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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

> The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.

Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do. Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for. Maybe some very low double digit percentage of these people will try to load a pwa from patreon.com

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> Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for.

I just searched the App Store for Patreon:

The top hit was an ad for Ashley Madison. Seriously.

The second hit was the Patreon app.

The third hit was ChatGPT for some reason.

But if the Patreon app was not in the App Store, no doubt there would be a bunch of scammers trying to pose as the official Patreon app.

Isn’t the whole point of the 30% apple tax to make sure their App Store isn’t full of garbage?

Yep, interesting how that massive cut of revenue doesn’t do a thing to actually help consumers, who as a consequence are shunted with the bill anyway.

Not only but also; as with a real tax from a government, all the money goes into a big pot, gets mixed around, and then the expenses come out unevenly from that pot.

I'm not at all aware of where the boundary is between "that's fine" and "that's abuse of market dominance to fund uneconomical expansion".

Does anywhere have a specific "national defence" tax and another "police fund" tax etc. for each expense, rather than "income tax" and "sales tax" for each source?

IMHO profits should be ringfenced by activity and taxed accordingly - otherwise you end up with funds from one activity being used to subsidize another without taxation, creating an unfair environment for competition. Youtube being the perfect modern example.

That Ashely Madison listing is a paid listing. The first one or two items in results are always paid listings.

We're all aware of App Store Search Ads. I even said, "The top hit was an ad for Ashley Madison." But thanks for the mansplaining.

Jerk

In particular Patreon can host things like podcasts so has a media player. The app isn’t just about configuring billing

So Patreon will need to become a reader app like Spotify/Kindle then that can do all this offline but you cannot subscribe or pay in the app.

The problem is that Patreon wouldn't even be able to tell people they can donate to their creators elsewhere due to Apple's assinine anti-steering provisions

This is honestly the main problem I have with that. You can argue that in-app purchase brings convenience etc. etc. and Apple deserves a cut and so on. But this enforced secrecy makes users unaware of the cost - they can't actually decide if the cut is worth the convenience or not. Apple relies on people not knowing the cost of the fees and that feels very dodgy.

That's really a solved problem. As an example, Google manages to have a web version of Youtube that works on iOS mobile Safari adequately. (It's not perfect but it works.)

There doesn't seem to be anything snowflake special the Patreon iOS app needs to do that a web app cannot handle.

Does it support playing media even when it’s backgrounded? Stuff like Picture in Picture?

Youtube is unusable on any platform without ad blocking, so who cares :)

Yep. It works with Democracy Now!'s web player.

Are you implying a significant portion of the population who stop paying things like their water bill when they find no hits within the iOS App Store?

What? I have many many many monthly bills that are not iPhone apps. My gas bill may or may not have an iOS app, but I'm sure as hell not confused and angry if it doesn't.

Your gas bill is probably charged and billed directly by the gas supplier.

People get confused very easily when small digital subscriptions are charged through third parties on behalf of sellers whose name is often different from the app or service.

I'm not sure a shop app fixes that though. Better communication and better choice of names seems far more important.

I’m not sure who is regularly hitting the App Store to search for apps. I did back when the 3GS was out(, and maybe through the 5, but I assumed it was mostly boomers and the silent generation doing that.

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