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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

> Oof, I don't envy app developers who have to tolerate this bullshit

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.

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Developers love paying 30% to a single middleman?

Hard disagree. Developers are often forced to integrate with both IAP and backend workarounds, which creates more effort and edge cases.

Maybe you meant to specify a specific subset of iOS-only developers?

> Now for publishers,

As if there are no developers who are also publishers.

If you're an indie developer who self-publishes, do you want to spend your time working on your app or on payment platform integrations?

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.

> If you're an indie developer who self-publishes, do you want to spend your time working on your app or on payment platform integrations?

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.

> Developers love this shit

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.

Apple's API is atrocious to work with, especially integrating it with a server to handle payment success/failure. It's annoyingly naive and kind of the API equivalent of "you're holding it wrong".

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