Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable.
Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Compare that with Counter Strike 2, and I can't imagine how much money Epic has left on the table by choosing this path. So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.
But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable. They are heading downhill, partially because they never had any ground to stand on. If we want to see less of this behavior, we should stop allowing the blitzscale strategy of running a loss to gain marketshare.
This is also why the claim of "greed" or "enshitification" falls on deaf ears for them. They could easily say: "No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share; we're now asking for some returns on that investment. We're not adding a Pro plan, we were paying for the Pro plan previously. Be thankful for how long it lasted, and how much money you saved."
I think many of the worst offenders, and so much of the problem, would go away if we combined a payment with a mandatory ad-free experience, for any bundled software. Buy a TV, no ads allowed on the TV itself. Buy a computer, no ads allowed on Windows itself. Buy a Mac, no ads allowed in Apple News, should it be bundled. If it's truly free software that the customer did not directly or indirectly pay for, then ads are permitted; but the moment there's a payment, it's over. You can have Free with Ads, you can have Paid with No Ads, but never both.
That would not stop Discord from getting worse, or other services like them; but not allowing a paid + ad combo would solve most of the painful problems.
These Ivy League MBAs have been getting taught how much money companies have been leaving on the table and they are infecting every industry.
This is a form of price dumping and it should be illegal. Actually I'm confused as to why this isn't considered to be illegal already becuase I thought we had laws against this.
Nothing wrong with this. Don't over invest in an idea before it's proven.
> bolt on features no <customer> wants."
This is the enshittification.
In which case, yes, they are just iPhones in a big box with HDMI ports plugged into your TV. The only reason you can't do productivity tasks, is because of the restrictions, so the legally-nonexistent claim of "general purpose computing" doesn't do anything here.
He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM.
Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band recreation in the Fortnite ecosystem, recently started limiting when you can purchase songs in an effort to get people to impulse buy them when available. Players call it FOMO mode.
Epic is still pretty scummy and dishonest, even if in this insurance it appears to be on the good side.
He seems like an idiot to me.
What's the implication here, that he has some personal vendetta against Linux? A sibling comment seems to imply this as well.
It seems like Hanlon's Razor would suggest there was just some engineering complication that they never dealt with. I can imagine a bunch of explanations for why Windows ARM might have happened first. Maybe there were fewer complications, maybe some competent engineer personally cared about Windows ARM, maybe they have Windows based testing infrastructure, etc.
> So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.
IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.
ETA: Exploiting adult whales is bad too, if that's the angle you were going.
Is Auto Zone exploiting people who like working on their cars?
You might be interested to read about whales as it relates to loot boxes (in particular sections 1.E-F): https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
I don't know what autozone has to do with this particular discussion, but I'm not familiar with their business practices, so I'm not going to venture a guess.
I won't make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite in particular. However, we should all be aware it is certainly engineered in some ways to capture as much attention and time as possible, and this is intentional. Not unlike in nature to the engineering behind cigarettes, although again no claims on efficacy.
The point being, we really need to be doing analysis further than "well they chose to do it". It's not that simple, and it's really never been that simple. Companies are dedicating billions of dollars on solving this problem. We should, in response, at least try to analyze it deeper than that.
We protect people(arguably not enough) from gambling and alcohol which are basically banking on a portion of the population becoming addicted.(tho I also do not make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite or say, gacha games)
At what point is the level of manipulation from these companies messing with psychology too much? It's an open secret they are researching how to farm attention. Don't people that are susceptible to this stuff deserve some warnings like booze and slots? I'm all for personal responsibility but we've created lines with other things where people lose control. Idk why this should be treated different.
No idea if anything needs regulated or what exactly needs to change, but as you said, at least more analysis.
Similarly, toys are fun to have for their own sake.
If you wanna be able to play as Batman or Mr Meseeks or the dog from Adventure Time, that's $60 already.
I can't deny they've made a crazy amount of money from convincing teenage boys that it's cool to buy outfits and play virtual dress-up. But compared to the must-have items of my youth at least you aren't excluded if you have no money.
Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.
The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).
Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.
So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.
You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.
So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.
I love me some Gabby’s Dollhouse but the show is literally about a toy dollhouse that you can go buy.
There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.
There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Just don't see the point in having multiple.
They’re fun and entertaining. I hardly feel addicted or preyed on moreso than when I buy any other entertainment product.
That's the point with abusive techniques such as this - they become generationally intertwined.
Its about the kids. Those kids become parents. Those parents have kids. The abusive trauma transcends generations.
What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.
But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?
This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.
They're both unprincipled. Sweeney just happens to be correct.
This sounds absurd. What was his argument for this?
Tim just wants all of his cut.
And wants Apple to pay his app distribution costs...
There's no good guys anywhere in this.
Yeah app distribution costs something. Finger in the air 10's of petabytes...
And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs
Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
Hard disagree. The tour-de-force on Fortnite's insane process
Epic is largely owned by Tencent anyway, who makes a lot of their money from gambling games.
They ultimately refunded everyone who bought the original or the two other games
> has been a gold standard for F2P monetization
Every F2P game is the same. They waste your time until you buy IAPs out of boredom. What gold standard?
Now is that better than the Apple store? Sure! But the real problem is that users can't install their own games without going through an arbiter like Epic or Apple.
instead you get peak FOMO, where you never know where item will return. It might be in a week, it might be in few years. you never know.
But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.
You can't say that with a straight face when he's so vehemently anti-Linux. To this day, you still can't download Fortnite or the Epic Games Store on Linux. At the end of the day, all Tim actually cares about is his corporation having to pay rent to another corporation.
Get rid of Roblox's and Epic's anti-consumer behavior, and then I will "grin" at this.
There is simply no 100.00% perfect solution here that'll make 100.00% people happy.
Every single individual app developer should be singing his praises today, because he could've just gotten the deal for his company, and many other companies have gone that route. Epic decided to demand better.
I think the real situation is that Apple allowing Roblox on their store despite its safety problems shows that Apple wants to profit from that exploitation themselves instead of prevent it. They have the power to kick them off, but they don't. (Although now they might)
I wonder if someone will try to force them to refund it all.
This is the Big Tech playbook. Apple and Google know what they're doing isn't legal. But they make so much doing it, that it's worth the lawyer fees to delay and delay and appeal and appeal as long as possible to keep the money train flowing. Historically the fine has never been as big as the profit, so even if they eventually get in trouble for it, it makes sense for them to profit in the short term.
If they also apply the same rules to other countries, it would hurt their case that this court order is unjust.
In either case, this thing will die with a whimper, not a bang. Apple will have to concede to EU and it would not surprise me if other large markets will demand the same.
So the stage is changing. Apple could have flown under the radar and made concessions with terms they could dictate, letting them simplify their offerings across the world without attracting regulators and mega-lawsuits (and hear me out - maybe focus on products and innovation instead). Now, they fight against multiple jurisdictions at once, which all have different requirements (obviously, since they are different bodies). Even if they fold now, by reducing the tax and making more lenient rules, they’re too late. They already have regulators and judges dictating for them what to do, so their agency is permanently limited.
People forget that in the EU, the ”gatekeeper status” wasn’t just ”go after Apple and Google”. It was the App Store specifically. For instance, Gmail was evaluated but not included.
TLDR Apple has to sleep in a bed that they shat in themselves. They were universally popular and could get away with lots of questionable behavior, but instead angered everyone and are rightfully getting curfewed.
I'm confused a) who is taking the concept of free markets seriously, especially in this context where markets (and competition) are arbitrarily defined and owned by corporations and and b) who would view self-interested laws as either surprising or bad? Of course laws are in self interest. Why on else else would you pass a law?
If you really truly think that regulation is dragging down some market, it's easy to talk about in specific terms. It is only possible to employ "free markets" in bad faith.
All it takes is a single competitor to gradually gain more and more strength and competitive advantage via dumping, regulatory capture, or other means (see: organized crime and syndicates) to win the death struggle.
What has saved us hasn't been some magical free market, it has been the markets themselves, once they achieve trust status, fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
He discusses how motivations fundamentally change after profit margins peak and argues that profit after this point necessarily produces less economically efficient processes (in terms of the flow of demanded goods and services, not the shareholder, who does receive further productivity gains). In this context, undesired market advantage (legal or illegal) is just a symptom of profit, but it can be analyzed like any other sort of inefficiency. The core prescription is to nationalize the process or otherwise remove the profit motive around peak profit (which is, to be clear, not always easy or possible to identify... but in the worst case, this would open further opportunity for private capital to invest in the next generation of improvements).
He also discusses how failed investment cycles can resonate into market crashes faster than capital can rationally reallocate. Both of these above observations seem very very relevant to our current situation in the US today, and should cause everyone to look askance at people who aren't concerned about how healthy our political economy actually is.
> fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
The kicker here is that there's no reason to expect either to continue yielding the same rewards. Some industries have projectable, plannable, investable growth patterns; others do not. Almost all the industries with predictable growth rely on consumption driven by yields from the lucrative exploitation of frontiers, mostly technological recently as you point out. I suspect that the market is going to get incredibly volatile as capital sees this frontiers dry up and adjusts expectations. ideally by cannibalizing itself and not eating us, but it might need a little help in that regard....
Beneath them, people tend to get good at programming before they get good at spotting exploitation, so there is always a stratum of True Believers to feed the operation. Individually they wise up and graduate, but the stratum remains as it is fed from the bottom by the proverbial sucker born every minute.
Then we have the top of the pyramid which actually does benefit from it all. They are small in number but they have enough money to fund the whole space (more importantly: enough money to have a reason to fund the whole space) so they have outsize influence. They could decide to ban me for saying this, for example.
Do we agree? Or will we find ourselves on opposite sides of this fight the millisecond the specifics of this case fade from the public eye?
The world stage is no more a safe place than it has been for any other part of history.
I would be lying if I claimed I hadn't dreamed of being liberated by a foreign power with more cultural competence at governance (which excludes Russia, obviously, but they probably at least aren't worse), but realistically anything but a slow scale-down in military power would probably entail the bloodiest world (and civil) war in history. Maybe nukes, too.
But, there's a fork in the road. We can choose to scale down our military presence (and control of trade) today, and figure out how we actually want to exist in a global community outside of letting our corporations swing their dicks freely... Or we can blow trillions of dollars continuing to make fools of ourselves rampaging through other countries rather than building high speed rail before we lose our grip on hegemony anyway as a matter of pure economics.
Or, I suppose, we can just murder anyone who disagrees with us until we're just miserably exploiting each other inside of high walls armed with automated guns. Something tells me that's the option we're going to pick.
Well it is. And it's willful. That trillion dollars is spent almost entirely on US made things by US workers. Only a small slice (still large in absolute terms) goes to those mega-contractors. The rest is the only thing that has kept any semblance of American manufacturing alive. The military buys everything (this isn't an exaggeration, you would be hard pressed to find something in your life that they don't buy in quantity) , and there are countless businesses that pay decent wages with benefits for low skilled workers in every state that are only still in existence because of military spending.
It also functions as an incubator, having special provisions for small businesses, especially those owned by marginalized people or located in especially impoverished areas. Basically "We need need coffee filters, so if you buy the equipment and higher the workers, we'll sign a contract to buy 2,000,000 packages a year from you. (And it's a kick-your-door-down felony if you try to backdoor foreign made filters)."
That's why it is never cut. It's a welfare plan that republicans agree too because it requires holding down a job to access. It comes with the side effects of keeping factories running and getting an overpowered military.
Also there may be some foreign policy applications.
But now our politicians are so dumb they don't realize that's what was agreed long ago, and think they can have one part of that deal and not the other.
Well that's not that obvious... Sure EU is more than willing to protect consumers from foreign(American) megacorporation because the cost of doing that is very low.
Entrenched major local companies? Well stifling competition through excessive regulation and propping up to bit too fall semi-zombie corporations is not necessarily that great for consumers long-term.
Regulating and fining them is very cheap politically when there are no jobs that can be lost or lobbyists to disappoint.
The EU. Let me explain, because this was confusing:
In US political debate, free markets have become synonymous with ”let companies do what they want”. Today, most of US ”markets” are neither free, nor (arguably) even markets at all, such as Amazon or health insurance. It is a mix between feudal system and protection racket.
Just like ”freedom isn’t free” in terms of civil liberties, same goes (imo) for markets. If you want to optimize for ”freedom” of markets, that means a non-zero amount of regulating them. This is obvious both in theory and by opening your eyes and looking outside.
As far as how to regulate them, I believe the EU is doing a good job, especially in the face of novel technology and business topologies. Basically, allow everything that isn’t deliberately anti-competitive. Because, drumroll, competition is fundamental for markets to work, at all.
Sorry for the confusion. It’s hard to make points when words mean completely different things in different parts of the world.
As a business, I understand why they would - more revenue. At least there's some progress and I wouldn't be surprised if the EU follows suit.
There is no side loading on iOS, even for the EU.
Not by my definition of side loading.
Apple as the company we used to know is long dead. I still buy MacBooks and iPhones but only because some remnant of the past still exists in them. The new company came up with Vision Pro, screwing Spotify over app commissions, screwing game developers users love (Epic), non-upgradeable devices, extremely difficult repairability, etc.
Spotify is the one who screws everyone. They deserve it
> Epic
Epic is another example of a shady company who doesn't want to give a cut from its micro transactions from users (users who are brought to them by Apple's innovation)
> difficult repairability
iPhone repairability score is 2-3 points higher than Pixel's according to iFixit. Only HMD beats iPhone.
How? They pay the exact same percentage as Steam does to it's creators, 70%.
Record labels are in the business of screwing musicians, though.
This is too easy of an answer. Would you take more money if I offered it to you?
My problem with Apple here is that I believe it's short sighted. Lack of compliance or whatever you want to call it, could threaten the whole business by forcing legislation and legal action.
The idea Apple deserved a cut of Patreon podcaster's monthly subscription fees was beyond the pale.
I mean, these leaders are supposed to be the best of the best and we're all sitting here wondering how they can be so idiotic and short-sighted.
They had a perfect thing going. Make free money, do next to nothing. All they had to do was make some concessions, not get too overconfident, and maybe reel it back a tad when things get hot. But no. They got so cocky, so arrogant, that now they risk losing it all.
Time and time again I am just shocked at the sheer stupidity behind the biggest companies in America. Any bozo off the street understands the danger of arrogance better than Apple leadership. How are these people in power and how do they repeatedly make such poor decisions?
Honestly I love the current macs, but of course I would like to be able to upgrade them as well. But yeah I also have the feeling that Apple is getting less innovative, more sloppy and more greedy, but I'm not sure I think its become a whole other company.
And yet during his time we had upgradeable MacBooks and Macs. Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.
Eh, wot? iPhone battery has never been easily replaced. Yeah, you could do it, but it still involved tiny screws and fiddly bits; you’re not popping a new one in while waiting at a stoplight.
But I do miss the days of throwing some cheap RAM at a MacBook.
Only real advancement I've seen is in Apple Silicon. Which is fantastic but very much on a tik-tok cycle like Intel. Really wish these companies would cut back on constant model upgrades and instead spend more time polishing the products.
This, honestly, doesn't seem to be in line with the injunction if it still applies to apps published by developers from the United States?
They exist to seek profits.
If this was a losing strategy for them, they would've dropped it long ago without the ruling.
Other countries should implement similar laws, not hope that Apple does the right thing.
Hope is a bad strategy.
*Take USB-C, Apple made tonnes of money from MFA, which was the main reason they didn't ever want to pivot to a different connector. Even if it was the better choice.
We’re updating our app in a couple days this will save a LOT of money.
We will kick users out to web and pass a JWT in the url with a short lifespan to log the user in on web and then prompt for Apple Pay or credit card. Then a link back to our app’s deep link
- Why not just handle all of this in the app? Do you think Apple won't allow it?
- Are you geofencing this functionality? It seems like per other comments this is US only.
- How are you handling existing subscribers (not sure if applicable)? Will you "encourage" them to migrate?
What you’re suggesting is a dangerous anti-pattern.
We should geofence it to US yeah.
We are thinking of sending a push notification with a discount to pay on web and cancel
This is a bit of an "egg-on-face" moment for the community that has relentlessly defended Apple's righteousness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852145 ("Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds (wsj.com)" — 585 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856795 ("Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral (thebignewsletter.com)" — 340 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859814 ("A senior Apple exec could be jailed in Epic case (9to5mac.com)" — 94 comments)
US based app developers hosting apps on app stores in other countries should also be covered by the injunction. What am I missing? Is the injunction only covering US based app market? And does not cover app developers?
Tim, come back. The deed is yet to be completed.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#pay...
FWIW, I will claim it does not: it should cover--at least for any developer in the United States--any app published by any Apple-affiliated entity, anywhere, and certainly covers Apple's centrally managed global store.
Well, this was only possible because the EU had pushed hard toward this openness otherwise, we wouldn't expect Apple to do this.
> For everything else there is always the open Internet. If the App Store model and guidelines or alternative app marketplaces and Notarization for iOS and iPadOS apps are not best for your app or business idea that’s okay, we provide Safari for a great web experience too.
IMO, Safari on iOS do not have a great experience for web devs who are willing to distribute their apps as PWAs, especially when there is no alternative browser that provides additional capabilities, they are all skinned Safaris. Take for instance the Vibration API [1], it has been supported since a long time in Chrome mobile but not in Safari. I believe it does an excellent job in giving a PWA some native-feeling when being used. Still though, I still miss that haptic feedback is not yet supported by Chrome. Bluetooth [2] is yet another missing API in Safari.
Of course, for these (and other) web APIs to be abused by developers, I encourage browser vendors to disable them by default when requested from a website and enable them ONLY on user consent. On the other hand, when a user installs the PWA, these privileges should be granted automatically with the ability to disable them by the user.
To finalize, another excellent API that facilitate the installation of PWAs by triggering an install prompt [3] is not supported in iOS Safari, which does really makes me wonder: "How Safari provides a great web experience?"
___________________
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...
3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
3.1.1 In-App Purchase:
If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency wallets, etc.
It came out in the original Epic trial that this is where 90% of in app revenue comes from.
Personally unclear how much less predatory the shift to subscriptions for trivial feature unlocks is than loot boxes...
They have a “one time payment” option. But I thought that’s what I already bought from the App Store when I bought it a couple years ago. I guess not. My totally fine, currently working version (v5) will probably randomly stop working at some point in the future and I’ll lose all my notes, because I suppose breaking totally working software is good business.
Wtf.
> They have a “one time payment” option. But I thought that’s what I already bought from the App Store when I bought it a couple years ago.
You said yourself you bought GoodNotes 5, and this is for GoodNotes 6.
There are publishers that drop reskin after reskin of the same game all with individual subscriptions, and they constantly try to kids from one into the other.
Then others clone that game and do the same thing. Fluvsies is an App Store virus.
This may be great for some publishers, but doesn’t benefit the consumer in any way. In fact as i consumer id much rather deal with Apple’s payment system than a separate payment mechanism for each app, especially when it comes to cancelling, changes etc
As an extreme example, if some company found a way to charge me $100 every day or my head would explode, that obviously is worth $100 to most of us. However, I'm currently not having to pay any company to prevent my head from exploding, so maybe that's just not something I should have to pay for.
But, if you're looking for counterexamples to show it can be done for less than a 15% cut, they're around. Almost every eBay category charges less than 15%, for example. And, as another user pointed out, Epic takes less than 15%. AliExpress charges 5-8% on average. Etsy is I think something like 6.5%.
eBay charges a final value fee of 12.9% and $.30 - $0.40 flat fee per order. And you pay a fee for international orders.
Contrast this with Steam, where search is better and the top result is not your competitor squatting your product name.
Apple sucks for their monopoly tactics, but it's very hard for me to have any sympathy for the rest of the mobile ecosystem. It's probably the most exploitative toxic software ecosystem.
Semi-related, but I also always pick an app that has family sharing of subscription over one that doesn't too (Headspace --> Breethe)
But, with these rules, I guess the goal is that I have to send them a gift card instead? I'll just not bother and get them something else.
Though you could make the argument that it would be more complex than it's worth. There's regional issues, like can I redeem your gift code from cdkeys.ru in the US. Can I return the app afterward if I don't want it for a 160 rubles credit? They might already need to handle that stuff for gift cards though.
Adopting the language of the abused to describe being inconvenienced by the company that makes your phone is uhh, something.
When "going elsewhere" means "getting stuff cheaper", people are likely going to go elsewhere to pay for any subscription even if setup is notably less convenient.
If my Shonen Jump subscription goes from $2 to $1.70, I'd rather pay the 30 cents than have to click and type for 2 minutes, and then have to solve a mystery to cancel it later.
If my ChatGPT Pro (hypothetical, I don't pay for that) went from $200 to $170, maybe worth it.
You're confusing developers with publishers. Developers love this shit, one simple API that's built in to the OS and you can support payments worldwide instead of having to integrate with dozens of payment providers all with their own quirky APIs.
Now for publishers, who want to maximise their profit margins and who don't have to actually write the code to do all those integrations, that's a different story. But I don't think there is a single developer in the world who enjoys integrating with 3rd party payment services.
Maybe you meant to specify a specific subset of iOS-only developers?
As if there are no developers who are also publishers.
Especially the smaller self-publishing developers won't benefit from this at all. It's just the large publishers like Epic who can afford the developer resources to build their own payment systems who have something to gain here.
Apple’s rules leveled the playing field. All this ruling does is give a competitive advantage to the big fish.
Integrating with Stripe is easy. Or with Mollie. Or with...
> Especially the smaller self-publishing developers won't benefit from this at all.
Indeed. No one will benefit from not paying 30% of revenue to Apple.
Somebody needs to alert the developers, because they're currently unaware of how much they love it. I've only ever seen devs complain about this stuff.
Of course, this is a self-selected group because people who are happy with the status quo don't usually talk about it loudly online. Still, many developers, including iOS-only indies, are unhappy with the App Store's payment constraints. Check out mjtsai's blog for regular roundups of their complaints.
There are several reports of people having their entire accounts banned, effectively losing access to everything they paid for. And it's basically impossible to get your account back.
...
> 3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
> 3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.
I do believe the court when they say that Apple has engaged in seriously anticompetitive behavior, and I don't look to Apple as some sort of altruistic honest company, but I also am curious to see if this reduces the average 'value' of a given app in the App Store. On the other hand, it could encourage the development of high-quality software since devs aren't paying the 30%+ tax on App Store sales.
By fighting so hard to keep the App Store as the sole distribution mechanism for iPhone software Apple has invited these compromises on themselves.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
So this change is just apple complying with 1.
Until a trial date is set there is no upcoming criminal trial.
You don't want courts to be able to decide on Monday that you're going to trial on Tuesday. You don't want courts (or any other entity of the judiciary or law enforcement) to decide that you're going to trial independently and the next step is your trial. Regardless of your political persuasion most people agree that fast and efficient prosecution by the state is a Bad Thing. Slow is good. Lots of hands and eyes involved in the process is good. Justice moves slowly by design.
Sure, there's checks and balances, and those are good, but it's ridiculous when we allow cases to drag on and then normalize it.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_delayed_is_justice_den...>
2. The US court found that Apple's implementation/requirement is bullshit and ordered it to stop. Apple complied, in the US only
" 3.1.3(a) “Reader” Apps: Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video). ... Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site ...
How times have changed.
Android ecosystem deals just fine with native apps being distributed in .apk format which can just easily be installed by the user clicking on the file. Why cant this happen on Apple devices too?
1. Read the argument
2. Disregard argument and instead try to read the person's mind or guess "what they really meant" to uncover some hidden agenda that you think must exist since it's simply not possible that somebody has a good argument against your pre-supposed belief.
3. Attack what you think they must actually believe rather than what they actually said.
You can also gas it up with some emotion too, especially if it's something deeply enmeshed in your identity like religion, politics, or Apple.
> Why cant this happen on Apple devices too?
There are many ways to interpret that question - a hypothetical pondering, or a "why doesn't it work this way?" in the most direct sense. I interpreted it as the latter.
> I think you've been hit with what I call the "hidden agenda" fallacy, which is something many people seem to commit routinely (or almost non-stop on reddit). It's closely related to (and involves) the Strawman fallacy, but includes some specific flawed reasoning.
Isn't this exactly what you've done to my comment?
> There are many ways to interpret that question - a hypothetical pondering, or a "why doesn't it work this way?" in the most direct sense. I interpreted it as the latter.
Yes, this is actually my point. That question isn't clearly saying, "you should do this on Apple devices too" it's asking, "why not?" The answer to that question could be anything like, "Because Apple and they're users believe it's better this way" or something more technical like, "software architecture limitations in <component>" or anything like that. You broadened your interpretation to assume that OP was advocating for Apple to make the change, but I don't see anything in their statement that would suggest that they are. You could maybe say, "well they should have clarified in the original" but then every comment would have to turn into a long list of what the person isn't saying, which could go on indefinitely. If you're really not sure what they meant, you could also practice the time-honored tradition of asking them and then dealing with their actual position, instead of assuming and addressing a strawman.
> > I think you've been hit with what I call the "hidden agenda" fallacy, which is something many people seem to commit routinely (or almost non-stop on reddit). It's closely related to (and involves) the Strawman fallacy, but includes some specific flawed reasoning.
> Isn't this exactly what you've done to my comment?
Hmm, possibly, I don't believe that I have based on what I wrote above in this comment above, but I will definitely consider deeper whether I've committed the same fallacy.
Btw, FWIW I don't mean anything personal by it. Nearly everyone does this to some extent (including me I'm sure), especially when it's a subject that we've been around repeatedly with lots of different people. There definitely are people taht post with hidden agendas and ask questions that aren't in good faith, so I'm not even saying we're always wrong when we do this. However, I do think it's important for discussion/conversation to strive not to make assumptions about somebody that we don't know. Honest questions can frequently sound the same as the bad faith questions, but assuming bad faith is an instant conversation killer.
Same goes for mobile compute power (which translates to browser performance)
And then there is the massive abuse of spyware in mobile apps. For that reason alone, I rarely bother with native apps if I can help it.
They really haven't.
'Web apps' are terrible, both from an end-user and developer perspective. They are a bloated, overcomplicated mess.
Making good apps is hard.
No, it's very much a technology issue. The overhead just for shipping an entire webbrowser with your app is insane. Building a decent UI in HTML/CSS which were never designed for that purpose, is an absolute disaster. HTML and CSS are for formatting text documents, not for designing user interfaces. There is a reason that there is a framework-of-the-week for webapps.
So now you have this massive webbrowser footprint, with the framework-of-the-week on top and then you have to write your app on top of this abomination in one of the most terrible languages ever invented.
The whole 'webapp' thing exists solely on the false promise of cost savings. Every kid who made a webpage for their aunt's Etsy business calls themselves a 'web designer', which has resulted in a race to the bottom. Web designer are a dime a dozen (sure, a good one may cost a pretty penny, but that's not what management sees). Now you can hire that cheap 'web designer' and they can build apps too, since that's just web tech, right? And since it all works cross-platform, you only need to build it once. What a cost savings!
They will even get an initial version out the door quickly. Look, everything worked out as expected. The problem is that it's quicksand. Your app grows and it gets harder and harder to fix issues and add features, as it's all build on shaky foundations. The more you move, the more difficult it becomes. Soon, you find yourself writing platform-specific code as the cross-platform promise doesn't hold for anything but the simplest functionality. Before you know it, you have this bloated, unmaintainable mess.
At the end of the day, it's easier and cheaper to just develop 2 native apps for iOS/Android than it is to build a 'webapp'. You can use nice, modern programming languages with very few footguns (Swift/Kotlin), good tooling, a UI toolkit designed to actually build UIs with, a set of well designed platform APIs. The whole cross-platform web-app thing sounds nice in theory, but it never delivers on its promises.
When using web apps, the browser you bring is no different than, say, having to install Qt. It's a static entity shared by all apps, with each app "just" being anywhere between kilobytes and tens of megabytes.
Electron brings a browser, but even then what makes the app bloated is still design Theres a baseline amount of bulk included, but it's mostly inconsequential to the actual app behavior - similar to how a standard system has god knows how many libraries and functions available but mostly unusued.
You could easily have an app written with PyQt that's way more sluggish, bloated and complicated despite using a fraction of the disk space. Shitty apps, that's the issue.
Tell me you know nothing about security without tell me you know nothing about security. Desktop software is a nightmare... and they can still be as bloated as the most bloated webapp.
Id like to hear your opinion on native apps built on a unified framework like react native. IMO they are a much buggier mess than web apps.
There are lots of good web apps. The problem is that companies more often than not prioritize native (let’s be real, react native) apps over web. And not mobile web, desktop web. So you have a second thought of a second thought when designing and building a mobile friendly web app.
I build most of my clients’ apps as web apps. I target their main platform of choice first and branch out from there. But if I start with desktop, I pre-plan for mobile as well.
You can have high performing web apps if you continually optimize for state and rendering performance.
And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone. I remember regularly using the iphone optimized version of Google Reader on Symbian, which of course had its own webkit based browser. Worked pretty well in 2008. I was working in Nokia Research then. Lots of people experimenting with browser based UIs there at there. Also the S60 webkit port came out of one of the teams there around 2005 or so. Nokia had a full blown browser running on smart phones years before the iphone launched. Incredible how they dropped the ball. I'm pretty sure that influenced the thinking in Apple when they were designing the iphone. Because Webkit of course was their project.
As does thousands of other online stores but that doesn’t mean they are App Stores too.
> The lack of native apps was resolved within a year of the iphone launch with the second generation. Probably they weren't ready for native developers and freezing APIs.
You’re basically just reiterating what I said here but in more favourable language.
At the end of the day, public demand was for native apps and the App Store was born from that. So all I’m doing is making a throw away comment about how times have changed.
> And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone.
Oh it really was. At the time it was heads and shoulders above anything else’s available for portable devices.
Which app stores pre-dated iOS?
Now, Symbian and various others had apps, but you had to buy them through the carrier. And carriers were even worse gatekeepers than Apple!
> Back then, native apps were considered a “must have” feature for smartphones.
This really feels like the beginning of things way worse.
I am worried that now game companies are incentivized to abandon "initial purchase" games/apps and go the "loot-box, subscription" route.
Is this the final nail in the pay one time for games coffin?
No, these will continue to be made. Just that the Premium iOS Games market will also stay much smaller than the IAP horror world the rest is.
But alternative payment flows will put some pressure on Apple to improve IAP features that many developers want to provide better experiences for their customers. Like IAP kind of sucks, unless your revenue model is tricking kids into charging things to mom's CC or finding whales and getting them addicted to your gambling app.
Removing apple and google from the payment chain mitigates this risk.
Edit: Maybe not globalizing App Store apps would resolve this? Or at least if you want to operate an app in a country, you need to incorporate in that country too? I think that might make it harder for overseas companies to get away with fraud.
The credit card system is far less generous than App Store's policies. Apple offers no-questions asked refunds. Credit cards don't.
As another commenter said, in some cases Apple's power in the relationship is detrimental to the consumer - if a user issues a chargeback then Apple can disable their entire Apple account.
If the customer requests too many refunds (say 3-4 within a few months) their Apple ID is likely to be banned from making further purchases.
Apple knows it's a rip-off: Apple has explicitly forbidden app developers from ever informing users how much they're paying for Apple's services.
Apple is too powerful in this relationship to provide it. If I have a problem with a merchant I can go to my credit card company about it. If I have a problem with my credit card company I might lose out on that one transaction but I can get a different credit card.
If I have a problem with Apple (or Steam or Nintendo or…) I either have to take the abuse or lose past “purchases”.
And the merchant themselves can do no questions asked refunds anyway.
Have any App Store consumers sued Apple? And were they successful?
Apple does refuse App Store refunds all the time. Apple also closes consumer Apple accounts all the time, for some reason or no reason, often refusing to tell the consumer the reason, alleging some kind of fraud, in which case the consumer loses everything they've ever purchased. One of the reasons, though, is consumers doing a chargeback on their credit card, which Apple hates and punishes severely.
Chargebacks are a huge pain in the butt to deal with and, as someone who's saw this first hand, chargebackery is correlated bad customership (two words that I just made up) to so I can understand that they'd hate consumers doing that instead of going through what's otherwise a pretty fair system.
Dealing with apple support in payments land has been, on the consumer side, one of the less infuriating things that have come out of what is now their support process. That said, the ux for getting refunds and checking on their status is antiquated, perhaps purposefully.
We need all the money we can get for killing some russians once they invade our borders in near future, so any contribution is highly appreciated.
You're not free to continue using Apple's payment system as a consumer.
Some things are relatively easy to refund via Apple, but not all of them. It's nearly impossible to get a refund for in-app purchases, gift cards, balance top-ups, auto-renewing subscriptions, redeemed digital goods, and so on. Coming from the EU, if I paid for these things directly with a credit card, I'd be able to get a refund in line with our consumer protection laws (if the item was sold deceptively, if it has a fault, if I am not satisfied for any reason within 14 days) that cover more or less all digital purchases - no problem.
To borrow your words, Apple's system is taking away trust. I like the refunds my European bank offers me because it operates under consumer-friendly laws. I don't trust Apple's refunds.
Anyway, opening any system to more choices for the consumer cannot decrease trust. If the consumer trusts the original payment option, they can use that. If that is not provided, but the customers don't trust other payment methods, the app won't make money. The market will soon negotiate so that the payment methods that customers and sellers find acceptable prevail. Apple fears it won't be their extortion (I mean payment system), and rightfully so. Aside from the Stockholm syndrome, there's very little reason to use it.
That decreases trust. Period.
You're claiming this is about adding choices, but it's not. App developers will be removing the choice for consumers to pay via Apple.
Saying it's my choice to then not use the app is disingenuous. When a good option is replaced with multiple worse options, there's no benefit to "more choices".
I really didn't think it necessary to reply to your sentence that "If that is not provided, but the customers don't trust other payment methods, the app won't make money" -- because it's so clearly relying on a false premise.
But since you need it further explained: trust in payment methods isn't binary. I prefer Apple payments but still use my credit card for everything else where it isn't available. If people can't use a better payment option, they'll fall back to a worse one. They usually won't just forego using the app entirely. Just look at the success of Adobe Creative Cloud despite its horrendous billing practices.
Again, that's what's wrong with your argument around choice. More choice leads to worse outcomes when you allow the best choice to be removed.
Developers are free to include no payment mechanism in the app that would involve an iAP, and tell people to click to go to the website (which can open an in app browser window).
Previously, apps could still require you to not use the apple payment option.
For example, Spotify only let you subscribe on the web because apple's 30% cut is larger than their margin, so they'd lose money if you subscribed in-app.
The "Buy" page in the app was just text saying "You cannot buy a subscription in the app". It couldn't link to the webpage since apple's rule banned that. It couldn't say "You can buy a subscription on our webpage" because apple's rules banned that.
Before, an app could simply not have any payment option in the app, and tell you "You cannot pay here". Now, an app can still choose to have no in-app payment and instead tell you "You can pay on the web", or embed that web payment option in-app.
You are still welcome to refuse to use any apps that don't support apple pay, as you could before.
This is unambiguously a win.
Presumably Apple could have had more control over communicating this if they opened up external payment options voluntarily.
Apple could have created an API for other payment providers to integrate with, so that you could sign up for IAP with whoever you want (imagine your IAP and subscriptions run by PayPal if you enter a PayPal account instead of a credit card).
Banks and payment processors already have tons of policies requiring payments to be presented in a clear way, refunds and cancellations processed properly, etc. There are also plenty of trademark and consumer protection laws that forbid misrepresentation. It's a solved problem that Apple pretends to be unsolvable and spreads FUD about to keep their cash cow.
Just use a virtual payment processor (PayPal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, etc) or any credit card directlyh. I mean, you often can't on an iPhone, and that's the whole problem.
If you have a genuine issue with what you bought via Apple's payment gateway and your bank files a credit card chargeback for you, Apple would even indiscriminately ban you. They are hardly the good guy.
They've installed themselves as an arbiter of what can be refunded and what cannot. But by law, the arbiter is the government, not Apple. So there are many, many problems with Apple's approach. The consumer rights are one, but acting above the law itself is a problem.
My credit card company. In fact, this is better because as a consumer, if I get scammed, I only need to deal with my CC company, and when I get my money back, I don't have to worry about Apple closing my account in retaliation.
> When Apple controlled the payment system,
I was beholden to Apple's whims and limitations. If I didn't like Apple's outcome, going to my credit card company was still an option. However, initiating a charge back could result in something happening to my account.
> imagine trying to sue a company in some foreign country to try to get your money back if they stole it
One phone call with my CC company (I don't even know if you still need to do the phone call anymore).
Oh, but... to be fair, I can't go to Apple's subscription page and cancel it there. So, there is that one thing.
It's possible to file a complaint with your credit card company and if need be do a chargeback.
When I use mobile apps I like being able to do all my spending in one place. I want to be able to go to subscriptions and cancel everything I don't need at once.
Just yesterday I had to manually stop a PayPal payment renewal since the merchants cancellation process doesn't work ( 2 emails to customer service and I get the vibe this is intentional).
That's not something I want to have to keep doing.
I can imagine Epic being able to convince people to use a 3rd party payment provider, but that won't happen for smaller studios.
and this is apple’s reasoning for why their strict control over the app store is warranted. they want it to be seen as trusted and infallible and that can’t happen if 3rd parties have free reign.
for me, the correct way forward isn’t external referrals. it’s allowing multiple app stores on devices. if you don't want the “untrusted” 3rd party store with more lax dev rules than Apple’s, just don’t use them.
Exactly. Or better yet just let me install whatever binaries I want. Make it clear I'm responsible for what I install though.
From the perspective of the average consumer, it's much easier for Apple to handle the whole flow. If I want to cancel my subscription via the app store it take 30 seconds, not a bunch of unanswered emails to customer support.