Apple complies with Dutch ruling, lets dating apps use other payment systems
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
* There are two new entitlements related to this, which you ask Apple to give you if you're a dating app.
* Once you get the entitlements, you need to create a new version of your app (it cannot be the same as your international one) that will ship exclusively in the Netherlands with that entitlement.
* Details of how this entitlement work will come at a later date.
* Apple will still charge a commission on these purchases, the details of which will also come at a later date.
* It is your privilege/responsibility to conflict resolution with regards to refunds and such.
In essence, Apple complied with the law in the narrowest terms they could, but they did indeed change things and I suspect many companies will go through this process even if it's made somewhat inconvenient. I guess what remains to be seen is if these entitlements slowly get rolled out in other countries as they also enact legislation to require it.
This is the only part that matters here. Doesn't matter how narrowly the law was complied with. Laws are the purview of lawmakers. If the lawmakers leave loopholes in their legislation all companies that can will avail themselves of these loopholes.
Blame the legislators. Those assholes left barn-door sized loopholes in their legal requirements for Apple's compliance.
It's a bit on us, the public, to not accept those alibi-type compromises.
Incompetence/cluelessness and lack of resources around tech is the bigger problem here.
Well that remains to be seen. The court just applied existing law for this specific conflict. Apple was found not complying, which is why the court issued this ruling. After implementing this narrow change they probably still do not comply. It would surprise me if dating apps would somehow be legally different from any other app. Apple is just stalling here. The next court case is going to cost money in addition to broadening the requirements on Apple, I think.
> The Geo-blocking regulation adopted by the EU in February 2018 prohibits any attempt to restrict consumers access to goods and services on e-commerce websites on the basis of their nationality or country of residence and establishment.[31]
Every time the apple fee comes up, this part of the discussion rarely comes up. This is a huge part of what you pay Apple/Google for. Lets say you roll your own on top of stripe [0]; each dispute/chargeback costs you $15 on top of the transaction cost. On an app with $0.99 purchases, each dispute will undo 15 purchases. If you get enough of these you _will_ be banned, quickly and with very little warning. I'm not going to claim that this on it's own is worth the full 30% whack but it does neet to be taken into consideration.
That being said, a $1 purchase through stripe likely has an effective fee higher than 30%, so this would only make sense for larger purchases.
That only works if you offer a no questions asked refund, and even at that, that doesn't imply 0 risk. Cards get stolen and tested on low value purchases all the time; if a scammer decides to check 1000 credit cards on your app, you're going to have a very bad time.
Some do it specifically because it will harm the merchant. Especially if they feel they've been wronged.
They do? In my experience it's much higher, particularly if you're dealing with low value transactions. When I worked in retail 15 years ago our payment handler charged a 1% fee on cash drops, and charged 0.30 plus 2% capped at some number I can't remember off the top of my head, _plus_ the card issuer fee. On a $100 transaction sure that's close to 2%, but on a $2 IAP or a $10 subscription (like Netflix) that's 17% and 5% respectively. I'm also pretty sure on top of that we had to pay a dispute fee if one was lodged with the issuer; presumably in the region of $10-15 per dispute. the risk of those disputed being opened on an online purchase vs an in person purchase is significantly higher.
> You have no opportunity to compete with Apple in this space, and that's what pisses off a lot of people
That's what a lot of people say, but how much of that is _really_ they just don't want to pay a 30% cut?
I'm not sure where you work (or where you live), but my experience has indeed been that payment processing is a pretty cut-and-dried technology at this point. People charge insane overhead for it because, as a marginal utility, other people have no way of determining what it's actual value is.
> That's what a lot of people say, but how much of that is _really_ they just don't want to pay a 30% cut?
I don't really think it matters, the statement is true nonetheless. If third-party app stores exist, Apple would be undercut in a heartbeat. By obstructing other people from competing with their App Store business, they're eliminating the need for the market to set a price.
You can argue to the ends of the earth with that logic (lord knows Apple keeps lawyers on retainer for that express purpose), but Apple's strategy here is to prevent them from having to compete with the rest of the market. There's a reason why European regulators are wising up to this nonsense (and a reason Apple obeys); it's a lost case. Everyone knows that it's dumb, the only defenses I've seen for it boil down to apologism and misunderstanding.
Why do we need to keep giving the world's largest company the benefit of the doubt? Can't we just hold them accountable for once?
I've had much more luck with apple than I have with "developers". NYT is the textbook example that comes up here. You can sign up in one click but cancelling still requires phoning them up.
It's also analogous to a physical store; I don't ask kellogs for a refund if my cereal doesn't work, I ask the grocery store.
If the NYT tried this here, I'd just revoke access from my bank account, assuming they even had any. There is probably also a law specifying how to unsubscribe, but I can't tell how it works in the Netherlands.
UPDATE: Thinking this through, it allows us to put a monetary value on consumer protection. Much of what the apple 30% tax gives you as a consumer is built into law. So assuming a more reasonable cost of say 5%, small time devs get a loss of 25% of income because of the state of payments and consumer protection in the USA. You can haggle over percentages, but there is a cost.
Nitpicking: Apple takes 15% from small time devs (less than a million $)
The law here in the Netherlands is that you must be able to unsubscribe by the same method you subscribed in the first place.
Snark aside, I do think you're going to require some sort of hold/guarantee from the developers to apple if you want to force that sort of relationship.
Was this actually confirmed? I remember in the epic vs apple lawsuit (in the US), the media reported something similar, but if you read the decision more carefully, it explicitly says that apple was still entitled to their 30%/15% cut. The logic was that the 30%/15% cut wasn't the fee paid for processing payments, it was also the fee paid for access to the ecosystem, SDK, and placement on the app store.
>[...] without that kind of transparency it still feels like I'm being scammed
It's not arbitrary because it was part of the developer agreement you signed.
>since it doesn't actually address the issues people have
Must all regulator action "actually address the issues people have"? Regulators/courts are limited in what they can do, so it's not surprising that the ruling isn't some sort of decisive victory for independent software companies.
The value is arbitrary, not the fee.
> Must all regulator action "actually address the issues people have"?
Not necessarily, I'd think "address the issues people have" is a good place to start when you're regulating American corporate policy in a modern democracy.
As in the Epic case, this interestingly expands the number of transactions that apple could potentially claim commissions for (in-app and out-of-app) depending on the specific definition of a transaction. In the case of dating apps nearly all user-activity is within the app, so Apple could claim that all transactions for iOS uses are within scope.
This will of course be negotiated and settled in some way, but as long as the 30% cut has not been deemed illegal, Apple can still demand the cut on relevant transactions.
Looks like everybody gangsta till regulator steps in.
Two easy examples:
Obama passing health care regulations greatly increased my health insurance costs.
EPA mandating new regulations on "safety" of gas cans has made gas cans nearly unusable with dangerous splashing of gasoline when using them.
I only say "at least temporarily" lowering premiums to reflect subsequent events, like the removal of the individual mandate and the risk corridor, and the general increase in healthcare costs over time.
>Obama passing health care regulations greatly increased my health insurance costs.
This is called paying into a system to support others in society who suffer healthcare events. Sucks if you are healthy and never need healthcare, nice for when you get hit with a NICU baby, cancer, heart attack, or any other healthcare event where you need hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of healthcare.
ACA explicitly transfers wealth from the young and/or health to the old and/or sick. There is no other way to provide more healthcare to more people, at current levels of healthcare supply.
Of course, letting people go without healthcare if they cannot afford it is also a perfectly valid position.
(Can you see my crossed fingers?)
The commission charged by apple is not a payment processing fee. It's a platform licensing fee, as has been common practice in the industry since day 1.
What this means is that the companies are allowed to use a separate company to charge users, and now they are required to manage refunds, etc themselves in line with local laws and the apple license.
Now they also have to manually track everything and pay apple the appropriate 15-30% licensing fee.
The next step is for somebody else to sue to remove the limit to dating apps, which is obviously ridiculous (and likely still not compliant with NL law). After that, the door is effectively opened for the whole Union. I expect at that point Apple will just allow it for all EU countries, with much fanfare, trying to spin it as them doing good for us plebs.
For the majority of apps it's 15%.
That commission is not a payment processing fee, it's very clearly a platform commission as has been common in the industry for 30-40 years at this point.
All this (and the similar rulings elsewhere) seem to confirm is that
* A developer can use their own preferred payment processor
* A developer still has to pay the platform commission
Finally, no one in their right mind should think that even if there was a reduction in commission that prices would decrease. We already have direct evidence: Both Google and Apple dropped platform commission to 15% for the vast majority of apps and there was no reduction in app prices. Additionally it is common sense: app devs already know that you will pay X for an app, if they get an arbitrary reduction in expenses through any mechanism why would they reduce their prices? This is the same flaw present in trickle-down economics. The price for anything is determined by what the market will bare, not the cost of production - this is as true for an app, as it is for an NFT, as it is for a banana.
They don't even need to go through appstore review if they add it to a webview server side.
So... Have any apps done this yet? Seems like the kind of thing that could be pushed out in a few hours by some teams.
"The ruling allows dating app developers to avoid the commission fee ..."
It says dating apps so I don't think apple allowed other app to bypass the rule. But good thing is it sets a precedence.