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Comment by _aavaa_ | Hacker News Reader

Absurd. What next, they want a 30% cut from me when I set up automatic payments for my credit card through the banks iOS app?

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Think bigger, Apple Intelligence will now detect that you are ordering a new TV over the phone and they will want their cut.

Apple doesn't charge 30% for physical good sold through apps on ios.

Yet.

You use your bank's app? Guess what, Apple gets 30% of your account balance. Look at your 401k balance? Believe it or not, Apple owns 30% of that.

The point is that since they keep broadening what they do want 30% of, we expect the next thing they'll do is removing the exception for physical goods.

It's always been 30% for virtual goods; definition hasn't broadened.

That's an interesting idea.

What if, instead of 'subscribing' for $10, you purchase a grain of sand for $10.

The grain of sand is available for collection from somewhere, doesn't matter where because nobody would bother to collect it. Your physical purchase comes with free access to digital content.

This wouldn't work, unless you actually have some legitimate way to obtain the grain of sand.

So Patreon would have to actually staff a location somewhere that distributes the sand.

So sell air which is only available for self-service pickup.

> The grain of sand is available for collection from somewhere

> staff a location

still costs less than 30% of all ios revenue

Or just say you shipped it. Neither party would have incentive to say 'they never shipped it/it never came'. Mail a postcard if Apple wants tracking.

Its funny, because this is the exact opposite of how some cannabis dispensaries operate in Washington DC. It is illegal to sell cannabis there, but not to posses or to gift it. So you buy a $50 QR code that lets you access "digital art", and they give you a free 1/8 of cannabis with your purchase as a "gift".

This is the old eBay shipping trick. Ebay charged vendors a percentage of the product sale price, but nothing on shipping. So I'd often buy posters for $0.99 with $14.99 shipping (US Media Mail shipping was a lot lower than that).

At Apple, that will take at least 5-10 years before they get to that state. Siri is barely usable beyond simple “create reminder” or “set timer” queries/commands.

Hope by then, we see government intervention and break up big tech

Close. They already get a % whenever you use Apple Pay. In fact, it's part of why the EU demanded Apple provide NFC APIs to allow third-party replacements of the built-in Wallet app.

https://paymentdepot.com/blog/apple-pay-fees-for-merchants/

>Q: What fees does Apple charge merchants for using Apple Pay?

>Apple does not charge merchants any fees for accepting Apple Pay payments. However, merchants may still be subject to fees from their payment processor or bank. Remember, credit cards and debit cards are behind each Apple customer purchase.

>Apple Pay fees are generally lower than traditional credit card processing. Credit card issuers charge small businesses substantially more. As such, many SMBs ask employees to encourage Apple Pay transactions.

>Merchants, on the other hand, aren’t charged at all to use Apple Pay on physical and eCommerce transactions.

Looks like Apple Pay is cheaper for everyone except banks:

>Major banks such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Capital One are unhappy with their cut from Apple. So much so that they’ve formally requested that Visa, “change the way that it processes certain Apple Pay transactions.” In other words, pay Apple less in transaction fees.

This website has a better breakdown of costs under the "What are the fees" section, but no firm figures, and the only estimate is from 10 years ago:

https://www.applemust.com/how-apple-pay-makes-money-merchant...

Ok, so that sounds like Apple muscled banks out of their swipe fees.

No! They want 30% of your net worth each time you connect to your bank over the internet using an Apple device.

30% of a negative number, I'll take that deal in a heartbeat.

Interesting that is exactly what investment specialists do…

Yeah I can't understand why people think that inviting new middlemen into their transactions is acceptable. It's time to stop prostrating ourselves to these companies.

It's complicated.

Apple has given me a simple way to manage many of my subscriptions, a single pane of glass, which I appreciate. I'm fine paying a little extra for that.

It would be more valuable to me if Apple didn't charge too much, which turns away service providers.

Exactly, it's the percentage that's just too damn high.

> can't understand why people think that inviting new middlemen into their transactions is acceptable

Same reason people use credit cards or Gmail or hell Patreon. It reduces the number of counterparties you have to deal with and trust.

That attitude made sense when Google was trustworthy, I guess.

It's not a Google-specific attitude - it's the value proposition of all middlemen everywhere.

Facilitation of transactions and assuming the risk.

It's worth it to many. I gladly pay Apple the extra 30% or whatever because it adds up to <$10 per month for me and I don't have to jump through hoops to cancel subs.

Because the people who truly value freedom are outliers, seen as weirdos.

30% cut of digital sales top line revenue of every physical business you enter with your iPhone turned on.

It's fine for App Store developers to complain about their costs of doing business like any other business. I'm not sure what the point of bringing up nonsensical hypotheticals like bank payments is.

Until 3 days ago, demanding a cut from sales generated over outbound hyperlinks was considered a nonsense hypothetical too.

Except this is a clear racket and not a regular cost of doing business. Imagine Microsoft tomorrow deciding to require 30% of even a fraction of things happing on windows. Imagine Apple trying to do this on the Mac. It's laughably anti-competitive and the only reason they're not doing it on the Mac is because it would expose the absurdity of the situation on iOS.

That, and Apple probably requires a shit load of third party utilities that do "naughty" things like read the file system or be "not sandboxed" in order to actually get any work done. They need the Mac to write APIs to charge people 30% on the App Store for the iPhone.

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