 30%.

If it's so great to use Apple Pay (one click, easy to revoke payment -- sounds great!), why would a customer not use it over browsing to a random page, entering CC details, and worrying if it will be hard to cancel?

I'd guess the convenience is not worth 10%, much less 30%, to most users.

> No one is trying to get it for free. They are trying to get it for [significantly] less than 30%.

And Apple charges 30% for sales of digital goods on their platform. You're trying to get what Apple is selling without paying for it. Don't sell on their platform them -- do what Amazon does with Audible or what Netflix does.

> If it's so great to use Apple Pay (one click, easy to revoke payment -- sounds great!)

Because that isn't what Apple is charging for, users don't pay this fee -- publishers do. They're charging publishers for the privilege to sell to Apple customers. I'm sure users like the convenience, I do, but the fee isn't for me. You're absolutely right that it's not worth 30% to me. But it's absolutely worth 30% to you when the alternative is not being able to sell on iOS and Apple knows it.

It's nuts that in threads like this that people begrudgingly pay Apple's 30% fee while in the same breath saying that they're overcharging. Well clearly not since you're paying it. If they were actually overcharging then you wouldn't be complaining because you just wouldn't have an iOS app.

> Because that isn't what Apple is charging for, users don't pay this fee -- publishers do. They're charging publishers for the privilege to sell to Apple customers. I'm sure users like the convenience, I do, but the fee isn't for me.

Do you seriously believe you're not, in the end, paying that?

I find it hard to believe that you do. Seems far more likey you're gaslighting for your idol, as Apple fanbois so often do.

> They are trying to get it for [significantly] less than 30%.

So what is the right fee for access to iOS users, and in turn, paying for iOS development itself? This isn't just a transactional payment system, it's an end-to-end payment platform designed to take high-value customers and turn them into sales with minimal friction. iOS is that system, not just IAP.

No one who has an app on the App Store is getting free publicity. There's a $99 fee per year per developer. For that much money, if someone uses their app to drive people to their websites, so what? Don't you think it's hypocritical of Apple to use iTunes as a gateway to Apple Music and iCloud without paying Microsoft a cut?

It's one thing to say Apple has the right to do what it wants with its own platform, but it's another thing entirely to set up a straw man in order to justify those rights.

Exposure in this context means “the right to set up your stall in Apple’s market and sell to their customers.” It might have been more precise to say “reach” but at the end it’s semantics.

You not paying for “publicity” in a marketing sense you’re paying for high-value shelf space in a store that brings in a lot of customers — iOS devices.

If MS wants to charge publishers 30% for all sales done on Windows then power to them.

> I had to fight NY Times like crazy (it was sign up online, call to cancel kind of thing).

I had that issue several years ago with Sonic (the broadband provider).

However, if you're in California, it should be possible to cancel a subscription by the same means that one subscribed to the service in the first place. For example, if one signed up online for a newspaper, they should be able to cancel online as well. This has been in place since July of 2018 I believe.

New restrictions coming into effect in July 2022 require having a link or button to cancel a subscription as part of a customer's profile page, as well as notifying customers of an impending renewal for trials that have an extended free trial period.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for NYT to receive a big fine.

>So until these folks clean things up where they ALREADY have full control (on the web) I'm willing to cut apple a ton of slack.

Sorry, but its easy to say that if they're not grabbing 30% of sales from YOUR small business. If you think this fight is about Facebook or Match or NY, you're missing the whole point. Those big guys can take care of themselves just fine.

> its easy to say that if they're not grabbing 30% of sales from YOUR small business.

They're not grabbing 30% of the sales from ANY small business. They lowered their fees to 15% for the first million dollars (I think both per year and per app).

It's actually worse than that. The vast majority of IAP revenue comes from the bigger mobile game publishers.

Not only do Apple take 30% of this, they screwed over all those developers by removing their (ad platforms mostly) ability to track users, thus breaking the developers monetisation model.

I honestly find it hard to believe that they didn't realise that this was going to hit them hard with IAP revenue, but then I've always been surprised at the lack of joined up thinking in large companies.

Apple's motto is screwing over developers in the name of customer satisfaction and decency. Usually they're in the right, including in this situation.

Yeah, but this one actually hits their revenues. It's disguised for now because their ad platform is way up, but over the longer term this will absolutely crater their app store revenue.

Therefore, I suspect that this will be substantially weakened/rolled back over the next few years (this process has already started, btw).

There are plenty of small businesses that have $1 million in yearly revenue or more. A single restaurant can easily make that or more a year.

If you go with SBA definitions, they use a $1 million to about $40 million range for revenue, and a maximum of 100 to 1,500 employees depending on the industry[1].

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-sma...

I mean, I would imagine a single restaurant would have to make more revenue in a single year to no longer be a small business - their costs of goods are far higher.

Meanwhile, when someone says "small businesses" cannot afford something, and that small business is a 1,500 person software company with $40 million in revenue, I think more "that is no longer a small business" than "poor small business". And if it turns out I'm technically wrong about a legal definition of small business, that's not going to change how concerned I am about that 1,500 person company - it's going to make me specify my concern is around supersmall businesses or whatever. That is, me being wrong about terminology is primarily going to make me change the terms I use.

They did not do this out of generosity or good will to small businesses. They did this for the PR, knowing that they're still rolling in the cash like Scrooge McDuck from all the years they've been milking it, and will continue to milk it, whilst looking like they're giving a handout. And it honestly looked like it worked from the comments of people defending their stance.

> They did not do this out of generosity or good will to small businesses. They did this for the PR

I doubt they did it for generosity or for PR. I do think there was some amount of goodwill. I think it's Apple's way of ensuring that more apps get made. That is, they are "subsidizing(ish)" the creation of many small apps they make almost no money off of anyway in the hopes more small apps will be created which might contain a breakout success. If lowering the revenue on all small apps leads someone to try to make an app and fall into viral like Candy Crush, well Apple is probably going to make more on that one app than they "lost" on all the small apps they charged 15% on combined.

And yet subscription scams abound on the App Store. Apple makes it INSANELY easy to start subscribing to a $7.99 per week subscription that there is a load of scummy apps that try to trick you into starting one and people would be a lot more cautious if they had to manually enter their billing info.

I think there's a better middle ground somewhere.

Apple should be forced to allow other payment processors store a platform wide login like you can with a Google account. So none of the payments run through Apples infrastructure, but there is no extra friction over their provider.

Eventually they will be in every sizeable market outside the US starting with Korea. With all that 30% cut money leaving the domestic economy and multi trillion valuation, Apple has made itself too juicy a target

> It's more than that: it's the fact that all of the payment info is there.

Haven't Lyft and Uber already collected that payment information to charge per ride today? Is there even any friction savings here? What justifies the 30% cut when these companies seem to have done just fine not using the Apple Payment infrastructure?

> What justifies the 30% cut

Power.

Prices in capitalism don't reflect moral justifications, they reflect power.

> Every step, field entry, hurdle you put infront of a consumer is usually associated a significant increase in "cart abandonment".

Yeah, that's annoying, but for new vendors I just use Paypal.

Apple Pay is different from App Store fees. Apple Pay is a payment process where the store doesn’t get your credit card number. Apple Store fees are a matter of business agreements between software companies and Apple.

Using PayPal won’t help an app company escape its agreements with Apple.

Even with the 30% up front - if it is such a great deal, why don't they allow alternatives?

It's clear as day they know the minute they allowed alternatives, a giant fraction of the App Store would depart because they can get a better deal either elsewhere.

> It's clear as day they know the minute they allowed alternatives, a giant fraction of the App Store would depart because they can get a better deal either elsewhere.

As an user of an iPhone I don't want this. I bought an iPhone because I deal with enough technology in my day to day job and I want a phone that's straightforward to use and doesn't need any attention. So no I don't want to install three app stores on my iPhone and have to deal with 20 different payment providers.

In the end it's important to make the distinction between consumer interests and the interest of businesses that want to sell their product on the iOS platform. I get that this sucks for developers because iOS is from what I've heard much more profitable than Android. In my opinion consumers interests should be weighed higher here and Apple's policies for the App store are mostly pro consumer, at least compared with the situation on different platforms.

Consumers that want a more open platform can always choose Android or Linux phones.

It's a totally false dichotomy that you have to choose between consumer friendly and business friendly outcome. The idea those things are linked is a convenient fiction Apple has come up with to maintain its position of control.

Apple can put however many constraints it wants on external app stores. It can make them present a uniform interface for payment, delivery etc etc. Just like it puts those constraints already on the apps. Pretending it's powerless and all these terrible outcomes will ensue when it literally already controls every detail of every single app on the existing store is one of Apple's "big lies" (but one clearly a lot of people have fallen for).

> Apple can put however many constraints it wants on external app stores.

I doubt you mean that. All apps must be served from server farms in the Oort Cloud and be in Esperanto would be acceptable constraints?

But it's actually not a false dichotomy. Things I want are vendors who make iOS apps forced to use other parts of the Apple ecosystem. Forced to use Safari. Forced to offer Apple Single Sign On (if they use anyone's). Forced to offer Apple's payment methods. Those are the very things they are trying to get out of by having alternate app stores.

should apple be allowed to make a (what seems like substantial) profit off that lock-in? by comparison payment processors like stripe can offer as a baseline 2.9% and 30 cents. if you predict that the average uber is 10 dollars (which is probably low these days) that's 6% if you were able to process with stripe and they're still turning a profit.

If you want to make the argument that because of the substantial number of free apps that apple needs to subsidize the costs of review etc. then I'm 100% sure that these companies would rather pay for the underlying resources than get raked over by this pricing scheme.

You do understand that Uber can use Stripe (or whoever else) to process the rides? It's just the in-app premium monthly membership fee we're discussing?

Apple's payments are extremely pro-user friendly. Do I wish they charged less? Yes. But if it's open to competition no one will use Apple payments even if they are the cheapest, because they are tilted more in the user's favor than other payment methods (subscription cancellation, etc.)

> It's just the in-app premium monthly membership fee we're discussing?

Sure, but even then Stripe charges half a percent extra to handle subscriptions. Given Uber One is 10$, my original assessment still stands that Apple wants ~4x what equivalent processors wants on their marketplace.

> But if it's open to competition no one will use Apple payments even if they are the cheapest

You're assuming that all subscription businesses would prefer to engage unethically with their customers. Many businesses are much more interested in the customer acquisition funnel and building up trust, and if Apple payments eliminates dropoff in subscribers because their payment credentials are already there or it just has strong user trust then many companies will prefer it even if they aren't the cheapest (but competitive).

And if Apple wants to enforce standard such that even the unethical companies have to play in their garden, then they need to be pegged at a fair and reasonable cost of services delivered which we can ascertain from everybody else who is doing this.

> You're assuming that all subscription businesses would prefer to engage unethically with their customers.

I'm assuming some do. Apple protects me from those companies. I also think most people aren't going to steal from me, but I still lock my door. Meanwhile, you have far more faith than I do that businesses will pay a fairly high additional cost (say 4x) to signal that cancelling is trustworthy - whether it makes sense or not.

Basically, Apple currently protects me over app developers, and I want that to continue.

> Forced to use Safari. Forced to offer Apple Single Sign On ...

I don't understand why you think Apple couldn't make those requirements? They already do for the apps on their own store, why couldn't the require it for apps on other stores? Apple can still control the signature process to allow apps to install on devices, they can just not sign anything they don't like.

(Putting aside whether those are reasonable constraints or not, I don't necessarily agree with them, but it's a separate matter).

Avoiding those restrictions (including Apple signing apps) are usually the reason listed to start other stores. Why benefit would those other stores offer to anyone?

30% cheaper prices? Better user experience?

Why would prices be cheaper? How would the user interface be changed in anyway and how would it benefit users?

That's exactly my point. There are no real improvements I can see coming from any new store. Please explain how it will be better and why any actor would make it better.

> Why would prices be cheaper?

In the emails linked, even Apple acknowledges that the 30% will be passed to the customers.

One Apple employee acknowledged that in their discussions with Uber employees about their need to pay a commission on IAPs, Uber tried to convince Apple to remove their commission because that 30% would have to get passed on to customers.

However, I have no reason to believe that Uber would actually follow through. It seemed like a bluff. Certainly, any economic theory I'm aware of would have Uber and customers split that 30%, with Uber paying the vast majority out of profits.

> Forced to use Safari.

That's a huge issue actually. See the story the other day about Optional Chaining operator breaking iOS 12 Safari[1] and there's nothing users can do about it even if the hardware is perfectly capable of handling Optional Chaining operators.

If I could just install another browser then that issue disappears. But I can't do that, because Apple will never allow any other web renderers on the App Store.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894300

The day Apple allows other browsers is the day you can put a countdown clock on the entire web only working with Chromium in a way that Microsoft could only dream of during their IE on the desktop period. Not because Chrome is better, but because Google has been very effective at using its dominant web position to force people to "upgrade" to Chrome.

Even Microsoft, which invested huge amounts of money in Edge, packed it in when Google kept telling people that Edge was going to kill their firstborn (or whatever other tactics they use, like allegedly making YouTube not work properly.)

So, yeah, I'm fine with allowing other browsers - a few years after we've seen Google successfully broken up.

Meanwhile, I'm fine with websites just not using Optional Chaining operators. It's syntactical sugar. And frankly, rapid iterations on JavaScript, adding optional features only supported on Chrome and then making people think the web is broken without them, is a huge source of Google's ability to bully people into using Chrome.

I agree it's a stupid problem to have when simple solutions exist (use cool features while developing, babel them into old boring code that runs on your smart fridge from 2002), but it's a problem nonetheless and a problem we wouldn't have if it was possible to install a new non-Safari/WebKit browser on iOS 12.

Would you support them doing the same thing on MacOS? Or transactions through Safari?

I don’t see how iOS requires a 30% cut but Macs and transactions through Safari don’t.

The justification is the same, they make and maintain all the tech behind those the same as they do iOS. So really iOS shouldn’t have a cut or MacOS and Safari should. To be consistent.

There is a mutual benefit. More apps means that Apple benefits from a stronger platform (and can sell more copies of iDevices/iOS). That's why Microsoft never charged 30% for the privilege of selling an app on MSWindows, back in the old days.

A platform is largely "made" by external developers who contribute to the platform. It is unfair to start charging them (or anyone who comes later) for being on the platform.

Of course, Apple execs, who have no pride in making things but only in extracting money out of things, will have a different opinion on this.

> A platform is largely "made" by external developers who contribute to the platform. It is unfair to start charging them (or anyone who comes later) for being on the platform.

> Of course, Apple execs, who have no pride in making things but only in extracting money out of things, will have a different opinion on this.

I think they've always known, that's why they created an artificial ecosystem where this equation is backwards. No developer can harm Apple, but Apple can harm the biggest of developers on a whim.

And this is the issue as I see it. Apple have made a device they know will be used a certain way, a general purpose computing device, but they are the only ones who can decide what software is allowed on it. I believe this should be illegal, either you've made a purpose-specific device and can impose a lot of restrictions on usage, or you've made a general purpose computing device, and once you've done that I believe there needs to be laws that say an owner of such a device must be allowed to personally decide what software runs on it. That means:

- Ability to unlock bootloader if I want to

- Ability to load software on the device unrestricted

Computers always worked like this, so we never had to regulate it, but now that corporations have discovered the loophole we really need to impose regulations. If we don't then markets like the App Store will never be fair.

I think governments are slowly addressing "platforms". Not just computing platforms, but platforms in general. E.g. shopping platforms, gig-platforms. Platforms are like an economy inside an economy, with the platform-company being the regulator, and this can be a bad thing (much worse than if the government was the regulator).

Exactly, the best example with regards to the App Store is Apples own participation in large swaths of it with both iCloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc), Apple TV+ (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, etc), or Apple Music (Spotify, Tidal, whatever Google has called their service for 2022, etc).

In each of these categories Apple are competing unfairly by demanding their competitors pay them 30% for the privilege of reaching over half the population of every first world country.

> I feel like these marketplaces could maybe justify 30% on the purchase of an app up front, where there are clear benefits to the exposure and platform offered by them. But ongoing revenue is really attributable to the app itself and feels to me much harder to justify.

It’s not 30% of ongoing revenue though. You only have to pay 30% in one situation: you are already earning millions of dollars in the App Store AND it’s the first year of the subscription.

If you earn less than a million dollars, you qualify for the small business program and the rate is 15%:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...

If your subscriber has been subscribed for a year or more, the rate is 15%:

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/#revenue...

maybe stop supporting apple's exploitive practices then and not buy their products. At this point, they're second tier on phones and laptops and dead last in desktop PC. I guess they're still first in watch and earbuds but that isn't saying much.

If you're talking about hardware capabilities you are so wrong. They are only in the market position that they are in because their stuff is expensive, and people think they need to buy new stuff so often that Apples stuff becomes prohibitively expensive for them.

Their tech is solid. M1 completely obliterates the competition for laptops, and is getting there for desktop. Their desktop positioning is mostly self-made to be honest, they haven't really focused on it.

Phones are so overpowered these days that the only thing that really matters is battery life, and Apples chips accomplish so much more than the competition with a lot less battery.

> M1 completely obliterates the competition for laptops

IMO, you are both wrong. The M1 is fine as a laptop CPU, because what it needs to do well, it does very well - which is power efficiency. However, if what you need is computational power, and you don't particularly prioritize power consumption, then the M1 not only does not obliterate the competition, it significantly under-performs. And this is before you add in a dedicated GPU that solves some of those tasks much, much faster.

Take Cinebench R23, where M1 Pro (10+16) has about the same performance as the top contenders that do not have dedicated GPU cores, e.g. Ryzen 9 5900HX and Core i9-11980HK. Throw in a dedicated GPU for a work task that can properly utilize it, and the performance difference is at least 3x that of the M1.

Now, I'm not saying that the M1 is bad. It's just that.... "Completely obliterates the competition for laptops" is a strange way to describe "yeah, if both systems do very little, the M1 will use much less power!". For many, this results in it being the best laptop CPU for the tradeoffs they want, especially if the MacOS is an added positive.

However, that the M1 competes and outperforms in terms of computation performance, would be just wrong.

Which is why I specifically said laptops, where workloads tend to be of the kind that benefits from efficiency. You're right that there are many workloads that they are not perfect for. Hoping that the second generation addresses some of these issues, but as a web developer M1 is already pretty damn great.

Obliterates was a bit strong I guess hehe.

Then it's all good :)

It's not uncommon to hear unrealistic praise of the M1 on HN.

> At this point I’d be happy if Apple just let me install apps outside their ecosystem, then they could at least defend themselves by saying if the developers aren’t happy with the terms of the App Store they can offer alternative methods.

And, of course, you can also use a different smart phone ecosystem. Android makes it comparatively easier to sideload apps and mess with stuff.

The overwhelming majority of apps can be turned into websites instead, unshackled by store regulations. Devs should vote with their feet if app store costs outweigh the benefits

But a lot of app classes can't. Browsers being the obvious one, but generally anything that requires optimised code, heavy computation, multi-threadedness, or access to certain sensors. Anything that fits any of those requirements has to be a real app and must then adhere to Apples rules.

> I’d be happy if Apple just let me install apps outside their ecosystem

Android allows it, usage of alt stores is marginal.

I wholeheartedly agree. 30% ongoing is criminal in my opinion.

Even 15% ongoing is criminal in my opinion. Other payment processors take <5%.

Maybe Apple forces Uber and Lyft to cost $3 upfront then.

Apple wants 30%

Developers want less

Customer don’t care, and want what Apple is selling.

Developers feel it’s not fair because they think they are losing money but customers seem happy to pay for Apple’s premium service.

Yes, the premium does not matter to me because it saves so much time and convenience in being able to cancel subscriptions.

If I want it cheaper in exchange for having to deal with onerous cancellation methods, I can just go direct to the developer’s website and buy it.

I think you meant "Customers don't know".

I suspect if the UI offered customers to pay now using Apple's thing, or have a button to get 30% off by going to some more convoluted flow, a lot of people would choose the rebate.

If people want a cheaper but more complicated experience, they have the Android option

I think at the point they're making the transaction, they're already locked in. It's not like someone is going to buy a new phone and replace all their apps when they're purchasing an Uber subscription.

Plus, I think another commenter pointed out that the end user is still getting the same price on Android - I don't know if that's because Apple mandates something or a business decision on the company's side?

Not charging 30% for ongoing revenue would immediately result in all apps being “free” with an in—app subscription.

Like… within months.

Why do people not get this?

Apple wants their cut. This is the only way for them to get any cut at all. It’s either this rule or $0 revenue.

No possible percentages in between 0 and 30%?

It's the industry standard. Most similar marketplaces (e.g.: Steam store, etc...) charge 30%.

  It's reasonable to assume that Apple chose 30% because that was the prevailing standard in the physical retail world.

That markup has been competed away in some circumstances (eg Costco) but otherwise still holds generally (Walmart 32%) It reflects unavoidable costs to all retailers, like local rents, staffing, transport etc Given that tech does not have a retail's fixed costs why has that markup not been competed away to establish a markup based on tech's unavoidable fixed costs?

What is your argument here? That Apple's services cost literally nothing to provide?

Apple provides developers access to an enormous marketplace that they run. A marketplace with hundreds of millions of "high value" customers pre-configured for payments. All sorts of related services are included, such as fraud detection, currency conversion, etc...

What do you think Apple does? Just skim 30% off the top without doing anything else?

Seriously, some people live in this fantasy world where all products should be worth 100% of their raw material cost, and services should cost only what the showroom rent+aircon costs to provide.

Apple's profit margin on the App Store was ~80% in 2019[1]. In a healthy market, competition would lead to increased efficiencies and more savings for consumers that would cut into those margins. Instead the market has stagnated because competition was forbidden, and one company profits handsomely from it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...

steam charges 20-25%

> Apple wants their cut. This is the only way for them to get any cut at all. It’s either this rule or $0 revenue.

Why do they deserve a cut?

Uber and Lyft, deliver a material service, Apple have not contributed to that in any way beyond existing as a general purpose computer manufacturer.

Take an alternative, food delivery service, you pay a monthly subscription for a set selection of fruit and veg delivered every week. The cost is made up of food cost and delivery cost... You could sign up through a website, or you could sign up through an app on Apple's app store, in the later case the only option would be to increase the price by 30%, because there is no where near 30% profit left over.

Not convinced? Ok lets go to an extreme, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay? Does their App store really deliver that much value?

Before, it was sort of justifiable when people were trying their get rich quick schemes with flappy bird clones... because the argument from the other side was a weak "but that's my get rich quick scheme", Apple's platform and what they shove in front of users faces made a real difference to the almost pure profit of those Apps, the apps simply would not be popular without Apple... but as soon as we start talking about apps that deliver material services and other significant value it makes no sense to argue that Apple deserve even 1 penny. Apple have gone completely fucking mental with their own greed, they think they deserve a slice of the entire world.

> Uber and Lyft, deliver a material service, Apple have not contributed to that in any way beyond existing as a general purpose computer manufacturer.

If the iPhone was a general purpose computer, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Well that's the problem in a nut shell. It is and it isn't... but it should be.

Feel free to start your own company that makes phones that behave however you want. Why should you get to decide what other people’s products “should be”?

why shouldn't people that have to use the platform have some influence over it given the level of integration iOs seeks to have in their users lives

Yeah that's the problem entirely. We need legal regulations here to force Apples hand. If you can't define in simple terms what specific category of entertainment your device falls under then you've made a general purpose computing device and that must come with requirements that users can load whatever code they desire onto it with your blessing.

Allow users to do that and they can put whatever rules they want on their store.

Why does your grocery store deserve a cut? I’m struggling w how to apply this to other industries.

I mostly support the argument that EVERY middleman is useless but…we kinda live in a world of middlemen.

Some middlemen are completely useless, others play a critical and necessary role in providing access to a product, and there is a whole spectrum in between.

There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).

Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.

In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.

Thank you for your thoughtful response! I think we’re in full agreement — which is weird on the Internet.

> There is some reasonable cost involved […]

Apple is just taking a profit like your corner store, COOP, Migros, etc. Is it reasonable? Don’t know! Are profit margins how most business operate? That is for sure.

Superbly well put, bravo!

Should Apple take a cut when I order my groceries using an iPhone through my grocery's store app?

> Why do they deserve a cut?

I don't know if you're trolling or not... but are you seriously unaware of the value they're providing? Is this some kind of mystery to many people?

In the PC/Linux space -- where traditionally no online marketplace existed with wide reach -- if you want to sell your software you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps:

1. Create a website.

2. Market your software. Nobody will see it. Spend more money on more marketing, and then maybe -- just maybe -- you might reach 1-10% of your potential market.

3. Sign up with a credit card payment processor. Find out that people will navigate all the way to your store page, see the CC entry form, and click cancel. A lot of people. Like... 50%.

4. Discover that you're treated like the dirt stuck to the bottom of the payment processor's shoes, and they charge a lot of overhead too. Especially for small transcations. You have no hope, ever, of selling 1 million copies of your small app for $1 and make anywhere near a million dollars.

5. Get hacked because you can't afford a full security team to babysit your online store 24/7.

6. Discover that you're on the second page of Google's search results for your exact product name because of competitor's SEO.

7. And so on. And on, and on...

Apple's 30% cut is cheap. It's notably less than doing it yourself at a small scale, under one million dollars or so.

They instantly provide you with hundreds of millions of potential customers, free marketing and exposure, frictionless payment processing that goes down to the single-dollar range efficiently, secure systems for all of that, and more.

Everybody in the mobile app industry knows that while there are more Android devices out there, the profit is in the Apple ecosystem.

An ecosystem Apple created at enormous expense.

An ecosystem that has devices that are mostly kept up-to-date (by Apple! For 6+ years! At huge expense!), massively reducing development and test effort. Notably, unlike the Android platform which is a shit-show of bargain basement garbage with either zero vendor support, or next to zero.

An ecosystem where customers feel safe because of the security guarantees provided by Apple! Confident customers spend more. A lot more. The Android marketplace is like 30% malware at this point, for comparison. Customers don't feel safe spending their money there. I know I don't.

I could go on like this for pages and pages, but I hope you get the point.

You're getting the end-result of the main product of the world's biggest company. If you think this is worthless, literally without value, then you're probably one of those people that also think that they could reproduce the Uber app over a weekend...

You wrote this block of text but missed the whole point of the link: they didn't end up charging this fee, at all. They got 0%. The cut didn't go up. The store didn't close. There was never a basis in cost, whatsoever.

> There was never a basis in cost, whatsoever.

Price is not based on cost.

Where's Uber without a trustworthy, city-corner-accurate GPS location for every driver and rider? Where's Instacart without a high-quality barcode scanner^W^Wcamera in the pocket of every shopper? The platform and software Apple delivered enabled those physical businesses.

Your argument is essentially the same as for patents... "I invented this tech, everyone can use it to create whole new things, I deserve a cut for my investment."

But Apple didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent the barcode scanner. Apple sells a hardware with a ridiculous profit margin. Devices that only have value through the software that is written for them, Uber is not selling a device with a GPS, they are selling a taxi service (for better or worse), and they will use whatever is available on the device to make that work well.

Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs (iOS and Android) and led other companies to die because either their hardware wasn’t good enough or consumers were abandoning them because they couldn’t download their favorite apps.

So maybe Apple did something “right” to deserve millions of developers and billion+ consumers to chose them instead of others?

It’s awesome to be in 2022 and act like “Apple doesn’t deserve anything”. Look at last 15 years of mobile history and what Apple has done to this industry.

Apple did do something right a long time ago... but it doesn't mean they get an indefinite 30% cut of the entire world.

I don't have a stake in this, I don't own an iPhone or Android phone, or any smart phone and never have... I just see a rent seeker abusing their position as much as possible.

> Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs [...]

Note that we are discussing a huge markup on a material service, not merely software.

> Where's Instacart without a high-quality barcode scanner^W^Wcamera in the pocket of every shopper?

Fairly certain that I, the iPhone owner, paid for that in full. Plus a healthy margin.

I guess but that's not really how services like that work. And iOS is 100% a service with customer owned hardware. The real cost of your iPhone is paid by every publisher that wants to sell you stuff on your phone.

Amazon operates this way, DoorDash operates this way. You aren't paying the cost of your deliveries, sure you get charged a fee but the bulk is paid by the seller forking over 30% of their revenue for the privilege of selling to you.

Just because you're paying doesn't mean you aren't the product.

You know something else that enabled that? The internet. And mobile connectivity. So 30 % to each of these as well would be more than fair, right?

> Uber and Lyft, deliver a material service,

And Apple's not asking for a cut of that. Apple is asking for 30% of the monthly Uber Membership fees, created as an IAP. The part that is completely non-scaling to the amount of rides the person takes. The part that is practically guaranteed to come from Uber's profits and not from the end users or from drivers.

So, I really find it hard to care about big companies fighting about it.

> e, what about a mortgage monthly repayment app, that's essentially a subscription to your home right? Do you think Apple deserve to have almost 30% of the value of your house for the privilege of letting you use an app to pay?

Apple's made it a point that they don't collect 30% on real (non-digital) purchases. Like a mortgage. They would be collecting 30% of the $25 convenience fee your bank slaps on, not the mortgage payment. Which may make it less likely a bank decides to add those fees.

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