[HN Gopher] Update on StoreKit External Entitlement for dating apps
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Update on StoreKit External Entitlement for dating apps
Author : tech234a
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-03-30 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.apple.com)
| spideymans wrote:
| Regardless of whatever good intent regulators have for "freedom"
| or whatever, I feel like these efforts will just result in
| predatory developers having more freedom to prey on their users,
| and ultimately a worse experience for end users. These developers
| aren't righteous actors; they're just businesses, like any other,
| looking to extract as much money from their users.
|
| Ideally governments, and not Apple, would be regulating away this
| predatory behaviour, but I don't view that as a realistic
| prospect. Governments have never been great at regulating away
| anti-consumer behaviour.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Apple is also a business and therefore preys on their customers
| behind a veil of protectionism.
| spideymans wrote:
| I just want myself and consumers as a whole to be protected
| from predatory developers.
|
| Regarding the regulatory changes, I'd be happy with one of
| two things:
|
| A) Governments impose restrictions on third party developers
| that are largely similar to the consumer protection standards
| that Apple has imposed on developers, while opening up
| alternative payment platforms.
|
| B) Governments impose restrictions on Apple to prevent Apple
| from preying on their customers.
|
| However, governments are going down the path of removing
| whatever protections the App Store provided consumers,
| without replacing those protections with any other pro-
| consumer regulation. This is the absolute worst case scenario
| for me. We've seen time and time again how developers will
| prey on their users, particularly with subscriptions.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| What kind of predatory behavior do you predict that would
| exist, but wouldn't get the app banned from the app store?
| spideymans wrote:
| If software developers are free to distribute outside of
| controlled app stores, free from any external vetting, we'd
| see the exact same predatory behaviour we see in the broader
| software industry. Hard-to-cancel subscriptions and
| misleading free trial scams would be two big examples. Dating
| app publishers haven't made any secret of their predatory
| desire to make mobile subscription cancellations more
| difficult, to extract greater revenue from users, for example
| [0]
|
| However, the "attack surface" would be much bigger, given
| that consumers spend far more time on their smartphones than
| on PCs.
|
| 0: https://nypost.com/2019/11/06/tinder-owners-stock-tumbles-
| af...
| alimov wrote:
| I had a similar feeling. This isnt the people of x country
| suing Apple to allow external payment systems, this is
| businesses that make $1mil (I think) or more per year(?) via
| the AppStore... just business interests being paraded around as
| freedoms
| cmdli wrote:
| Ultimately, this is about freedom for tech companies, not
| users. Users will have to use whatever the tech companies give
| them, and tech companies are always going to do things that
| benefit themselves the most.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if users are simply forced to use some
| external service that has a much worse user experience and
| ultimately the consumer suffers.
| rhizome wrote:
| _" As we have previously said, we disagree with the ACM's
| original order and are appealing it."_
|
| Oh nothing, just some company interfering with a nation's
| democratically enabled oversight and consumer protection laws and
| policies.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's like literally why courts exist - to judge issues people
| as well as companies have with laws and executive orders based
| on these laws.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Not to mention: choice.
|
| Most of my friends here in the Netherlands don't have a credit
| card. Instead they have Maestro (a debit card -- aka Pin --
| with a bank account number on it instead of a credit card
| number). If you want to sell things online in the Netherlands,
| iDeal (a payment system) or go home.
| bnt wrote:
| And you're ok with that? An entire nation, single way of
| paying?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Some countries are small. The Netherlands has a population
| of 17 million. About the size of Michigan and Arizona
| combined.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's size and population is really similar to the city of
| L.A. and outskirts IIrC.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Ist that similar to the US? You basically only have credit
| cards there. Even debit cards run on the same network these
| days.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Interfering by...having an opinion and following the law even
| though they don't like it? That's a bizarre standard for
| interference. I guess the ideal democracy is the DPRK, where
| 100% of people vote for and support the same Glorious Leader.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > must limit its use to the app in the Netherlands storefront
|
| Apple has still not learnt the lesson. EU will see this as
| another provocation by Apple and the US is going the same way.
|
| Governments are losing patience with Apple.
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| I will never subscribe to services for the most part if they
| don't provide a way via Apple. I'm sorry but I don't want to
| email, call someone, answer hundred questions of why I want to
| unsubscribe etc. I want a single click unsubscribe with no
| questions asked. A very handful of companies do this. If they
| earn my trust then I will, until then I prefer to do it via
| Apple.
| [deleted]
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| PayPal has been doing this for years. In fact just last week
| I unsubscribed from something with one click on the PayPal
| site.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yeah but then your account gets frozen for no reason
| nicoburns wrote:
| Apple could almost certainly enforce apps offering
| unsubscribe functionality though a standard interface without
| forcing them to use their payment processing.
| spideymans wrote:
| That's only true so long as Apple can maintain their App
| Store monopoly.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Charging back a single bad actor doesn't get your
| Apple/Steam/Google account banned, though.
| agluszak wrote:
| > As we have previously said, we disagree with the ACM's original
| order and are appealing it.
|
| "As we have previously said, we don't want to give our users any
| freedom of choice and we won't give away a single penny from our
| monopoly"
| viro wrote:
| Apple's iap system is anti-dark pattern and because of that
| pro-consumer.
| alimov wrote:
| Are you an iOS / iPasOS user by chance? If you are and you
| continue to use these products would you mind explaining why
| you are staying with Apple products vs switching to Android or
| any other alternative that might meet your needs?
|
| If you are not someone that owns and uses an iOS / iPadOS
| device then I was hoping you might explain why this is
| troubling you so much.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| I'm more or less tied to the Apple ecosystem because all of
| my family and friends use iOS (I'm in the US), which means
| breaking out of that bubble and being the person turning the
| group chats green (or saying "can we move to
| telegram/WhatsApp/signal instead?") or saying "sorry, I can't
| FaceTime. Duo instead?" is not worth the bullshit that comes
| along with it. The stickiness factor of these services is far
| greater than zero.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Have you ever actually met or heard of a user (outside of
| software engineers on hacker news) that cares about this?
|
| I'd think the last 20+ years of the evolution of the internet
| would be clear enough evidence that:
|
| a) users don't want choice about these kinds of things.
|
| b) even when users do get these kinds of choices, they either
| can't be trusted to choose in their best interest (e.g.
| millions of people chose to install malware in the past 20
| years) OR
|
| c) bad actors will learn to trick users into making the choices
| they want (e.g. Amazon changing button colors to trick people
| into doing things they don't want to do)
|
| IMO trying to frame this as about "user choice" is
| disingenuous.
|
| There are benefits to not allowing choice in some case - I
| don't know if you've ever had to call a company to cancel a
| subscription you've signed up for online, but that doesn't
| happen to iOS IAP users.
| striking wrote:
| When have users been allowed to choose, in the "last 20+
| years of the evolution of the internet"?
|
| I think if you allowed users to choose between xx% markup and
| being able to cancel subscriptions from a centralized place,
| there would be takers of both approaches.
| mrmanner wrote:
| > I think if you allowed users to choose between xx% markup
| and being able to cancel subscriptions from a centralized
| place, there would be takers of both approaches.
|
| Many people choose Android phones, which kind of proves
| your point :)
| viro wrote:
| Every piece of dark pattern research kinda disagrees with
| you.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Users do care: Apple does not support the by far most popular
| payment card that people use (like 99% of cc payments).
|
| We only use Mastercard/VISA for travel, not for domestic
| payments.
| ben_w wrote:
| The way you're phrasing that makes me think that you think
| that all Apple users are American. Was that your intention?
| tedivm wrote:
| The fact that it's _hidden_ and that Apple causes problems
| for companies that expose how big the fee is makes it
| extremely consumer unfriendly.
|
| Do most users care or regularly discuss it? Probably not.
| Would they be happier paying 30% less for their apps though?
| Quite likely.
|
| Apple is also explicitly reviewing the payment providers
| involved in this. There's no reason to choose between "only
| apple" or "users will install malware". There is a huge
| middle ground here.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| We don't show ATM transaction fees either.
|
| We don't show creditcard fees either.
|
| In the Netherlands, companies are required to advertise
| all-in prices (VAT etc. etc.)
|
| Also, the whole lawsuit was not against the 30% appletax.
| It was about "freedom of payment provider". Ofcourse the
| real reason is the 30% commission, but that doesn't hold up
| in court.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Would they be happier paying 30% less for their apps
| though? Quite likely.
|
| Indeed, but that's almost certainly not going to be the
| consequential result of whatever happens to the App Store.
|
| The businesses might make 30% more, in their best case.
|
| Worst case, Apple is ordered to split up in a way that
| means development of iOS has to be funded independently of
| device sales, and also that there App Store is no longer
| allowed to be the unique store for iOS sales, in which case
| developers might find that each of the frameworks they rely
| on from ARKit to WidgetKit now has a licence fee, or end
| users of iOS may find they have to pay for upgrades instead
| of getting them free.
|
| It's possible that the economic rent Apple currently
| extracts from the App Store will end up somewhere more
| economically useful, _but not guaranteed_ for the same
| reasons mergers can reduce waste -- replication is
| necessarily redundant, even though it's also necessary for
| the exact competition that would naturally minimise
| economic rent extraction.
|
| (That said, I don't think any of this is why basically all
| governments are going after Big Tech right now. I think
| that's happening because Big Tech is scaring a lot of
| governments by being too big, and in the case of everyone
| outside the USA, too beholden to Washington -- as I've said
| before on the site, it is _ridiculous_ that I, a British
| national living in Berlin, have to report to the US federal
| government the use of encryption in the apps I write, while
| working for German businesses who sell the apps to other
| German business).
| jbverschoor wrote:
| > Indeed, but that's almost certainly not going to be the
| consequential result of whatever happens to the App
| Store.
|
| It is 100% gonna be 27% instead of 3%. So a potential
| saving for the consumer of 3%. No thank you!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Europe used regulation to cram down interchange fees [1].
| The US could (and should) do the same, again, with
| regulation. Users shouldn't have to care (just as they
| shouldn't have to understand the intricacies of core
| financial infra in their country), and Big Tech shouldn't
| be able to use monopoly power to take such a large cut.
|
| And lets not mince words: Apple in this case (and Google in
| theirs with their mobile ecosystem) is acting as a payment
| processor, and that function should be regulated as such.
| If that margin, once regulated down, is insufficient to
| operate an app store (hah), charge a flat fee per app to be
| listed and made available to customers. Shopify costs
| $30-300/month (depending on plan), which sounds like
| reasonable cost segmentation to adopt for providing a
| mobile storefront/app in their app store.
|
| [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/lt/I
| P_15_...
|
| (I'm aware this post is Netherlands specific; I'm speaking
| in broad strokes)
| atultw wrote:
| When apple cut the commission from 30% to 15% for small
| devs, most app developers didn't lower their prices. The
| savings went to developers. I think it will be similar here
| dspillett wrote:
| Or if the result is a proliferation of alternative
| payment processors because a ruling makes that possible,
| we'll see a proliferation of payment processors that
| charge 30% by some combination of means. It seems to be a
| value that the market will bare.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 27%.. The 3% is for payment processing, which now has to
| be paid somewhere else (actually in the Netherlands you
| can pay by direct debit, which is a fixed fee of only a
| few cents).
| car_analogy wrote:
| > There are benefits to not allowing choice in some case - I
| don't know if you've ever had to call a company to cancel a
| subscription you've signed up for online, but that doesn't
| happen to iOS IAP users.
|
| We already have a mechanism to restrict choice - regulation.
| Turning to corporations to safeguard consumer rights will end
| in tears, especially if used as an excuse to curtail user
| freedom.
|
| > Have you ever actually met or heard of a user [..] that
| cares about this?
|
| Ordinary people don't care about a lot of things they
| _should_ care about - there are only so many hours in the day
| to learn about issues and acquire the necessary knowledge to
| form an opinion. If experts in the relevant fields don 't
| care _for_ them, the only other ones are those that stand to
| profit.
|
| I bet it would be mostly mechanics speaking up if auto
| manufacturers started requiring only "licensed" brake pads or
| blinker fluid be used. Does that mean the practice isn't car-
| owner-hostile?
| viro wrote:
| It doesn't help that most devs are actively user-hostile.
| So yea I would rather trust Apple than some random dev that
| wants to make it as hard as possible to cancel that 3-day
| trial he just gave me. then charges $9.99 a week .... I'm
| looking at you plink.
| [deleted]
| dspillett wrote:
| _> than some random dev that wants to make it as hard as
| possible to cancel that 3-day trial_
|
| That is not a dev thing. At least not a _good dev_ thing.
| That is a shady business person thing, possibly holding
| devs to ransom with "I know you don 't like it, you can
| always leave if you dislike it enough and I'll get
| someone else to implement".
|
| Of course it is possible to be both a dev _and_ a shady
| business person, but away from one-man-band entrepreneurs
| people don 't usually have the desire not the time to
| excel at both.
| spideymans wrote:
| This is largely just a semantic argument. There are
| developers that are individuals (eg, you and me), and
| developers that are businesses (eg, EA, or Match Group).
| Developers that are businesses can be (and frequently
| are) predatory, just as businesses are frequently
| predatory.
|
| Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of software
| that people interact with is coming from developers that
| are businesses.
| m12k wrote:
| Most consumers have no idea what profit margins are. They
| don't know or understand how the one chosen payment method
| that Apple provides takes a 30% cut, or how that means that
| any service with less than 30% profit margin cannot be sold
| to them on the App Store unless the operator sells at a loss.
|
| Just because consumers don't understand how something works
| doesn't mean it can't be bad for them. There are already tons
| of examples of this in other areas like legal contracts and
| biology/chemistry, where consumers need experts and
| regulation to be their advocates, and ensure their rights.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| The ones that care know. This is true in any category of
| product or service. You have people that understand how a
| product's manufacturing might impact the environment and
| choose to make a different purchase decision. And actually,
| Apple correctly identified this as something their market
| cares about and speaks to in their marketing/comms. Do you
| know what market segment they don't really care about?
| Hacker news. We are the only ones who discuss this sort of
| thing and it doesn't really align with what Apple
| values/cares about anyway. Half the people on here are more
| probably more aligned with Android's values. This is not
| surprising.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They will still take a 27% cut.
|
| People fully understand that any other store takes a cut.
| The gov takes another 21%. It's arrogant to think that
| consumers don't understand. They understand once they've
| been told.
|
| Consumers aren't told that ATM transactions cost money.
| That a creditcard transaction costs the merchant even more
| money. etc. etc. etc.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| My mum wanted to sign up for Netflix on her iPad.
|
| > c) bad actors will learn to trick users into making the
| choices they want
|
| Bad actors have been doing this for _years_ , abusing Apple's
| amazingly convenient payment APIs, like a "Heart Rate
| Monitor" app that prompted users to put their finger on the
| touch ID sensor, and then throw up an $99 IAP screen which
| would be immediately purchased because the user's finger was
| already on the touch ID https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-
| touch-id-scam-apps/
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Is there a name for this pattern? Changing the user
| interface immediately before the user interacts with it?
| It's not normally a dark pattern like this but as far as I
| know it's an unsolved problem. E.g. I go to click a button
| but 50 milliseconds before that the app has decided to
| change layouts and now I click a completely different
| button than I meant to.
| rhizome wrote:
| Bait and switch.
| robbie-c wrote:
| My first job was for a telecoms startup, this concept is
| called "glare" there. E.g. I go to touch the screen to
| make a call, but someone starts calling my while my
| finger is in motion so the UI changes and I press a
| button that I didn't mean to.
| withinboredom wrote:
| This is very much a solved problem (see: coyote time),
| and is solved (for free!!!) by OS's and web browsers.
| When you implement your own controls and do stupid stuff
| with JavaScript, you end up with exactly as you say.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| the real way people would care is if it made things cheaper.
| very unlikely that will happen
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Max 3% if the new payment provider charges 0
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I don't want no stinking external payment system. First of all,
| it probably won't give lower prices. Second of all, I've seen
| way too many dark patterns regarding subscriptions.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| There are definitely some apps that charge more on iOS
| compared to paying directly. Off the top of my head YouTube
| and Spotify (before they removed it). And apps like Netflix
| doesn't even let you subscribe in the app. Or I'm unable to
| purchase e-books with the Amazon Kindle app. Even Twitch.tv's
| subscriptions costs more on iOS.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, they're not allowed when using external entitlements:
|
| > Consistent with the ACM's order, dating apps that are
| granted an entitlement to link out or use a third-party in-
| app payment provider will pay Apple a commission on
| transactions. Apple will charge a 27% commission on the
| price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a
| reduced rate that excludes value related to payment
| processing and related activities. Developers will be
| responsible for the collection and remittance of any
| applicable taxes, such as the Netherlands' value-added tax
| (VAT), for sales processed by a third-party payment
| provider.
|
| So yay for 3% saving, which they'll spend on another
| payment provider, do all the support, add reporting, vat
| etc. Seems like a lot of trouble. They simply made the
| wrong case, just like Epic did. If they would've said that
| they think 30% is too much, it'd be a whole different
| story.
|
| Would I want to save EUR0.75 on a EUR25/mo subscription and
| have to deal with dark patterns etc? Hell no. And
| especially no to the dating industry which is known for
| their tricks. Also, the 75ct saving should be split between
| the user and the dev. So my incentive would be 20ct? 10ct?
| Good luck lol
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| And that's why I hope the ACM will not accept this new
| change as enough.
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