[HN Gopher] Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and f...
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Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
Author : miiiiiike
Score : 651 points
Date : 2024-08-12 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.patreon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.patreon.com)
| philipov wrote:
| Is this going to affect people who don't use patreon through the
| apple app store?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| From my understanding: no.
|
| > If you have not switched to subscription billing by this
| November, your fans will not be able to purchase new
| memberships in the iOS app.
|
| Basically, you just won't be able to make purchases via the iOS
| app. Which is just really not great for creators.
|
| The per-creation billing is where this really stinks. I much
| prefer to have this all managed in Patreon rather than Apple.
| I'll be able to manage just fine, but this is going to cause
| confusion. Honestly, this is why the web is so important. At
| least you can still use the website to get around paying for
| this.
| jprete wrote:
| It sounds like they're outright killing per-creation
| patronage, so...yes? This seems to affect all their users?
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| where's the line between buying something on amazon, ordering a
| ride on uber, and patreon?
|
| why do some purchases get exempt and not others?
| htrp wrote:
| Subscriptions I expect....
| Hamuko wrote:
| Whatever you get as a Patreon patron isn't typically a physical
| product, unlike something you buy on Amazon (generally
| speaking) or a physical car ride. It's closer to a Netflix or a
| newspaper subscription, and Apple wants 30% of those too.
| akmarinov wrote:
| That's the reason why Kindle doesn't sell ebooks on iOS
| mintplant wrote:
| Apple is threatening to remove the Patreon app if they do the
| same.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| Whether Apple believes it can strongarm the related companies.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Arbitrary Apple rules. Apple decided that "physical" goods &
| services in app purchases don't get taxed (e.g., clothes, uber
| rides). Digital goods do because they feel like they can get
| away with it which is why you can't buy eBooks from Kobo or
| Amazon on iOS, can't buy or rent movies from Google on iOS.
| People will tell you this is for "safety" and to keep you from
| getting scammed but there's nothing stopping malicious actors
| from creating apps that promise to ship physical goods and just
| don't. At least with digital goods you should get whatever you
| pay for immediately after purchase.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But Apple doesn't take a share of Venmo or PayPal or Zelle
| either.
|
| And Patreon sure feels a lot more like those -- you're
| sending money to a creator.
|
| Sometimes you get extra content, but sometimes you don't.
| wpm wrote:
| The line is wherever Phil Schiller fucking says it is.
| delecti wrote:
| The line is "can you use the purchase solely in the app
| distributed through Apple's infrastructure". I think their fee
| is outrageous, but that does seem like a defensible line.
| rondini wrote:
| Except they're stepping far over that line! You can use a
| Patreon subscription on all platforms, same as a Spotify or
| Netflix or Kobo... and yet they want a cut even when they
| have no part in the payment processing. Totally indefensible
| imo.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, I think you misunderstand. It's not "can you use it
| elsewhere?", it's "if the user chose to, could they use the
| purchase solely inside the context of the Apple ecosystem?"
|
| That is, if someone wants to, they can use Patreon's iOS
| app, not interact with Patreon in any other way, and get
| all of the benefits available to patrons.
| jjcm wrote:
| I do wonder if a workaround here is buying a physical postcard
| from a patreon creator that comes with a free monthly
| subscription. A 50c mailed card would be cheaper for any
| subscription above $2.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is there a reason why Patreon doesn't just pull out of the App
| Store? Whenever I got Patreon rewards, I'd just get them in an
| email notification and the link there took me to the website.
| Worked great without having to download an app.
| xenospn wrote:
| The 30% fee is steep, but conversion rates using in-app
| purchase are astronomical compared to regular webpages with a
| credit card form. Everyone hates it (developers, I mean), but
| it works very well.
| rafavento wrote:
| This isn't going to hit developers.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| The developers part relates to having to deal with Apple
| and Google's review process, hence the dislike.
| xenospn wrote:
| If they pass the 30% on, sure. Not so easy for smaller
| apps. Patreon might pull it off.
| yunwal wrote:
| In case anyone wants to know why this is: it's because 1) I
| don't have to enter credit card information 2) Apple allows
| me to cancel subscriptions in a central location as soon as I
| sign up
|
| If your service forces me to auto-renew my subscription, I'm
| probably not gonna buy it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Patreon has been pushing an app-based approach for awhile now;
| every email I get from them has callouts to open the
| notification in their app.
|
| I don't know why they badly want this - presumably for more
| user tracking, or because studies show that people engage more,
| or whatever - but pulling out of the app store would be at odds
| with this desire to push everyone into their app.
| daemin wrote:
| My assumption would be that if you have a company's app
| installed it allows them to spam you with marketing
| notifications for different things. Much harder to do when
| you can only use emails, because too many emails can get you
| put into spam.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Companies that send me too many notifications for crap get
| their notification privledges revoked... Can't Apple users
| do that too?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's not just the notifications; it's the other data that
| can be more easily collected through the app than through
| a browser.
|
| Browsers can have things like adblockers that keep you
| from collecting a very valuable commodity: data.
| Zak wrote:
| Sources seem to be pretty consistent in saying that on average,
| native app users are significantly more profitable for
| companies than web users. While I'm sure that's partially
| because the most dedicated users of a given service are the
| most likely to install the native app, an app does afford more
| opportunity to collect data about the user and to attempt to
| grab the user's attention.
|
| As a user, I strongly prefer websites for this sort of thing.
| I'll pay attention when it suits _me_ , not when the service
| wants me to. It does explain why Patreon wants to have an app
| though.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Absurd. What next, they want a 30% cut from me when I set up
| automatic payments for my credit card through the banks iOS app?
| polotics wrote:
| No! They want 30% of your net worth each time you connect to
| your bank over the internet using an Apple device.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| 30% of a negative number, I'll take _that_ deal in a
| heartbeat.
| grecy wrote:
| Interesting that is exactly what investment specialists do...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Yeah I can't understand why people think that inviting new
| middlemen into their transactions is acceptable. It's time to
| stop prostrating ourselves to these companies.
| macintux wrote:
| It's complicated.
|
| Apple has given me a simple way to manage many of my
| subscriptions, a single pane of glass, which I appreciate.
| I'm fine paying a little extra for that.
|
| It would be more valuable to me if Apple didn't charge too
| much, which turns away service providers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can 't understand why people think that inviting new
| middlemen into their transactions is acceptable_
|
| Same reason people use credit cards or Gmail or hell Patreon.
| It reduces the number of counterparties you have to deal with
| and trust.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| That attitude made sense when Google was trustworthy, I
| guess.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's not a Google-specific attitude - it's the value
| proposition of all middlemen everywhere.
|
| Facilitation of transactions and assuming the risk.
|
| It's worth it to many. I gladly pay Apple the extra 30%
| or whatever because it adds up to <$10 per month for me
| and I don't have to jump through hoops to cancel subs.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Because the people who truly value freedom are outliers, seen
| as weirdos.
| Despegar wrote:
| It's fine for App Store developers to complain about their
| costs of doing business like any other business. I'm not sure
| what the point of bringing up nonsensical hypotheticals like
| bank payments is.
| talldayo wrote:
| Until 3 days ago, demanding a cut from sales generated over
| outbound hyperlinks was considered a nonsense hypothetical
| too.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Except this is a clear racket and not a regular cost of doing
| business. Imagine Microsoft tomorrow deciding to require 30%
| of even a fraction of things happing on windows. Imagine
| Apple trying to do this on the Mac. It's laughably anti-
| competitive and the only reason they're not doing it on the
| Mac is because it would expose the absurdity of the situation
| on iOS.
| wpm wrote:
| That, and Apple probably requires a shit load of third
| party utilities that do "naughty" things like read the file
| system or be "not sandboxed" in order to actually get any
| work done. They need the Mac to write APIs to charge people
| 30% on the App Store for the iPhone.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Think bigger, Apple Intelligence will now detect that you are
| ordering a new TV over the phone and they will want their cut.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Apple doesn't charge 30% for physical good sold through apps
| on ios.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| Yet.
| chihuahua wrote:
| You use your bank's app? Guess what, Apple gets 30% of
| your account balance. Look at your 401k balance? Believe
| it or not, Apple owns 30% of that.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The point is that since they keep broadening what they do
| want 30% of, we expect the next thing they'll do is
| removing the exception for physical goods.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| It's always been 30% for virtual goods; definition hasn't
| broadened.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| That's an interesting idea.
|
| What if, instead of 'subscribing' for $10, you purchase a
| grain of sand for $10.
|
| The grain of sand is available for collection from
| somewhere, doesn't matter where because nobody would bother
| to collect it. Your physical purchase comes with free
| access to digital content.
| MikeRichardson wrote:
| This wouldn't work, unless you actually have some
| legitimate way to obtain the grain of sand.
|
| So Patreon would have to actually staff a location
| somewhere that distributes the sand.
| Aloisius wrote:
| So sell air which is only available for self-service
| pickup.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Its funny, because this is the exact opposite of how some
| cannabis dispensaries operate in Washington DC. It is
| illegal to sell cannabis there, but not to posses or to
| gift it. So you buy a $50 QR code that lets you access
| "digital art", and they give you a free 1/8 of cannabis
| with your purchase as a "gift".
| xyst wrote:
| At Apple, that will take at least 5-10 years before they get
| to that state. Siri is barely usable beyond simple "create
| reminder" or "set timer" queries/commands.
|
| Hope by then, we see government intervention and break up big
| tech
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Close. They already get a % whenever you use Apple Pay. In
| fact, it's part of why the EU demanded Apple provide NFC APIs
| to allow third-party replacements of the built-in Wallet app.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://paymentdepot.com/blog/apple-pay-fees-for-merchants/
|
| >Q: What fees does Apple charge merchants for using Apple
| Pay?
|
| >Apple does not charge merchants any fees for accepting Apple
| Pay payments. However, merchants may still be subject to fees
| from their payment processor or bank. Remember, credit cards
| and debit cards are behind each Apple customer purchase.
|
| >Apple Pay fees are generally lower than traditional credit
| card processing. Credit card issuers charge small businesses
| substantially more. As such, many SMBs ask employees to
| encourage Apple Pay transactions.
|
| >Merchants, on the other hand, aren't charged at all to use
| Apple Pay on physical and eCommerce transactions.
|
| Looks like Apple Pay is cheaper for everyone except banks:
|
| >Major banks such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and
| Capital One are unhappy with their cut from Apple. So much so
| that they've formally requested that Visa, "change the way
| that it processes certain Apple Pay transactions." In other
| words, pay Apple less in transaction fees.
|
| This website has a better breakdown of costs under the "What
| are the fees" section, but no firm figures, and the only
| estimate is from 10 years ago:
|
| https://www.applemust.com/how-apple-pay-makes-money-
| merchant...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Ok, so that sounds like Apple muscled banks out of their
| swipe fees.
| fiatpandas wrote:
| 30% cut of digital sales top line revenue of every physical
| business you enter with your iPhone turned on.
| jprete wrote:
| I remember reading that per-creation billing is a very important
| feature for Patreon creators, because it removes the moral
| obligation to produce content just to justify a subscription.
|
| If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is
| just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a
| really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated
| markets to change their own structure and products just to fit
| Apple's preferred billing flow.
| balozi wrote:
| Patreon also stands to gain from this change. Come think of it,
| the new arrangement is a win for everyone involved - except the
| actual patrons ofcourse.
| voiceblue wrote:
| Is there any evidence that Apple has actually made this
| "threat"? I'm not seeing anything other than what Patreon has
| claimed (and it seems that they are only recently going to
| begin to allow iOS purchases, which might mean they are
| bringing this upon themselves).
|
| I am suspicious, because the specific change to per-creation
| billing is overwhelmingly positive for Patreon (and, as you
| pointed out, not for its users), from a business economics
| perspective (assuming they don't lose too many users over
| this). It also seems odd for Apple to press that point
| specifically.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Apple has been on a crusade against all payments not going
| through them for many years. I absolutely believe this is
| Apple's fault, although I would have expected this to have
| happened much sooner.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am a creator on the per-creation model and I got a very
| unambiguously worded email from Patreon this morning
| basically saying "if we want to be on the iOS store, Apple
| requires that we remove all billing methods that are not
| compatible with their payment method, and yours is not; in
| November 2025, you _will_ be switched to the one billing
| method that Apple allows us to still have. If you would
| like to start earlier go to this link and hit this button
| to start the process. " They used more words but they were
| very clear that this is a thing Apple is imposing on them
| as the price for being on the iOS App Store.
| xmprt wrote:
| Not really. There are a lot of creators I watch who only make
| content once a year. Sometimes they'll have 2 videos a year
| if they're lucky. With the per creation model, I have no
| problems supporting them but if it's billed monthly then the
| price becomes a lot steeper. Alternatively they could reduce
| the cost to support them but then the fees becomes much
| higher for both the creator and patreon (29c + 5% IIRC).
| ncr100 wrote:
| Agreed - the market will respond to these higher costs in a
| predictable manner. A smaller market.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Taking away the options is not a win for the creators
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| How can they gain after losing 30% to Apple?
| borski wrote:
| Relative to not having predictable monthly recurring
| revenue.
| bluGill wrote:
| Patreon doesn't lose anything to Apple - they give creators
| on Patreon a choice - charge Apple users more to cover the
| 30%, or eat the loss. I don't know what Patreon's take is,
| they are going to take the same either way. However they
| know their customers and users will lose from this and it
| is good for them to look out for their customers (it
| doesn't costs them much)
| cyrnel wrote:
| Customers leave when prices rise above their willingness
| to pay. Some customers will realize on their own that
| they can bypass Apple's fee by subscribing through the
| browser, but most won't (since Apple forbids even
| mentioning this trick).
| theturtle32 wrote:
| This, imo is a solid argument for "fine then, we're just
| gonna pull our app and use mobile web exclusively."
| bluGill wrote:
| Only if the users follow. If users decide they won't use
| the mobile web then patreon and the creators they
| represent lose. Nobody knows for sure, but there is a
| general belief that users will not follow (or at least
| enough won't follow).
| jachee wrote:
| If patreon pulls their app, and the former app users
| still want access to the content they patronized, they'll
| go to wherever it is.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Perhaps, although that requires experimenting the new fee
| model first.
|
| It's too big of a decision to take without actual
| numbers, and having gone through it for a few months also
| helps on the communication side: on the surface Patreon
| at least gave it a try, and there's even a chance users
| are pissed off enough by the new model to campaign for
| that change and defend the move to their fans.
| merlindru wrote:
| But patreon earns off of those purchases, right? And
| since a 30% price increase deincentivizes purchases for
| customers, they'll have less purchases.
|
| Or, of course, eating the 30% fee yourself deincentivizes
| you to use the platform (or upload content as regularly)
| if you opt for that one
|
| I'd say it's a loss for everyone involved except for
| Apple. Since Apple now gets a cut from all transactions
| its hard for me to see this as anything else except
| hostile and arrogant
| bloppe wrote:
| Patreon's take will not be the same. Apple's fee is
| charged first. So for all the creators that don't raise
| prices, Patreon is also getting 30% less, because they
| charge flat fees. And every creator that does raise
| prices will probably end up with fewer patrons, or
| patrons donating less, and will probably have a similar
| effect.
|
| It also just kinda harshes everyone's vibe when they
| eventually realize they're being gypped and paying a lot
| more than others for the same thing, and that can cause
| people to just unsubscribe.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Fewer patrons is a likely consequence, which would not be a
| win.
| darknavi wrote:
| Maybe I am missing something but Apple supports consumable
| purchases. Think any game with purchasable virtual currency.
|
| Can't Patreon support a ton of different-priced SKUs and let
| creators use those SKUs for one-off purchases?
| Volundr wrote:
| I think what your missing is that these aren't one-off user
| initiated purchases. I back a couple of patterns that are a
| per-video model, so if the content creator produces 2 videos
| I'm charged 2x $amount that month. If they produce nothing
| I'm charged nothing. Apple doesn't provide a way of doing
| this. In the scenario you described I'd have to monthly count
| up how many videos said content creator produced and manually
| submit an order through the app... And users aren't going to
| do that. Hell, I'm not going to do that.
| darknavi wrote:
| Ah yeah. I definitely was not aware that's how it worked. I
| was thinking user-initiated purchases, not purchase-on-
| demand.
| mattstir wrote:
| That's distinct from the existing per-creation billing in a
| few ways, with the most obvious being that the existing
| method is automated while consumable purchases require user
| input. Trying to create a SKU for every possible per-creation
| price is also just incredibly janky and hacky in a
| fundamental way that would never scale and would probably
| make accounting next to impossible.
| meagher wrote:
| Where did you read that? I worked at Patreon from 2018-2021 and
| per creation was a much smaller group than recurring during
| that time at least. (Think per creation was even disabled as an
| option for new sign-ups for a while.)
| burkaman wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear this, I thought it was the main selling
| point of Patreon. I have per-creation subscriptions to a few
| people on Patreon who produce very high-quality stuff very
| infrequently, and I will probably cancel if they are forced
| to switch to monthly billing. Their stuff is great, but not
| so great that I'm willing to sign up for a monthly fee that I
| forget about and then realize 3 years later that they've
| stopped making stuff.
| trollied wrote:
| The thing most aren't thinking about is that per-creation
| billing is an absolute nightmare, and I don't blame Apple for
| not supporting it. Can't even begin to imagine the support
| nightmare/chargebacks etc.
|
| It's not all about the 30% cut.
|
| If it was easy and trouble free, they would support it.
|
| Imagine what a great time apps would have if Apple let them
| charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user
| authorisation?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user
| authorisation?
|
| It's a simple matter of user communication: you make it clear
| from the start that the billing will be unpredictable, and
| potentially provide a ceiling for monthly bills to let the
| user stop if it goes out of hand.
|
| I follow per creation billing creators and it's fine. Amazon
| also offers an option to auto buy new volumes of a series.
|
| The customer not knowing in advance how much they'll be
| billed isn't common, but it's not complex in itself.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Patreon has been trying to kill it for like half the time I've
| been using Patreon. They haven't offered it as an option for
| new campaigns for years, and their last redesign completely
| removed what little data was available in the web UI - you
| wanna know how much money you can expect? Download a CSV and do
| it yourself, we can't be bothered to give you even the simplest
| data of "your next three posts will be worth $x, $y, and $z"
| any more.
|
| I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god
| _finally_ we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn
| thing ". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon
| clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together
| my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in
| making a Patreon-like that _does_ offer it and recapitulating
| the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform,
| what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough
| money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough
| for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and
| tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big
| enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay _their_ tithe or
| leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games 's
| suits".
|
| Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth
| Problems and says "sign me _right_ the fuck up, convincing a
| bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running
| a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple
| tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from
| fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a _great_ way to
| spend a few years of my life ", hey, I'll gladly give you input
| on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or
| something.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The world where Apple is just completely fine with Apple users
| paying $13 instead of $10 for a subscription if they do it
| through an app is an interesting one.
|
| Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think
| about it they must think very little of their customers treating
| them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple'
| should be remembered.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Apple users (I'm not one of them) seem fine with that
| arrangement.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Apple is making sure that it is not easy for Apple users to
| find out about this fee.
| EricE wrote:
| Hardly! The fee has been a hot topic of discussion since
| day one.
| akudha wrote:
| Hot topic of discussion where? Amongst developers, right?
| How many non-developer Apple users are aware of Apple's
| shenanigans? I doubt not many.
|
| Even if the end users are aware and accept it, that
| doesn't make Apple right.
|
| We as a society accept a lot of things - from the
| security theatre at airports (last week, I saw photos of
| passengers taken, for domestic flights) to Amazon workers
| peeing in bottles. As long as we get our crap the same
| day, we're good with some unfortunate souls peeing in
| bottles. If it bothered us, we'd stop shopping at Amazon,
| for example.
|
| All this to say, we've been trained very well to tolerate
| and even accept a lot of bad behavior if it helps with
| our laziness. Doesn't mean it is right though
| EricE wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-plans-new-fees-
| rest...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/appl
| es-...
|
| https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/do-you-have-to-pay-
| the...
|
| Yes, there is far more discussion in tech/nerd spaces,
| but it's also being talked about in non-tech areas too.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Nobody is discussing this outside of tech and nerd spaces
| nozzlegear wrote:
| It could be that nobody _cares_ outside tech and nerd
| spaces.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Apple users mostly don't know about the fee and almost all of
| them didn't know about it when they joined the apple
| ecosystem.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| In a survey of my non-technical friends, only a very small
| minority seemed to know that Apple took any cut whatsoever.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| How would they know and why would they care?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Good question. But reading this thread and every one of
| these has multiple people saying "Apple users know and
| choose to have this experience, we've opted in."
| talldayo wrote:
| We have to go further than that. Naming and shaming Tim Cook
| hasn't changed anything from Butterfly keyboards to
| cringeworthy "mother earth" interviews to exploitative Chinese
| manufacturing schemes. Apple doesn't speak your language, you
| can only communicate to them by showing them a world where they
| hurt.
|
| So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old
| problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing
| irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their
| concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've
| done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've
| stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would
| even be solvent.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Butterfly keyboards are gone.
| talldayo wrote:
| All it took was four years, an impending major redesign and
| a few class-action lawsuits over switch failures. Apple was
| definitely super responsive about that one. Or maybe it was
| their courage speaking.
| dangus wrote:
| While that's all very true, I find it notable to point
| out that the company stopped making butterfly keyboards 5
| years ago. The folks out there that are still bitter
| about this really need to find something else to occupy
| their mindspace.
|
| In related news, I just got my keyboard settlement check!
| talldayo wrote:
| I'm not bringing it up apropos of nothing; it's evidence
| that Apple doesn't listen to blatant (and epistemically
| correct) outcry from their customers when they make a
| mistake. When the Butterfly keyboard released people were
| literally shocked; I remember getting messages from
| people asking if their Macbook keyboard shipped broken
| after the honeymoon phase wore off. There were SGA
| members on Twitter bemoaning how they hated their job on
| the new laptop; programmers everywhere plugging in USB-C
| keyboards to make their Starbucks workstation tolerable.
| It was inconceivable that you'd pay a price premium for
| thinness when all it got you was a miserable keyboard and
| thermal issues.
|
| For crying out loud; you just got your settlement for a
| hardware flaw Apple doesn't admit exists 8 years after
| they shipped the flawed product. _Mankind_ cannot sustain
| this pattern of business refusing to back-down from
| demonstrably harmful practices that their customers can
| identify and isolate. The Butterfly keyboard is a
| microcosm of how Apple ships deliberately flawed products
| in an attempt to market a solution they are exclusively
| qualified to sell. And despite all this, people still
| rush to Apple 's aid like it's wrong to call them out for
| being so greedily obstinate. The reality distortion field
| is still in full effect.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Yes, how much time do you think a redesign takes?
| wmf wrote:
| How much time do you think it takes to _go back to the
| working 2015 design_?
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Probably about a year.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Usually schemes like this have terms like "you're not allowed
| to offer a cheaper price outside the ecosystem".
| neongreen wrote:
| My understanding from reading the Apple v Epic court
| documents is that Apple is unique in that it doesn't force
| cheaper prices outside the ecosystem. I might be wrong
| though.
| dopamean wrote:
| This has got to be helpful in arguing in court that there's
| nothing wrong with the apple tax.
| alwa wrote:
| I vaguely recall them imposing an anti-steering kind of
| provision, though, didn't they? Where you can do what you
| want on your own channels, but you can't tip off the iOS
| user to that fact at the point of sale in the app?
|
| I vaguely remember the courts being unimpressed with that
| requirement, and Apple maliciously complying with the
| judgment by allowing something hilariously minimal and
| uninformative, like "one tiny in-app link to your main
| website but you can't say the word 'cheaper,'" something
| along those lines.
|
| (Edited to add: yes, sounds like that came post-Epic, and
| involved an even more Dantean set of caveats than I'd
| remembered. Among other things, not only can there be no
| more than one link, but that one link can only ever appear
| in one place in the app, it can't "discourage" in-app
| payment, and its one appearance can't be during the payment
| flow:
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/16/apples-app-
| store-... )
| lovethevoid wrote:
| In Apples case they changed that several years ago so you can
| definitely charge your Apple users more.
|
| However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of
| showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the
| Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping
| things vague, but even then you might get rejected for
| "discouraging the in-app purchase system". This doesnt apply
| to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very
| recently.
| maccard wrote:
| I don't think that's unreasonable - the user found your app
| through apple. Imagine if I sold tools, and I hung out in
| Home Depot next to our tools display telling people "hey,
| if you buy them directly from me, you can save 30%"
|
| I can't see that lasting very long.
| pests wrote:
| So if I see an app on TV, go to the app store and
| download it, somehow I found it through Apple?
|
| No, I very obviously saw it on TV and got it from Apple
| because that's the only way to install native apps on
| iOS.
| antonyt wrote:
| It's arguably unreasonable in a physical space but this
| is virtual space we're talking about.
|
| In more open ecosystems like the web browser, you can
| literally install extensions that tell you where you can
| buy something for cheaper. I'm sure Amazon, Walmart, and
| friends would love for that to be impossible.
|
| The virtual space only "belongs" to Apple because they've
| deliberately walled it off.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| In Patreon's case, I don't think the user found the
| content "through Apple". The customer found the creator,
| and the creator said "Pay me through Patreon". The user,
| only having an iOS based device is now trapped by Apple's
| restrictions on the transaction, which brings dubious
| benifits to the table.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Am I not allowed to visit the Patreon website from my iOS
| device?
| jasonjayr wrote:
| As long as Apple provides a standards-compliant web
| browser, of course you are.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| That horse has left the barn. But if there was a
| conceivable way and leverage to get a cut on paid content
| on _the open internet_ , I'm sure apple would find a way
| to coerce money from _those_ visits too.
|
| One analogy: By offering only Fairplay DRM on iPhone,
| they get a cut that might otherwise have gone to Google
| (widevine), Microsoft (playready) or some other third
| party.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Since creators point people to their patreon page, surely
| that gives Patreon the ability to show a lower price in
| the browser even for iOS users.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > ... the user found your app through apple.
|
| Not necessarily. They may have heard about it on the
| internet and then looked in the app store for it.
| danShumway wrote:
| When was the last time you bought any large item from a
| physical store that didn't come with advertisements in
| the packaging for direct services?
|
| If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be
| advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services
| (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the
| _outside_ of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart,
| there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons
| from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking _Apple Ipad_
| from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its
| direct services once you start using the product.
|
| People bring up this comparison all the time and it's
| very simply not true. You can advertise direct services
| inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple
| is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the
| _store page_ , Apple is saying that you can't advertise
| alternative platforms _in the app itself._
|
| There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts
| like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on
| whether a physical product you buy from them can have an
| advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the
| box or software that comes with it.
|
| If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really
| should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store
| purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart.
| After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right?
| Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases?
| That's how Apple sees the world.
| bluGill wrote:
| Looks close - those services are typically not the same
| as what you can get at Walmart. You can get parts, but
| often the device itself isn't sold (instead they list
| places you can buy). Or if you can buy direct it is
| cheaper from Walmart. Walmart is a large enough customer
| that they won't let you sell it for less (either you
| don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at
| Walmart).
| mistercheph wrote:
| Walmart does, in fact, sell devices, and Apple uses their
| devices to advertise third party services to Walmart
| customers which compete (e.g. Amazon app)
| danShumway wrote:
| > those services are typically not the same as what you
| can get at Walmart.
|
| Several things:
|
| A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service
| that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.
|
| B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that
| Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).
|
| C) Is your implication that if Walmart _did_ open up a
| music streaming service that suddenly it would be
| improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices
| purchased from Walmart? Because that 's a wild thing to
| suggest.
|
| D) Just re-stating B more directly: _Apple_ advertises
| direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store -
| a direct competitor to Walmart 's tech hardware sales -
| for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple
| advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging
| for devices that are bought from Walmart.
|
| Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block
| letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best
| place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not
| be able to link to this page within an iOS app.
|
| There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.
|
| > Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.
|
| I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but
| I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering
| all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an
| Apple store.
|
| > Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let
| you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart,
| or you will sell zero at Walmart).
|
| Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But
| amazingly, somehow _less_ egregious than what Apple is
| doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive
| does a company have to be in order to be worse than
| _Walmart_? That 's almost an accomplishment.
| bluGill wrote:
| Walmart carefully avoids anti-competitiveness in these
| deals. The OEM cannot sell for less than Walmart, but the
| target down the street might.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| I have been using patreon for 5 years, and I "found" it
| via the artists I like who use it as a platform. If I buy
| my first iPhone tomorrow and download the patreon app,
| that's not because apple helped me discover anything.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| It might even be vice versa: in theory, as an Android
| user you might have learned about this thing called
| "iPhone" in an Patreon banner promoting the fact that
| Patreon can be downloaded through the Appstore.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved
| by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him
| complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy
| books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
|
| In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick
| to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of
| a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit
| juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the
| "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on
| a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
|
| The failings of any organization are more often than not the
| fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
|
| [0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick
| because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple
| has a very well-paid legal department.
|
| The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of
| antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
|
| The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's
| policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently
| than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal
| single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The
| US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are
| 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| > The US will let corproations do whatever they want until
| they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
|
| *The US will let corporations do whatever they want while
| they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant
| judges.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the
| relevant judges_
|
| There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times,
| they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter
| was correct.
|
| We can't be going into courts of law making poop up.
| Going into a court of law and saying that a company with
| 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is
| a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to
| the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt
| bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making
| that argument. They are just following the law. There's
| not corruption involved.
|
| People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to
| go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple
| is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a
| monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what
| Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do
| address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we
| don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple
| is.
|
| But this political theater where you make an issue of
| what Apple is, and then try to address it in court
| knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need
| some leaders who will actually write some new laws and
| put them up for a vote.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| > Going into a court of law and saying that a company
| with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in
| PCs is a "monopoly"
|
| Usually courts don't care about their global market share
| but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for
| mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought
| to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is
| enough to argue abuse of dominant market position.
|
| Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free
| market" doesn't really work at the level that the US
| currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how
| the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack
| thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I
| honestly am glad of.
| bix6 wrote:
| How is that insulting to the judge? If you have 27% you
| could be the single biggest player in a given market and
| exercise monopoly-like control. Especially considering
| all the colluding occurring.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| * If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player
| in a given market*
|
| Not if your competitor, android, controls 70% of the
| market.
|
| That's what I meant about being insulting. In court, when
| we're making these kinds of claims, we shouldn't talk
| about what could be, we must talk about what is.
| mcguire wrote:
| 70% worldwide. 30-40% in the US.
|
| And "Android" is a bunch of companies, not one.
| arvindh-manian wrote:
| The Brown Shoe Company merger in the 1960s was shot down,
| even though it would only control around 7% of the
| nation's shoe supply.
|
| It's important to not just consider the quantitative
| impact of the monopolist (percent of market share) but
| also the qualitative components (is it vertically
| integrated? is it hurting consumers?).
|
| I'm not sure whether or not Apple is a monopolist, but I
| certainly think there are some arguments.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Yup, and at the time of the Paramount Decree the movie
| studios had 17% of theaters and 45% of film revenue. And
| that was across 5 independent studios.
|
| Apple has over 50% of smartphone marketshare in the U.S.
| and over 60% of mobile app revenue.
| wpm wrote:
| US Antitrust law generally is about pricing, collusion
| (over pricing or market access), and competition more so
| than just monopoly power. It is straight up not illegal
| to be a monopoly, only to abuse the position.
|
| I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a
| "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their
| platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks
| like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an
| anti-competitive practice by the courts. You can buy a
| Brother printer and not have to buy paper or toner from
| them, why should I have to buy my apps from Apple? And to
| be clear, that is precisely how Apple thinks of the
| relationship between the user and the app. Apple owns
| that relationship. They mediate. They manage. They
| facilitate. No one else. Users don't buy apps. Users pay
| Apple. Apple pays the app developers.
| nodamage wrote:
| > I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a
| "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their
| platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks
| like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an
| anti-competitive practice by the courts.
|
| Epic tried to make this argument in court and failed,
| mostly because tying is generally not illegal if the
| consumer is aware of the tie when purchasing and has the
| option to purchase an alternative product without such a
| tie.
|
| In other words it would be absolutely legal for Brother
| to sell a printer that only uses Brother-branded paper
| and toner, because if you don't like those restrictions
| you can simply go and purchase a non-Brother printer
| instead.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Literally majority control has never been a requirement
| to be a monopoly.
| intended wrote:
| gifts to judges aren't applicable to tech yet, at least
| not as far as I know.
| tivert wrote:
| > *The US will let corporations do whatever they want
| while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the
| relevant judges.
|
| Cite please? IIRC, the present day antitrust precedents
| were set in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United
| _States_antitrust_law#Ri....
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Global marketshare is irrelevant, Apple has over 60% of the
| mobile OS market in the US and are responsible for 70% of
| all mobile app sales in the US.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but
| they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In
| some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more
| market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to
| have some market power.
|
| Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares
| about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-
| granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial
| antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the
| copyright over their own films[0] even though that's
| _extremely_ anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched
| their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you
| can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail
| themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they
| had explicitly open-sourced Android.
|
| But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is
| unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal
| e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were
| committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1]
| by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to
| turn off chat history and recording functionality that was
| legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the
| decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was
| best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena
| a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails
| discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning
| as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal
| system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you
| can pretend to be a starving artist.
|
| As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are
| special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I
| personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now
| just like phones and they have the exact same positioning
| that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like
| Apple does.
|
| [0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over
| theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an
| antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power
| they are using is above and beyond the market power the
| government intended them to use.
|
| [1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant
| to ongoing litigation.
|
| [2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it
| to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I
| also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers
| asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class
| solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop
| until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.
|
| [3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says
| that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan,
| too.
| Iulioh wrote:
| >27% of phones is still high enough to have some market
| power.
|
| 27% Worldwide
|
| And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android
| device makers.
|
| In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly
| when your closest competitor is at 24%.
|
| And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone.
|
| 80 fucking 7 %
|
| To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is
| perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares
| about actions taken to restrain competition.
|
| Yes, but "only when it harms both allocative efficiency
| and raises the prices of goods above competitive levels
| or diminishes their quality."[1]
|
| [1] https://law.stanford.edu/press/congress-hears-
| challenges-to-...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Killing per-creation billing and demanding a 30% cut that
| will be passed onto the consumer sounds like a pretty
| obvious example to me.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I'm not going to fall all over myself defending Apple,
| but it's not as cut and dry as being a price gouge. Apple
| spent mountains of money on R&D to create wildly popular
| consumer devices, build and maintain the systems, build
| and maintain infrastructure, security systems, app
| distribution systems, and operate payment systems.
|
| There's no reason Patreon _must_ use Apple 's store. They
| could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site.
| iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content,
| and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if
| the services Apple is offering _do_ have value, and
| people are just arguing about the bill.
| nodamage wrote:
| > Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares
| about actions taken to restrain competition.
|
| Not sure how this myth keeps getting perpetuated. The
| antitrust laws that are relevant to the lawsuits against
| Apple (specifically Epic's and the DOJ's) absolutely care
| about market share for the purposes of proving
| monopolization or attempted monopolization under the
| Sherman Act.
|
| (Yes, technically it is true that _some_ antitrust
| violations can occur with low levels of market share,
| such as price fixing, but those are not really relevant
| to the lawsuits against Apple.)
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never
| stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the
| mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with
| fruit juice[0]
|
| You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government
| has to get in order to enforce the law. At some point
| (which we've already passed) both governments and
| corporations are so big and all-controlling that they act
| as one, and there is no "keeping them honest". Consumer
| rights go out the window because nobody is willing to
| enforce them when being a good government employee
| precludes becoming a corporate employee later on.
|
| Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the
| government has to get in order to enforce the law._
|
| I don't see that at all. A very small government that is
| willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far.
| It's just that the will is not there.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not that I think Steve Jobs was a super nice guy, but he
| clearly cared about Apple's brand, including the part of
| about users and developers not thinking of them rapacious and
| hostile, which is sort of how I (and many others) view their
| pricing model today. I like to think he'd have seen how bad
| this choice has played out for Apple's brand and changed his
| position by now, if he were still around.
| Longhanks wrote:
| You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his
| very own company because he refused to change course, the
| guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because
| he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine?
|
| I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax
| system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this,
| both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from
| his very own company because he refused to change course
|
| Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what
| happened to the company afterwards. He was more right
| than they were.
|
| > guy that most probably died earlier than necessary
| because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical
| medicine
|
| Hilariously irrelevant.
|
| > both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple
|
| I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate,
| when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in
| the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he
| died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting
| around the rate while small developers had to pay it.
| _Nobody_ , in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At
| the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically
| required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60%
| fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier
| had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
| Longhanks wrote:
| Both him getting fired and possibly dying earlier are
| directly related to the fact that the man does not easily
| change his mind. For his company, this turned out to be
| the better way, yes. For his body, it may have been
| better to go some other way. Either way, the point is
| that Steve Jobs does not easily change the course that he
| himself set.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| ...him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too
| easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal)
| Apple Tax.
|
| Heh. Attempting to buy a book from the Kindle app was how I
| first became aware of these policies. Was fruitlessly
| searching for a buy button, but could not find anything. Did
| a web search to figure out why I was an idiot who could not
| spend my money. Only to discover that I was purposely getting
| a worse user experience because some mega corporations all
| wanted a taste of my transaction.
| mcguire wrote:
| At least the Android app tells you that you cannot buy
| ebooks in it. :-)
| xnorswap wrote:
| Wouldn't Apple users have to pay $14.29 for there to be $10
| left after a 30% cut?
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Yes: https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1822996361551184290
| wmf wrote:
| From Apple's perspective they say they are helping their
| customers with things like making subscriptions easy to cancel
| and Apple thinks that's genuinely worth 30%. The fact that
| Apple doesn't want their customers to know they are paying more
| is an interesting wrinkle though.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| That's funny, I actually hate Apple's subscriptions because
| they are a pain to cancel. My wife has an iphone, she travels
| regularly to different countries for work. Because apps on
| apple store regularly have country restrictions (apps are not
| available in different countries), she has multiple apple
| accounts to deal with that.
|
| Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault
| of the app developers), but Android make switching to a
| different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4
| apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita
| since you need to logout and login to whichever account has
| the subscription.
|
| Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can
| assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users
| have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple
| products is that they are designed by people who are not
| internationally minded (see for example the fact that you
| can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website
| and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow,
| or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and
| badly designed)
| imchillyb wrote:
| What you've described is not an Apple problem but a
| specific use case scenario that is in direct violation of
| Apple user agreement.
|
| Apple's policy is one account and other family sharing or
| child accounts.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I mean, this is exactly why I go out of my way to pay for
| subscriptions via the App Store whenever I have a choice. I
| don't want to go through some rinkydink "please don't cancel
| bro" cancelation process on somebody's website, I'd rather
| just open the App Store and cancel it in one tap. Not to
| mention the subscriptions and purchases are automatically
| shared with my wife.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Previously, Apple specifically prohibited charging more though
| AppStore for services that are available to be purchased
| elsewhere. I'm not in the mood to sift though current version
| of Apple's _legalese_ , but I'd be surprised if they dropped
| this requirement, that'd be very uncharacteristic of them.
| zchrykng wrote:
| It is actually 14.29. To give Apple 30% of the new payment,
| have to increase your original price by 42.9% or so.
| jp57 wrote:
| Why does Patreon need an app?
| saurik wrote:
| If nothing else, to get consistent notifications from the
| creators you are a patron of, as Apple dragged their feet on
| web app notifications for many years, and they are still
| crippled and unreliable.
| 4ad wrote:
| So for nothing then.
| pests wrote:
| Nothing for you. Important to others.
| wheybags wrote:
| Email works just fine? Seriously, absolutely hate the trend
| of making apps out of websites.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Me too, but shockingly there are a lot of people who don't
| have a computer, just a phone. I even know people in their
| 40s like this.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| Phones usually have a web browser installed.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| mmmhmmm, indeed. You need to consider the mentality of
| the people who chose to live this way. Most don't want
| want to type an address into a browser, ever, they want
| to tap an app.
| neilalexander wrote:
| I don't think it's anything to do typing the address.
| It's that there are a lot of people out there who don't
| understand what a web browser really is, how a web page
| is distinguished from an app, or how to get something
| from a web browser to their home screen.
|
| See also: people who copy and paste images into Word
| documents before attaching them to emails. Same mental
| model disconnect.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| For sure, I was using a simplistic description. My point
| is that my experience (and it's just my experience) is
| that many people don't care to understand what a browser
| is or how to use it properly, they want apps. I stress
| this is just my experience but I'm one of those people
| who tries to (unsuccessfully) teach them. They just don't
| care (though I'm probably a bad teacher).
|
| And yes, see also people who print emails so they can
| scan them XD
| dwb wrote:
| I can read my email on my phone, and also get it to
| notify me when I get a new one from a particular address.
| It's not as easy as installing an app, but it's really
| not that hard either.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Even webbrowsers can use push notifications for webapps
| IIRC, so that would also be a thing (ignoring that Apple
| kneecaps PWAs, dunno if they allow this).
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I love Apple stuff. I'm all in, iPads, iPhones, AirPods, Apple
| TVs, HomePods various *Books everywhere.
|
| I wish Patreon had more apps. It's a pain to watch videos on my
| TV. I have to mirror my iPad and keep tapping the screen to
| keep it from locking and ending the session.
|
| But they're being forced to use a payment platform that they
| don't want to use and have to alter/drop one of their best
| features to do it.
|
| Feels like getting a dry cleaning bill from the guy who stabbed
| you.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| It sounds like the problem is that you're using a combination
| of devices that makes it unusually hard to just play a video
| from not-your-TV on your TV.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Or, Apple could stop coercing Patreon into setting 30% of
| donations on fire and Patreon could make the Apple TV app.
| Everyone wins.
|
| Apple should have a carve out for small donations/creator
| support just like physical goods.
| blue_dragon wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment. I tried the app a few years ago
| and found it offered nothing of value. Most content you can get
| by supporting an artist is best enjoyed outside the app anyway,
| like goodies they send in the mail or high-res art that looks
| better on a bigger screen.
|
| The only use cases I can think of for an app are 1) Socializing
| with other supporters who support the same artist, and 2)
| Searching other creators on Patreon and discovering similar
| artists you could support.
|
| But Patreon's social features were (still are?) terrible, which
| is why all the creators took their social communities to
| Discord instead. And ever since the beginning, Patreon has
| opposed adding search. So their app, to me, is totally
| worthless. I'm astonished they're still in business.
| deegles wrote:
| I think it's fair to take a fee for payments through Apple's
| infrastructure... but 30% is egregious.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Patreon doesn't currently and doesn't want to us Apple's
| infrastructure. They're being "forced" to do so, hence this
| post.
| dirtsoc wrote:
| they should have just gone the same route as amazon with
| ebooks and removed the ability to subscribe in the app.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| If you can't pay money to content makers, what's the point
| of a patreon app? It's the whole purpose.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Seeing the content you paid for when using a non mobile
| device?
| aphantastic wrote:
| I've happily been using Patreon for years and didn't even
| know an app existed. Has the world entirely forgotten
| about websites?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Native apps are better than websites on mobile. I know
| you know this.
| diggan wrote:
| What do you do on Patreon that only a application could
| do, and not a website?
|
| I subscribe to a bunch of Patreons, and most of them are
| videos (which I can view on a website) or they're
| downloadable assets I use my PC for accessing anyways,
| wouldn't make sense on mobile no matter app or website.
| aphantastic wrote:
| For what? Clicking a "pay this person $5 a month" button?
| Maybe commenting on a post or watching a video? I don't
| see how the platform could affect that in any significant
| way.
| __loam wrote:
| The app is better for viewing the content you paid for.
| Patreon is not just for subscribing to creators. They
| also deliver content. This isn't hard to understand.
| aphantastic wrote:
| What does the app do that <video> <img> and <audio>
| cannot?
| yunwal wrote:
| Any sort of audio/video control for sure, which is a
| substantial portion of patreon content. Also, if you want
| to support offline content, it's nearly impossible to do
| it in a browser.
| aphantastic wrote:
| What's wrong with the native html <video> tag? Or
| <audio>? I use those for everything and i've never been
| unable to control media.
| kelnos wrote:
| And whose fault is that? Apple's!
|
| Hell, Jobs originally wanted there to be no iPhone SDK,
| and for everyone to create webapps. Man, that would have
| been a better world. Initially it would have sucked, but
| the mobile web platform would have improved so much
| faster, and APIs for doing native-y things would have
| been complete and useful 15 years ago.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Has the world entirely forgotten about websites?
|
| Perhaps, if only the segment of the population forced to
| use a browser that didn't support PWAs for over a decade.
| I can see why they would forget about websites over a
| long enough period of time.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon
| continue to use unsupported billing models or disable
| transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having
| the entire app removed from their App Store.
| jirf_dev wrote:
| This is confusing to me, does this mean Amazon, Netflix,
| and Spotify will be in violation as well? None of these
| companies allow subscription or digital goods
| transactions in their iOS apps.
|
| I'm not sure why Patreon couldn't replace the "subscribe"
| button with a "wishlist" button within the iOS app. They
| could add a link that opens your wishlist in the browser
| too. It turns what should be 1 click into 3, but it seems
| far more sensible than accepting the 30% fee.
| danShumway wrote:
| Admittedly, I also wondered about this. I'm taking
| Patreon at their word (for now), but I would welcome
| Apple making some kind of statement indicating that
| Patreon is allowed to disable payments in the app.
|
| And if it is true that they're not allowed to disable
| payments, I would also love to know what's special about
| Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify (other than their size) that
| would allow them to "get away" with the same behavior.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Or drop the app. And explain to everybody why you're doing
| this
|
| Patreon works fine in a web browser.
| wpm wrote:
| And watch loads of creators lose a good portion of their
| livelihood and leave the platform?
| jasonjayr wrote:
| If they drop the app, then they are free to send users
| directly to the web site.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| There's a decent chance they are about to watch the same
| thing
| shagie wrote:
| One could create a web app based Pateron and use the web
| based push notifications. https://imgur.com/a/JccxAIs for
| the process for how to do this on an iPhone.
|
| The challenge (as always) is accessibility and
| discoverability. The functionality is all there.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The challenge (as always) is accessibility and
| discoverability._
|
| And that's the challenge that actually matters, and is
| more or less insurmountable on iOS.
| matwood wrote:
| This is part of Apple's argument why they think they are
| owed 30%. They have built and nurture the most affluent
| set of mobile users with a CC ready to charge. A company
| leaving Android is ho hum, but leaving iOS is business
| ending. How valuable then is it to be on iOS? 30%?
|
| I'm not making a judgement on right or wrong, but I see
| many people just thinking about infrastructure and not
| realizing Apple sees iOS user base as one that would not
| exist without them. And, they want to get paid for
| access.
| jerf wrote:
| We don't have numbers on how much Patreon usage comes
| through the Apple app.
|
| Patreon does.
|
| I'm inclined to think the "write off the iOS app entirely"
| option was one of the very very first things they pondered,
| and the odds are that it's pretty clear that was going to
| be a very, very expensive option.
| Izkata wrote:
| Putting it in quotes is misleading, they are actually being
| forced:
|
| > Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon
| continue to use unsupported billing models or disable
| transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the
| entire app removed from their App Store.
| diggan wrote:
| > Putting it in quotes is misleading, they are actually
| being forced:
|
| They're not literally forced, they have a choice: A) abide
| by the rules of the platform or B) leave the platform.
|
| I agree that it's shitty by Apple, but if you start playing
| the game (being on the AppStore), don't be surprised when
| you have to continue playing the game by adjusting how you
| do things.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Let's not forget that if Apple created something called
| "Apple Creators", they would instantly gain 100% of the
| market share because there would be no fee (assuming
| feature parity)
|
| This forcing apps to use your payment platform through
| extortion is anti-competitive. Full stop.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Don't they already have this for podcast subscriptions? I
| feel like this is a direct move to get more customers
| over to Apple Podcasts, which can now be 30% cheaper for
| customers.
| bangaladore wrote:
| I'm unsure, but I'm pretty sure Spotify had this exact
| issue recently and decided to make payments via only
| their website.
|
| But, IIRC, Apple makes it nearly impossible to offer off-
| app payments without breaking their TOS, including
| linking to them (don't quote me on that).
| kelnos wrote:
| That's not really a choice. That's "either do what we
| say, or your business will be destroyed".
| RIMR wrote:
| Patreon should just remove the ability to subscribe from the app,
| and just offload the process to Safari. Let Patreon users
| purchase their memberships using Apple's own browser app. Let
| Apple decide if they want to try to take 30% of all transactions
| made using their browser and see how that works out for them.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| If they tried that, Apple will just remove the app from the App
| Store.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| Yes. If you have a link to a site that has the ability or
| even another link to another place where you can buy
| something, Apple will block publishing of your app. They
| pulled this on us earlier this year after three years of
| publishing with no problems. All we had was a link to our
| support site, which had a link to our main site (where you
| could buy a subscription), the latter we had to remove or
| they refused. In fact, if we even try to give users materials
| on subscription details or talk about (not even providing a
| link) how to find those details, Apple blocks it. They need
| to get smashed with the antitrust bat hard.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| It's still comical to me that Google lost their anti trust
| suit while Apple does blatant offenses with their 30% fee.
| storafrid wrote:
| I hope the automatic price offset is separated out and labeled in
| the cart/checkout as "Apple's user fee".
| lovethevoid wrote:
| This isn't allowed in the US, not sure about the new EU rules
| regarding this specifically. Best they can do is show a
| "deduction" only on web/other platforms that shows they're
| getting it cheaper than iOS iirc.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _This isn't allowed in the US_
|
| Can you cite the US law for it?
|
| I think it's specifically Apple that doesn't want it because
| it would give more visibility to Apple's abusive behavior.
| sparky_ wrote:
| I believe the poster means, it isn't allowed by Apple's
| guidelines, ergo your app will be rejected because of it.
| Nothing to do with the law itself.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Apple doesn't allow this
| orangesite wrote:
| That would be golden!
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new
| memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to
| anything bought in your Patreon shop.
|
| >remember, Apple's fees are only in the iOS app. Your prices on
| the web and the Android app will remain completely unaffected.
|
| If this means Apple will take 30% of funds I send to Patreon,
| then time to dump Apple Pay.
|
| Yet another reason I avoid Apple, seems they are in a race with
| Microsoft to be the biggest abusers to their users.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I like being able to cancel subscriptions from the App Store,
| it's a huge advantage because companies will usually try to make
| it difficult to cancel.
| pornel wrote:
| Apple could add an API for 3rd party subscriptions to integrate
| with that screen.
|
| But Apple prefers to insinuate that you either pay them 30% or
| get scammed, and there is absolutely no option in between.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 30% is too high. Charge whatever Visa charges.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Without commenting on the appropriate level of charges,
| Visa and Apple provide very different services. For
| example, with Apple, you get administration of taxes in
| many locales as well as dealing with currency exchange.
| Also, I don't think sellers have to deal with chargebacks,
| although Apple might have their own version of a
| chargeback, but I am not sure.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Also, I don't think sellers have to deal with
| chargebacks, although Apple might have their own version
| of a chargeback, but I am not sure.
|
| They absolutely do, just through Apple, "Disputes".
|
| Apple will refund the user the full purchase price
| (that's fun, $10 app, you get $7 after the Apple cut, and
| on refund, you have to refund $10, so you're actually out
| money).
|
| And too many disputes will get your developer privileges
| restricted or revoked.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That's pretty shitty of Apple.
| jp57 wrote:
| You mean for Apple to charge that on top of the Visa
| charges, which Apple is paying out of the 30% now, I
| assume? Apple is the merchant of record for App Store txns
| and pays all the transaction fees, as well as all their
| other costs, out of the 30%. (I don't know how much all
| that adds up to, but the total is strictly greater than sum
| of the credit card fees.)
| matwood wrote:
| What would you pay to have access to the most affluent
| mobile users with CC's preloaded and ready to buy? That's
| what Apple is charging for. It must be worth quite a bit
| since people either pay or complain up and down they are
| forced to pay it or they don't have a business.
|
| IIRC, the judge in the EPIC case even said there was no
| issue with 30%.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Apple could add an API for 3rd party subscriptions to
| integrate with that screen.
|
| They could. And the third parties would absolutely ignore it
| or make it a front door to their own subscription management,
| which could mean anything from something as simple as the
| current iOS subscription management (highly unlikely) or a
| link that opens a browser page that tells you to call a given
| phone number to cancel your subscription that is _always_
| "experiencing high call volumes" and "thanks you for your
| patience" after half-an-hour on the phone.
|
| A service that is effectively un-cancelable really is the
| dream product: the person doesn't want it, so they don't
| actively use it (meaning you have no expense in providing
| it), but also don't want the hassle of putting up with your
| "are you sure?" tactics to cancel. Businesses make hundreds
| of millions of dollars annually on hard-to-cancel
| subscriptions in the US.
| aftbit wrote:
| But then Apple could use their market power to remove those
| cheating apps from the app store, just like they are doing
| for the billing changes.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Maybe. Or they could just keep doing the thing that earns
| them the most money, which is what they're doing now.
| aftbit wrote:
| I'm just saying, it's a strawman argument to claim that
| Apple is doing this to "protect users". That's what they
| want you to think, but they're actually doing this to
| make a massive amount of revenue at the cost of literally
| everyone in the market, users and creators alike.
|
| Edit: Econ 101 - the more inelastic the demand, the more
| the tax burden falls on consumers. One would assume that
| demand for Patreon is relatively elastic, at least when
| compared to things like food, housing, transportation,
| etc. Thus most of this tax burden will actually fall on
| the producers (i.e. Patreon and the creators), which
| explains why they're not willing to just take the 30% cut
| and will instead charge more for Apple users.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The thing is, it does protect users, in some ways. It
| just happens to earn them a ridiculous amount of money
| too.
|
| I'd prefer to see them cut the rate from 30%, because it
| doesn't give anyone _that_ much value, but it does create
| some for the users of the App Store.
| aftbit wrote:
| I would prefer to see them forced by legislation (like
| the Digital Markets Act) to allow some sort of fair,
| reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing on the App
| Store. Ideally they would be required to allow third-
| party marketplaces and self-signed app distribution, then
| marketplace competition could push their take rate
| towards 0%.
|
| I understand that some things are hard to cancel and some
| companies are malicious about this. Back in the pre-app
| days, this came up with "free samples" and gym
| memberships. The general solution back then was to either
| (a) not get scammed or (b) use a unique credit card that
| you could easily cancel. With the advent of things like
| Privacy cards, you can pretty easily do this without an
| App Store intermediate.
|
| That said, they could keep the benefit for users and the
| fee for Apple Pay, but then not require that apps
| exclusively use Apple Pay. They could even require that
| all apps call an API to issue some scary warning that the
| subscription will not be manageable in your Apple Pay
| dashboard, make sure you trust this app developer, are
| you sure you want to continue? etc etc
|
| Plus there are plenty of other billing services that can
| do this. I already mentioned Privacy cards. If you sign
| up for PayPal recurring payments, they also have an
| authorizations dashboard that you can easily use to
| revoke payment permissions. Neither of these companies
| needs to charge a 30% fee to offer that. Both charge
| somewhere around the "standard" CC fee of 3%.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Honestly, that's the one thing I _don 't_ want out of all
| of this... a secondary iOS app store.
|
| There's real value for me, the family IT guy, not having
| to worry about my parents, who are in their mid-60s and
| not tech-savvy, getting told by their "friend" through
| email to download malicious software to their iOS
| devices. Right now, you just can't do that. If something
| wants to execute code on an iOS device, it has to do so
| through somewhat-sanitized means. It's not 100%
| foolproof, but getting malicious executables onto an
| iPhone without someone knowing about it is currently
| beyond the capability of most threat actors.
|
| Is it as open or cheap as us tech people would like? No.
| But if I want that, I go buy an Android device.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| That's fine, but that doesn't happen on Android where the
| restrictions are more lax. (Well, it does, but in rates
| that are too low to justify imposing the excessive
| measures iOS employs)
| talldayo wrote:
| I empathize with your struggle, but it's a pathetically
| weak argument against letting Apple continue abusing
| their position. If your parents are clicking on random
| email or SMS links, that's an issue outside of your OS
| security policy. They could be autofilling their credit
| card details on a malicious site in Safari or iMessaging
| their SSN to someone with a spoofed CallerID. My parents
| both use Android and let me tell you, worrying about them
| activating Developer Mode on their phone is the last
| thing I go to sleep worried about. In a post-Pegasus
| world you and I both know there are bigger fish to fry.
|
| Do your parents a favor, talk to them about digital
| security if you're actually worried about them. Your
| other choice is to let reductive paranoia consume you
| until you're only comfortable when their web browser and
| contacts list is locked in a straitjacket.
| matwood wrote:
| > I'm just saying, it's a strawman argument to claim that
| Apple is doing this to "protect users".
|
| It can absolutely be both, which is why this isn't such a
| cut and dry issue.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I'll bet if you polled most people, even non-Apple customers,
| they'd be okay with paying a little extra for the convenience
| of an app store. The problem is that it's 30%.
| atommclain wrote:
| I thought it was 15% for the first million in revenue, then
| 30%.
| ziml77 wrote:
| But that's not designed in a way which considers that
| despite the app bringing in millions in total revenue, each
| individual creator makes far less than that.
| gumby271 wrote:
| The problem is that it's the only option across the OS.
| There's no reason this option couldn't exist with other
| options, built by the app developer so it cost Apple nothing.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The problem is that the fee is not charged to the Apple
| user on a line item in addition to the content price. Like
| all markets are supposed to operate. It's information
| hiding.
| matwood wrote:
| Do you know the markup at any retailer? Maybe in
| aggregate if I look at the financial statements or some
| specialty retailers like car dealers?
| orangesite wrote:
| Will you still like it enough that you're willing to pay a 30%
| premium as more and more services start passing the Apple Tax
| on to the consumer?
|
| This is why I love capitalism!
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Unequivocally, yes. I already do so.
| FredPret wrote:
| The beauty of capitalism is that you can choose.
|
| You don't even have to have a smartphone at all and if you
| decide to have one, you don't HAVE to have an Apple device.
|
| There are countless other brands to pick.
|
| If you truly hate the 30% thing, then don't buy an iPhone.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| And yet the point of this post is that, thanks to Apple's
| dominance, _all_ users will lose the "pay per finished
| production" payment option regardless of whether they use
| an iPhone or not.
|
| The beauty of capitalism is that you can choose the color
| of your car as long as it's black.
| FredPret wrote:
| You act as if all the iPhone Patreon donations would've
| rolled in regardless of the app / app store, but also
| that Apple is somehow going to kill it. It's logically
| inconsistent.
|
| 1. If Apple plays a key part in getting those donations,
| then the 30% is not a problem: the content creator is not
| getting 70c on the dollar; the content creator is getting
| 70c instead of 0c. Apple gets people to donate that
| wouldn't otherwise have done it. There's a ton of money
| flowing through the Apple ecosystem purely because Apple
| made it a premium experience.
|
| 2. If Apple does not play a key part in getting those
| donations, then the 30% is still not a problem: the
| content creators / app makers / Patreon can simply switch
| to some other platform and get the same results.
|
| The beauty of capitalism is that we used to have horses
| and shoes only, then black cars became an option, and now
| you can buy any color you like. I guess some people think
| they appear to be clever, thoughtful, and fair-minded
| finding an issue with every step forward.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The beauty of capitalism is that we used to have
| horses and shoes only, then black cars became an option,
| and now you can buy any color you like._
|
| I'm pretty sure it's at best wildly misleading to argue
| that the reason cars were invented is "capitalism".
| FredPret wrote:
| Looking forward to the long list of innovations that
| socialism came up with, continuously improved, _and_
| provided at scale at _decreasing_ real prices.
|
| It's pretty obvious that almost everything that fits that
| bill was made with a profit motive.
|
| My broader point is this: you're not entitled to being
| given good options by private individuals and companies
| of individuals. Any option offered to you by an
| individual, even a shitty option, is strictly an
| improvement in your circumstances because having a a
| shitty option (walking or riding) and a slightly-less-
| shitty option (a car that has to be black) is always
| better than only having the first shitty option.
| talldayo wrote:
| HN is incorrigable. Life is not a bipolar axis of
| capitalism and communism like a 60s propaganda film.
| Since the beginning of the United States, taxes and
| regulation have been used to protect the market from
| abuse and harm. You are privately allowed free
| enterprise, but said free enterprise does not protect you
| when you break the law. If you sell an illegal firearm to
| someone, the legal nature of the transaction doesn't
| cover for the fact that you're violating export
| restrictions and municipal law. It's the basic
| communitive property.
|
| You can jeer when the FTC throws your favorite
| corporation a yellow-card, but what else are you going to
| do? Europe's not going to stop, Apple hasn't payed taxes
| to half their jurisdictions in God knows how long. Japan
| doesn't care since Apple schemes ways to avoid their
| hardware duty. Your broader point can be whatever you
| make it, but the world doesn't owe you shit if you
| deliberately organize a criminal racket.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't have any Apple devices, but as a Patreon customer,
| I'm going to be affected by this requirement that Apple is
| forcing upon Patreon.
|
| The entire point of this article is that Apple is abusing
| their market power to force other companies to do things
| that affect people who are not even Apple customers.
|
| But regardless, your argument is laughably wrong. We don't
| have "countless other brands". We have iOS and Android.
| They are not fungible. There are pros and cons to both
| platforms, and sometimes it's impossible to reconcile a
| showstopper negative on one platform with a different
| showstopper negative on the other. Or to reconcile a must-
| have feature on only one platform, even though that
| platform also has a showstopper negative.
|
| Yes, it's nice that there are many Android manufacturers,
| but they are still largely very similar products, with the
| "differentiation" being annoying most of the time, not a
| benefit. The idea that we have "choice" is hilarious.
|
| Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a smartphone
| at all" as an alternative, my respect for their opinion
| drops to zero.
| FredPret wrote:
| Patreon built their organization partly on how easy it is
| to get donations from Apple users through the app
| ecosystem. As an Apple user, I personally spend a lot
| more on apps every month than in my pre-Apple days
| because it feels secure, easy, and premium.
|
| So even as a non-Apple user, you benefited from Apple's
| system. The same is true for Patreon, and for the content
| creators.
|
| As for your complaints about the dearth of ecosystems, I
| guess the rest of the world can only apologize to you for
| not pouring even more hundreds of billions of dollars
| into developing an ecosystem that fits _your_
| requirements * just so *. (By the way, I was talking
| about phone brands, nice work shifting the goalposts)
|
| > Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a
| smartphone at all" as an alternative, my respect for
| their opinion drops to zero.
|
| Well, I am devastated. But "no smartphone" is indeed one
| of the options, as is "Apple smartphone", "Samsung
| smartphone", "flip-phone", and many others. Can't find
| one that is perfect in every way? Welcome to the real
| world.
| wccrawford wrote:
| While I agree that the peace of mind for subscribing through a
| service like Apple or Google is nice (or any other service that
| you know will be easy ahead of time), Patreon's model is the
| same. It's really easy to subscribe and unsubscribe from
| individual creators. There's no benefit to the user from adding
| Apple into the mix.
| bogwog wrote:
| Fun fact: governments can solve both problems! They can break
| up monopolies AND regulate dark patterns.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Then you should get the option to pay a 30% surcharge for that
| privilege.
|
| Others can choose to use virtual credit cards that come for
| free (or cheap) from their bank or privacy.com for that
| purpose.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Does this scheme also apply in Europe?
| stavros wrote:
| I guess it must, unless you're using an alternative app store.
| isodev wrote:
| Yes but the EC is busy fighting Apple on it. Until now the
| conversation was mostly focused around app developers, but of
| course it has implications for the actual activity behind every
| app (like the creators using Patreon and alike)
|
| cf. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-sends-
| pr...
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| If apple was a young startup, struggling to get market share, or
| struggling to turn a profit, I can understand why they might want
| a cut of profits here.
|
| But they literally have more cash than anyone in the world... why
| bother with this?!
| dosinga wrote:
| Ah, but isn't it the other way around? If you are a young
| startup without market share (but well funded), you don't care
| about the extra margin. Uber was cheap before it killed the
| taxis.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| They have to make more and more money or their stock goes down.
| This is the gross world we live in now. There's a reason Warren
| Buffett sold half of his Apple holdings. They've squeezed blood
| from the turnip about as much as you can.
| bkraz wrote:
| As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial
| support, the news is terrible: Patreon informed me that all
| creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead
| of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use.
| The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time
| off, and only charge people when I release something, thus
| incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really
| annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it
| happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another
| platform, or come up with some other solution.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| If you're able, my artist friend has had a lot of success
| running their own site and doing their own payments through
| PayPal.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Am I misunderstanding, that PayPal can workaround Apple's
| payment rules which Patreon is complying with?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| As long as you're not using the paypal app on an apple
| device
| burnished wrote:
| You are misunderstanding, the suggestion is to do it
| yourself instead of using patreon.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| think p2p transactions are exempt - apple doesn't get 30%
| of my venmo or zelle.
|
| no clue why patreon doesn't count though
| froggit wrote:
| It's not p2p. 2 transactions happen: you pay patreon,
| patreon pays them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| likewise with venmo, no? who gets to decide what
| constitutes a transaction
| grugagag wrote:
| It seems this bypasses both Patreon and Apple.
| ryan29 wrote:
| How do they deal with the taxes?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 1. Building and running your own site is a lot more work than
| using Patreon.
|
| 2. Now you're at PayPal's tender mercies, which... well, you
| do you, but _I_ wouldn 't advise it.
| underlipton wrote:
| Keep it simple, use templates.
|
| In fact, how amazing would it be if someone who was about
| to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco
| instead just released a Patreon-like template? There are
| other payment providers.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Everyone's heard horror stories about Paypal, though. Doesn't
| seem like a platform that you want to become too reliant on.
| renewiltord wrote:
| How can another platform be better about this? Wouldn't they be
| subject to the same thing? Or is there some component here that
| is not tied to the Apple demand?
| bkraz wrote:
| That's a great question! How far does Apple's control extend
| into markets that are unrelated to their core business? I
| always prefer using mobile websites on my own android phone
| instead of downloading apps because of security concerns and
| general notification spamming, ads, and annoyances, and it
| seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing
| "apps" with bookmarks. For the current situation, I may look
| into services like Nebula, doing PayPal directly, YouTube
| subscriptions and donations, or setting up an online store.
| Or even.... sponsored videos!! (just kidding)
| xnyan wrote:
| > it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just
| replacing "apps" with bookmarks.
|
| I think there are several reasons users gravitate to apps,
| but the biggest pain point apps mitigate is the login UX.
| I'd wager that you use a password manager, most people do
| not and cannot be convinced to do so. With an app, one can
| create an account and log in once, then stay logged in and
| never think about the password again until they get a new
| device, at which time the password can be reset via email
| and then immediately forgotten.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| It's bad, yes. It would be good if Patreon allowed sticking
| with the billing systems which Apple is forbidding, but I do
| understand that they may no longer be able to justify the
| business expense of maintaining them given the anticipated
| changes in usage patterns.
|
| Practical suggestion:
|
| Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year,
| reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of
| flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be
| explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year
| will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of
| 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
|
| Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately
| the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in
| most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed,
| but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are
| probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many
| people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also
| think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
| bkraz wrote:
| Yes, it's a reasonable workaround. I believe Patreon also
| allows creators to "pause" their account, suspending payments
| for an indefinite amount of time. So, I could just keep the
| account paused, then unpause for a month when I make a video.
| Although, I believe that Patreon doesn't want the per-
| creation model themselves, since charging the same amount
| each month is simpler, and easier to project revenue, etc, so
| they are probably just bundling this unpopular change with
| the Apple announcement.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| So why is Patreon doing this if even they don't like it?
| bluGill wrote:
| Patreon doesn't have a choice. Apple is too large to give
| up having an iOS app - too many customers will just walk
| away instead of using the alternative (or so they think -
| but I don't blame them for not being willing to
| experiment - if they are right it will cost a lot of
| customers)
|
| Well there is a choice, but it is questionable if suing
| will or will not result in any change. Even if they win
| in court it will be several years and millions of dollars
| in legal fees, and it isn't clear they will win.
| xnyan wrote:
| iOS market share is near 60% in the US and a bit over 25%
| worldwide. They can't afford to leave that on the table.
| cesarb wrote:
| I've seen some creators on Patreon "pause" their monthly
| subscription when they have nothing to release on a given
| month, so that patrons won't be billed for that month. That
| could be a workaround for your use case.
| danShumway wrote:
| Do we know whether or not iOS's subscription model supports
| pausing?
|
| I guess I assume Patreon would mention if it didn't.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It does not. Apple do all the billing. You have no
| mechanism to link up users and bills or change users
| billing. The only way would be to notify all subscribers to
| cancel their subscription, hope they do that, and then
| notify them all to resubscribe afterwards, which would
| obviously be catastrophic for subscription revenue, as well
| as a terrible user experience.
| stavros wrote:
| I think the platform you should switch to here is Android. This
| is Apple's fault, Patreon doesn't seem like it likes the
| changes any more than you do.
| spullara wrote:
| do you think that they can switch their customers platform?
| this comment doesn't make any sense at all.
| SilkRoadie wrote:
| Does the app give any benefit over the web? Asking
| customers to use the browser over the dedicated app doesn't
| seem unreasonable.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Does apple allow that?
|
| I think there are rules about telling people not to use
| IOS method.
|
| Not sure if that would extend to content displayed in the
| app too from creators?
| Arainach wrote:
| Take Apple out of the loop entirely.
|
| Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the
| website. Send them updates when people post new content.
|
| I've never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS.
| I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I'd
| want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are
| sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my
| email, and if they're long enough I click a link and read
| the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.
| abudimir wrote:
| Exactly what I do, subscribe through the web. Don't need
| another app on the phone. Subscribe and forget.
| lozenge wrote:
| The app's useful for audio posts. But mostly it's just an
| extra chance for them to make money. Push notifications,
| the home screen icon, etc. Most people I know, their
| inbox is barely functional due to the marketing emails,
| and they're reliant on features like Gmail's "Important"
| which only highlights real people, not Patreon content.
|
| You're not the average user, and if the average user gets
| a billing email and hasn't bothered to read their content
| email, visit the site or open the app, they are more
| likely to end their subscription.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Can't you do all those things with a PWA?
|
| What does the Patreon app do that a PWA can't?
| layer8 wrote:
| Aside from many users not being familiar with PWAs and
| not wanting to install them, I believe they'd also have
| to drop support for older iOS versions, as for example
| PWA push notifications were only added in iOS 16.4.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Given Apple's back and forth history allowing or not
| allowing and limiting or not limiting PWAs, I'd be
| hesitant to risk my business model on them. Which is
| exactly what Apple wanted I guess
| lesuorac wrote:
| Remember your password.
|
| I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I
| have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill
| my password but same page as a PWA it won't.
|
| I also did some testing with macroquad [1] and I was
| finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just
| didn't work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff
| in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there's
| no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.
|
| ---
|
| PWAs just can't do the same things that native apps can.
| This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not
| only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle
| man between them and their customers?
|
| [1]: https://macroquad.rs/
| consteval wrote:
| > visit the site or open the app
|
| There's another erm... "creator oriented" Patreon-like
| service that works entirely through the web. Specifically
| to avoid Apple and Google's cut. And they seem wildly
| successful, although perhaps the type of content may
| influence user's decisions.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure Apple allows it. However it is much easier to have a
| good UI experience with a custom app than a web app. Some
| people also think they must have an app for everything
| and so even if there is a good web experience they will
| demand the app anyway.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| They used to forbit it, but court cases struck down the
| "anti-steering rules"
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/apple-lets-
| devs-....
| input_sh wrote:
| Apple forbids even mentioning alternative payment methods
| within the app.
| octacat wrote:
| It is patreon, creators will just ask people to use a
| browser to subscribe.
| zchrykng wrote:
| That will be just great when Apple finds a creator doing
| that during App Review and bans Patreon over it. Patreon
| is going to be forced into the position of policing it
| for Apple, I'd guess.
| frumper wrote:
| If I click my subscription on my iOS Disney+ app, it just
| launches a browser to manage.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I think that's changed: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2024/01/apple-lets-devs-....
|
| > However, the rulings established that Apple's so-called
| "anti-steering" rules--language prohibiting developers
| from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options
| that might be available outside of an app--were
| anticompetitive.
|
| > Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow
| developers to provide external links to other payment
| options, technically circumventing its normal fee
| structure.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google forces apps on the Play Store to use Google's payment
| methods and give them a 15% to 30% cut of revenue, as well.
|
| You can sideload, but the duopoly exists and they're shaking
| 99.9% of users down for every dime they can get out of them.
| gedy wrote:
| I guess I'm having a hard time understanding why a Patreon
| app is even needed or wanted. ApplePay I understand.
| stavros wrote:
| True, but Android at least allows alternative app stores,
| and there are a few. Obviously it's not as easy as the
| native store, but if enough developers are dissatisfied,
| there is a way out.
| omoikane wrote:
| My understanding is that Patreon does not use Google's
| payment system and isn't subject to a cut of the revenue.
| This is why the article says "Your prices on the web and
| the Android app will remain completely unaffected".
| kmeisthax wrote:
| At least until 2025 when Google implements the exact same
| policy change. Every questionable hardware choice Apple
| does is something Android vendors or Google Play copies
| within a year.
|
| Remember when Samsung made fun of Apple for removing the
| headphone jack?
| mcguire wrote:
| You are aware that you cannot purchase ebooks through the
| Amazon apps on Android, right?
|
| What you say may be true today, but tomorrow is unknown
| territory as far as these sorts of agreements go.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I can purchase ebooks on my Amazon Kindle Fire that runs
| Amazon apps on Android fine.
|
| I bet I would also be able to purchase ebooks on the
| Amazon Kindle app installed from the Amazon Appstore on
| my Google Pixel phone.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial
| support_
|
| How long until YouTube (Google) demand "their" cut of _your_
| Patreon income? What will you do then?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I don't understand why Patreon has to drop the per-creation
| model. Can they not just not offer that on iOS, and continue it
| on other platforms? (Perhaps with a "convert from susbcription
| to per-creation" feature online?)
| rk06 wrote:
| Most likely because this feature existed on iOS before
| Uvix wrote:
| User confusion - if they block users from subscribing to
| those creators on iOS they will inevitably have support
| tickets to deal with it. Hence their 16-month project to
| remove non-iOS-compatible plans.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon
| continue to use unsupported billing models or disable
| transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the
| entire app removed from their App Store.
|
| In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable
| through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
|
| Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the
| pale.
| reddalo wrote:
| > Someone should get the FTC or EU involved.
|
| I agree, but I also wonder why Patreon needs an iOS app.
|
| It's 2024, you don't need an app for everything. See
| OnlyFans, they're doing fine even without being able to
| access the proprietary stores.
| mcgrath_sh wrote:
| This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the
| web. I think there is some age/line where on one side,
| your first instinct is to open the browser on your phone
| and navigate to a website, and on the other side of the
| line, you open the app store and navigate to an app.
|
| Personally, I agree. I want better/first class mobile
| websites over an app. I don't want apps for most things.
| That said, I didn't grow up in a mobile first/mobile only
| era.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the
| web
|
| I don't think age is the driver. For most people, for the
| last decade, all software in their phone has come from
| the App Store. Everybody is trained to check there first.
| Even if you think to google it first, you're just going
| to get App Store link in the top results. Company's own
| site might be at the top and you'll instinctively look
| for the 'get on App Store' badge when you click through.
|
| Some small number of android power users are the only
| people that really know that downloading an app from not
| the App Store is possible.
| kragen wrote:
| hey, i answered your email about aleph last wednesday; no
| stress if you're answering slowly, i just wanted to check to
| see if it had fallen into your spam filter
|
| unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact
| you other than email and hn comments
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Apple has quietly been one of the biggest culprits in the
| proliferation of subscription software. They _still_ don 't
| support upgrades/upgrade pricing. Subscriptions are also the
| easiest way to implement a software demo or trial in the App
| Store. Finally they use their control of the App Store to
| coerce anyone doing something different than monthly/yearly
| subscriptions into that model (as we see here).
|
| It sucks big time.
| derefr wrote:
| > They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing.
|
| What would this mean, exactly?
|
| You can sell people a demo-full-version permanent unlock as a
| one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
|
| And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more
| features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
|
| And you can, in theory, freely mix these -- e.g. charging
| someone a subscription for the base version, and then
| charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
|
| If you want, you could even charge for app features as
| consumables (just like F2P games do) -- where you pay to have
| a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month
| and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
|
| What's the missing revenue model here?
| raybb wrote:
| What's missing is you pay for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it's
| yours forever. Then when CS3 comes out you can upgrade with
| a nice discount.
| derefr wrote:
| Ah, alright.
|
| There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this --
| it requires two things:
|
| 1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some
| SSO auth system -- but just require Apple's own SSO for
| it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync
| the transaction status from one app to the other; _or_ a
| local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the
| transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the
| group container for the other app to read
|
| 2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead
| breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-
| purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for
| individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that
| each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new
| version just _a superset of the features of the old
| version_ -- and so, when you 're buying the old version,
| you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying
| the new version (with the app being able to see whether
| or not you've bought the old version), new customers are
| buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying
| D+E.
|
| ---
|
| Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I
| think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this):
| don't release V2 as a separate app from V1.
|
| Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release -- which
| converts the V1 app into a _launcher_ with an "edition"
| (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1
| and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for
| download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2
| "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple
| for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when
| the app needs to run them.
|
| With this approach, the app would either start up the
| first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the
| option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the
| app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that
| allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer
| the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and
| V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled.
| Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app
| level.)
|
| Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-
| time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2
| engine; or you could allow the user to switch between
| V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between
| V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each
| edition is separately available within that edition's UX.
|
| The expectation here is that all the user's existing
| feature entitlements would keep working as long as they
| continue to use the V1 engine -- as you said, the V1
| engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this
| edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the
| app, V1 itself _should_ still keep working for them
| forever.
|
| The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app
| approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that
| V2 can _inherit_ some of the V1 entitlements, and then
| simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets
| discounted for V1 purchasers _inherently_ , by the fact
| that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the
| components of the V2 purchase-bundle.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Have you actually done this? Is there a common example on
| the app store?
|
| When did it become possible to download additional
| executable bundles on iOS?
| derefr wrote:
| Re: feature entitlements shared through a shared SSO auth
| backend and/or Group Container -- yes, apps do this.
| Mostly this is in app "suites" where you can IAP a
| feature entitlement in one app in the suite, and the
| entitlement should then become available to the other
| apps in the suite. (I think the Omni Group apps do it?
| Correct me if I'm wrong.)
|
| Re: multi-edition shared apps -- I'm not sure if this has
| been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just
| a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically,
| moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those
| dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this _is_ a
| common approach to supporting netplay (and especially
| _replay_ of _historical_ netplay) in competitive-eSport
| multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players
| need to be on the same exact version of the game engine +
| netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded
| on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an
| exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay
| recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand
| when you go to replay the recording.)
|
| ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting
| reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources
| are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like
| the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-
| bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with
| it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing.
| Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for
| executable-ODR?
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let
| people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author
| now assumes the burden with each new release of
| maintaining and testing V1 (that's with all the feature
| flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between
| V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like
| insanity to me.
| nomel wrote:
| > One at a time.
|
| That would be a _choice_ , not a requirement. It's
| literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with
| it. It would be trivial to have "V1 full app unlock"
| feature be the same as "V2 full app unlock" feature.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| @jayd16 - it's been a few years since I read the Apple
| Developer Agreement but at that time downloading code and
| executing it within your app was forbidden by the
| agreement. A sensible security safeguard IMO.
| derefr wrote:
| iSH does it. Not sure how they get away with it, but the
| dev is around on here so maybe they can explain.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| AFAIK, even the iSH developers were never given a proper
| explanation. iSH was actually removed a few years back[0]
| and then reinstated with an apology but no policy changes
| or clarifications.
|
| This was before the change to allow Delta on the App
| Store, too.
|
| [0] https://ish.app/blog/app-store-removal
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's a lot of nuance here. Some of it is ours, some of
| it is on Apple's side. Before I get into it I will say
| that most of what I say about Apple's side is largely not
| a position they will clarify or take publicly, and some
| of it is our interpretation. When iSH was removed from
| the store we did push them to clarify this in the App
| Store Review Guidelines but they chose to not do so.
|
| When you run an App Store that involves human review the
| big problem you have is apps that mask their behavior
| during review and then end up breaking the rules later.
| My understanding is that the "don't download code" policy
| is intended to prevent this, at least in spirit. I think,
| at least at the highest level of the company, the intent
| is to keep to somewhere near this at least for
| submissions made in good faith and not prone to opening
| them up to a slippery slope. There are distinctions here,
| though, and policy enforcement is also complicated.
|
| My (and iSH's) position is that "code" should be
| interpreted very broadly, including native code (which
| the platform blocks from loading anyways) but also things
| like embedded webviews updated server-side or those
| "code-push"/"run JavaScript in an interpreter in your
| app" things. And going even beyond that, I feel that to
| provide a full experience for the review team when you
| ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the
| behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the
| review team test that if they want.
|
| From this perspective you will note that code isn't even
| really the interesting part here, it's the _behavior_
| changing that matters. So this leads naturally what we
| have described as "scripting apps", which download code
| but do not change their behavior. Their entire point is
| to download code. Like, App Store is an app store,
| regardless of whether you download TikTok or Google Maps
| from it. iSH is a a Linux environment. Nothing you will
| do in the app will change that. And notably we have zero
| ability to change that _ourselves_ , short of submitting
| a new app. It's not like we can just add Windows
| emulation as a downloadable JavaScript package without
| going through review. From our discussions with
| leadership, I think they agree with us on it, but are not
| willing to commit to it publicly, because then people
| will take creative bad-faith interpretations of it to
| argue what a feature of the app versus something a user
| does in the app is, or something like that. Or they just
| want to hold all the cards and reserve the right to take
| this away. Either way I strongly disagree with them doing
| this, but for now iSH remains on the store.
|
| You will note that the changes we make (see our blog post
| about repositories: https://ish.app/blog/default-
| repository-update) continue to support that position.
| Again, I cannot say for sure whether this is the
| interpretation Apple uses, or if they even have a
| _consistent_ position. It 's just an attempt on our side
| to show good faith. As a final note our experience has
| been that the higher you go the more consistent and
| reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers
| often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see
| in a Hacker News comment (it says code therefore your app
| for coding is bad). But again, this is just our
| experience; we have no idea if Phill will hit his head
| tomorrow and decide to pull iSH tomorrow because he
| thinks Linux is the child of the devil.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| What you've said largely tracks with my interpretation of
| Apple's actions here.
|
| > I feel that to provide a full experience for the review
| team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to
| list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have,
| and let the review team test that if they want.
|
| After Epic added direct purchase gated behind a feature
| flag to Fortnite, I'm genuinely surprised Apple didn't
| start requiring full control over and documentation of
| all downloadable configuration files as part of App
| Review.
| saagarjha wrote:
| While being vaguely on the side of review being not very
| useful I would agree with Apple doing that if only to
| make their position more consistent, even though I am
| sure every developer would riot if this was the case.
| (Although I vaguely remember someone saying we provided
| feature flags to Apple when we submitted builds at
| Twitter. But do take it with a grain of salt, since I
| wasn't on the release team and my view of them is vaguely
| positive in that I think they generally didn't try to use
| tricks to get through review.)
| saratogacx wrote:
| The model is the "old school" model for software sales.
|
| The first version you sell to a user at full price and
| offer a discount for upgrading (something like 40% off). It
| lets the customer pick when they feel the value prop is
| worth the cost and lets you offer a loyalty incentive to
| the user.
|
| Right now the choice is "keep paying for it to keep
| working" or "fully price for every upgrade".
| rdsnsca wrote:
| Bundles can be used for upgrade pricing, you put the new
| version up for full price (ie. $20) and and a bundle with
| the new and old version (ie $30, for a 50% discount on
| it) for those who own the old version. When you buy a
| bundle you don't pay for the one you own.
| gcr wrote:
| Are there any examples of apps that do that? As a
| consumer, I haven't ever heard of an app that offers this
| (e.g. goodnotes, LiquidText, MarginNote, Audulus and
| Things have new major releases and don't seem to do this)
| refulgentis wrote:
| Couple of the old school macOS dev houses tried this once
| this hack became visible and little birdies said the hack
| WAI. (ex. OmniGroup)
|
| Since then, people have backed off.
|
| If you're going to this much work to help users
| workaround Apple nonsense, you really care about helping
| them save money, and the support + refund costs of people
| accidentally buying the bundle with the old version they
| don't need is > just building out your own server-side
| system, versus a combinatorial explosion of bundles in
| the App Store that creates a confusing minefield for
| users.
| refulgentis wrote:
| By jumping through hoops, tying unrelated tools together,
| confusing users, and reaping an extra $10 you didn't want
| to take + support costs thereof, yes, it is possible. It
| is not what we expected or asked for when we started
| asking for this in 2007 (we = iOS devs).
| pwdiscflatmajor wrote:
| FL Studio (fka FruityLoops) is an outstanding exponent of
| this old method (but once, free upgrades for life)
| mcguire wrote:
| Free upgrades are problematic themselves: once you've
| saturated your market (a good place to be, right?) you no
| longer have income to provide upgrades.
| nomad41 wrote:
| I don't exactly remember how it went but ~5 years ago
| Goodnotes 5 came out and they offered a "bundle" of
| Goodnotes 4 and 5 together at the same price of Goodnotes
| 5. Maybe owners of version 4 had some kind of discount on
| the bundle because they already owned half of it?
| zchrykng wrote:
| That isn't officially supported and is super error prone.
| People can end up getting charged more if things don't
| work perfectly.
| baby wrote:
| I really hate how the current pattern is
|
| 1. Download seemingly cool app on iOS (free with potential
| payments)
|
| 2. Go through a 30min quizz
|
| 3. Required to subscribe for $150/year to start using the app
|
| It's not free, it's false advertising
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Yeah I hate how to get Logic Pro on my iPad I have to
| subscribe not purchase
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Funny how UX only matters to Apple when it doesn't cost
| them $$
| nomel wrote:
| They added "in app purchases" indicators in the store for
| this. I use it all the time. "In app purchases" on
| something that claims it's free is not free.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Apple's longstanding App Store guidelines always forced a
| certain level of "quality" and good customer experience,
| yet they're now allowing apps that are the exact
| opposite.
|
| Most of these apps use dark UX patterns to trick new
| users into scammy free trials which convert to $100+/yr
| subscriptions after 1-3 days. These apps also make it
| difficult to close out of the subscription window, or
| make it seem like you have to subscribe when you don't.
|
| It's entirely contradictory to everything Apple once
| stood for in justifying their gatekeeper App Store
| experience.
|
| Apple could easily ban these types of scammy UX patterns,
| but they won't because it benefits them. That's my point.
| 05 wrote:
| Yeah but you can't filter on it, dark patterns at work.
| harry8 wrote:
| In the days of the ipod every single user of it I
| encountered had apple's UX wipe their music collection.
|
| But maybe that was by design as they decided to call
| their music shop by the same name as their ipod
| management software. That is the essence of Apple's UX.
| Shiny destruction of your property. It remains so.
|
| The UX everyone wanted was copying files onto and off the
| device presented as storage on any computer it was
| plugged in to.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Don't forget censorship/banning of nude images. The tumblr
| fiasco (among others) was their doing.
| nomel wrote:
| That's not totally true. Twitter/X is fine, in this regard.
| The toggle is web based, but there's no censorship once
| it's toggled. The large amount of age restricted content on
| YouTube is another example.
| api wrote:
| They've certainly encouraged subscriptions but the big driver
| is the drive for recurring revenue, which can be valued up to
| 20X what one-time revenue is valued. In some cases companies
| with investors are instructed to not even care about non-
| recurring revenue since it doesn't matter. Revenue is
| recurring or it doesn't exist.
|
| Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed
| is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks
| have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue
| models. Now everything can be a subscription and now
| companies that _don 't_ have subscriptions are at a massive
| valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies
| figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies
| _have to_ figure out how to add recurring revenue.
|
| This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is
| trying to get you to subscribe to something.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Apple also takes a smaller share via subscriptions after a
| year (30% -> 15%).
| AmVess wrote:
| It has basically made their app store completely unusable. I
| am not going to manage a bunch of subs for what amounts to
| zero effort crapware.
| david_allison wrote:
| Not being able to set custom price points for subscriptions
| is also painful
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The only way to put an end to this is if more people stop
| installing apps that are just website skins, and just use the
| open web instead.
| xelamonster wrote:
| Yeah, though the problem with this is that from my experience
| with Android, the web version of Patreon is practically
| unusable. Not that the app is much better, they seem
| determined to come up with the most horrific UX anyone could
| imagine across all platforms, but it at least can somewhat
| consistently handle playing the podcasts I subscribe to
| without cutting out every five minutes.
| Bwass wrote:
| What do you mean, unusable? It's simple and
| straightforward.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's slow with tons of loading spinners.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Apps are now forcing you to use their website skin even
| though its damn easy to offer a mobile web alternative that
| doesn't squander ever precious local storage.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Reddit is probably the worst at this, really annoying.
| josephg wrote:
| Which apps? The only one I know about is Reddit, where the
| web version is crippled compared to the app. (You can't
| read all the comments). But old.reddit.com works fine on
| mobile - even if you have to constantly zoom in and out.
| socksy wrote:
| ultimate-guitar.com is a big offender. The mobile site
| jams lots of things in your face to and get you to
| download the app (including an entire fake tab page that
| you can't interact with but can scroll past on iOS
| devices). Then on the mobile site you can't tap on any of
| the chords to see the fingerings (very important!).
|
| You can if you choose to request the desktop site, but
| then you get an obnoxious bar going across the middle of
| the page blocking some of the tab.
|
| If you fold and finally download the app, you're greeted
| with a 10+ page unskippable questionnaire that after
| you're done ends with a paid subscription call to action.
| If you then force close the app, and open a tab link from
| the browser into the app, you are finally allowed to view
| a tab.
| imzadi wrote:
| I don't think this is up to the consumer. The companies
| should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If
| something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess
| with an app at all? It's not like consumers are clamoring for
| these apps. Everyone I know hates that you have to have an
| app for everything these days.
| maxglute wrote:
| Applied Science in the wild! Your videos look expensive, does
| per video patreons tend to cover them?
| trainyperson wrote:
| Does Patreon let you see what percentage of your subscribers
| signed up through the iOS app?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Write to your Representative and Senator Wyden before you
| switch.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Oh you too. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's really
| liked per-creation for years. "I pay my rent if I can do eight
| posts of comics pages/art/etc a month" was a good kick in the
| ass to keep working.
|
| Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for
| like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're
| pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't
| think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't
| want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a
| few Wordpress plugins.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Any chance we could chat about how per creation works? I'm
| working on a competitor. @shokuonproduct / "shokunin." On
| discord
| neilv wrote:
| Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems"
| and "interoperation", to support market competition and
| innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open
| standards.
|
| Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a
| hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download
| thing that could've been a Web site.
|
| In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive
| on their hardware in various ways. (Often through foot-dragging
| when other vendors were trying to make Web apps a smooth
| experience, but sometimes also going out of their way to make Web
| work worse.) (See also: making kids look like losers to their
| peers in chat, if they don't have iPhones.)
|
| Apple then imposes predatory rates and terms on other businesses
| who are pretty much forced to use the Apple proprietary app
| store, due not to the merits of the app store so much as Apple's
| dominance of hardware and conflict of interest when implementing
| open standards.
|
| I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and how
| much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple can
| be. Or they have some idea, but pragmatically have to accept it.
| Also, this affords Apple a lot of money for really first-rate PR.
|
| What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the
| snot out of the Apple app store, with finality. For example:
| Apple may only charge a few-percent administration and payment
| processing fee, and that's it; and they have to permit other app
| stores with first-class access to the system, as a compromise
| given the proprietary lock-in mess they've made. (Making them
| support other open standards better, even to the exclusion of
| prorietary ones, is more complicated.)
| ncr100 wrote:
| > I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and
| how much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple
| can be.
|
| Here is an awesome graph (scroll down 1 page) charting out the
| 3 options -- 1 web, and 2 overtly expensive for iOS.
|
| https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/27991664769677...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open
| systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition
| and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other
| open standards. Then Apple comes along,_
|
| Wow. I don't know if that's selective memory, or revisionist
| history, but you've got a huge dose of the stuff.
|
| No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a
| lot better than it was in the 80's.
| RangerScience wrote:
| AFAICT, all the best things on the internet came from people
| giving things away; although usually with some kind of way to
| send them money later.
|
| Open core, Royal Road / Patreon pipeline, Linux itself...
| __loam wrote:
| Apple is currently facing anti-trust action so it's not like
| regulators are sleeping on it.
| underlipton wrote:
| >What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the
| snot out of the Apple app store, with finality.
|
| I imagine that part of it is that Apple's stock backstops a lot
| of activity in the financial markets. No one wants to kill the
| golden goose to protect "a bunch of Millennial and Zoomer phone
| addicts"; you have to remember, we're the cows everyone else is
| happy to milk dry for their own needs.
| talldayo wrote:
| Bingo - give this guy a cigar.
|
| The EU had a tenuous relation with Apple from the start.
| Apple spent the past 20-odd years manipulating Irish
| subsidiaries to avoid paying a dime in taxes on any of their
| European operations. Despite being called out on it and
| partially settling the back-taxes in some jurisdictions, they
| still owe billions to multiple EU members they haven't payed
| back. There's no history of love, between Apple and Europe.
| They conspire against Apple because Apple conspires against
| them.
|
| Then Apple _had_ to kick the hornets nest and piss off the
| Dutch regulators with the Tinder case. Apple forfeit quickly
| but it set the stage for everyone else joining in on the
| fines. This was the perfect catalyst for the DMA and the DSA,
| which would be copied in other countries like Japan (which
| coincidentally also has tax feuds with Apple).
|
| Good luck to the shareholders They won't take kindly to the
| news that the Apple of their eye is a big fruit-shaped
| bubble.
| Rudism wrote:
| Due to their app store monopoly, Apple is probably one of the few
| companies whose version of enshittification often involves
| enshittifying the products and services of other companies.
| advael wrote:
| We need to kill the phone duopoly
|
| A big part of it is restrictive and onerous standards on cellular
| firmware that act as a compliance moat for Apple and Google (and
| seem designed to enable surveillance more than anything), but if
| we fail to get open-source alternatives via commonsense
| regulatory reform the antitrust guns need to come out. When
| smartphones are often the only authentication mechanism accepted
| by major payment providers, workplaces, and other contexts that
| most people can't opt out of, a (fairly cozy, collaborating as
| often as they compete) duopoly on viable operating systems is
| unacceptable
| bluescrn wrote:
| > We need to kill the phone duopoly
|
| We also need to save the world wide web. Most of these 'apps'
| have no need to exist.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| What advantage does the Patreon app offer to iOS users that the
| Patreon website is unable to offer? Why does Patreon even need an
| app?
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Being able to consume Patron-exclusive content on the go,
| probably.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| iOS is the most-used platform for Patreon, according to the
| CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-LoTH3PzgM (0:57)
| TheDong wrote:
| There's a few things:
|
| 1. Some iOS users don't realize there even is a web browser,
| and only look for apps. If there's not an app, they give up.
|
| 2. The patreon app has features like playing music and video
| (patreon rewards), notifications (new posts and messages and
| such), etc.... and while those features would work for a
| webpage on android, they either don't work on iOS, or are more
| difficult to implement, buggy, and feel "non-native" for the
| user.
|
| Notice how the other two replies assumed "web page" didn't mean
| "using safari on iOS". If hacker news commenters have trouble
| with the concept of "using a webpage, not an app, on iOS", what
| hope does the general populace have?
| albertopv wrote:
| I think one of the reasons Apple feels entitled to do this is
| almost monopolistic US market share. People should stop buying
| iPhones for this, but it's not hard to foreseen it won't happen.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Apple has a far from monopolistic US market share for mobile
| devices. They might be one of the largest single vendors, but
| if I want to go buy a new smartphone that has decent app and
| service support from the marketplace, I can absolutely do that
| without giving so much as a penny to Apple.
| standardUser wrote:
| Apple has just over 60% of the US market share and employee a
| whole arsenal of tactics to create artificial friction with
| other platforms in order to increase that market share.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That's big, but in the minds of most, that's not a
| monopoly. Duopoly with Google, sure, but convincing a court
| of a monopoly when a lot of people in that court have
| living memory of Windows being 80%+ of the total OS
| installs in the country is going to be a tall ask,
| especially considering that didn't even stick, long-term,
| as a rationale to keep MS under the original terms of its
| punishment.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Windows (Microsoft) never tried to charge 30% on top of
| all commerce occuring on the platform.
|
| What would your opinion be if they did?
| matwood wrote:
| IMO, it's the interop that that will potentially get Apple.
| The stuff about the store and fees will likely end up
| nowhere in the US.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think this simplistic view of "monopoly" is all that
| useful today. This article, IMO, is proof of that: Apple is
| forcing an unrelated company to change something fundamental
| about how they take payments, which (negatively!) affects
| that company's customers (both patrons and creators), even
| those who do not use Apple products at all.
|
| If that's not abuse of market power, I'm not sure what is,
| then.
| iandanforth wrote:
| No mention of suing Apple, no mention of reducing _their_ cut.
| Doesn 't really seem like Patreon has got creators backs.
| bjtitus wrote:
| I'm sure Patreon is just itching to take on the wealthiest
| company's legal department. Even the wealthiest nation states
| are struggling to reign this in.
| intended wrote:
| Their cut is 8%.
|
| Apple's cut is 30%.
|
| If Patreon went to 0%, creators will still be getting 22% less.
|
| What would, according to you, be a good reduction on Patreon's
| side?
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Patreon only takes 5%-12% , even if they gave it all up it
| wouldn't the Apple Tax.
| nhggfu wrote:
| never build your house on rented land eh.
| _han wrote:
| This is the most shocking part to me:
|
| > Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon [...]
| disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having
| the entire app removed from their App Store.
|
| Absolutely astounding that removing transactions from the
| platform could result in being removed.
| sschueller wrote:
| How is the EU going to respond to this since it is literally
| blackmail with Apple's market dominance?
| nabla9 wrote:
| When they respond Apple changes policy for EU users, not for
| anyone else.
|
| Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have
| the ability to install apps using alternative app
| marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App
| Store.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| Is that so? I've been waiting to try app sideloading but
| haven't seen any app repositories or so that work with the
| app marketplace APIs
| nabla9 wrote:
| Yes. It has been just few months. It takes some time to
| catch up.
|
| Mobivention (b2b specialized) https://app-marketplace.eu/
|
| AltStore https://altstore.io/#Downloads
|
| Sometime in the future, Epic Games Store, MacPaw's Setapp
| ryan29 wrote:
| I wonder how far those rules from Apple go.
|
| I don't know a ton about Patreon, but what if creators have
| exclusive content available via the app and use that to
| encourage fans to subscribe outside of iOS? What if creators
| start an education campaign on YouTube telling their fans to
| avoid subscriptions on iOS?
|
| I wonder if Apple is playing with fire on this one. If the
| creator and influencer markets turn on them, I think it could
| have a non-trivial impact on Apple's brand, especially with
| younger generations. Many modern creators are also smart
| business people and they're not going to see much value in
| Apple taking 30% of their revenue when Patreon is already
| providing all the services they need for about 15% at the top
| end IIRC.
|
| Right now I think the biggest change that could help the
| average consumer would be for legislators to allow, or maybe
| even require, app owners to split platform fees into separate
| line items. For example, something like:
| Donation $1.00 Patreon Platform Fee $1.18
| Apple Platform Fee $0.50
| ---------------------------- Total
| $1.68
| sunaookami wrote:
| WordPress had the same problem:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-says-wordpress-doesnt...
|
| They had to remove payments completely so that it's a "free
| standalone app".
| dnissley wrote:
| This is what the world looks like when you give up the ability to
| download and install an app from anywhere.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Why is there even a Patreon app? Should've sent people to the
| website.
|
| You bought into the platform, so you have to pay by their rules.
| trvz wrote:
| > Why is there even a Patreon app?
|
| Considering its tendency to overheat your phone even when
| displaying pure text posts, it's there so you can warm your
| hands in winter.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The Patreon website is equally shitty, at least it was when I
| last used it last year. Haven't tried the app though. So you
| hands should remain toasty.
|
| But I do agree, why not just send Apple a big "fuck you" and
| create a really good mobile website?
|
| Apple is still really pushing it with the 30%. I do agree
| that they should get cut, or straight up charge app
| developers a yearly fee for being in the App Store (which
| they already do with the developer licens), perhaps a smaller
| fee per update and a fee for using their subscriptions
| feature (which I do like as a consumer).
|
| Patreon need to tread really carefully, because what Apple
| does not that different from Patreons own business model.
| Creators are similarly complaining about Patreons fees.
|
| Still 30% is a lot, but I don't know what the actual cost of
| running the App Store is.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| As a user, I welcome this change if it means it becomes possible
| to easily cancel Patreon subscriptions with a single click in my
| device settings instead of having to go through Patreon's
| cancellation process. Patreon makes it a completely unnecessary
| pain in the ass to cancel multiple subscriptions.
|
| It seems like only Apple gives a shit about making things easy to
| cancel and I find it hard to have any empathy for companies /
| developers that make canceling things painful.
| sersi wrote:
| I dislike Patreon because they keep making their UI worse over
| time but that said, I'm furious at apple for this. I like Patreon
| to allow creators to do per-creation schedule and I hate that
| Apple has enough power to impact me despite being an Android user
| (specifically because of these kind of behaviors).
|
| So, to people who say that with only 27% of global marketshare
| there's no case for an antitrust lawsuit, well if they can impact
| users outside of their ecosystem, there's a clear case for
| antitrust.
| __loam wrote:
| DoJ agrees with you lol.
| dinobones wrote:
| Not a fan of Apple's policy, but I am a fan of consistency.
|
| It was unfair that Patreon was able to operate on the App Store
| without paying this 30% cut, it basically gave them a monopoly
| that no similar Patreon-like platform could compete with.
| summerlight wrote:
| Even if we have to accept all the BS from Apple, at least
| customers should be aware of the information at the purchase time
| that they're paying 30% more money compared to other alternative
| options. This asymmetricity of information is playing good only
| for Apple at the cost of all the app creators and their
| customers.
| neves wrote:
| Non North-American here. I've read that Biden passed a "Hidden
| costs" bill. Wouldn't this Apple charges account as a hidden
| cost?
| wccrawford wrote:
| You are presented the final cost up-front. There is no "hidden
| cost" here.
|
| When you sign up for a hotel room and they add on room cleaning
| charges at the end of your stay, that's a hidden cost,
| especially since the charge is the same no matter what you do
| while you are there.
|
| Ironically, "sales tax" feels like a hidden cost to me. Yes,
| everyone knows it exists, but not everyone knows what the local
| value is wherever they are, especially on vacation. It should
| be on the sign. I guess it's not surprising that the government
| exempts themselves from this law.
| FredPret wrote:
| The reason sales prices are quoted without tax in North
| America is because there's a million different permutations
| governing what the sales tax is going to be in different
| situations (who's buying what, from whom, where, when), and
| this changes all the time.
|
| Local governments can shift their taxes at any time to
| encourage or discourage certain things. I'd argue this
| flexibility is very good, but the downside is calculating
| sales tax in the US is complex enough that there are
| companies dedicated to it.
|
| So everyone quotes pre-tax pricing.
| ttepasse wrote:
| If we only had databases and computers which can track and
| calculate those advanced math stuff.
| FredPret wrote:
| Well, yeah, but you can also see how the key piece of
| information a company discloses is the pre-tax price.
|
| To show each customer the right post-tax price, you'd
| have to know where they live and where they will buy your
| product. It would be impossible to advertise a price en
| masse on your website / in a brochure.
| mandeepj wrote:
| Any reason why Patreon can't go Netflix/Spotify way? they charge
| their customers via the web thus bypassing Apple paywall.
| jjcm wrote:
| In my eyes the most egregious aspect of this is it's a financial
| transaction between two people that they're taking a 30% cut of.
| I see 30% as fine for things like IAP for digital games and such,
| but somehow in this lens it feels wrong.
|
| One proposal for a compromise that would feel fair: Apple gets
| 30% of the app creator's take rate.
|
| IE if patreon's take rate is 8%, Apple should get 30% of _that_ ,
| not 30% of the full transaction. This could generalize to
| physical goods as well. It would require more reporting, but
| would feel more fair in the eyes of the creators and the users.
|
| I run a similar service to patreon where I charge a flat $1 fee
| on subscriptions, regardless of the size of the subscription. A
| $50 sub suddenly getting only $34 after my $1 fee and apple's $15
| fee feels wrong. There's no amount I can reduce my take rate to
| cover Apple's take. But I'm entirely ok giving them $0.30 on my
| $1 take.
|
| Basically - I'm entirely OK having 30% of my net profits taken by
| Apple. I'm not ok with 30% of my gross.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I expect Apple and platforms would not be happy with this
| model. Apple now has to trust that platforms are properly
| reporting their gross take. Platforms now have to give detailed
| financial records to a (potential) competitor.
|
| The current situation with Apple as the middleman lets them
| ensure they get every dollar without any accounting
| shenanigans.
| adamomada wrote:
| If it was a financial transaction between two people, then
| Apple couldn't possibly take any cut of it.
| stahtops wrote:
| Developer + Guitarist makes an iOS app and sells $10/mo
| subscriptions to their guitar tabs in it.
|
| Guitarist sells $10/mo subscriptions to their guitar tabs
| through the Patreon app.
|
| Why should these be considered any different?
| verisimi wrote:
| Apple are really such filth. Imagine thinking it's ok to take 30%
| of every transaction like this, and like they already do on their
| app store. I don't know how anyone thinks this is ok. It's worse
| than credit card rates.
| stahtops wrote:
| Gotta be honest, I don't get the vitriol.
|
| Patreon wants to advertise and publish content in an iOS app.
| Apple says you must allow in-app-purchases. Either there is
| value in being on the platform or there isn't. Patreon seems to
| think there is.
|
| To creators there is no cost, by default the price of their
| subscription offerings will be bumped up so they get the same
| revenue. Patreon will also increase revenue by taking the same
| % of the higher overall price.
|
| Users will have the choice of subscribing through iOS or
| through the website. If the higher cost from within the app
| isn't worth it to them, they will go to the website.
|
| Who cares?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| This is so shitty, imagine taking 30% from donations to creators.
| It should only be 30% from the money that Patreon itself makes
| off of subscriptions.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Next step: if you do any transaction in your smart banking app,
| 30 per cent go to Apple.
| dboreham wrote:
| Did I miss something? Did Apple acquire Patreon?
| aftbit wrote:
| As a Patreon user who primarily subscribes on a per-creation
| basis, I will be ending all of my affected subscriptions if they
| make this change. That was kinda the whole point of Patreon for
| me. I can support my creators but only if they actually produce
| some content. If they take a long break, they don't get any money
| from me, but they will also get paid automatically if and when
| they come back.
| jobigoud wrote:
| I use this model as a creator and I just hope/assume that my
| users will use the website instead of an app. It doesn't remove
| the per-creation model, it just makes it absent from the iOS
| app.
| aftbit wrote:
| Ah okay, that's fine then. I'll just keep using the per-
| creation model. I don't use Apple hardware so I won't even
| notice the change.
| genpfault wrote:
| > I'll just keep using the per-creation model.
|
| Until Patreon takes it away:
|
| > As a result of Apple's mandates and in order to make sure
| that you can continue getting new members in the iOS app,
| we've started a 16-month-long migration process to bring
| all creators onto subscription billing by November 2025,
| supported by a roadmap of new features and tools to make
| sure the billing model works for you, your community, and
| your business. To be clear, this means that _first-of-the-
| month and per-creation billing models will be discontinued
| in November 2025_.
| ed_voc wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if a third-party made an app for
| viewing Patreon content.
|
| Would Apple accept that the third-party client cannot accept
| payments on Patreon's behalf and not require the Apple tax?
| tomcam wrote:
| Can't Patreon just use a link to a website?
| theturtle32 wrote:
| Yay. More Enshittification and Chickenization due to monopsony
| power in a walled garden.
|
| I hate it here.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Patreon shouldn't need an 'app' to begin with.
|
| We have very capable web browsers on mobile these days.
| diggan wrote:
| Something I didn't see mentioned: Did they explore the option of
| not having a iPhone/AppStore application at all, and instead
| refocus those efforts on the website?
|
| Then they wouldn't have to compromise on their "creator-first"
| approach and they wouldn't have to bend their platform to fit
| Apple's views.
| derriz wrote:
| Thanks, I was struggling to understand the discussion here.
|
| I've bought fully into the Apple ecosystem - a bunch of
| iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs and Macbooks. I've also been paying a
| couple of creators via Patreon for the last year or two. But I
| hadn't even realized that there was a Patreon App. Why would
| you use such an App instead of the website?
|
| And the answer seems obvious as you suggest. Direct users to
| the website and forget about the App?
| joemi wrote:
| It really seems like the obvious solution. I can't believe that
| they haven't considered it, so then that would mean they _did_
| consider it and decided that it's better for them to do what
| they're doing and just blame any issues on Apple. Doesn't seem
| right to make Apple out to be the bad guy when Patreon made a
| shrewd business decision at the expense of the creators.
| sureIy wrote:
| I don't understand one part: why can't a creator just decide to
| not appear in the app?
|
| Are they changing the donation structure for _everyone_
| regardless of their interest of the Apple platform? Why should
| YouTubers be bothered by this change, for example.
| ajdude wrote:
| They said that if they offer different options for people who
| are not in the app, Apple threatened to remove them from the
| App Store.
| Havoc wrote:
| I can see a fee for facilitating...but that in my mind is 1% not
| 30%.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Let's not forget that if Apple created something called "Apple
| Creators", they would instantly gain 100% of the market share
| because there would be no fee (assuming feature parity)
|
| This forcing apps to use your payment platform through extortion
| is anti-competitive. Full stop.
| popcalc wrote:
| >would be no fee
|
| Because fraud doesn't exist?
| bangaladore wrote:
| Why would Apple charge itself a platform fee? They are the
| platform.
|
| Unless you are talking about CC fees, which are like 2%
| compared to the 30% that Apple is extorting you for.
|
| Can you explain your comment?
| Gud wrote:
| What a total dick move by Apple. 30% of the money donated to
| independent creators will now go to Apple, the richest
| corporation in the world. How is this legal?
| drewg123 wrote:
| The only reason I'd want to use a Patreon app over their website
| would be to play creator's videos on a large screen. As far as I
| can tell, they don't have an AppleTV app.
|
| This, TBH, is why I've never supported a creator via Patreon, as
| I have no idea how I'd access a creator's supporter-only content
| in a way that was convenient for me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can't you just play a video from their website full-screen, and
| AirPlay that to your Apple TV?
|
| AirPlay is the general way to get anything from your phone or
| Mac to your Apple TV.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| I'm a huge Apple fan in general, but this isn't right. Feels like
| a leader is getting ambitious, trying to squeeze revenue in a
| couple quarters instead of building new stuff that would generate
| new revenue
|
| Maybe they have data suggesting people were using Patreon as an
| easy way around in-app payments?
|
| Can't imagine this generates enough revenue to offset the long-
| term reputation cost among creators (what I would imagine is
| disproportionately an Apple user base)
| dzonga wrote:
| just use the web. porn companies do this and they're still in
| business.
|
| uber / lyft etc i'm 98% certain don't pay apple tax.
| xyst wrote:
| It's odd how Apple picks and chooses where to enforce this
| requirement.
|
| Netflix has been using their own billing system for years, yet I
| can still download Netflix on iOS, tvOS app stores.
|
| Makes me wonder if there is an under the table deal between
| Netflix and Apple.
|
| On the topic of Patreon vs Apple. I am not a lawyer but this
| seems to have the same basis as the Epic Games vs Apple
| litigation.
| shreddit wrote:
| AFAIK this is because you can not make changes to your
| subscription within the app. You have to visit the Netflix
| homepage. There is no "pay" button in Netflix, so they do not
| have to use apple's payment system...
| xyst wrote:
| If this is the case, I don't understand why Patreon and other
| sites cannot adopt the same approach. Very easy to remove buy
| buttons in apps, and redirect users to patreon.com to manage
| subscriptions for content creators and "per content"
| payments.
|
| iOS and Google apps just used to view content.
|
| Patreon is a relatively small company so velocity to complete
| this effort even amongst multiple teams should be at most a
| few weeks. If this was a Fortune 500, I would probably
| estimate it at 2-3 months.
| matwood wrote:
| I know for awhile Netflix had this weird thing where you called
| a phone number and they would direct you to the Netflix website
| to sign up.
|
| It's not having their own billing system, but allowing
| purchases to be made in-app that triggers the requirement.
| Which as far as I can tell, Netflix does not allow. I just
| checked and I can't change my plan in the app.
| xyst wrote:
| Maybe Patreon could leverage this loop hole as well.
|
| You can view content from creators in app. But only
| patreon.com can be used to manage subscriptions to each
| creator. No in-app purchases on Google or Apple App Stores.
|
| UX takes a small hit, but better than giving up 27-30% to
| Apple or Google.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Apple used to create products for creators. Now it creates
| revenue streams for investors
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Where is Lina Khan when you need her, eh?
| timmytokyo wrote:
| I suspect we'll be hearing from her soon. She's not been shy
| about taking on anti-consumer monopoly behavior.
| kelnos wrote:
| And yet so many people here seem to think that Apple doesn't have
| monopoly power, and doesn't abuse their market position.
|
| Go figure.
| mcguire wrote:
| I don't know Google's Android policy for Patreon, but I expect it
| is or will soon be similar, if the inability to buy ebooks from
| the Android apps is any precedent.
|
| Walled gardens suck.
| jocaal wrote:
| > Walled gardens suck.
|
| Let me fix that for you. uhuhm. Duopolies suck.
| danShumway wrote:
| Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that
| seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that
| Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than
| _Patreon 's_ fees.
|
| It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the
| market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The
| market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition.
| This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that
| charges fair prices - because fairness does not exist in the
| market, only competition.
|
| BUT... since fairness gets so often brought into conversations
| about Apple's fees, often with the implicit suggestion that Apple
| "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting
| into hosting and curating apps and for (in heavy quotes)
| "creating" a market that they supposedly also don't have duopoly
| control over: does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the
| Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and
| creators than _the existence of Patreon itself does_?
|
| Like, if we're going to talk about what's egregious and what's
| not egregious, charging higher fees per-transaction than the
| platforms you are hosting seems like it might be a good indicator
| that things have gotten out of control.
| queuebert wrote:
| Kind of like how realtors make more money on a house
| transaction than the closing attorneys who draw up all the
| paperwork and execute it legally.
| danShumway wrote:
| Or, I would argue, like if a realtor made more money off of
| the sale than _the person selling the house_ made.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| that is easily true. You buy a house for $500k. A year
| later, you decide to move. The house's value remains at
| $500k. Realtor commissions of 6% cost you $30k. You lost
| $30k on the total transaction, the realtor made $30k (not
| including the original buy).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Surely the realtor shouldn't work for $0 just because
| your investment didn't pan out, though?
| danShumway wrote:
| Only on HN would I see someone argue that depreciating or
| stagnant assets are the same thing as a 30% transaction
| fee. This community is smart enough to be able to tell
| the difference between a tax on _revenue_ and a tax on
| _profit._
|
| Apple is imposing a tax on _revenue_ that is higher than
| the revenue that Patreon pulls in from each transaction
| fee.
|
| There is no equivalent situation in a realtor market. In
| no world would a realtor sell your house for $500k and
| then tell you that they deserve a higher cut of the
| revenue than you do.
| frumper wrote:
| I don't know if that is a good comparison. Our realtor has
| spent a lot of hours over the past few years showing us homes
| and writing up more than a few losing bids. It's not constant
| attention, but so far it's all unpaid.
| queuebert wrote:
| One is necessary to have a legal transaction, while the
| other is rent-seeking. People buy cars all the time without
| agents. We have excellent websites to educate us about car
| features and locate cars for sale. Realtors keep their
| racket going by working with each other to get houses sold,
| while ignoring FSBO homes. In fact, buyer's agents have a
| conflict of interest in that they get paid more if you pay
| more for the house. How people accept this befuddles me.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about
| the market that services charge what they can, not what is
| fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only
| competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent
| monopoly that charges fair prices - because fairness does not
| exist in the market, only competition.
|
| I agree with you that the reality of markets is quite different
| to the "common sense" model. Unfortunately I rarely find either
| in the press or just talking to people myself, that anyone gets
| beyond this kind of price=cost(1+a little incentive) thinking.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I don't like this action form Apple, but I don't agree with
| your assessment of market economics here.
|
| The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective
| measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it
| aligns with their own personal interests.
|
| This is one of the key problems a free market economy solves.
| Price discovery is the intersection of what somebody's willing
| to sell something for, and what somebody else is willing to pay
| for it. Both of these parties will have a completely different
| idea of what's fair. That's why fairness is not a valid price
| discovery mechanism, and I don't think any free market
| economist has ever advocated for it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Would this view conclude that there should never be
| regulation of any sort? Or is there possibly a level of
| "fairness" that's evident to the average person?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Regulation is itself neither objective nor fair.
| Additionally, regulation is not immune from market
| pressures as the legal environments and incentives they
| create are also subject to competition. No nation-state has
| a monopoly on hospitable business environments.
|
| Fairness at its most objective is merely a process. It's
| not and should not be proselytized as a guarantee of equal
| outcomes irrespective of circumstances.
|
| > Or is there possibly a level of "fairness" that's evident
| to the average person?
|
| The "average person" does not exist and thus doesn't have
| an opinion representative of an arbitrary individual or
| group of individuals. A rational flesh-and-blood person can
| only speak for himself.
| frereubu wrote:
| I don't think the parent comment's main point was about using
| fairness to judge anything - the two main good I questions I
| got from it are (a) does Apple provide more utility in
| hosting the apps than the entire Patreon service? and (b) if
| not, doesn't the fact that it costs more show that something,
| somewhere is very wrong with the economic model?
|
| I'm a mild advocate of the Apple ecosystem in that I really
| like the fact it all works together pretty flawlessly for me,
| with many security headaches taken off my plate. (I'm always
| reminded of this when every ten years or so I think about
| trying to save money with a Windows laptop and come running
| back). But I think the parent comment's suggestion that this
| isn't about _fairness_ as such, but whether that kind of
| arrangement is _egregiously wrong_ hits home, and it does
| make me feel that this is the kind of weird economics that
| can only come from an unhealthy duopoly of iOS and Android.
|
| What to do about it? I'm not sure the parent or I have any
| particularly good answers...
| danShumway wrote:
| This is extremely well phrased.
|
| I will say, I do have opinions about what to do ;) But
| parent comment is right that I'm not trying to advocate for
| those opinions above, someone might completely disagree
| with me about how to respond to the situation, and that's
| fine.
|
| I'm more just pointing to the situation and saying, "this
| seems really weird, right? This is not the outcome that any
| of us would expect or want. Maybe you disagree with me
| about how to solve this, but this does seem like something
| we should try to solve."
| danShumway wrote:
| > The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective
| measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how
| it aligns with their own personal interests.
|
| With respect, this sounds a little bit like you're agreeing
| with me?
|
| Another way of phrasing "fairness is not a valid price
| discovery mechanism" might be to say that fairness as a
| concept "doesn't exist" in the market, only competition: ie,
| what people are willing to pay to acquire a service from the
| available options they have before them, ideally within an
| environment where low barrier-of-entry to the market allows
| prices to fall if a service can be legitimately offered
| cheaper elsewhere, and where regulation sets the (occasional)
| market cap on how exploitative businesses are able to be.
| Fairness as a concept is not applicable to market prices:
| they don't get set because they are "fair", they get set
| because businesses calculate the maximum amount that people
| are willing to pay for products before going to a competitor
| (assuming there is a competitor to go to).
|
| BUT, if people on HN insist on bringing fairness into
| discussions about anti-competitive behavior (which very often
| happens in discussions about the app-store), I think that
| Apple's fees in this case, and the impacts they will have on
| small-market creators, are unlikely to line up with most
| people's personal evaluation of "fair".
|
| A sibling comment phrased this in a really good way, I think
| this is a situation where regardless of how you feel about
| fairness, you can look at the market outcome and think, "wait
| a second, something is not right here."
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This is one of the key problems a free market economy
| solves.
|
| This is one of the key problems a _competitive_ free market
| economy solves. The distinction is particularly relevant in
| this case.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that
| seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that
| Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher
| than Patreon's fees.
|
| they are both rent seeking middle-men who abuse network effect,
| its just one has more power than another.
| danShumway wrote:
| This gets brought up a lot in conversations about Apple.
|
| In one sense, I agree with it. Patreon is a rent-seeking
| middleman who abuses network effects. 100%.
|
| But the creators on Patreon who's income are going to be most
| affected by this don't care about which side of the debate is
| more likeable to you, and I'm kind of sick of pretending that
| policies that affect a huge swath of people (often people
| with limited options, virtually no power, and few backup
| resources) can be treated like popularity contests.
|
| The video essayists, programmers, artists, authors, and
| indies doing weird, wonderful work supported through Patreon
| get their revenue squeezed even tighter, being forced to
| either bleed revenue or subscribers due to new fees, being
| forced to abandon revenue models and subscription models that
| Apple doesn't like.. and, I mean, honestly, "I hate both
| companies" just is not a valid or acceptable response to that
| situation.
|
| The solution to rent-seeking middlemen is not to make more of
| them.
| riku_iki wrote:
| I am wondering why Apple and Patreon even a thing in this
| market. Most of the content is distributed through Youtube,
| so Google can just step in, create patreon interface and
| cut both of them, get some extra revenue, and be a good
| guy.
| iteria wrote:
| Because not everything is distributed on YouTube. I
| support writers and artists on patreon. That's the bulk
| of what I support. Even if we say Google, youtube
| creators already complain about youtube and how it
| squeezes them so is it really better? Youtube even has a
| patreon like thing, but creators prefer to diversify the
| platforms they are on. Especially if, as is common, what
| they are selling on patreon are things that aren't
| allowed on youtube.
| danShumway wrote:
| :shrug: It would be nice to have alternatives, like you
| say, it's not like Patreon is particularly good at this.
| I understand that payment processing is kind of hellish
| to deal with, but that wouldn't be a barrier to a company
| the size of Apple/Google.
|
| Internet payments/subscription platforms are in desperate
| need of more competition, even partial competition.
|
| I thought for a while that Youtube was experimenting with
| paid subscribers? But it's possible that I misunderstood
| or that Google just got bored and abandoned it.
| nomel wrote:
| Youtube already has this through channel membership
| subscriptions [1]. Billing is through web only.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_uk/join/
| cyberax wrote:
| > Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that
| seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that
| Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher
| than Patreon's fees.
|
| Patreon made a shitty decision to push their crapp a while ago.
| They gimped their website and made some features accessible
| _only_ from the crapp.
|
| So now they can't really criticize the Apple policies without
| annoying the management who made the decision to focus on the
| app side.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I downloaded the Patreon app to listen to podcasts.
| Regardless of who is to blame from my perspective their
| imperfect app provides a better user experience than Firefox
| or Chrome on my Android phone.
| cyberax wrote:
| Does it sync them for offline listen? I can do that with
| Youtube videos in a browser.
|
| They could have trivially added that to their website.
| desert_rue wrote:
| I was able to get the feed and import it into my favorite
| podcast app (Overcast). I don't open the app very often.
| brookst wrote:
| > does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app
| on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators
| than the existence of Patreon itself does?
|
| I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular
| companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a
| second-tier _distributor_ to bring more value to a first-tier
| distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers?
|
| Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local
| distributor picks up a local product, and then a national
| distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty
| obvious that the national distributor brings more value.
|
| Looping back to the specifics, if Apple was the primary means
| that people discover Patreon and the creators on it, sure, it
| would make sense. But for Patreon specifically that's not the
| case (I think). The economics would suggest that Patreon should
| do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and
| everyone would be ahead.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > 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
| rtpg wrote:
| In particular Patreon can host things like podcasts so has
| a media player. The app isn't just about configuring
| billing
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local
| distributor picks up a local product, and then a national
| distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty
| obvious that the national distributor brings more value.
|
| That isn't obvious at all. In both cases the distributor's
| margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there
| is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there
| are a thousand, competition will force their margins down.
| Whether they're local or national.
|
| Moreover, in this context _Patreon_ is the national
| distributor who needs to distribute content to _everyone_
| whether they have iOS, Android, web or something else, and
| each of the platforms is a local subcontractor for a subset
| of the customers. Which leads to exactly the problem. The
| notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one
| another in this context is false, because to distribute to
| Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS
| customers you need Apple. You can 't switch from one to the
| other because Google can't distribute to iOS customers.
| They're each a different market serving different customers,
| and then they collect a monopoly rent.
|
| What the usual trope that analogizes this to Walmart or
| Target is missing is that "Walmart customers" are also
| customers of Target or Amazon, but the large majority of iOS
| customers are not also customers of Google Play or any other
| app store.
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| > Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that
| seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that
| Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher
| than Patreon's fees.
|
| Unfortunately this is in the nature of suppliers and retailers.
|
| Supermarkets make more profit on a litre of milk than farmers.
| Way way way more. Because they know farmers in practice have to
| sell _all_ their milk, not just some of it.
|
| And what Apple really has, and knows it, is the only
| supermarket on the main road out of iBorough. And there are no
| corner shops.
| xyst wrote:
| It's time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If only we
| haven't defanged the regulatory agencies ...
| hermitdev wrote:
| > It's time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If
| only we haven't defanged the regulatory agencies ...
|
| I think you mean we _should_ de-FAANG the regulatory
| agencies.
| simonh wrote:
| Broken up in what way, and how would it help?
| desert_rue wrote:
| Generally, the Apple Store would be a separate company from
| Apple phones. A user gets to choose which store they want
| to use on their phone. Along with other things like which
| map app is the default.
|
| This way, the different stores could compete - by charging
| lower fees or offering more services. Like the android
| store does a bare-bones check of the app and so it only
| charges 10%. Apple checks every app throughly, so it
| charges 15%. Some open source store might have 0% fee, have
| no app checks, no payment processing, and it is 100% on the
| user not to download infested software.
| Terretta wrote:
| If it was an open platform, then Apple couldn't charge any
| more than Steam which is on an open platform, because
| nobody would pay that much unless forced to.
|
| Wait, Steam charges more?
|
| Never mind.
| danShumway wrote:
| If you're suggesting that Steam doesn't have an effective
| monopoly on the PC market, I have bad news for you. One
| of the biggest differences between Steam and Apple is
| that Steam does a better job of hiding the effects from
| users who will lash out at creators who talk about
| problems on the platform.
|
| An indie creator I follow recently implored fans to buy
| their next game on Steam and not other platforms...
| because in order to be profitable they absolutely needed
| to get their game to be ranked on Steam above a certain
| review threshold, and reviews of the game would only
| count towards their ranking if matched with specifically
| a Steam purchase. And once again, I get this weird
| feeling. I'm struck that at the point where a creator is
| begging users to reinforce the most dominant PC gaming
| platform because if those users buy the game somewhere
| else that has better creator terms and fees, the platform
| will (in effect) punish their store listing, something
| might be going wrong with the market.
|
| Sometimes Apple advocates will point at similarly bad
| situations in other markets and say, "what, are you going
| to regulate that too?"
|
| Don't threaten me with a good time.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| A huge difference is Steam doesn't come pre-installed on
| your computers nor does it block you from installing
| other game managers.
| danShumway wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| I do think Steam is engaged in anti-competitive behavior,
| but that doesn't mean they're the full equivalent of the
| app store. And we can see on the PC market the large
| number of indie games that very literally would not exist
| if PCs were locked into only using Steam.
|
| My point here is more that Steam is not really a good
| argument for justifying a pricing model. But it's a good
| clarification that in many ways Steam has "only" mostly
| locked down the PC gaming _market_ , where Apple has gone
| further and locked down the actual software that can be
| loaded onto the phone.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Your "nobody" is doing all the work. Steam distributes to
| Windows, but you aren't required to use Steam to
| distribute to Windows, _and then many people don 't_.
| Adobe isn't paying Valve to distribute their suite. Epic
| doesn't use it for Fortnite. Random enterprise software
| developers have nothing to do with it.
|
| It's like pointing to the existence of people who
| willingly buy a BMW as a justification for forcing
| everyone to buy a BMW whether they want it or not.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Apple doesnt need to be broken up, they just need to be
| forced to open their devices. No proprietary apis that only
| they have access to, when you open the phone for the first
| time you should be able to pick what store to use and they
| have to allow alternative browsers
| lmm wrote:
| Nah, just Apple. Whenever any other tech company tries
| bullshit like this, alternatives pop up and people switch to
| them. When Apple tries it people make excuses for them.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market
| place.
|
| >does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app
| on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators
| than the existence of Patreon itself does?
|
| I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store
| for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease
| of access than the content itself.
|
| I agree that the high proportion t of take between the two
| firms says a lot about the state of the market. It also says a
| lot about the users, and what they care about.
|
| I think people are shocked by these outcomes because they
| aren't used to thinking about transaction costs as meaningful.
| Transfer, trust, and triangulation are critical parts of an
| exchange, and their costs can be even greater than the good
| itself.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market
| place.
|
| This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first
| conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent
| and what apple has on their app store is not free market
| capitalism, its pure rent seeking.
|
| Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores
| run on the device that they own.
| gretch wrote:
| > Apple users should be able to decide what software and
| stores run on the device that they own.
|
| They do decide, right when they buy their phone.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| And since we live in a democracy with laws where Apple's
| current arrangement can be voted to be made illegal, we
| can also decide to force Apple to open their device
| ecosystem (which may already be illegal).
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| You know that's not what the OP meant.
|
| "Apple users should be able to decide what software and
| stores run _on the device that they own._ "
|
| It should be able to be decided while owning it, not
| before. The point is that a phone that doesn't give the
| user the same level of control over the software that the
| manufacturer has simply should not exist. It should not
| be left to market forces.
| danShumway wrote:
| > If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for
| their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of
| access than the content itself.
|
| Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower
| prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or
| less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that
| consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from
| them?
|
| I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about
| privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-
| outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of
| users did care about privacy when they were able to make an
| informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being
| mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid
| options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them
| to make.
|
| But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of
| reasoning and is arguing the opposite.
|
| I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't
| consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users
| being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this
| case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most
| users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears
| to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being
| explained to them why that happened.
|
| That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that
| users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for
| their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of
| access than the content itself.
|
| You can't really argue that it's a fair choice when Apple
| does everything in their power to make going outside their
| walls a worse experience.
|
| Case in point, they hobble WebKit, but also forbid any
| alternative to WebKit. Are users choosing WebKit? Nope.
| DataDive wrote:
| > does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app
| on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators
| than the existence of Patreon itself does?
|
| There is a video link on the page from the original post where
| the Patreon CEO explains and reiterates the issues.
|
| Notably, at one point, he says that Apple Platform brings in
| the most money to Patreon.
|
| So there, looks like Apple brings in the money for Patreon.
| Apple seems to want a cut of that.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Importantly at one point he says that Apple lpatform brings
| in the most money to Patreon.
|
| I'm not surprised.
|
| The dirty little secret people won't talk about is that
| monetizing anything is _so much easier_ on iOS because Apple
| users have, in some combination, more disposable income to
| offer, and are more willing to spend money.
|
| This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career,
| almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on Apple is
| easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for good
| software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for the
| software they want.
|
| There's a lot of reasons for this, many of them socioeconomic
| in nature that mark out the differences between your average
| iPhone user and your average Android user, and I don't want
| to get into that quagmire and be called elitist: all I'm
| saying is, when Patreon says the vast majority of patrons are
| buying from iOS powered devices, between iOS being easier to
| monetize and the general populace being on their phones far
| more than their computers; yeah that makes complete fucking
| sense to me. I believe him.
| logifail wrote:
| > I don't want to get into that quagmire
|
| I'm not sure it's a quagmire: iOS devices are more
| expensive compared with the competition. I don't think this
| is up for debate.
|
| Given that, a null hypothesis might be that since their
| owners are happy to pay more for their device that they
| have more disposible income?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I don't think it's up for debate either, but it doesn't
| change that a lot of people I've interacted with, online,
| at work and even at conferences don't like talking about
| the... differences in monetizing on the two major phone
| platforms.
| frabcus wrote:
| Hmmm - it's been well known and talked about when I've
| worked for large B2C apps! In London.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >The dirty little secret people won't talk about is that
| monetizing anything is so much easier on iOS because Apple
| users have, in some combination, more disposable income to
| offer, and are more willing to spend money.
|
| That fact is neither dirty nor secret. I know you were
| using a figure of speech, but still. Everyone knows it.
|
| >This has been the elephant in the room for my entire
| career, almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on
| Apple is easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for
| good software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for
| the software they want.
|
| That's also pretty obvious, and likely because Apple users,
| whether mobile or computer, tend to spend more per capita
| on hardware than Windows or Linux users, simply because
| Apple hardware is more expensive.
|
| It was already true on desktop, before laptop, and before
| mobile, on Apple devices.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| American-manufactured automobiles bring in the majority of
| money to drive-thru restaurants too. Should they get a cut of
| drive-thru restaurants' revenue?
| 1over137 wrote:
| If they were as smart as Apple, they'd probably try!
| danShumway wrote:
| "a cut of that" is doing a heck of a lot of work here to
| handwave the amount they're asking for.
|
| A "cut" in this case means such a high percentage of the
| transaction that if Patreon didn't pass the extra cost on to
| consumers/creators, they would make negative dollars on each
| iOS subscription. That really genuinely does not strike you
| as odd at all?
|
| It doesn't strike you as weird or maybe like a possibly
| negative market effect that Patreon as a platform should be
| more profitable for Apple than it is for Patreon? I think
| most people would say that's a signal that something might be
| going wrong.
| lapcat wrote:
| > So there, looks like Apple brings in the money for Patreon.
|
| Apple _users_ bring in the money for Patreon.
|
| I own an iPhone. I am not Apple, and Apple does not own me.
| Why should Apple be able to charge money for "access" to me,
| as if I were a prostitute and Apple my pimp? I'm simply using
| a computer, which I paid for.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >I own an iPhone. I am not Apple, and Apple does not own
| me. Why should Apple be able to charge money for "access"
| to me, as if I were a prostitute and Apple my pimp? I'm
| simply using a computer, which I paid for.
|
| really solid point. they shouldn't be able to.
| prmoustache wrote:
| If you can afford an iphone, you can afford sending money to
| a number of random strangers without seeing a blip in your
| monthly budget. That is pretty much the reality.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon
| app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and
| creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?_
|
| This isn't a Creators/Patreon/Apple phenomenon, this is a
| consumers/distributors/(publishers|labels)/creators phenomenon.
|
| See page 12:
|
| https://articles.unesco.org/creativity/sites/default/files/m...
| danShumway wrote:
| "Apple isn't being doing anything bad, they're just like the
| music industry" is a heck of an argument to make. Do you
| think the average person would argue that the music industry
| isn't exploitative?
| Terretta wrote:
| I didn't make that argument.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Let's take this to an extreme. Imagine an app that does little
| except thread together the basic UI components provided by iOS.
| In other words, something that most people here could write in
| an afternoon. Now imagine it ends up on the Apple marketplace.
| Given how much work goes into building iOS, the UX, and the app
| store, by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees. The
| person who created the app just spent a few hours and Apple
| spent bazillions of hours (amortized over many apps).
| danShumway wrote:
| > by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees
|
| No, by my argument, _even if_ someone believes that Apple is
| somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation
| for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the
| amount of work they 're putting into making specifically the
| Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that
| was put into _building Patreon._
|
| If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a
| certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk
| unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and
| effective market competition without falling into the trap of
| worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by
| that discussion.
|
| The trap that people fall into so often when talking about
| Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a
| villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying
| to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come
| on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much
| more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple.
|
| "You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market
| outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want
| from an app store market. We should do things to make that
| market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-
| store policies.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| I think we should strive for making all "middle-man" platforms
| non-profits. App stores should be run by non-profits. Food
| delivery platforms should be non-profits. Rideshare platforms
| should be non-profits. I think it's the only way to defend
| against the natural process of enshittification that occurs when
| the platform itself is has a conflict of interest from the two
| parties that it connects.
|
| That goes for Patreon itself by the way - why in the world is a
| platform for connecting creators to fans itself a for-profit
| entity? A non-profit would be able to offer significantly less
| transaction fees - for example, Every.org. There's also the
| question of what Patreon's "exit strategy" will be...
| joemi wrote:
| This is an interesting idea. Though I think it'll be tough to
| differentiate what exactly constitutes a middle man, and
| therefore hard/impossible to enact. Would marketplaces (such as
| Amazon) be considered a middle man? If so, good luck making any
| traction on this plan. If not, then why would app stores be
| considered middle men if Amazon isn't? It would have to come
| down to some very particular and very exact legal points, and
| you can bet every middle man would try very hard to be just
| barely on the OK side of the law.
| bhewes wrote:
| I am happy I removed Apple from my business workflow.
| duxup wrote:
| I only recently started using Patreon (as in giving someone
| money).
|
| I really never thought of the app and I just went to the website.
|
| Is there some reason to use the app?
| fmorel wrote:
| If you wanted notifications there instead of email.
|
| But I've been using the website for over a year and don't feel
| like I'm missing out.
| ginko wrote:
| Isn't Patreon essentially just a website to pay creators? What
| added value does the iphone app even provide?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| The only reason I installed their iOS app was because their
| mobile website is essentially hot garbage that made it
| impossible to navigate through a creator's media playlist, let
| alone cast it to a television.
| fredski42 wrote:
| Apple creating an ecosystem of mobile apps is causing all this.
| Just go back to the Internet's universal UI: the Web
| jacobp100 wrote:
| Obviously Apple will back down here. They have enough issues with
| regulators. Their rules currently say any form of tipping has to
| use in app purchases - so I expect this rule to be changed.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Obviously Apple is testing how much teeth the rules have.
| gohwell wrote:
| What's the advantage for Patreon to have a native iOS app?
| iamleppert wrote:
| If any part of your face, voice, or any text that is ever written
| by you, or any kind of software or code you have written, has
| ever touched an Apple product, you better be prepared to kiss the
| ring of Tim Cook & Apple if you want to even THINK about making a
| dollar of it. Apple gets their cut, and yes, if you don't or
| can't pay they will shut you down. Not even your business
| account, they will come for your personal accounts, phones and
| any devices you own or have owned in the past and shut them down
| as well.
|
| Let it be a lesson to anyone trying to skirt out of paying their
| fair share, Apple is due AT LEAST 30% of what you make, plus
| developer fees. If you don't like it, TOUGH LUCK, PAY UP!
| phkahler wrote:
| Taken to an extreme, Patreon just drops the app and requires
| mobile users to use a web interface. Then what? Apple tells
| browser makers they have to skim a cut of any payments to any
| sites and give it to Apple or else your browser isn't allowed in
| the app store?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They should move to the Epic App Store.
| acqbu wrote:
| One more reason to stop using Crapple
| bn-l wrote:
| 30% is fucking disgusting and the only way they can get away with
| it is a captured regulator. It's so despicably greedy and
| arrogant. It's like they're rubbing it in your face that they can
| do this: "what are you gonna do about it huh?"
| Bwass wrote:
| Basic question: does the use of the Patreon iOS app incurs some
| sort of additional expenses for Apple?
| seatac76 wrote:
| How can this go on? It is a tax on innovation
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Already hitting me to the tune of $30/mo. for my family to do
| laundry.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| One more reason to avoid app stores and build/use PWA or just web
| apps.
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