Revenue $32 B
Operating Costs $7 B [1]
Estimated Profit $25 B
Operating Margin ~78%
Apple could take just 7% cut and still make 20% profits.
Fun Fact: During the Epic trial, it was revealed that Apple's profit margins on the App Store were so high that even Apple's own executives were sometimes surprised by the internal financial reports.
---
edit: There is no ideological argument for voluntary action here. The entire goal is to force regulators to step in. The debate over 'good vs. bad companies' is just online noise and rhetorical trik, no one on either side of the political spectrum wants these systems to be fixed voluntarily with corporate altruism.
It just focuses on the receiver of the money than the sender.
I think Apple is slowly killing apps with this policy. Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else. This will likely be much stronger in countries where iPhones do not have the same market share as in the US.
This is why Apple makes PWAs so miserable in Safari and disallows other browsers unless they're just Safari with lipstick.
Frankly, yes, please. I mean, I'm biased as my whole career is in web app development, but there are so many things these days that do not need a whole native app. They're just communicating with a server backend somewhere, using none of the unique native functionality of the phone (much of which is available in browser APIs these days anyway). I can block ads in a web app much more easily. It's much harder to do customer-hostile things like block screenshots in a web app.
Native apps definitely have a place, but I think they're very overused, mostly for reasons that benefit the business at the expense of the customer.
I disagree, native apps on iOS have important abilities that no web application can match. The inability to control cache long-term is alone a dealbreaker if trying to create an experience with minimal friction.
There are hardware APIs for some stuff that only works in native (cors, raw tcp), but 99% of apps don't need those.
My chat agent, file transfer tool, Grubhub, Amazon, YouTube, news, weather are all deleted in favor of a set of armored browsers that suppress the trash and clean up the experience. Its been an amazing change, as those companies no longer get a free advertisement on the application grid of my phone, making my use of them much more intentional.
If third party native apps were installed and run without user interaction the same as cross-origin redirects, I would expect the same limitations with native apps.
I believe you can see it working on TikTok web as well.
You just can’t have the first video unmuted on initial load, although I wonder if this can be relaxed when user installs a PWA.
You still can't have a "share to" target that is a web app on iOS. And the data your can store in local storage on safari is a joke.
Of course, forget about background tasks and integrated notifications.
In fact, even on Android you miss features with web apps, like widgets for quick actions, mapping actions to buttons and so on.
And no matter how good you cache things, the mobile browser will unload the app, and you will always get this friction when you load the web app on the new render you don't have on regular apps.
This loading is not nearly as seamless as a regular app starting back up.
For a regular app, you have the app loading, and the os cache helping with it. If you do your job half correctly, it loads as a block almost instantly.
For a web app you have the web browser loading, the the display of the white viewport in a flash, then the app loading in the browser (with zero os cache to help with so it's slower). It needs then to render. Then restoring the scroll (which is a mess with a browser) and the state as much as you can but you are limited with persistence size so most content must be reloaded which means the layout is moving around. Not to mention JS in a browser is not nearly as performant as a regular app, so as your app grows, it gets worse.
Don't give them any ideas.
(Apple's censorship notwithstanding)
For bill payments though, they'd just insist on taking 30% of your electric bill payment and if the electric company's margins aren't high enough to absorb that then "Haha that sounds like a you problem" - Tim Cook, probably
Apple then "maliciously complied", allowing it while demanding a 27% fee on any web-based payments, which was found to be a violation of the injunction.
https://technologylaw.fkks.com/post/102ka4o/apple-violated-u...
> Can I opt out of the App Store Fee?
> For U.S. fans, there’s still a way to avoid Apple’s fee. When signing up in the iOS app, they can choose web checkout instead of Apple’s in-app purchase system. Apple’s rules require that any paid content shown in the iOS app is also available to purchase through Apple’s in-app system.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/28801582599181...
In 2022 the total volume was estimated at $6T * .15% = $9B. Real number would be maybe half due to lower fees on debit, but it's hugely profitable for Apple, and carries zero risk.
When I put my credit card into Apples ecosystem they take a 0.15% cut of the transaction and appear to be very happy with the results. When I put my application into the ecosystem they take 30%..
You can then break down why this is, but boy is that an interesting contrast.
If you were a chain store in a high end mall where customers cars were all parked for free by valets, mall staff knew their names, and generally made them feel special, you’d not balk at a higher commission to be paid to mall for access to their customers, right? Airports come to mind for this.
I believe apple lets you set whatever price you want on their store, just not tell customers that they could get a lower price elsewhere/on the vendor’s website (I don’t follow App Store policies very closely so my info is probably out of date).
They're doing about as much to facilitate my use of Patreon as Apple is.
This isn't like a mall at all. This is like a web browser, where apps are webpages, and Apple is insisting that the contents of that webpage are something they can dictate all payment terms on.
For the airport analogy to work, it would have to be that you go to the Airport, go into the electronics store, buy a Kindle, and then the Airport insists it can take 30% not just on the purchase of the kindle, but 30% on every single book you buy on the kindle forever.
Apple taking a cut on the purchase price of an app that a user found via the app store does make some sense. Apple taking a cut of an in-app interaction with a creator that the user almost certainly found elsewhere is nonsense.
What next, should apple take a 30% cut of my rent because I found my apartment on the Craigslist app? Should they take a 30% of my train ticket that I purchased using the Safari app? Why does Patreon have to add a 30% cut on in-app content, when Safari lets me pay for in-app content with my credit card without taking any cut?
I agree that if someone discovered the artist elsewhere, Apple has weaker standing in claiming a huge commission. But if they found an artist elsewhere, they would also know that they can support that artist elsewhere and not through the iOS app. If the patron found them through the patreon iOS app and use the app to consume the artist's content, then clearly the patron has indicated that they prefer the iOS experience.
Even if people do enjoy browsing through the PAtreon app and choosing creators they want to subscribe to, that's not worth 30%. Rent-seeking is a cognitive disease.
... and of course the user found the artist elsewhere than the iOS app store. They found them on youtube, or reddit, or _possibly_ on the webview inside the patreon iOS app, which is also _not_ apple's App Store content, it's content provided by Patreon.
Again, should accessing my bank via the Safari or Chrome iOS app mean apple gets 30% of all my bank transactions, just because they were displayed on a webview inside an iOS app?
However, regulators would probably take note that Google has been aggressively pushing their browser for free for over a decade to gain market share, and have a field day.
The difference is that Apple's business model hasn't changed - you've always been restricted to distributing apps under a business agreement, and the conditions on commissions have been pretty consistent since inception, or at least since IAP was added in 2009.
"What ifs" about Apple charging 30% for bank transactions would run afoul of regulators. This is about consuming member-exclusive goods and services in-app, which again has been in the contract terms since 2009.
Goods and services consumed outside of the app (such as purchases of physical items on Amazon, or plane tickets or the like) are actually forbidden from using in-app purchase and do not have a commission rate.
I hate IOS enough that I'm running at least a full numbered version behind with updates turned off and never plan to buy another IOS device, and I'm subscribed to multiple Patreons started through the IOS app merely because it was the device in my hand and they automatically funnel Patreon links to it.
I'm not entirely pro-Apple percentage in this argument, but I think people often dismiss the magical thing that Apple created with the app store and their payment/subscription system. The rest of the world keeps ripping users off, and Apple's walled garden is as protected a thing as it gets.
I've gone directly to my bank for subscription charges billed directly to my credit card and they wouldn't reverse or stop them. Cancelling and reversing on the App Store is basic, easy, and friction-free.
Plus, the Android environment doesn't yield nearly the same sales volume even with significantly more installed units.
People spend on iOS and they don't spend on other platforms.
30% hurts and it sucks, but.. Patreon will probably take it because they'll do the math and it won't come out in favor of the alternative. That's what really sucks, beyond Apple max-max-maxing this.
This keeps getting repeated but it's not actually my experience. Not even Apple believes it, otherwise they could avoid a lot of legal and regulatory trouble by giving users a choice: Pay through Apple for an extra 30% protection fee.
Chrome definitely does, at least to a degree.
But you have the option to not use it, because guess what? You're supposed to own the device.
It looks like you may have edited your comment, but the issues of Apple's app store payment percentage, the open/closed nature of their appstore, and the ability to sideload apps are 3 separate issues.
The screenshots for the app had "Documets" and "Lasspass" prominently visible
Nothing about this is for your sake.
Sure they could, and usage of those products to purchase goods would nominally drop to 0%. People do not care about a lot of things, but they do care about losing money.
Amazon was able to achieve this by positioning themselves as the primary distributor of the goods in question. Apple is in no position to leverage a monopoly over fiat transer or housing supply.
With regard to municipal transportation, perhaps they are edging closer with Apple Pay, NFC, Wallet, etc.. but I can't imagine municipalities supporting, or constituents accepting, a tax on their existing taxes.
Of course, maybe Apple.gov is the long game. Hard to say whether that would be better or worse that the status quo..
When I paid over $1000 to buy an iPhone I thought I was buying a technological product that I could use to improve my life.
I didn’t realize I was buying a ticket to Disneyland where the seller of the product decided how I interacted with everything the device enabled.
I don’t think this should be disallowed. I certainly think it’s incredibly false marketing for Apple to claim I bought an iphone, when in reality I paid upfront for essentially AOL.
If you're the sort of person who posts on HN and you bought an iPhone after they hit the $1000 price point, you probably did know that.
It surprises me a little that so many people who do know still make that choice.
I wonder if that has ever been tried against Apple or a similar company in a court of law, because I think there might be real merit there. One would have to get a bunch of people together claiming a refund on the purchase price on the grounds that ownership hasn't been transferred and therefore Apple is in breach of contract in relation to the contract for sale of an iPhone. Then those people would have to bring a class action, and the case would revolve around the concept of "ownership". Because "ownership", to a first approximation, means the legal right to do with some piece of property essentially as you please, and Apple is clearly basing much of their business on the assumption that users do not have those rights and is taking positive action to prevent users from exercising such rights.
I don't know much about the law in the rest of the world, except Germany, but in Germany that would certainly be the case, and there is a surprising amount of case law revolving around such things as horses or other animals being sold, and the former owner then trying to restrict the new owner in exercising their ownership rights, which generally end with ownership rights being upheld by courts.
It’s a choice, and you can tell it’s a choice because many, many other companies choose not to.
Often in small claims court you win by default if the other person doesn’t show up and I’m sure judges know average will sympathize with the kinds of arguments that you raised above.
Also, any kind of effort to annoy someone by bringing coordinated actions in lots of venues all at the same time is probably abuse of process.
Is there even such a thing as precedent in the German legal system?
The goal of this isn't to annoy someone, the goal is to seek compensation for their unacceptable behavior and raise awareness of it so that others may do so as well.
With the mindboggling assymetry in resources between a single individual and an entity like Apple or Google it only makes sense for people to team up and coordinate against them.
Apple can easily say "Use our store exclusively and you get our security/privacy guarantees. Go outside our store and you're in the wild west". App developers can then decide how much fee they are willing to pay for access to the user base who refuse to venture into the wild west. Other stores might try to persuade users that they are more secure and more private too via stricter review policies or more locked down permissions etc.
It would prevent fragmentation and give people a choice to pay up if they actually value Apple's extra protections (if any).
If the EU has the right approach, then they still do not have the right implementation.
The only reason they haven't been smacked with a billion dollar fine for their Bullshit (Core Technology Fee)yet, is because of Trump.
*And anything on their payment rails should have a normal transaction fee, e.g. Stripe’s retail rate is 2.9% + $0.30.
The per-user model means that apps which have adopted freemium and advertising-driven models wind up having quite different financials, and could be more expensive.
If the platform like patreon is supposed to absorb that fee they will increase prices for everyone even people who won't touch Apple like me. That's not fair. Or more likely, they will just give less to the content creators.
In the EU it's already forbidden to force payments through Apple or to forbid the platforms to charge the fee back to the customer.
"Buy our electricity at a huge markup to power your vehicle. Oh, you don't have one of our vehicles? Sorry, that's an extra 10% on top"
This was dystopic scifi like 20 years ago and Americans are so clueless they just sleepwalked into it because they'd rather not have a government at all.
I like Apple less and less these days for various reasons, but I haven't purchased an app on the App Store in more than a decade. It's strictly a vehicle for local utilities when, for whatever reason, a browser will not suffice. Nearly all purchasing is done on the 'open' web.
That's an incredibly ridiculous take. R&D is an operating cost and it's an ongoing expense related to the app store existing.
> I think the actual profit margin is closer to ...
You can replace "think" there with "feel".
Apple cannot charge for that. However, apple does attempt to gimp the web platforms on mobile to "subtly" push for apps.
Even after EU DSA told them to allow purchases via Web, Apple literally demanded a 27% cut from purchases happening outside of App Store (and then a bunch of other arrogantly greedy fee structures that keeps them in courts).
Apple knows how hard is not to be in the duopoly of app stores. They keep web apps half-assed, won't direct users to them, but allow knock-off apps to use your trademarks in their search keywords.
Not even in the days of IE was I ever this frustrated.
I've been web devving since the days of IE as well and this reeks of hyperbole. Maybe things are different for browser games, but for me, everything has vastly improved since those days.
The latest issue that I've noticed yesterday is the button nav bar on the screen when running PWAs. The button is over the bottom navbar of the PWA, and despite apple themselves coming up with the API to inform the browser about safe display areas, it doesn't work in PWAs on iOS. PWA mode on iOS != non PWA on iOS. They often behave completely different and you often have to use JS for basic things to work, like clicking a link(yup, this was a thing for years).
That does sound frustrating. You're working with APIs that I don't usually touch (audio, canvas) so it's not surprising that I haven't experienced that. I was thinking back to the days I had to support IE 8, trying to debug weird issues in production like scripts not working because `console.log` wasn't defined unless the developer tools were opened.
It doesn't matter if you are not technically in a dominant position if your special role in a large ecosystem basically allows you to act like one in your own purview.
You could say this kind of move invites more scrutiny but the regulators are already there watching every Apple's move with a microscope and their patience with Apple attempts at thwarting compliance is apparently wearing thin at least in the EU if you look at preliminary findings.
Regulating the fees for one central app store is no solution.
Oh boy, now my mom can get the full experience of having malware on her phone too!
The other problem consideration here is negotiating power.
Today consumers don't have negotiating power over individual developers, but both Apple and Google do. If you complain to Meta about their unwanted tracking, you don't really have many options besides deleting the app (which you should do anyway). But if enough people complain to Apple or Google, they are more inclined to do something and have the power.
While it may be a marriage of convenience, it's undeniable that both companies through their app distribution models have also provided benefits to consumers that developers otherwise would have abused - privacy, screen recording, malicious advertising, &c.
If you want to argue from the standpoint of pro-consumer action, you have to remember that "developers" are usually pretty awful too and will get away with anything they can, even if it harms their customers. A good balance, instead of ideological purity about one "side" or the other is the smarter move. I tend to come down on the side of the mainstream app stores precisely because those asking for more "freedom" to do as they wish are a tiny minority and are usually more technical. I.e. they can jump through the hoops to install 3rd party app stores and jailbreak their phones today, and since you already can do what you want, maybe it's best to just leave the masses alone since they're very obviously happy with the duopoly.
I think the principle of digital autonomy should be front and center. Surely we can figure out security models that don't imply that two American tech companies get to call the shots on what people can or cannot do on hardware that they supposedly own.
If Google Play Integrity didn't exist, the app would only be certified to run on e.g. unrooted Samsung Knox devices.
Digital goods DO NOT work like physical goods. I can just buy another washing machine. I CANNOT just choose to opt out of using a smartphone. My choices are apple or Google, and even within those choices it's limited by network effects.
If you go all the way to "everyone should have the freedom to get pwned", then you are also funneling the money of innocents into the pockets of some of the worst people in the world, and that's not a great outcome just to make life more convient for some HNers.
The question is about what trade-off makes sense for most people. That probably is some sort of escape hatch nontech people just won't do.
Maybe it's a hard thing to appreciate until you've watched aging family members get tricked by absolute scum, mostly enabled by how loosey-goosey modern computing can still be.
Of course thats PR argument, in reality its about distorting and manipulating the market to get the most money out of its users and bind them to their ecosystem as hard as possible to extract even more. And the amount of those same people who uncritically defend them here is still staggering. But maybe its just employees ignoring their ndas, some investors and similar folks.
Right on. But that's exactly the wiggle room where voters could pull some of those cards like "climate change mitigation (of consequences)", "climate change preparation", "upcoming waves of climate change refugees", "AI dividing the population", "Universal Basic Income", all of which are things companies like Apple won't do anything for (or against) while their goods are still mostly for proper earners and not for people who buy stuff at a discount (I'm exaggerating).
Since corporate altruism is definitely not on the menu, government institutions and NGOs will have to pick up way more than they are currently prepared for.
We are in a strange phase of calm before the storm, despite all those wars and conflicts--or in spite of them, I don't know. Shits' gonna hit the fan sooner or later and it's up to the voters to demand adequate preparation.
Big Corps caused significantly more damage than they had to cause for all those profits, whether as a side effect or not, and they did that long enough.
Job cuts, whether due to AI or not, will remain a thing while no "new" giants will rise for quite a while ... and corporations will sing the song "it's what the people want" only as long as voters will stay quiet.
Sure, bribes, corruption and blablabla, but it doesn't change how votes work and none of it changes how the devoted clerks in the administration do their jobs and write laws (if they have to have to) ...
We can say this to any company, "$X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits", but it doesn't really make any sense. Making profits is what makes a company a company instead of a non-profit organization.
In normal markets there are competitors who force each other to keep reasonable profit margins and to improve their product as opposed to milking other people's hard work at the expense of the consumer.
The consumer is willing to pay the price based on the perceived value from the App Store
Collective action by the creators would help.
All they have to do is dual-host (a fairly trivial matter, compared to organised collective action). What would make things even better is if they dual host on a competing platform and specify in their content that the competing platform charges lower fees. If even 10% of the creators did this:
1. Many of the consumers would switch. 2. Many of the creators not on the competing platform would also offer dual-hosting.
The problem is not "As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set". The problem is the mindset that their content is not their own.
I say it's their mindset, because they certainly don't act as if they own the content - when your content is available only via a single channel, you don't own your content, you are simply a supplier for that channel.
Apple will ban you for this.
How? I thought it was a Patreon thing - the "competing platform" would be competing with the Patreon app.
I'm not familiar with Patreon, but I thought the way it worked was that you could tip content creators via the Patreon app. I'm pretty certain that Apple cannot tell Patreon (a third party) that they are only allowed to offer exclusive content.
To me this is the thing that should be outlawed. Let people pay the Apple tax if they want, but don’t prevent people from making other arrangements. Most people are lazy and will pay the tax, if it isn’t excessive.
"No one needs app" is not the same as "No one has biological mandatory need to have an app"
there could also be cases where cutting back to $Z profits might be preferable in case not doing so were to prompt legislation causing someone to be forcibly cut to $Z-1 or even $0 profits from a particular profit source.
Which it has been my observation that when someone is saying "X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits" it often coincides with saying therefore company X should be legislated on this particular profit source.
Note: $X didn't make much rhetorical sense.
Not in an environment where regulatory capture costs so much less than any change legislation could bring. The remedy in almost every recent monopoly case has been remarkably nothing. Politicians don’t actually want change, they want the threat of legislation so that industries bring truckloads of money to line their pockets.
At this point the regulators should investigate what the barriers are to new entrants and if it's too costly and nobody has managed to cut in the last few years, establishing some rules is probably a good thing. This happens as industries mature and become critical, it happened in transportation (most bus, train companies), energy, water supply, trash, etc, depending on the country and market conditions.
Google is moving in that direction.
Until it turns into cancer because of unrestrained growth.
Like it or not capitalism is a part of an ecosystem. We’ve been “educated” to believe that unrestrained growth in profits is what makes capitalism work, and yet day after day there are fresh examples of how our experience as consumers has gotten worse under capitalism because of the idea that profits should forever be growing.
Microsoft Office: Revenue $45B Operating Costs $12B Profit $33B Operating Margin 75%
Google Search Ads: Revenue $175B Operating Costs $45B Profit $130B Operating Margin 75%
While technically true, this argument doesn't provide any merit to the discussion. The App Store backed purchase for the Patreon subscription would not exist at all without the creator's work and investment in creating their form of content.
In the absence of the App Store, the creator would still have access to their patrons via mobile web and payment via the methods already provided by Patreon. The app is merely a convenience - it's a hard sell that this convenience is worth 30% of the creator's revenue through the platform.
Both parties are getting the chance to set whatever price they want. Up to the market to resolve supply/demand equilibrium
The app store payment cut harms only creators who have disproportionately high percentages of patrons that primarily consume their content from iPhones - a demographic that they have no control over.
If they wish to increase their price to make up for this, they then are forced to risk turning away their other, non-iPhone-primary patrons. Notably, Patreon is forbidden by Apple from making this pricing scheme transparent and up-charging only iPhone users to keep the creator whole.
The only party with power here is Apple - and they are using it to strongarm.
It cuts both ways. The app store payment disincents consuming content from iPhones (indirectly, as the iPhone-heavy creators raise their prices). Of course Apple has the greater power, but there are always tradeoffs. That is the market in action - "cutting both ways" so to speak - or "strongarm" in your parlance - until you reach equilibrium. An equilibrium which is always temporary (ever heard of disruption?).
Was this recorded or just people drawing lines between Epic's expert witness claims and the executives trying to down play them?
They can choose to sell in the store where all users are, or in the store nobody goes.
It's not analogous to iOS that has no other options for distribution.
Agreed, there are bad privately held corps, and worse privately held corps, with badness usually proportional to their size and profit.
The "nearly" is the issue. Opting out of the Apple/Google duopoly comes at a great cost.
Truly is nearly. Some apps (banks) you need to toggle a compat mode.
> Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up (the 2024 evidentiary hearing). To unveil Apple’s actual decision-making process, not the one tailor-made for litigation, the Court ordered production of real-time documents and ultimately held a second set of hearings in 2025.
> To summarize: One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive. Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing,and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Apple’s goal: maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. Two, the Court had prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct consumers to, other purchasing mechanisms. Apple’s response: impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full page “scare” screens, static URLs, and generic statements. Apple’s goal: to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
> One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive.
Epic is twisting other people's words here. Notice how they quote “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” but not the point about it being anticompetitive. It's because the decision never said that.
I'm not sure what is the basis for your question but using market definition where Google Play and Apple Store are in the same market is not correct (market definition is essential part of any monopoly regulation).
Markets are defined by choice of practice, not by choice in principle.
Yeah that has to be a good 95% of why businesses do bad things.
The last thing Apple wants is for people to think they've plateaued. Stock starts going down to normal P/E ratios, expensive engineers leave, etc.
It's a classic direct-indirect management problem. Think about Android for a second. It costs nothing to put an app on their app store. People can make apps for themselves and then just publish because either "why not" or it's an easy way to distribute to friends and family. So basically it is making app creation easy. Meanwhile Apple charges you $100/yr to even put something up on the store, makes it hard to sideload, and consequently people charge for apps, which Apple rejoices as they get a 30% cut (already double dipping: profiting from devs, profiting from the devs' customers).
BUT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT SMARTPHONES
A smartphone is useless without apps! People frustrated they can't find the apps they want on iPhone? They switch to Android. People on Android want to get away from Google but they can't do half the shit they want to on iPhones (and the other half costs $0.99/mo)? They bite their tongue or rage quit to Graphene.
The only reason this "fuck over the user" strategy works is because there's an effective monopoly.
All of this is incredibly idiotic as the point of a smartphone is that it is a computer that also makes phone calls. We have made a grave mistake in thinking they are anything but general purpose computers. All our conversations around them seem really silly or down right idiotic when you recognize they are general purpose computers. And surprise surprise, the result is that seeing how profitable and abusive the smartphone market can be leads to a pretty obvious result: turn your laptops and desktops into smartphone like devices. Where everything must be done through the app stores, where they lock you out of basic functionalities, where they turn the general purpose computer into a locked down for-their-purposes computer.
The thing that made the smartphone and the computer so great was the ability to write programs. The ability to do with it as you want. It's because you can't build a product for everyone. But the computer? It's an environment. You can make an environment that anyone can turn into the thing they want and they need. THAT is the magic of computers. So why are we trying to kill that magic?
It doesn't matter that 90% of people don't use it that way, and all those arguments are idiotic. Like with everything else, it is a small minority of people that move things forward. A small percentage of players account for the majority of microtransactions in videogames. A small percentage of fans buy the majority of merchandise from their favorite musicians. And in just the same way, it is a small number of computer users (i.e. "powerusers") that drive most of the innovation, find most of the bugs, and do most of the things. I mean come on, how long did it take Apple and Google to put a fucking flashlight into the OS? It was the most popular apps on both their stores for a long time before it got built in. Do you really think they're going to be able to do all the things?
Apple is succeeding largely on merit, within the bounds of civilized, peaceful competition. Shouldn't we all just be grateful for the contributions they have made to our civilization?
> force
> regulators
That's my whole problem, personally.
What we need much, much less of in this world is government force, especially during these trying times of government force and outreach (something I expected my more left side of the isle colleagues to have finally realized by now).
COIVD really was a test of how much governmental draconianism we would take, and we failed spectacularly, and not only that, but are demanding more government.
So no, we don't need more regulation, especially given this country's history of regulatory capture. We need new solutions.
I want big corporations to be scared. I want them to fear for their own survival, and to tread lightly lest the sword of damocles fall upon them.
Edit: Maybe I am greedy now, but it would be nice if large transactions like say buying a house only would cost me a 15% transaction fee to Apple.
Yet Apple can get away with taking 30% and companies still accept this and push their apps rather than websites.
companies and users!
Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.
It doesn't matter if they are developers or not.
They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.
That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)
So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).
Think about how many lives were improved just by M* CPUs or Siri
/s
But these were paid for by the hardware purchase.
Since various countries have regulated the ability to do third party payments from apps, Apple has since added API to launch said payments, to help generate statistics on use so that they can then demand third party auditing that the commissions are still being properly paid.
In the US there was a court decision that they couldn't meter or charge commission, which may very well be walked back and will lead to lots of fun future articles.
Valve already takes a 30% cut of all Steam transactions. It's just corporations fighting to steal each other's revenue streams.
This is totally made up.
If the government stepped in to regulate the sales of software (to protect developers and consumers?) do you think: A) apps will cost less B) the government won’t want their cut
[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/12/app-store-and-japanese-co...
On macOS, Apple don't take a 30% cut on Steam purchases. Steam take 30% however.
There's a big difference - when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something and they legally can charge.
I don't actually have an opinion on whether 30% or 15% is too much or not. It's factually wrong or illogical arguments that bother me: how can we fight anything when the arguments are just nonsensical.
Apple make plenty of user-hostile decisions, but people need to criticise them reasonably, otherwise they will be ignored by those that might have the influence to change things for the better.
Is it?
We spent several decades of the PC world, MSDOS and Windows, with zero platform license fees or approvals. This was hugely beneficial for innovation, and this is why everyone hates the sudden rise of platform landlordism.
Rent-seeking on SaaS platforms is far worse I think, e.g. $30 per month for 10GB of data in a recent offering I was looking at, and who knows where the data are. Some datacenter in a foreign land with a mad king probably.
Are you sure the ToS allows that? Given the "anti-steering" rules? Can you point me to an example that isn't by a megacorp?
> $30 per month for 10GB of data in a recent offering I was looking at, and who knows where the data are
That's worse pricing than my mobile contract!
Doesn't change that if you distribute inside the app store, the app store rules ban you from any kind of external payment system.
No it's always been like this.
> Doesn't change that if you distribute inside the app store, the app store rules ban you from any kind of external payment system.
Yes because you're paying for the payment system amongst other things.
I don’t agree that this is an Apple hating thread. Its commentary on a pretty despicable action that Apple is taking.
Sure, Apple is greedy. But it doesn’t deserve what is usually assumed: legal persecution.
It's not, it's just factually wrong.
If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee.
That's reductio ad absurdum.
Lol.
Apple could absolutely do this. They could say that professional medical use of macOS requires a commercial license, and the price of that commercial licence could be linked to revenue.
Doctors - or rather their hospital IT/procurement departments - would be held to the terms of service they agree to. Far more rigorously than ordinary consumers.
So everyone raced to the iOS app store, it was only 30%, what a great deal!
The problem is that two decades later it is no longer that great deal in mobile duopoly world.
The Mafia can learn a thing or two from Cook.
And I'll be happy to prove you wrong: there are many things that Apple could do but hasn't done yet that would make them money and yet nobody is suing them for that. For instance they could make the cut 35% or 50% and if they don't then shareholders would sue. But they won't.
The claim isn’t that Apple must raise fees to 35% or be sued—clearly that’s not how fiduciary duty works. The claim is that, over time, dominant platforms tend to increase extraction once they’ve locked in users and developers. That pattern has been observed repeatedly, and it’s what people are pointing to when they talk about “enshittification.” Individual fee levels can vary, but the long-term direction for monopoly or duopoly platforms is fairly consistent.
https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co...
Both employ mafia tactics
30% is just so unreasonable that it would be totally understandable if someone would believe this.
Apple chose 30% because they knew they weren't a retailer. You can hunt for a cheaper Diablo II copy online or at Wal-Mart, but not on iPhone.
Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.
EA was an outlier, and by the time they capitulated and started Origin it was so bad that people regret signing up for the service. GoG didn't have this issue, Valve didn't have that issue, EA did.
Apple see the iPhone as a game console, not that anyone else thinks of it in that way.
It’s egregious now but at the time it wasn’t crazy because software developers often made way less than that when going through traditional publishing routes. Plus everyone was just happy to be making money off the new platform.
The real innovation was convincing us this was inevitable.
Reality disagrees: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/12/13/data-regulato...
In all seriousness, finance people see everything through the lens of margins and money primarily. Since any company's function is to deliver value to its shareholders, if allowed, bean counters will scorch the earth for it.
Ultimately, this is at odds on how Jobs approached things, i.e., money was not the end all be all.
Those with listings of SMS codes for which app to download, depending on the phone OS.
So it was a great deal back in 2008.
The fact remains that it was a very stupid system in 2008, and lowering the percentage doesn't obviate Apple's perverse incentives.
If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentially was ~$1. Stripe had roughly the same fee when they launched. You had more traditional credit card merchants and when I inquired one in Germany back in 2010, it was more or less in the same ballpark (~10%).
In Europe, you could also just get money wired, which cost you something like 0-10 cents.
30% for payment processing were always extremely high.
Edit: The only thing where you had no other options was when you tried to sell stuff on the internet for $1, because the flat fee part of credit card processors would eat up all of that. Apple indeed helped here a little bit, because it was always 30% and no fixed part.
PayPal also offered a "micropayments" rate (that I used in Cydia), wherein they charged $0.05+5% (which is much better for payments under $12).
Steam comes to mind. They take 30% (and I think 5% for credit card or whatever).
So I do not think that "outrageously wrong" is characterizing my remarks adequately.
Your phone is general purpose, steam is focused on a narrow band of market
The iOS store adds nothing but cost to the purchasing process, with hilariously terrible discoverability and sorting, steam makes navigating and discoverability breezy and easy
Your phone is arguably not an optional part of your life, whereas nobody ever missed an important call because they weren't on steam
Steam does not take any money from apps or companies for transactions it was not involved in. Here, and in other cases, the costs of doing business with apple extend to people who have no relationship with apple at all
If you think you can make any money selling software on the internet and paying nothing other than $0.35 + 1.7%, think again.
- Developers helped to make Apple the platform it is today.
- Apple had their 30% fee when the App Store was MUCH smaller. It's not like that fee came only after they had the audience.
- Apple will do zero marketing for you unless you are already successful.
- Apple doesn't earn money with the most popular free apps, but still hosts them. They could charge by traffic, by downloads, whatever, but they won't.
- Apple will charge you if you make money in the app. They will force you to use their payment processor if you want to make money.
So, it is 100% a processing fee and everything else either came later or isn't congruent with what they actually charge money for.
However, newspapers and content creators are popular in a way that carries political weight. It'd be wise for Apple exempt these categories and write off the few hundred million in forgone revenue as a political expense.
For example allowing the NYT or Joe Rogan to have nice paid apps with no fees would be a much more effective use of money than the same amount in political donations.
They do have carve outs in the agreement, such as the 'reader' exception. Newspapers I believe also fall under the 'reader' exception.
I have suspected for a while that the 15%-after-the-first-year subscription rate drop was a carve out targeted specifically at trying to retain Netflix IAP. However, Netflix was able to operate without IAP because of the "reader" exception.
This would make it much easier to find and install web apps than the current method.
Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.
A few sites throw up a blocking screen to download the app, which disappears once you spoof a desktop UA. But the big problem is businesses now having no web interface at all
Because we have such limited control over our devices, they effectively provide the security of a jail locking down what users can do. That is appealing from a healthcare or banking perspective because it obfuscates the client-server API and gives exact control over the UI. As a bonus, the coffee chain gets to glean lots of details from your phone that would be unavailable in a browser.
As individuals we can do little more that push back: don't let yourself be trapped by coffee chains (go to a different one) and bother your bank's service line about having to use their app. The rest is up to government intervention, I fear.
That is an education problem. What do school computer courses teach these days? Do schools even have computer literacy classes anymore? Do they still teach students about the internet?
We do mobile friendly Web UIs, that is enough.
Their customes, employees, go to the respective company website, get a responsive UI for their device, done, the services require to be online anyway.
Just like apps in general, PWAs are mostly a mobile heavy modality. Bookmarks and the browser is largely still fine on laptop/desktop, but even there you see the app design language start prevailing with things like bookmarks and “recent sites” being presented like app icons.
So you get your "app" to tap on.
The mobile ecosystem was built in a way to funnel all users into apps. That's the experience that is optimized for use, that's the experience users feel safe and secure. Barriers were put in place on what apps are even allowed to do (like not having alternative app stores, or a browser in iOs that is not just a webview of Safari). This created an enviroment where developers and companies are forced to develop to this ecosystem, and pay the Apple tax, since that's where the users are. And an alternative system is impossible to be created since Apple uses it's power at the hardware and operating system level to make alternatives impossible.
And someone will probably come and say that this is all users choice to be locked down in the walled garden. That the walled garden is keeping the users safe, so therefore it is only fair that Apple gets to capture 30% of all digital economical activity.
You could accompany it with some copy explaining how it keeps the service efficient and affordable, i.e., possible stating if you were to offer an app you would have to increase the price by 75% to pay Apple their fee and for the extra costs.
I suspect other arguments for PWAs would not really matter, like that you have no need to track them or use other abilities an app affords, etc. Most people only care about very few things engineers actually care, let alone know about.
I’ve always been an advocate of PWAs whenever it makes sense and will even design and architect to that objective. But even when I would deal with clients, I think the real “up hill battle” is that apps allow for higher fees and charges because they’re more work and come with greater expenses for for-profit apps, so there has been very little incentive to spread general user awareness about the “add to Home Screen”/PWA.
It’s a bit of a paradox, but I guess that seems to be an under-appreciated driver in something like “advanced consumer capitalist economies”, where the “rational actor” simply does not exist anymore.
Specifically, do people not use websites that have rich/complex data driven functionality anymore?
If they do, I'm wondering what determines whether an application is seen as needing a mobile app vs being ok as a regular web app.
Basically you just ask their email address and add it to a list in Firebase. Upload your ipa to firebase and the user will receive an email with a link to download
Because in my circle, power-users and beyond. Everybody is angry with apps needed for everything, you want buy bread in store, "do you have our app?" It's a meme here. And in our local subreddit, 600k users. Sentiment is the same.
We also tried to bypass stores apps with generating new accounts and distributing QR/cards for free to everyone. It was kinda popular.
And problems are more real with each day, eg.: scammers have their work way easier, since dumb users can take a huge loan directly from banking app in their phone.
Also small EU country, btw.
Did you ask them why?
I write cross platform apps using Vue/Quasar (previous Angular/Ionic, and before that Titanium), I have put up a web-based version of their app (as a fallback and as an early MVP) and it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone to even play with it. Then you put an app up on TestFlight and suddenly they are using it.
And that’s just trying to get the to use the web while I’m still setting up crap for a “native” app. The idea of not having an app is a non-starter.
Again, I don’t agree with them, I’m just telling you what it’s like out there if you are developing software for other people. An app brings “prestige”, they want be able to say “we have an app”. And no, saving a webpage to the home screen is not a viable alternative (trust me, I’ve tried). Clients and customers reject that and there are extra limitations with that approach (or there were last time I tried, around using the camera feed, things that work fine in mobile Safari).
The app might make it easier for them to enforce DRM-like behaviors to prevent people from pirating creators content, but I strongly suspect people aren't doing that on iOS regardless.
For those that are not aware, on Android you can install Firefox and Ublock-Origin. Life saver!
If your TV supports AirPlay, you just tap the icon on a video in Safari.
My sister and my parents basically ~only read newspapers from their apps, despite it being static text with some images.
I don't know how, but Google and Apple are really good at nudging people to use apps instead of websites.
- how to install them
- what advantages (and disadvantages) they have. In particular regarding censorship and privacy!
Apple and Google need to be pressured to make PWAs
- easier to install
- more capable
- less buggy (Mobile Safari in particular).
If your app's needs can be met with a PWA, you owe it to your users to offer one!
Here are a few PWA showcase links:
https://pwa-showcase.com/#/all-cards
And a lazy AI-generated list of things that PWAs can do today on top of the things a normal web page can do:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/make-a-list-of-all-things-p...
Sure you could do it in a browser, but half the time the credentials dont cache, or you have to waste 4 clicks and 20 seconds finding a bookmark.
They want convenience. For better or worse.
I'm not sure how has the goalpost here moved to app-exclusivity, I understood exclusive here to mean "exclusive to Patreon" as opposed to supporting a creator that posts everything for free somewhere else, which is the use case that made that one user assume one doesn't check on Patreon often.
Also, mobile browsers easily cut out background audio so the website is nearly useless on a phone for audio posts compared to the app, as much as I'd prefer it.
The other way around is a little confusing as a question because that's the primary purpose of Patreon and is mentioned on the homepage marketing (multiple payment tiers with exclusive content).
Hope this clears things up. My main point was that there is in fact an incentive for users to check the app beyond setting up payment and forgetting about it. Even if it is not the only way such content is available, it certainly is a convenient one.
I too got confused by oneeyedpigeon's question but I assumed from their claim about it being "setup and forget" that they simply don't know much about it.
Works offline?
I've never seen a PWA do that feature well.
b) if so, does it work any better than a web app can offline?
Been running linux (popos) for donkey years and I entertained the thought I should go back to Apple and get the MacbookPro-16 (which is probably the best laptop you can buy imho).
Then I remembered all this crap that Apple does and dismissed it.
He talks about Apple's app store
I've instead handed the reins to others, so I don't have skin in this game any more. ;)
And the other half of the mobile app market is monopolized by Google who copies the pricing model while delivering even worse (if any) service to developers.
It's either getting out of mobile apps or paying up.
This is not going to change without drastic steps by regulators, which both Apple and Google fight tooth and nail.
This even includes developing open source tools for MacOS.
And even if it doesn't backfire it is largely a wasted effort.
We kept working on the platform and developing tools and things changed. Of course Apple is a lot more powerful than MSFT back then and the general population is their target.
Why did we let mobile go down the one-app-per-website path?
I was an app advocate for a long time, now I made a PWA and it’s maybe 90% there. But you still get behaviors that you can not fix.
IMO the worst however is products that have a fully functional website, but refuse to let you use it (e.g.: Instagram)
The trouble is, market forces always try and push things the other way.
The Reddit App for example is totally unnecessary. It's just public web content and should be a website.
SaaS on the other hand shouldn't really be a thing at all. I have no idea why anyone thinks it's a good idea for their private data and app state to be on a cloud somewhere they don't control.
Note that this does not preclude the use of cloud services that users can control e.g. by specifiying trusted endpoints. I'm trying to build the idea of "data locality first" software. I.e. you know where your data are and where they aren't.
Since app distribution is not a fair market anymore, it needs to be regulated. Either the fees have to go down close to cost or alternative app stores should be allowed. And not the malicious compliance version of it (as Apple is trying in the EU).
Because the web is still barely usable for anything more complex than showing a few lines of static text and an image?
Because for almost as long as (modern) mobile apps exist the web was even less usable?
Because even now you can whip up a fast complex mobile app with 60fps animations and native behaviours probably in minutes? While on the web you're lucky if you can figure out which state/animation/routing library du jour isn't broken beyond all hope?
I struggle (and mostly curse) to figure out what swipe gesture to use to get simple stuff to just work. Not super sure all the 60fps animations and wizz-bang behaviours are being used the way you think they are.
#include<"old-man-yells-at-clould-meme">
1. App creators will pass the extra cost over to the iPhone users.
2. Android (and other platforms that can host smartphone apps) will be more competitive and start to look better for both app creators and consumers.
Sure, there's a bit of a context switching cost. Not everyone will just be able to automatically change over to an Android phone tomorrow. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. These phones get updated and replaced every 1-2 years. If iOS users see their app store prices rising too high, and they aren't OK with this, then they will switch to Android eventually, once it's worth it.
Otherwise, I don't see any problem with Apple reaping the benefit of their powerful and well-built walled garden ecosystem.
Or they'll stop buying as many apps, or stop supporting people on Patreon.
Aren't they making the majority of their money from selling hardware and iCloud subscriptions? Why they go on and milk developers, who make apps FOR THEIR ECOSYSTEM?!
Even the stupid many headed hydra can't survive when an 8 year-old kid has a super intelligence capable of autonomously manufacturing a bio weapon.
30% is not that.
It's an egregious share, and Apple is making an estimated $30 billion a year with this, at a margin perhaps more than twice as high as on iPhone sales.
They are greedy because Apple fans would by a turd in a box if it had an Apple logo.
If I was in charge of Apple I would do the same thing. In fact, I would likely increase the Apple cut to 40%. People would pay, they like their slick toys.
The developers will continue to make apps for their ecosystem regardless.
I feel like I've just watched a man in a $4000 suit wresting the change jar out of the hands of a homeless person
But then again to avoid a 30% fee.. probably worth it
They'd actually have to do it though and that could lead to a large loss of revenue for themselves and their subscribers.
Click here to avoid apple tax takes you to web page if allowed.
And it's still a net loss.
Thanks a lot, Eddy Cue, for all that you do to bring Apple down to its knees!
I’ve never even considered publishing apps for other platforms as my gut tells me juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze. Or to put it another way, I would prefer customers who already proved they have deep(er) pockets and are price insensitive.
I don't pay attention to all of Apples behaviors (still running an iphone 11) but this feels quite rent-seeky and creator hostile.
Please Apple, make this happen.
It’s a surprisingly hard thing to search for online…
I quite like it though. At one of my banks I don't even use a password. My browser has the right material (from a prior authn) and then it pushes a validation request to my phone and with FaceID I'm in.
That’s exactly what I don’t want though. I don’t want to be tied to a bank app that requires a non-rooted device/whatever other checks it does.
But the upside is: they work offline, and makes your 2FA app unhackable because it's not an app and instead a physically separate device.
If you're as serious about your opsec as I am, I heavily recommend to not use apps on smartphones for banking.
My local credit union (TechCU) does none of that nonsense, and I highly recommend a credit union over any of the big banks in any case.
Do you mean SMS codes or a Chase Bank App?
I have to deal with the former because I auto-delete cookies when I close tabs and use Multi-account containers on Firefox.
I've never been required to install any application (Chase branded or otherwise) on my phone in order to use the Chase website. I'll note that I've been a Chase customer since they acquired Chemical Bank in 1996.
Am I missing something important here? If so, I'd love to hear about it.
The all new modern push notifications! Pay only 99ct per 2FA message, that's a steal deal!
Its still widely used :-D
2. The costs for this would be ridiculous. I have probably sent over a million public messages on Discord in the decade I've been using it. $10,000 is a pretty steep fee to do some chatting.
3. This is essentially a digital ID scheme with extra steps, and requires ceding privacy completely to communicate on the internet.
I understand your comment was probably an off-hand joke and not to be taken seriously but if you think about it for very long it becomes apparent that it would actually make the problem worse.
Junk mail isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. And I'd be surprised if the margins for this was so high that a mere 1 cent transactions wouldn't deter so many of them.
I see it the opposite. You will never stop truly motivated propaganda from spreading its messae. They put millions into it and the goal isn't necessarily profit. But you stop a lot of low time scammers with a small cost barrier.If only because they then take a cheaper grift.
Like my point is that atleast for amazon/yt, these bots usually cost this much ~$0.03 to buy once.
Then we probably see a scammer buy many of these accounts and then (rent it?) on their own website/telegram groups to promtoe views/ratings etc./ comment with the porn ridden bots that we saw on youtube who will copy any previous comment and paste it and so on.
So technically these still cost 3 cents & scammers are happily paying the rate.
Once upon a time it was expensive to send messages and now it's cheap.
I remember Verizon wireless at the time had a plan with unlimited nights and weekends for calls and texts, so my friends and I would message each other like crazy on the weekends when it was free. Got grounded when I got my first girlfriend in high school for racking up the phone bill from text messages and promptly got my phone taken away.
Popular apps have been exempt from these rules since the beginning of time - not that I agree with this.
would it be weird/embarrassing for Apple?
That’s what “popular” means, in this context.
That’s how they make their decisions.
But Patreon does have a web version but I am not sure how many people prefer web sites in Apple ecosystem especially on Ios so I do find the whole thing to be a bit weird because this ~30% cut essentially seems to rip off of creators in some sense.
Hell I'd argue more people are upset about the lack of an OnlyFans app than Patreon. OF has way more brand-recognition (outside of tech) than Patreon.
Epic Games went to federal court over this with Apple like 40 fuckin times - a related fun read for you.
Personally I think Apple should have two pricing tiers: one for interactive entertainment, and one for everything else. For interactive entertainment, a flat 30% on everything. For everything else, Apple lowers their margin to cover transaction costs only (in the realm of 5-10%).
Is it a "platform" the way a console is or is it a public marketplace? I'd think the distinction comes down to size relative to the rest of the market. If I run a private club that caters to a only a few people I'm not impacting anyone else. Whereas if I run a giant chain of so called "private clubs" that in reality 50% of the town purchases their groceries from then perhaps some scrutiny by the regulator is in order.
To answer your question directly: I contend that when it comes to operating a marketplace for interactive entertainment, an iPhone is no different from a Nintendo Switch, and if you want to impose rules, they must be imposed equally. For all other apps, I think Epic made some valid points.
I take two issues with your response.
First and foremost, the point I raised was specifically about the size of an operation relative to the overall market. You haven't addressed that. You say you see no difference but don't explain why. It seems obvious to me that larger players will require different regulations than smaller players due to having different effects on the market.
Second, Apple doesn't operate a marketplace for games. They operate a general purpose market that includes apps for anything and everything. Compare a 1000 sq ft mom and pop game shop to a 400k sq ft big box retailer that sells groceries, liquor, clothing, home goods, yard tools, just about everything except for literal building materials. It wouldn't be reasonable to treat them the same way.
I agree with this in principle, but I don't think that principle applies here. Apple is not a uniquely large vendor of games. There are multiple ecosystems operating at similar orders of magnitude in games sales, at around $10B or more. Against that backdrop, portraying the App Store as some singular 400-pound gorilla with respect to games is not accurate.
> Second, Apple doesn't operate a marketplace for games. They operate a general purpose market
That distinction cuts the other way. A general-purpose market does not escape product-specific regulation; it applies it selectively. A store that sells liquor must comply with liquor laws when selling liquor, but selling liquor does not prohibit it from selling candy to children. It is normal and reasonable to attach rules to the product being sold, not to the fact that the venue also sells other things.
Perhaps if Apple were willing to exclude games from the App Store and move them to a newly created Game Store, it would be easier to imagine how they could be made subject to different rules. But I don't think that should be necessary for the government to impose different rules on different product categories.
To be clear, another acceptable outcome IMO is for the Epic Games argument to prevail with respect to all major gaming platforms. If they believe Apple deserves 0% of Fortnite revenues on iOS, then Sony deserves 0% of Fortnite revenues on Playstation.
I did not suggest that Apple could escape laws that apply to a given product category. Quite the opposite - that I think it is reasonable for a behemoth to be subject to _additional_ regulations that cut across _all_ product categories. That was the point of my analogy. In physical retail big box stores are subject to additional regulations that mom and pop shops are not. The fact that Walmart happens to sell games and happens not to be the largest retailer of those is not going to get them out of being treated as the giant that they are.
I don't think it matters that in any given product category Apple isn't the largest. The issue is that they are one half of what is effectively a mobile app store duopoly in most of the western world. That fact carries serious implications for developers and consumers alike. Developers in particular, regardless of product category, are effectively forced to do business with Apple. On that basis I believe that either the app stores of both Apple and Google should be subject to _extremely_ stringent regulations or alternatively that the platforms should be forcibly opened up by law (ie no more locked down devices).
Given that the service operator gates access to the customers and that most customers are unlikely to switch just to do business with a particular vendor, then shouldn't policy be determined solely by the size of the service operator? Why should the type of good or size of the vendor enter into it?
In the west Apple is approximately half of mobile. That's massive. Saying a vendor isn't forced to do business with them is like saying that a vendor isn't forced to sell their products competitively. All things being equal if you publish software for mobile then you will be selling through Apple regardless of the terms they might impose.
Your remark about Bungie and Naughty Dog seems to me like saying that the local city doesn't need to tax a chain restaurant at the same rate as an independent one because it has storefronts in other cities with more favorable terms. The idea being that if they don't like the city's terms they can just close that storefront; it won't kill them due to their size and reach.
1. Where the hell is the notion of "using the platform for free" even coming from (it's coming from Apple of course). I didn't know that iPhones are free, or that dev fees are waived for everyone.
2. Why the hell can't I use a different payment processor tham Apple and tell people about it? Then I'm neither using Apple's platform "for free" nor paying Apple's transaction fees.
For all other apps, I agree that alternative payment processing should be permitted for one-off transactions. And I can agree for subscriptions as well, provided the developer can meet a high standard for simple, frictionless cancellations.
Why? iPhones are not gaming consoles.
iOS is not a liquor store, and allowing people to use other payment processors or even other stores on the platform is not selling liquor to minors.
Note how your analogies immediately fall apart for other platforms like, for example, Apple's own MacOS.
Not that I like Google much more re: Android and locking down side-loading more than before.
> The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.
If you cap the margin, you’re entrenching the monopoly forever. Allow them to charge what they want, and set tax rates on corporations commensurate with the size of their profits. Make it easier for competitors to start.
The path to a sustainable marketplace does not come from top down enforcement of margins. It comes from competition
For monopolies, that is the least bad option. What would be way better, though, is mandating an end to that monopoly by allowing all users to install any apps they want on their iPhones without needing Apple's permission in any way, shape, or form.
It doesn't have to be like this.
Also, contrary to current political environments, Congress is more than capable of doing multiple things as once.
On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.
What is your solution to the government that you may not like using previously established "regulations" against people? My point is that you ask for regulation hoping that it will prevent this type of issue, but the regulation that you actually get will be barely having any effect and it will enforce ID + picture verification, it will enforce downloading specific government sanctioned keylogger app, it will enforce specific US state association, etc. New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print. It will just lead to excluding so many people from using the service and making the overall space so much worse. That's why I'm encouraging people to think twice before immediately asking the government to expand its overreach via new regulations.
The problem here isn't that Patreon is centralized, but that the app store is. Apple could easily require a cut from any app using nostr and related protocols. Or simply ban them altogether.
Not saying government mandates are ideal, but I don't see any other way to force some sense into Apple (or Google). App stores should be some sort of independent institutions (non-profits) but companies have no incentive to cede that revenue. Until that happens, best not download from app stores unless absolutely necessary.
This is nonsense. Yes bad regulation is bad regulation, that's not an argument against regulation but an argument against bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad regulation - in fact most of it is good regulation. I enjoy not drinking feces for example but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how regulation against poopy drinking water is going to be turned against me.
> New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print.
Good regulation recognizes that small businesses don't have the same ability to comply with complex requirements, so it creates exceptions for small business or relaxes requirements.
By all means, please advocate for good regulation and call out bad regulation, but pretending that regulation is unnecessary or inherently harmful only serves the interest of capital at everyone else's expense.
you can't interfere or comment effectively on the policies or processes of your water treatment plant. on the Patreon case the user can simply stop using Apple hardware or move to the web
throwing every problem down to the goverment feels like: i believe in animal rights so instead of going vegan i'll protest to the goverment make it illegal to kill sentient animals for products.
i know we can do both but OP's anarchy solutions feels much more reasonable than expecting the goverment solve stuff. creating a culture that uses de-centralized approaches is times better than sticking to a centralized platform, regulated or not
Of course you can! You can simply install a well, a water filtration/RO system to make poopy water drinkable, or move to a different town that better suits your water quality needs. You always have the option of taking matters into your own hands and the point of having a government is so that you don't have to, in the interest of boosting quality of life and productivity.
> throwing every problem down to the goverment feels like: i believe in animal rights so instead of going vegan i'll protest to the goverment make it illegal to kill sentient animals for products.
Yes - obviously? That's how "rights" work, what separates them from "personal beliefs" is existence of a law that prohibits (or stipulates) certain actions from other people.
If I say that murder is cruel and harmful to other people, is your suggestion that I simply abstain from murder instead of demanding legislation that prohibits it?
Apple should not be allowed to be in the middle of business and half the users of the world.
And yes, that is very much something that governments have regulated for decades. In fact it's basically why anti-trust was invented. Train companies and deals with Standard Oil meant together they controlled the market since if you didn't go through them you couldn't ship your product.
Because the government is the only body equipped to create and enforce consumer rights laws. Do you think we'd have refund policies if the government didn't regulate them?
>then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.
Okay. How is the act of forbidding platforms from banning alternative payment processors going to backfire?
Markets without competition degenerate. Markets are also artificial and always rely on government enforcement to exist - Apple sues people who try to get around its market manipulation. You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.
Historically, markets are destroyed by government interference, not propped up by it. Your own example is a case in point: were it not for the government making laws in favor of entrenched companies, Apple couldn't sue the people trying to get around its market manipulation.
> You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.
This is a grossly unfair mischaracterization of the post you are replying to. Bad show, old chap.
That's it. No "government monopoly" or anything, just regular commercial monopolism.
Apple is already getting sued by the DOJ for their abusive business practices. They should be regulated.
Was all Apple since the iBook G4. Bought a Pixel last week. It's nice.
The Epic v Apple lawsuit verdict makes this allowed now.
Unfortunately, due to their behavior in the latest years, I'm not going to buy anything Apple anymore.
Fortunately for me, I prefer Linux to MacOS so I never have been totally tied in the Apple ecosystem and I know how to leave the boat without a lot of hassle.
I'm really saddened because they know how to make great products when they want to. It's just infuriating that everything that is shitty in their products is never due to randomness or bugs or whatever, but ALWAYS because they decided to fuck you.
I was a user of android for 15+ years, and I had been using a pixel 4a when the battery issue came up last year. Google handled that so terribly I bought a used pixel 7a and installed Graphene.
Installation is quite easy. The lack of native voice-to-text was a pain; I installed a 3rd party utility (FUTO) for that, but unlike the native one where it translates while you talk, FUTO waits for you to finish then translates everything.
The messaging app is less integrated too. Android finally fixed things up with Apple such that emoji responses (heart, thumbs up, +1, etc) would appear as an annotation after the text message I sent, but now I'm back to getting "So and so likes your comment <full text of my comment>".
Some of the other pain was because I have tried to cut down on other google properties. I use "here we go" for mapping instead of google maps. Due to the scale of things, the real time traffic updates on google maps is far better than on here we go. I use fastmail instead of gmail and I'm 100% happy with that solution.
Its a walled prison
I am so close to having raspberry pi phones but even rasp pi 's are getting expensive because of AI dammit
but honestly its also the fact that I love cli tools and yea I can and I have used termux in the past but I really wish for a more first class for cli tools as well and I don't know but I just really wish to support linux tools.
Like I am just not satisfied with the current options we have right now and you can look at fragmede's comment as to why I mean that. I mean I just want a cheap affordable linux phone with just decent specs nothing too fancy. By decent I mean that I used to be on a dumb phone for a year with 32 mb ram iirc so perhaps my specs can be considered to be minimal but I feel like 2-4GB ram might be a good start. (prefer the 4gb option as to favour both me anad the masses)
Can framework or some other company go ahead and create a linux phone too please?
A Linux smartphone has been tried before. That's not too say someone shouldn't try again, but just to say there are lessons to be learned from those attempts.
Thanks for writing this comment because that's exactly something which I wanted to convey with my original comment too
But I was more speaking on the software end. You can certainly piss off Google if enough people decided to buy an android phone but have it boot up Linux instead. Might even piss off Samsung, so that's a plus. I assume the infrastructure to get APK support on Linux is a herculean task, though (that's the only way I see as a middleground until native linux apps work on mobile).
My understanding is that the reason the number 30% is so magical is a historical anomaly. When software was physically distributed back in the day, 15% of the MSRP was reserved for the distributor and another 15% for the retailer. When these digital marketplaces were set up, the companies just said "well, we're the distributor and the retailer, so we'll keep both". Forgetting the fact that the cost to distribute and retail the software is literally pennies on the dollar of what it used to be.
I think the irony in this case is that this is a greed problem of their own making. When Steve Jobs announced that apps on the original iPhone would only be $1-$3, he set off the first enshittification crisis in the software industry. In 2008, Bejeweled cost $19.99 if you wanted to buy it on the PC. On the iPhone it was $0.99! This artificially low anchor price is what kicked off the adoption of ad and subscription driven software models in the first place.
Of course the retailer margin is never actually 50%. That's theoretical if 100% of product is sold at MSRP. Actual retail margins are about 25% because of sales, write-offs, et cetera.
OTOH when there's a sale in Steam, they still get their full cut (of the reduced price).
So that margin not only had to pay for small management costs, and had small opportunity costs on the floor space, but it also was divided by a large unitary price.
It made perfect sense that this shiny new iOS platform would take 30% of a cheap app to ensure that it matches the high quality of iOS. These were little productivity apps and games at the time.
This however - I just don't understand what the need is for an app at all for Patreon. Isn't this a website/platform kind of thing? Wouldn't an app just be an additional window into the Patreon platform?
What's next - 30% of my pizza price goes to Apple because I ordered it on my phone?
You joke but this already happens with places like DoorDash. They take 30% of the order from the store owner after adding their own additional fees to the order that customers pay.
Someone I know owns a pizza store and his prices are 30% higher on DoorDash but some people still pay. The big difference is it's not a monopoly. He offers regular delivery at normal store prices and 95% of his deliveries go through that.
I'm pretty sure Apple has discussed things exactly like this.
Their upper management really does tend to think that 30% of any monetary transaction on an Apple platform belongs to them. Too bad our government is too busy being ran by the billionaires to do anything about these abuses from billionaires.
That's the other part of the surrogate war happening with mobile. The web was unregulated and hard to profit off of, so Jobs took great strides to push the "there's an app for that" mentality that overtook that age. This had the nifty side effect of killing off flash, but it's clear the prospects didn't stop there. Not to mention all the other web hostile actions taken on IOS to make it only do the bare minimum required to not piss off customers.
It very much could just be a website with no reliance on IOS as a dependency. But Apple clearly doesn't want that.
> https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/technology-blog/story...
Apple still insists that the app store "provides value" for developers. They simply can't comprehend the harsh reality that these days, for most developers, the app store isn't the godsend service that helps their app get discovered, but instead an asinine bureaucratic obstacle they have to clear, and then regularly attend to, to have an iOS app at all.
The Mac app store, being optional for developers, is a good example of how much people actually want something like this.
Oh, no, they can comprehend, they just don't care. Apple controls access to a valuable pool of business, and they are going to extract as much value as possible from people wanting access to that pool. And, of course, they are going to try to burnish it with marketing speak, but that doesn't mean they believe their own marketing.
How does this shakedown work for companies/orgs that have large number of paying iOS DAUs?
What am I not getting here?
I'm not betting the US to do this right now. But look at the EU... Alternative app stores are allowed (forced by EU regulations), and it already lead to lower fees.
The vast majority of people will continue find and install (and pay for) stuff via the AppStore.
Let this be a cautionary tale for Google's plans with Android (developer verification, etc).
[0]: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
The very last line of the article.
Jack up every Apple user's monthly payment by 30%.
When they go into the app to figure out what the hell happened, they will find big red text saying "want to avoid the Apple tax? re-subscribe through our website! (Link)"
They click the link, it opens a webpage where all the payment info has been auto-filled. They click "ok." Bam, fee gone.
And yes, I do legalese details of that are much more complex. But it just makes no common sense.
Without IE, we wouldn't have had XMLHttpRequest, which means we wouldn't have had Gmail, which means we wouldn't have seen the bloom of "web 2.0" websites.
As for Java, Microsoft's C# is way ahead of Java in terms of language features. No idea how the runtime performance compares these days (both are very fast), but I'd rather have Microsoft Java than Oracle Java.
Microsoft's intent was always to break the competition, but they did it by offering features others wouldn't or couldn't. Evil Microsoft's Windows was the most feature-packed operating system out there because they threw every possible feature at the wall, kept what sticked front and center, and bothered to maintain what didn't stick. Microsoft Agents, the shitty Clippy things, were supported well into the Windows 7 era despite dying out the moment Bonzi Buddy was found out to be malicious. But Microsoft dared to break backwards compatibility with .NET 1 to fix the typing problem with generics that Java has to this very day; they just ended up supporting both, side by side.
It still did. Did you ever have to write specific code for ie6? <shudder>
The overuse of dependencies is a problem, sure, but it's completely unrelated to "over-unification". Every ecosystem with a built-in package manager suffers from this, be it Node.js, Python, or Rust, to name a few. In fact, it's not even the package manager, it's the ease in adding new dependencies. Go demonstrates that pretty well.
That's because those devs are incompetent, not because there are a ton of packages.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but it feels like over the past couple of decades we've gone from clever guys coming together with an idea and starting companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to celebrating buyouts of startups by large behemoths—that's how low the definition of success has dropped. Is competition law even a thing anymore?
Apple also sits on a board that approves new web technologies for standards formalization, so they can squash adoption of anything that might make web browser APIs as capable as a native application, so that they can force people to make native apps where they can extract a percentage from it (they can't do that with a web application). Rather than work out reasonable ways to support things other browsers allow, they just say "no thanks" and then there is no standard allowed to move forward.
It's extremely abusive and anti-competitive. I hope the DOJ continues to pursue litigation against Apple for this and many other things.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
> Patreon gives creators the option to either increase their prices in the iOS app only, [...]
it would totally not fly with Apple. They don't let this 30% commission to be visible by users, just like every other company that does such commissions. You don't see that the creator only gets about half of your donation on YouTube or Twitch, you never see that Visa takes 1% of your payment in a store, etc. Even governments do that. I don't see the value of VAT in the price of goods in stores. The US sales tax is an exception.
A lot of people would complain about how high those fees (or taxes) are if they saw them spelled out for them.
Patreon is probably going to shut down the payment feature from the app and orient people to the website. That's what I'd do... And bad mouth Apple.
Given Patreon's clients is influencers, this is a fairly bad PR move by Apple, for probably zero return...
Unless they pay me 30% of all hardware and software revenue because popularity is a vehicle to sell more under the Apple brand.
I'm curious what percentage of creators chose which
Which is why we have been getting great UX like being unable to buy books in the Kindle app.
Really they ought to further split that out into "processing fee" and "platform services fee" and Apple would then be entitled to 30% of the latter.
You MUST use our billing system. Oh, btw, because you are using our billing system, we get 30%.
"Use our payment system"
"No thanks, our current system works just fine"
".. or get kicked off our store"
"Okay, I guess I'll do it then"
"Okay you're on our payment system; we take 30% off all purchased using our payment system."
"Get fucked"
Otherwise it just wouldn't make sense. Google gets a cut of all revenue, Apple gets a cut of all revenue, x, y, z, ... there would be nothing left over.
Until there will be a broad regulation that enforce any general purpose computing device to allow installing non-provisioned apps, we'll be in those situations.
I've noticed watching blood money on Netflix that greedy systems tend to get greedier and greedier, and this is the best way to catch bad actors.
On the other hand, criminals that try not to become too big and remain low-profile are the ones that never get caught.
I giggled
Source I run a non-profit and we have an app that takes donations via Apple Pay
There is no way around it especially in an apple dense market like Switzerland.
They have a clear monopoly and together with Google a duopoly.
I can thankfully continue with my refusal to purchase from HP perfectly fine.
They make literally about 40% of their profit off of Apple services. Do you really think if people on mass stopped buying Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, an iCloud, they wouldn’t care?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/2025-marked-a-record-...
I mean the minute people started talking a general worker strike in Minneapolis all of a sudden all these companies freaked our and wrote a letter protesting about IVE’s behavior in Minneapolis.
It's not an attitude, it's an observation. Corporations almost never change their behaviors because of protests and people bitching about them. It's one of the least effective ways of implementing change, especially when said company holds a locked in/monopoly position.
The thing is the end consumer is mostly hidden from the problems of Apples over charging, it deeply affects the companies selling services on the Apple platforms. What would affect Apple far more is not consumers not buying, but a huge part of the people offering on Apples market pulling out. But, Apple has that game rigged to. Particular suppliers get special deals with far lower costs. The competitors to those suppliers are now screwed. Apple will not offer them lower costs (again, Apple hides these contracts until they eventually get disclosed in court), every other company ends up paying a huge Apple tax because pulling out hand the competitor a huge market.
Honestly I'm fine with Apple charging whatever it wants for on its store. I am not fine with Apple selling you what should be a general purpose device and saying only its store can be used. Competitive stores on the device would quickly break Apple of it's monopoly behavior.
Having a boycott against you is like being hated. Firms spend enormous sums on advertisements.
Even a tiny group boycotting you has a substantial influence on your popularity-- they will tell their friends, etc. and will lead to reduced popularity.
General public: "OMG, I should boycott Apple because they are making some other businesses life hard, why?"
It's a very hard sale because all the general public sees is Apple phones are easy to use and friendly. Attempting to explain the complexities that occur in the background gives Apple power in the narrative that they are doing everything to keep you "safe".
Yes, because protests almost never reach critical mass when talking on the scale of a billionaire conglomerate.
The 3% rule is at effect here. if Apple made 200 billion last quarter (I don't know the exact numbers), we'd need at least 6 billion dollars worth of damage to make them listen, and make it clear it's because of this.
Even if the average IOS spender spent 1000/month (averaging in some super whales), we'd need 6 million users to stop spending for this to start having an effect. Can we get 6 million users to do that? I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>The thing is the end consumer is mostly hidden from the problems of Apples over charging, it deeply affects the companies selling services on the Apple platforms.
Yes. But that isn't proof that protests don't work. It's proof that people are ignorant to these situations. Making them aware is the hardest part in all this, and I'm sure corporations know this.
>every other company ends up paying a huge Apple tax because pulling out hand the competitor a huge market.
Companies work too, but we have even less coordination on this. And their incentives match Apple's. Patreon proper does not actually get directly impacted by this unless a bunch of creators pull out.
But the rare chances companies do push back, it works quickly. Just look at the Unity situation a few years back for a modern example.
I don't think that's all it would take but I kind of see Apple worrying that their products will start to be like fur in the 1980s or something... something that gradually fades and loses its brand value.
I guess in the end I sort of agree with the OP that boycotts can work and fretting about numbers initially leads to this kind of chicken and egg problem. If you try it it might work, if you try it repeatedly it's more likely to work, but if you never try it will never work.
I can do a bit more as a voter, but not in this current administration. It's sadly not even a top 10 pressing issue compared to what BS is going on right now. But I won't forget this.
>I mean the minute people started talking a general worker strike in Minneapolis all of a sudden all these companies freaked our and wrote a letter protesting about IVE’s behavior in Minneapolis.
Yes. And it took not one, but two blatant murders on the street to do that. Tech is much more ephemeral in its evils.
Your mindset results in Apple users thinking "the problem is those stupid Android idiots who accept being in an ad tech company's spyware garden" and Android users thinking "the problem is those stupid Apple idiots who accept that 30% of literally everything they do goes to Apple". In reality, we have a common enemy in the big tech duopoly and extremely lacklustre regulation which lets them keep doing this shit. You calling me an idiot for making a different shitty trade-off than you helps nobody.
Or allowing users to control their hardware and software and give them the freedom to install the hell they want on it?
We've been using computers for eternities where we still have the possibility, yet, as soon as it is about phones then "no way, we protecting you from bad actors".
Give me a break, you want to help protect me from bad actors implement proper software/hardware jails/containers for third party software and that's it.
I'm not switching to Sailfish.
I don't think you calling me an idiot will make that happen faster, is the point.
Are you suggesting some sort of app store or web page to send money/bitcoin?
I think people find it easier to scowl at the villain du jour than to dig into the deep complex issue of when capitalism doesn’t work, when the government isn’t doing enough, and what we could do about it… or the feeling that we really can’t do much.
That's why people don't dig into the deep complex issues. Because it's uncomfortable, and forces one to confront the potential reality that their worldview, and everything they've known about how our society works is wrong, broken, and collapsing in front of them.
It can be a very distressing and depressing state of mind. There's a reason "ignorance is bliss" is a common trope, because there's some real truth to it. For some, it's better for emotional and mental wellbeing to ignore the problems of reality and remain ignorant.
I think it isn't just some, it's effectively everyone, the nature of being human. Instead, there's a group of people who are willing to sacrifice their emotional and wellbeing to face these problems of reality, and try to use the limited power they do have to improve them, for the greater good.
We can do a lot if we pressure the company or the regulations around it. Maybe not right now in this current regime, but tides will shift.
The issue is that people's attention spans on this are much too short. The fervor around this may not even last to the end of this month, let alone until a change in power allows a new administration to properly go after the company.
Not a bit deal really, a tiny minority of people will be a few dollars out of pocket, because the loophole most of us don't enjoy has been closed.
if many people subscribe via ios then obviously apple is bringing creators more paying subscribers no so seems kinda fair to charge for access to that ecosystem?
The practical way out is to just buy QQQ and get some of your money back.
> According to TechCrunch, only 4% of Patreon creators are still using the platform's legacy billing system, with the rest having already switched over.
I've never used the Patreon app even once -- those creators I support, I set it up on the website.
Too many parasites between creators and consumers
But from past threads in a Linux Forum, seems this only applies to people using the Apple IOS App for Patreon. Not sure if using Apple Laptops.
But if you use Patreon's WEB Site directly, the fee cannot be collected by Apple.
That was my take anyways.
Moreover, the fee only applies to the subscriptions made using Apple's payment system. That being said, in most jurisdictions their payment system is the only one developers can use in an app. IMHO, this is the real problem.
Yet. Apple forces a specific browser engine on all apps, so they have the means to block patreon website too.
If they weren’t a public company, you’d think they were the mob. I’ll never trust the Apple ecosystem ever again
Patreon fought this for a while but Apple has all the leverage unfortunately.
There is really so many people visiting Patreon, only because it's in Crapple appstore?
Or is this because they want to support as many payment methods as possible. And Apple Pay support requirements is to have an app?
Would be great, if they simple take a hit and gutted the app and redirect all people into website.
If they have good PR team, with proper messaging, they could make even more money, since people on Patreon usually don't like corpos.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
I mean, keep buying their phones or whatever.
It’s funny seeing people call 78% operating margin too high, while we all know that software VCs demand 90% margin from their startups, and if it wasn’t Apple, people here would call that an excellent business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
> While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025.
> Even though Apple was no longer prohibiting linked-out purchases, the district court held that this new approach effectively prohibited linked-out purchases, and it violated the spirit of the injunction. The district court then enjoined Apple from imposing any commission or fee on linked-out purchases. However, the Ninth Circuit panel found that the complete ban was overbroad and punitive. Apple should be permitted to charge a commission based on costs that are genuinely and reasonably necessary for its coordination of external links and linked-out purchases, but not more.
"Genuinely and reasonably necessary", not being defined, will naturally be taken by Apple's malicious compliance department to mean "26%", I'm sure, and we'll get to enjoy a continued round of show trials in court with no meaningful effect for years to come.
The idea seems to be that the injunction shouldn't be able to force Apple to operate a given account at an overall loss. They can bill you for resources of theirs that you actually use.
This would be an entirely different conversation if Patreon was still allowed to use other payment systems outside of Apple's IAP service. No, this is Apple forbidding competitors on their platform.
- the devs all need to get licesnses and specific hardware to develop for IOS
- They spin up their own servers to manage all the finances coming in
- They work on their payment processing solution separate from Apple. And Patreon still pays some fee to apple over the app.
- the model of Patreon only takes 5% off of creators, so that's not enough for Apple. It also wants a cut at the customers of the website who provide services. Customers not beholden to any one platform.\
- And to force them to do that, they are kicking the other processing plan off as an option, leaving only them to work with.
And it's somehow not evil? If I let a friend sleepover at my apartment, is the landlord in the right to demand a day of rent from them too?
This goes way beyond rent seeking, it is much closer to outright theft, for rent you get something in return. This is just a nice form of robbery and I'm sure it is all legal by some stretched definition of the word but it makes me sick.
Yesterday we had the monthly Woz adulation article, I really like the man but would like him even more if he told Cook to his face that this is not the Apple that he had in mind when he co-founded the company. It's not like he has anything to lose.
Those cases take a long time.
Once again, Patreon is going to strong-arm all of us into "charge at the moment of sign-up" instead of "charge on the first of the month." They have wanted this for years, and once again they are saying that Apple has given them cover to demand it. Here's what I wrote when they tried to pull this shit a year and a half ago and then chickened out:
Patreon has two billing models, monthly (bills on the first of the month, or whenever they get around to it) and daily (charges you the moment you sign up.)
For several years now, they have been trying really hard to get creators to switch to daily billing whether they like it or not, with a series of intrusive nags and dark patterns. E.g., the "Settings" tab always has an "unread" alert on it reminding me that I have not made the "recommended" change.
Now they're going to force everyone to switch, and they're blaming Apple for it. And, to be clear, fuck Apple, but also fuck Patreon, this is their choice and it's going to mean that I can no longer use their service.
Here's a support request I just sent them, again, after clicking 15 levels deep into their FAQ before finding the thing that might contact a human. Since the email alerting me of this change came from a "noreply" address because of course it did.
Feel free to send your own:
---
Subject: Subscription billing is unacceptable
You recently sent mail saying that you're going to force me to switch from monthly billing to subscription billing.
Subscription billing is unacceptable for my Patreon. It does not work.
I sell monthly memberships to a physical nightclub. The memberships begin on the first of the month. I fulfill and mail the physical membership cards on the first of the month. If you make me switch to daily billing, that means I will have to do merch fulfillment on a daily basis instead, and I simply cannot do that.
If you force me to switch from a monthly cycle to a daily cycle I will have no choice but to stop using Patreon.
To be clear: I do not give a shit about the iOS app. Not one fractional fuck is given. If the solution to this problem is that people cannot sign up for, or access, my Patreon from the iOS app, that is 100% acceptable to me.
I know for a fact that none -- zero, 0% -- of my patrons have signed up using the iOS app. I know this because I had to warn them away from it, due to the 30% Apple Tax, and all of them complied. All of them. The iOS app is utterly meaningless to me and to my patrons.
(Also you are blaming this on Apple's bullying, which is simply not credible. You've been nagging me to change to subscription billing for years, with the little red error icon appearing everywhere. This is your decision. You are transparently using Apple as an excuse.)
---
I said this same thing to you a year and a half ago, the last time you tried to pull this nonsense. Second verse, same as the first. Last time, support replied that they "completely get why this change would be upsetting" and "will bring my feedback to the team." Uh huh.
Patreon's absolutely awful level of service and support has been a huge problem for quite some time, but I am really not looking forward to having to figure out how to implement recurring monthly billing on my own.
Patreon, YOU HAD ONE JOB.
[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/patreon-is-lying-again-and-...
I subscribe to like 10 patrons each at $1-$3/month. Right now they can just charge me once, $20/mo, pay 3%+30c card fee on that, they pay a buck in fees, get $19, great.
Instead they want to charge me $1, 10 times a month, hit with a 30c fee every time, instead paying a total of $5 in fees, getting way less proportionally.
They must really make their bulk on big patrons paying like $20+/month to a single patreon
Alternatively, they could show up at the nightclub in person and bring their phone with proof of purchase and the bouncer could hand them a membership card and cross their name off a list.
Because the "daily" billing model is prorated IIUC. Seems a bit unfair not to be given access to something you've paid for.
> bring their phone with proof of purchase
One does wonder.
It’s a physical club. You can’t get access to the building without physically going there. If someone buys a membership on a Monday but doesn’t show up until Friday, that’s on them!
The person in question is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Apple (perhaps like all corporations but I'm focusing on Apple) is a greedy company that has massively lost it's way. Tim Cook support fascists and/or anything to improve the bottom line, especially if it increases "services" [0]. Alan Dye (thank god he is now busy screwing up Meta) shipped the worst UI revamp I've seen in a while from a company Apple's size and the iOS/iPadOS/visionOS/macOS software is all in dire straits. And they managed to do all of this while alienating developers left and right and playing chicken with governments around the world [0] instead of relaxing their hold on their platforms.
But who cares? The stock price went up. /s
I was overjoyed to see Alan Dye leave (and Jony Ive) and hope that we don't have to wait too much longer to bid Tim Cook adieu. Whoever takes over next has a lot of work ahead to dig out of the hole Tim Cook dug for Apple.
Tim Cook might be the best thing for shareholders but he has been horrible for product quality (software and hardware) and for democracy.
[0] Pay no attention to how much of services revenue came from the Google search deal with the majority of the rest coming from casinos for children and adults alike.
[1] Like the EU DMA, which, I have publicly and privately voiced my dislike of parts of it but Apple has no one to blame but themselves. By keeping a white-knuckle grip on their revenue they forced governments across the world to pass laws (often bad IMHO) that fragment and confuse the entire iOS market.
I suspect developers are looking for these workaround because of the 30%. If Apple had asked for, say, 10%, would there be as many developers looking for loopholes?
I don't know. Apple perhaps should ask for compensation for "vouching for" the developer's app, hosting the app, distributing the app. But Steam shows us another model where the developer themselves pay a modest up-front cost to have their app hosted ($100) and then Steam steps out of the way.
I wonder if this would go a long way too to thinning the herd so to speak from the Apple App Store—perhaps improve the overall quality of the apps submitted.
But now iOS is the most popular computing platform in the US. We no longer _have_ an option to ignore it.
And 30% is just crazy. And it's _on_ _top_ of all other expenses: Apple hardware that you need to buy to develop for iOS, $100 per year subscription fee, overhead of using Apple's shitty tools, etc.
For example, this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/10wvgoo/do_you_think... seems like majority is positive about it, even though people debate. When Apple tax is brought up, there's almost never even a discussion there, it's pretty universally hated.
Apple seems to have almost adveserial relationship to its developers. I deploy to App Store and I feel like I'm getting screwed. Even compared to Google, which takes the same cut, but does bahave a lot more nicely to its developers.
Checking an LLM, it sounds like they more or less all charge 30%. That's shit.
Ports hiding on the back so you have to endure the sound of USB-tin scraping against anodized aluminum, the round mouse, etc.
For example, you have to scroll beneath last-gen laptop GPUs before you can find any Apple hardware on the OpenCL charts: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
By software problem, though, I meant referencing OpenCL benchmarks. No one in 2026 should be using OpenCL on macOS at all, and the benchmarks aren’t representative of the hardware.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-betrayed-trust-says-iph...
In your cavemen logic the closest example would be that nobody killed the first guy; he was forced out of business because a new cave opened nearby and they were selling rocks much cheaper.
I think the most annoying thing is how unevenly the policy is applied. Some megacorps pay the 30% and others like Amazon get sweetheart deals. So it unfortunately comes down to who benefits more. If you have something Apple really wants then they will cut a deal. But if not then you pay the high tax. They've at least cut it down somewhat for smaller devs and teams, but the whole industry needs to change. IAP/Subscriptions shouldn't just inherit the pricing systems of old.
I have a feeling Tim is just going to tank the Trump stuff and then peace out next admin so he gets all the blame. Much like Ive and Dye have been.
I agree, there were deals down to 15% I think (maybe lower) but I don't think that's still happening? I mean, Netflix finally gave up but only after increasing their IAP fee to cover the difference for many years. I might be behind the times on this but I didn't think they still had better cuts for larger corporations. I do know not all developers are treated the same (see Meta still being on the app store after all the shenanigans they pulled with enterprise certs, or Uber), and that does suck. It means that if you are big enough you can break the rules while an indie dev can have everything taken due to an automated system or mistake, even when it's not their fault.
> I have a feeling Tim is just going to tank the Trump stuff and then peace out next admin so he gets all the blame. Much like Ive and Dye have been.
I agree that's likely, though the thought of him staying till the "end" of that is not attractive.
Apple and the contracted company are very very unlikely to tell you they have a secret contract for lower prices in effect unless they are forced to under court disclosure.
App stores are another source of distribution of the platform. Apps create another engagement channel. Apps are another way to reach more people and keep them "hooked" longer (push notifications, tighter integration with the system). Poor performance of the website-only apps is often offputting showing lower retention and engagement metrics. People don't konow how to create a web app icon on the home screen, but know how to search for apps in the appstore.
Some platforms make website-based apps harder to create and manage (in the name of the resource optimisation or security). So no background players, no face-based logins, no airplay, battery drains way faster with web based apps, no proper file storage, hard to handle guestures, no restoration of the state of the pages, etc, etc.
When inside patreon company there is a question "do we do the native app or we keep the website" there is no good argument from project manager side why not to do the app as it increases all the metrics they care about and accept future possible risk that something will change from Apple side.
I would argue Patreon is far more parasitic than Apple in this case, they're shaving off 10% for a pretty simple service.
I think it's reasonable to say Patreon shouldn't take 10%, but you can't ring up Visa and get a regular 2-3% rate from them for something like Patreon, most likely, due to things like brand risk, chargeback rates, etc.
Then there's all the administrative overhead involved in disbursing payments to creators from all sorts of different legal jurisdictions and reporting information to the right government agencies. I can easily imagine the operating costs of Patreon being something like 7-8% of the money they handle.
I haven't seen anyone in this particular thread calling for Apple's cut to be 0%. I do think they could afford that, but a common refrain is that Epic's rate of 12% would be sustainable, and I agree with that. It's also the case that Apple moved to a gradual rate system where low-income developers only pay 15%, which kind of proves that they don't actually need 30%, they just want 30%.
This is the triple-dip attempt.
As far as I can tell it wasn't even raised in the Epic case either.
No one thinks Apple shouldn't be allowed to make a buck. No one thinks Patreon shouldn't be allowed to make a buck.
But Patreon's fees are near-universally held to be reasonable and fair, and Apple's are some bullshit.