Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackify | Hacker News Reader

Crazy. I thought hackernews didn’t care because this happened yesterday and I never saw anything!

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

View on HN

So many questions:

- 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?

It'll be a nightmare to get an in-app change like this through their approval process. OP's solution to offload the entire thing to the web is a great stop-gap measure since when it is definitely rejected they can appeal through their App Store rep pointing to this external payment URL decision and have some small chance of getting it approved in the nearest term.

Because customers can’t trust payments in the app. Unless I’m being bounced out to somewhere I can see the URL and an SSL certificate I’m not paying.

What you’re suggesting is a dangerous anti-pattern.

I don't know about iOS, but on Android you can just pay through a Google Pay pop-up, you don't need to input any kind of payment information to the app itself. Does iOS not have such a mechanism?

iOS does and of course you can call an in-app Safari popup to any payment processor or website (with limitations on JavaScript speed) if you don't want to pop them into a browser and then back into the app.

It seems right now the rules are more clear about if you mention or link out, it’s ok. So that’s why.

We should geofence it to US yeah.

We are thinking of sending a push notification with a discount to pay on web and cancel

If you pay for something in the app apple gets 30% of that money. If you send users to your website to pay you get to keep it all now that the 27% fee was found illegal.

> I thought hackernews didn’t care because this happened yesterday and I never saw anything!

This is a bit of an "egg-on-face" moment for the community that has relentlessly defended Apple's righteousness.

Would be interested to hear the magnitude estimate of savings.

Presumably somewhere between 30% and 0%. Let's call it...20%?

Noiiice, tx for feeding my mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com