Think Apple has already seen the writing on the wall - both S. Korea & the US are now probably going to push back against the IAP restrictions, and they can / should do a couple of things, which might actually increase revenue.
1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone.
2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year.
The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. All Apple has to do is to make the rates competitive enough, that after considering building their own purchases system, factoring in sales tax and VAT, most developers will happily just opt for Apple's system if the rates make sense. Many people are putting up with 30% already — bringing the rates down to something reasonable with an upgrade path to put them on par with payment processors like Stripe (with VAT and Billing and Radar) or Paddle will just increase revenues for them.
The moment they drop rates and ease restrictions apps that are not being built because of these rules will get built, and these apps will gladly pay the market rate of 5% to 10% for a full service payments system.
> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system.
The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do for web payments. Apple’s offerings are quite polished so I don’t think they’ll fall out of favor but it’s going to reduce their profit margin and I’m sure the number of people who will use alternatives is much greater than zero.
Companies will want it, but I'm not sure users will. Apple does a really good job of warning me, I feel, and centralizing subscription cancellation etc., and that's huge. Like, if I have to go to your app--or worse, your website--to cancel a subscription? I'm gonna just not use your stuff, because I'm going to forget about it until you whack me for another year or whatever.
> Apple’s offerings are quite polished so I don’t think they’ll fall out of favor
Any iOS devs care to weigh in? Apple's system could just as easily be a godawful mess. No personal experience but I've seen people online complaining about how StoreKit sucks.
They've had in-app purchases since 2009 and no competitive pressure from other SDKs, because they can block them with app store policy instead of needing to offer a better product. That sounds like an easy environment for it to become an afterthought; the people using it have no choice in the matter if they want to be on the App Store.
Oh I agree with you. I think 30% is highway robbery and that opinion hasn't changed since day one.
But also just take a look at the number of subscriptions we all have these days - Entertainment stuff (Spotify/Music, Netflix/streaming, HBO, Xbox Live), Donations (Charity, Github Sponsors), Software (Password managers, backup solutions, Jetbrains, Adobe), Membership (Prime/equivalent, internet, mobile), ... yada yada yada. It's a huge unwieldy list.
I have tried my best to keep at least all the app ones in iTunes/Apple (in my case - weather app, dating apps, productivity apps). My alternative is I just won't subscribe. I'm sick of the subscription economy as it is. This would be the last straw. If Bumble tells me I have to give them my cc info and have to call them to cancel (like NYT does), I just won't subscribe.
Essentially I'm subscribed to some of these apps because I'm not being forced against my will to stay subscribed using terms and conditions that are outrageous (looking at Adobe with its annual contract).
On the other hand, I love how apple lets me use a visa gift card purchased in cash at the local convenience store. When trying to pay for a VPN service anywhere but the app, they reject the card, but Apple let me use it to purchase the subscription.
I agree with this. On top of that, the experience in games is often downright weird. I'm no Apple user, but on Android, you're in the game, you try to buy something, it pops the Android payment UX, you pay, then you wait a sec or two, get your thing in the game.
If its a Gacha or something, you then are getting some in-game currency, that you then have to redeem for the item you wanted. The extra steps are really annoying, and if its a company I trust, it would be easier to give them my info to smoothen things up (big if, mind you)
You're talking about oranges. This case is about In-App Purchases -- for things that are used digitally, in the app itself. The Amazon app is selling physical goods, delivered outside the app. This is already permitted by Apple; the Amazon app already does this; in fact if you have an app that sells stuff outside the app you are not allowed to use Apple's IAP system for those sales.
>the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method.
Let's say you want to sell your original product on Amazon, but you also have your own fulfillment center and a storefront on your website. What if Amazon removed you from their store, because your instruction manual included a URL to your website, and it was against the rules to tell your customers that you accepted payment outside of Amazon's ecosystem in any way.
That's what Apple did with software, though suspiciously they left the largest, most litigious companies like Amazon alone, because they've been free to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases of physical products for years now.
Given how polished everything that Stripe makes is, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the de-facto non-Apple alternative. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if they'd already built an SDK to cover this very eventuality.
This is true, and the solution for Apple is to go cross platform themselves with their functionality. Make IAP a service usable on other platforms/apps. I am not sure how successful they will be though if they go that route.
The ability to use Apple Pay on the web more seamlessly than I can use Stripe on the web will probably be Apple’s killer feature in this area. I’ve already noticed a change in my purchasing behavior because of it.
You can already buy stuff from the Amazon app using your existing Amazon payment method. All of this controversy is about in-app purchases of digital content.
Also scammers will want to redirect people to alternate methods, as well as those who engage in not-quite-scam-but-still-unsavory-business practices. Games aimed at kids are the biggest offenders, possibly using this as a way to circumvent parental controls on purchases or just to introduce some additional friction to customer service requests or requests to terminate subscriptions.
This is all stuff Apple can design around or codify into their approval standards, obviously. Which is why it's imperative they act on their own so they can dictate how it shakes out rather than having a poorly considered implementation forced on them by regulators.
> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system.
the apple developer ecosystem (with regards to subscriptions and app purchases) in my experience has been quite awful for a multi trillion dollar company. really bad API docs, really poor experience around understanding what is even happening in their black box. i'm honestly astonished at how "unfinished" the whole experience feels. something like Stripe is on another level
I'm not sure if you ever used StoreKit or their subscription API... its so full of holes and poor documentation and poor implementation that it's a nightmare to work with (particularly subscriptions). Don't believe me? There's a YC startup raising millions of dollars dedicated to solving the subscription implementation problems Apple has created...
If you could choose between 30% of a billion dollars, or 15% of twenty billion, which would you pick?
There are externalities to each choice, of course, but the correct answer is, actually, the obvious one. Apple is not in the right on this one, from any perspective. If they care about their users and developers: they'd drop the commission. If they cared about their revenue and investors: they'd drop the commission.
Fortnite's protest should have been the wake-up call for the people dead asleep at the wheel of their App Store division. Epic very likely would have stayed on the App Store indefinitely at 15%; the issue has metastasized, and now Tim Sweeny has taken the stance of "alternate payment frameworks or nothing", but I'd bet every dollar I've got that if Fortnite's IAPs were at 15% before they left, they'd still be on the App Store. Everything is about money at the end of the day; Apple doubled-down, so now Epic had to double-down.
Imagine a commission so reasonable that Netflix could sell its subscriptions there; that Amazon could sell books; that Fortnite could (maybe) return, and the next triple-A gaming hit that hadn't even considered mobile because of the commissions. That's the money Apple is leaving on the table. These companies WANT their products to be easy to buy; nothing makes that easier than App Store IAPs. There's a number that could work for everyone, but Apple comes to every negotiating table with their fingers plugged in their ears yelling "nah nah nah I can't hear you 30%"
Apple's App Store policies throughout the 2010s will go down in history as the biggest blunder big tech has ever made. I am absolutely certain of this. They're throwing away an empire that could last a hundred years, because they think they're invincible. Tim Cook literally said, under oath, "we don't know how profitable the App Store is". They've publicized proudly about how they employ five hundred whole people to do hundreds of thousands of App Reviews. This is not malice or greed; its complete and total incompetence. Why are investors not OUTRAGED at Apple's leadership?!
I actually think it’s the exact opposite and Epic would have picked a fight with Apple even if the fees were 15%.
This isn’t about fees and it’s not even (just) about Apple - Apple is just a relatively unsympathetic defendant for them to fire their opening shot. As noted, Microsoft fees are 30%, Google fees are 30%, etc, and yet Apple was singled out (with those companies actually jumping onto the lawsuit against Apple too).
This is, more generally, about prying the Apple platform open, and other similar platforms like it. Remember, Epic didn’t start this suit over anti-steering clauses, the real goal here was epic getting their own third party store, which means they don’t have to pass an Apple review before being able to request permissions that let them mine data/etc. Thats a way bigger prize than (checks notes) 30% of 12 million dollars.
One of App Store's biggest draw for any developer is that they are compliant with VAT/GST of multiple countries. With Europe's MOSS now gone, I can't imagine individual app developers hiring an EU rep just so they can comply with EU VAT legally. And that's just EU. You can't even easily comply with Indian GST without incorporating a subsidiary there. Now Canada is also in the mix. And those are just 3 regions. US Sales Tax is another money pit, with proper compliance costing hundreds of dollars per month for each state you develop nexus in.
Add to that the fact that App Store purchases are riddled with fake cards and usually draw a much higher MDR from merchant accounts. If people are rejoicing that they can just hook up their Stripe and world will be rainbows, they are in for a shut down email pretty soon.
It's not just that. As a developer I wouldn't want Apple to know who my paying customers are. Right now, there is no option. With this hopefully there will be more options.
I, as a customer, don't want to pay many companies directly. The prime example is any news publication. There are many I'd happily pay for except (like gym memberships it seems) it can be incredibly difficult to cancel. I won't reward that model so they get none of my money.
Why not? Not that I think it's an unreasonable position, but there's generally going to be some payment processor who knows who your paying customers are, right?
Stop using apple then? Why do you need government to tell apple how to run their company? All these seems really absurd and incompetent coming from Epic.
> most developers will happily just opt for Apple's system if the rates make sense
The _buyer_ experience with Apple's IAP is mostly good, but I would argue that the developer experience is downright horrible. Working with subscriptions and IAP receipts is clunky. You can only use one of about 100 SKUs, which makes it difficult to offer discounts and customized pricing at the higher price tiers, where the gaps between amounts are quite large. Until recently, it wasn't even possible for developers to issue refunds!
Even if Stripe charged 30%, I would choose them every time over Apple's IAP.
Stripe's rates are $0.30 + 3% ( https://stripe.com/pricing ). Paypal is a quite a bit better at $0.09 + 5% for micropayments.
For a $0.99 IAP through Apple (with all of the associated infrastructure to handle IAP) that would cost $0.15 to the developer.
That same purchase through Stripe would cost $0.33... and the developer would need to provide some way to handle IAP. Paypal would be the same as through Apple.
That "set up some way to handle IAP" is going to be interesting too.
Trying to hang onto systems where your customers resent paying you is not where you want to be. You bring up an interesting proposal, fundamentally Apple needs to create a system where developers WANT to pay the fees because of the value they get in using the system and services. And all those connected credit cards and customer identities definitely have value.
> Trying to hang onto systems where your customers resent paying you is not where you want to be.
OK but like, dark patterns exist and everybody knows users don’t like them. Developers use them anyway because they’re profitable. Yeah I guess you feel bad but the bags of money help dry those tears.
If there’s no chance of customers altering their decision )because you have something exclusive for which there is no substitute, or no good substitute) then there’s very little downside to dark patterns. And this is true even for something as banal as a newspaper subscription, where you would think there’s a lot of substitutes.
> 1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone. 2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year.
Payment processors and their networks are infinitely more complex and resource intensive than a mobile app distribution store, and their commissions tend to only be between 1% and 3% per transaction.
> Payment processors and their networks are infinitely more complex and resource intensive than a mobile app distribution store
First of all - citation? Have you run a mutli-billion$$ App Store with hundreds of millions of individual customers, and the associated support channels etc?
Secondly, Apple is also providing those 'infinitely more complex' payment processing services on top of the App Store, so even if true, your argument is kinda moot.
For the hypothetical case that there will ever be Steam on iOS I'd rather pay through the Steam account I had already setup on the PC rather than through the Apple payment system. Same for 'cross-platform' subscriptions like Spotify.
> Call this function from account settings or a help menu to enable customers to request a refund for an in-app purchase within your app. When you call this function, the system displays a refund sheet with the customer’s purchase details and list of reason codes for the customer to choose from.
People will prefer to use Apple's system if the cost is close enough to the same. The larger/more trusted the brand making the app is, or the higher the cost difference, the more likely the user will be to go to the trouble of going off platform to make the purchase.
Most of the revenue Apple makes is from top apps and top brands, which is why they had no problem cutting the rates to 15% for the little guys already, the little guys are a tiny slice of the overall pie.
There is no way this will overall increase Apple's revenue, especially as companies concentrate on building solid 'Apple fee avoidance' funnels. Not to mention that many pay-for apps will very likely convert to free to download and then push the user to pay for the app externally to the app store as a 'one time lifetime subscription'.
This is going to cause a massive revenue loss for Apple if it stands.
> Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system.
Speak for yourself. I am from India, and we already have much better payment systems then Apple's:
1. All our debit / credit card are chip-based.
2. No card transaction can happen without the PIN. Some online transactions require both a PIN and a password.
3. For any online transactions, the payment processors often support the following options to pay - using debit / credit card, directly from our bank account (Net Banking with 2FA), Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ( https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview ) which is another online digital payment mode that even allows for easy peer to peer payment between parties and umpteen online / mobile digital wallets.
4. Best of all, using any of these payment modes won't allow Apple any access to my financial data.
(And naturally Apple supports none of these popular modes in India because otherwise Apple would come under closer scrutiny from indian regulators.)
As far as App Store commissions are considered, from a developer's perspective Apple can go screw themselves if they want anything more than what competing payment processors charge. (Like Epic, I am disappointed that consumer rights weren't considered at all - ultimately it is us owners / users of Apple devices that pay these 30%-50% or whatever commission!)
> The moment they drop rates and ease restrictions apps that are not being built because of these rules will get built, and these apps will gladly pay the market rate of 5% to 10% for a full service payments system.
I have an app like that that's already done and in the app store. We would love to take advantage of Apple Pay for subscriptions, but the 30% tax means we literally can't. We'd have to jack our prices so much that the cost becomes prohibitive, and if we take the 30% hit ourselves we'd basically be giving things away for free.
If the cost would drop to somewhere in the 5-15% range it's a whole new ballgame.
EDIT: For anyone who's wondering – we basically use the same strategy as Netflix et al, the app is useless unless you already have an account and in order to get one you have to sign up elsewhere. We don't have links or information on how to sign up, you have to just magically end up on our site or have an account added through one of our partners.
As iOS and macOS user, I always subscribe directly through the app developer if they allow this. I stopped trusting Apple subscriptions when I called them asking to reimburse the subscription I forgot to cancel (just a few days later) and they said “no”. I never encountered any internet service declining this kind of requests.
> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system.
Apple only takes credit card in most countries. This makes sense in countries where credit cards are the norm, but not in countries where credit cards are not the norm and far from ubiquitous.
OTOH, external payment providers (eg: stripe) often integrate with local payment mechanism.
In my case, local payment mechanisms are far simpler, easier, and secure. Using a credit card requires me moving money into my Wise account before I can pay anything, adding so many extra steps. Not to mention that I have to remember to transfer money every month before subscriptions get charged.
Plus, the whole online payment system with credit cards is utterly unsafe: share your "secret number" with all merchants and pray none of them leak it or overcharge you.
Given the option, I think most customers would absolutely rather use the company's system, if the company offered lower prices for buying through them. Of course, that assumes both systems would be on offer - but if there's market pressure for companies to offer Apple as an option, that may be enough.
> "they can / should do a couple of things, which might actually increase revenue."
cutting prices that drastically will most certainly not increase revenue. in a competitive market, pricing is near/at the price elasticity equilibrium. in a monopoly situation, pricing is much beyond that point, in the company's favor. you're suggesting they move prices in the opposite direction, which would most certainly impact revenue negatively. note that these are not nascent, high growth markets where the growth rate can overwhelm the price elasticity dynamics.
the court should be mandating broad, open, and honest competition, not dictating prices, which is will practically always get wrong in some way. price is a signal for how competitive a market is, not a lever to drive competition.
Would you be willing to pay 30% more? Why not let people choose how they wish to pay. If you like that UX and are willing to pay for it, app developers should be able to offer it along with cheaper alternatives.
As a counter point, I always avoid subscribing via the app as the prices are higher than if you subscribe via the website. Google One has this where you pay more to use the apple method.
The thing is that it is still worse than an open system. Why pay the bridge bandit? There is some infrastructure and that is fine, but I hate to see the tendency in tech to insert themselves as middle man. OS that don't do that are superior targets.
Another option is for Apple to offer their digital store as a service to larger players for a lower % fee. Akin to MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) and equally on some levels comparable in a way that building that type of network in the first place is costly and in Apples case, it is battle proven software back-end as well as front.
> no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system
They have this brilliant Apple Pay workflow that's almost completely unused in IAP — it bothered me that we couldn't just use Apple Pay to purchase a Spotify subscription directly in-app. Perhaps soon we'll see this.
> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system.
I have been paying for things online for decades now and never once have I used Apple's payment system. I assure you, plenty of us will use payments not provided by the fruit company.
As a user my dream is that Apple actually puts in the effort and makes the changes to convince these companies to use IAP. My nightmare is that they don't and everyone drops IAP for a wilderness of credit card web forms.
Apple has always given me a refund for shitty apps without question, whereas shitty apps who have their own payment system, like CouchSurfing, never even respond to requests for refunds at all.
The silent majority – the users – will always prefer to go through Apple. But HN seems to be full of user-hostile devs (as you can tell by looking at all the downvoted comments here who speak from a user’s PoV) who only hear the companies that want to break down the garden’s walls to prey upon users.
The Apple fee model favours cheap shitty apps because that's the best way to not get gouged by Apple's fees.
Relaxing that model will lead to better apps overall because finally you can invest and charge appropriately, you just need to trust yourself to not pay in apps you don't trust.
> All Apple has to do is to make the rates competitive enough
No. All Apple has to do is amplify a few horror stories, for example people using [any competitor]’s renewable subscriptions and not being able to unsubscribe. Or amplify a story of a virus/malware on, hopefully, Epic or Steam.
This is certainly what makes you choose a MORE expensive product, that’s certainly why I buy my fire extinguishers $200 instead of $50 for the same model (but a trusted source). Apple should be able to keep a more expensive margin based on reputation alone.
I'm really happy to see this moving forward, but I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay.
I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it's unfortunate we have to make a tradeoff at all.
Hopefully, this move will put downward pressure on Apple's payment infrastructure that incentivizes devs to keep using Apple payments because it's the same fee structure as whatever 3rd party they might move towards.
Just to be clear here (and this fact doesn't really detract from your point) - Apple Pay is very different to Apple's In App Purchases. Apple Pay can be used anyhere, and it could still be used if a company rolls their own purchase system on their website that they link to from the app. Apple only gets a very minor % cut of Apple Pay transactions, from the bank, compared to Apple IAP where Apple gets 30% from the developer.
Besides, isn't the competition here what we want? Apple IAP are still easier, and probably will convert at a higher rate than pushing a user outside the app to do the payment on a website, so there's still incentives for developers to use them. If Apps switch away from IAP, then Apple is incentivised to actually compete (imagine that!!) and make something better that developers actively want to use.
It says something about the state of competition where Netflix can just say "no, we no longer want people to sign up on an iPhone and give us money". That says they don't think IAP is good, and Apple should actually work on building something that companies want to use.
In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.
It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.
> Besides, isn't the competition here what we want?
Depends what you mean. The subtlety that is always lost in these conversation on HN is how deep does the competition have to go? I don't think anyone seriously argues that iPhones do not have viable competition in the smartphone market. And yet, if I as a consumer want to use a smartphone which places strong restrictions on third-party developers (which is one of the most significant reason I use iPhones and recommend them to friends and family), somehow those restrictions are considered "anti-competitive." If these restrictions are lifted or prohibited, that clearly removes one of the key differences between iPhones and their competitors (mostly Android phones), and it baffles me that this could be construed as a more competitive smartphone market for consumers.
As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see the ruling as forcing Apple to lose money.
If I were Apple, I would have gone nuclear early on, and eliminated all % fees but made the annual fee per app of $X to each developer (whatever $ makes sense) and then you can collect money however you want. This would likely kill a lot of small app developers, but the big ones would not care. The ruling makes Epic a big winner, but everyone else loses in the long run, because Apple (and Google) will find a way to recover lost revenue.
Some people also want to have 1000 app stores allowed. Good luck with that one... imagine having to build an app store just for your app, or supporting 25 different app stores.
Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?
At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.
I think what it will eventually turn out to be is - Apple will require IAP/Storekit but will be forced to allow others. And you will see something like this - $10 - Pay by Apple, $8 Pay via Amazon/Google/Whoever big name enters this business, $7 pay by credit card directly. And you can chose if you need Apple's unsubscribe, want to trust Amazon for $2 discount, or want to get a further $1 discount by entering your credit card number and risking doing a chargeback in the future if the developer is really crappy.
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
> As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
I think this is a fair argument, and I believe also shows that if options are available, that is where us as a consumer have our freedom. I also personally like the ability to quickly pay when needed for things using Apple, but in return - if I was able to pay for it because another offer, or option, or something was presented to me that was easier, I would totally take that that too. However, I can see how that would be a loss for the people writing and maintaining the app and the associated services.
The problem I see is that this swinging at the moment between a single payment gateway and every payment gateway out there is a huge pendulum that is swinging to the extremes of both, neither side actually gets anything good out of it.
It would be lovely in a world where the option was to use Apple + an external, and letting users decide what they feel safe with. Some will be happy going direct with Apple, some would be happier with <insert payment style here>.
I think it is mentioned below, I can see larger companies immediately dropping the Apple method because it loses them the extra profit, and just making the ecosystem harder. People lose faith in paying for services, and then another service comes along, charging 30%, and we are back where we started.
So yeah, IMHO, it is good it is being recognised, but at the same time, its going to be a bumpy ride.
> how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.
If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.
As a Developer, I also don't look forward for integrating 50 frameworks for payment, deal with the limitations of each and every one and go through the bureaucracy of 180 countries for export compliance and taxes.
When you sell something through Apple, depending on the location of your user, Apple will act as Agent or as a Commissionaire. This makes everything easy, even for a solo developer. Sold an in-game coins in France? Apple collected the money, paid the VAT to the French government. If you do this through your own means, you will need to establish a relationship with the French government so that you can pay them the VAT that you have to collect from your users.
This will ultimately benefit large companies who can jump through the hops of managing all this, putting the independent developers in a disadvantaged position due to the high barrier of entry into improved margin(compared to Apple Store where everyone gets the same cut) payments. In some places you can be required to send a printed receipt to the user.
It would not be fun to watch, let's say Zynga, collecting their low cost payments across all their portfolio by making users sign up once and having indie games instantly losing a payment or falling back to high commission options because users are tired of entering payment info for each game.
Sad day for the little guy. Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission or is it Epic, Netflix, Spotify who will benefit from this? Unless you do low margin commission work (like platform where you take a cut, i.e. online tutoring) the %30 commission is a non issue.
Game crystals don't really have a cost, so %5 cut or %30 cut doesn't really matter that much. However, one company having access to the %5 and other not having access to it will change the landscape because the large company will be able to advertise more thanks to its better margins, wiping out the rest.
I'd be stunned if everyone starts using niche payment providers. I think it's more likely the larger providers will step up. It'll be more along the lines of:
Pay With --- Apple IAP ($1.43) - Stripe IAP ($1.06) - Paypal IAP ($1.06)
That's also why Epic is disappointed. If Apple were forced to allow competing app stores, Epic is in a perfect position. They have app store tech with payments, commissions, etc. built in. If Apple's only forced to allow competing payment providers to become more prevalent, everyone thinks of Stripe, Paypal, etc. first. Epic probably has their own payment processing fees to cover, so they'll never be able to compete on price and that's where things are heading IMO.
You make It sound like apple's service will disappear over night. If you're fine with them taking 30% then that's your choice. And if your app does become big enough to reap the benefits of implementing mutiple payment providers then thats even better.
> As a Developer, I also don't look forward for integrating 50 frameworks for payment, deal with the limitations of each and every one and go through the bureaucracy of 180 countries for export compliance and taxes.
It sounds like you should be using some kind of service that does that for you, maybe even provided by Apple?
> Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission
Independent devs seemed pretty happy overall with the 15% concession they already got as a result of the legal scrutiny on Apple. No doubt they'll enjoy further improvements to the terms once there is an actual threat of switching.
It would be hilarious if the end result was iOS users no longer being as valuable to app developers, if the ecosystem just starts to feel sketchy and people stop spending as freely on it. I don’t think it’s likely, but it feels plausible enough to lol at the idea.
This doesn’t stop Apple from controlling which apps can be installed. It stops them from using a link to external payment as a criterion.
I do think this will have some effect that you describe (e.g. perhaps Epic suffers a breach in their payment system) on the end user side but it’s not as bad as the android store situation. if anything it will make iOS users more attractive to devs as they can now keep a larger percentage of IAP sales.
But when IAP costs less than 30% I expect all paid apps to go the IAP route.
On Android, I use Google Pay all of the time for in-app purchases, and it doesn't require Google to take 30%.
It's just another payment processor. It often shows up beside "add a credit card" in apps. I use it to order food, pay for rideshare, buy tickets, etc.
According to google, that is not correct. They levy a 30% fee on all Play Store transactions for apps and IAP. I've seen articles that say they are cutting the fee to 15% for businesses with under $1m revenue, but that's not what the support page says.
I agree. Literally makes no difference to me whatsoever. Even using a websites payment system is usually trivial because Android's autofill is pretty smart these days.
> Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
this is not an unresolvable issue though. Apple could force developers to make their payment option as the default payment option similar to how they forced devs to use Sign in with Apple (when they have third party login). Big companies like PayPal could provide an SDK which can be used by devs to complete trasaction similar to web. I could think of many more ways to solve this issue.
The win would be that you're actually able to sign up for more things in the iOS ecosystem that you previously weren't able to, like Netflix or Spotify.
No, and it wasn’t meant to. It was meant to let companies keep more and give Apple less. That’s all.
In all likely hood things will get worse for consumers. I will definite not buy apps requiring custom payment platforms. Hopefully it’ll settle on stripe companies will offer multiple payment methods rather than trying to force their own.
I look forward to it making Apple lower its IAP fees for everyone. I’d still like to use their infrastructure, but without the enormous fees (15% for small devs is still huge).
I think it will ultimately boil down to 2-3 major payment gateways such as Stripe after initial chaotic 'every app trying to be force their own payment processor' phase
It feels ironic to ask customers to bear the burden to make big companies behave, in a thread about a court ruling regulating anti-competitive behavior.
Apple Pay charges the banks a percentage per transaction on the credit card, despite not taking absolutely any of the risk in that operation. Plus a quarterly fee per card.
Do you think the banks are going to foot that bill? Of course not: it's us, the consumers.
Are you willing to have everything be a bit more expensive, for everyone, so that you, apple users, can have something a tiny bit more convenient?
Isn't that how any convenience works? Credit cards already increased the price of everything for the convenience of using credit cards, as an example. I'm old enough to remember there was once one price for cash, and another for credit cards.
Correct- it is 0.15% on credit card transactions, or a flat $0.005 per debit card transaction.
Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30) is willing to eat this fee, presumably because of the benefits of vastly lower fraudulent transactions and chargebacks.
Will I be able to use it with King's implementation, or my local pizza place's outsourced app?
edit: I was instantly downvoted without any discussion, which doesn't add to the conversation. The reason I ask is because that's what the key value add is of Apple's IAP - I know that my payment method is accepted on the app store.
>I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have gotten greedy...
This is the problem with major companies that think they can just control everything. Then when the government steps in they say what they were doing is anti-competitive and suddenly the consumers now have to bear the brunt of the negative aspect of full on competition. Had Apple just been reasonable and not charged egregious fees from the get go, this wouldn't have been an issue.
The most likely move here is that Apple forces developers to put a drop down of payment options, with Apple Pay being the default. Same way Google did when Android was forced to offer a choice of default search engines
I think the judge didn’t specify how equal access needs to be given to alternatives means of payments. It’s very straightforward to design a payments SDK where card data gets stored on the phone and payment providers are forced to use that SDK so that all of them would absolutely the same experience as Apple pay. You can even force them to provide subscription cancellation like Apple does. But Apple wants you to believe that’s not possible, so probably they won’t do it.
I'd prefer allowing apple to do whatever they want in their appstore, and forcing them to accept third party app installation, including alternative stores
When Apple announced it was introducing intentional security vulnerabilities to their Apple Pay platforms last month that was the signal that they were done trying to be a bank. I wonder if that decision was made knowing the likely outcome and downstream results of this case.
I've been saying this for years now: this is why Apple should've ushered in lower commissions on larger publishers themselves because otherwise a court, a regulatory authority or a legislature was ultimately going to do it for them.
And you're almost always better off making that change yourself.
Big publishers have their own payment processing pipelines. Apple's is just extra overhead. Smaller publishers still (IMHO) can see a lot of benefit from Apple's 30% cut. It's those large publishers who are most likely to challenge your rules in court or lobby against you.
If the very largest publishers were paying 10% as a Preferred Partner instead of 30%, they would be a lot less willing to challenge the status quo when they might lose that privilege.
We've already have ridiculous workarounds for Apple's policies here like how you can bypass it to buy directly from Amazon through the app for physical goods. The carve out for digital goods is and was always a tortured post facto justification.
Where once the 30% cut funded the App Store (when it was small). It's clearly transitioned to being a massive profit center and Apple executives couldn't see past the short term revenue to see the writing on the wall. Woops.
I agree. It also allows the judge to slap them without agreeing with the other side. Epic didn't get anything they really wanted. This change will not make much difference. No change to single app store model. As far as I can tell, Apple will have to allow communication in the app about payment through other means. That's it. I think it is likely that Apple will require apps to offer Apple payment as an option alongside the new communication about an external payment system. That is just a guess on my part, but it wouldn't be surprising.
If I guessed right, Apple's income probably won't go down much. I would rather use Apple payment system. Lots of other people will also. It is simple and allows me one-stop management of subscriptions and purchases. Some folks won't of course, but it is the easiest choice.
Sure; you also "risk" the regulating authority deciding it's no longer an issue. Best case, you get to frame the solution; worst case you get the same outcome, the regulator deciding, BUT with you having demonstrated willingness to address the issue.
The only reason to defend yourself is if you legitimately think what you're doing is defensible.
Personally, I am surprised at all the anti-competitive actions Apple has been able to get away with over the years:
Bundling the OS with hardware
Enforcing an App store
Dictating/Castrating Browser on mobile
And the list goes on.
I'm not saying this as a ding on Apple products, because I genuinely appreciate them, but I think at the same time Apple has resorted to creating roadblocks rather than innovating.
One fact that has emerged is that Apple is pushing lock-in as a strategy. So to everyone who has ever felt like they are too "invested" in the ecosystem to leave- that is by design. You are victims.
Is this really an issue? I agree Apple has been pretty shady but this is a facet of any hardware you buy today from any manufacturer. Now, preventing/obfuscating the install of _other_ OS software, I agree, total bullshit.
It is not an issue. MS is the outlier here in that they sell their software to anybody (Linux is given for free), like you said everybody else (TV manufactures, cars, etc) bundle theirs.
You could, maybe, make the argument that what Apple does is anticompetitive, but in the laptop space they are the ones being hurt by a monopoly, not the ones who benefit.
What about bundling camera, speaker, screen, processors etc? They are selling a product. You don't complain about car companies bundling 4 wheels and a motor.
I'm not. Amazon does the same thing: produce a great end product, and users won't give a shit about what you did behind closed doors to get it that way.
I believe people are over conflating the "friction" involved with using an outside payment system (such as Stripe or PayPal). Apple ID's already allow you to attach your PayPal account as primary funding...this is just giving developers that direct choice now.
PayPal, you confirm checkout total, login to paypal, confirm subscription or price. Done.
Stripe, you can use their standard checkout page, autofill your card info, or just use Apple Pay to confirm the subscription/item, pay. Done.
What's changed is just giving developers that flexibility. Ultimately saving them money, they can hire more devs, and make their products hopefully cheaper (and better).
Most consumers will still have no idea that their checkout is not happening with Apple, and it's happening elsewhere (aside from PayPal Checkout being obvious with their checkout/login flow).
Apple could absolutely adapt their native subscriptions SDK to support the status of a third-party app, though I doubt they ever would. They tried to do this with streaming services (HBO, Netflix, etc.), but they shut this down recently
Apps based around "physical goods" (read: food ordering) have been able to do this for ages, and if the trend I see there expands into "normal" apps, about 50% will support Apple Pay, 25% will support PayPal without AP, 10% will support card scanning, and the rest will make you manually enter your card number, billing address, name, email, firstborn child, etc.
So no, I don't think the flow will remain nearly as seamless as it is today, and that's disappointing to me. I don't pay for much IAP-wise (though I do order plenty of DoorDash), but I guess this will give me even less motivation to buy crap I don't need.
>What's changed is just giving developers that flexibility. Ultimately saving them money, they can hire more devs, and make their products hopefully cheaper (and better).
The only ones who can save money on third-party payments are big developers or apps that charge a lot of money. For usual $0.99-2.99 in-app buys, you won't be saving much, in fact, you are likely to pay more. And of course, you have to do VAT, refunds and other things yourself. I just don't see how a small dev is benefiting here. I'd rather pay Apple's 15% and be done with it.
This is somewhat surprising to me. I thought Epic had a reasonable chance of getting an eventual win on some points, or in getting enough attention that regulators stepped in. I also thought Apple had a pretty decent chance of winning.
But I did not think that Epic had a particularly strong chance of getting an injunction like this.
I hope that the takeaway people take from this is "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case", and not, "the judge was always obviously going to issue this injunction." I still personally think knowing what I know now, if I went back to the start of this case I still wouldn't be able to confidently predict this injunction.
But maybe other people are better at reading court signals than I am.
I did follow the trial, and actually probably commented on that exact compromise hint at the time (although I'd need to look over my comment history to know for sure).
I didn't read a "compromise" as indicating that an injunction was particularly likely, and most of the commentary I read on HN at that time didn't read it that way either.
I think people are looking back with the benefit of hindsight at something that was not by any means a generally assumed outcome, even from people who were covering and talking about the trial on HN itself or on other social media sites I followed.
A hint that the judge is curious about finding middle grounds in a lawsuit is definitely not a promise of a permanent injunction.
Something that I like to do, when discussing these issues with people, is get the other person to commit to a position, ahead of time, and go back to those comments later to see who was right.
I had multiple discussions, with many commenters on hacker news, where people were way too certain about the court case, when clearly it could have gone many different ways (Thus, I agree with you that "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case" ).
> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.”
It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Whether the current definition of a monopoly needs to change.
If you are mixing the two arguments discourse can go nowhere because you're substantively discussing cause and effect. The current definition of a monopoly needs to change, imo, then we can talk about whether Apple is a monopoly.
I'm also interested in discussing conglomerates and whether they are good or bad, and how to control them similar to monopolies, but that discourse can't be had until we can agree on something like the definition of a monopoly.
In my opinion we don't need to change the definition of monopoly, we need to integrate "conflict of interest" more into anti-competitive practice discourse.
Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors (<<super>> shady).
That's the root of the problem in many cases.
Of course, this needs to be coupled with stronger anti-cartel enforcement. Because tech is rarely a pure monopoly, but extremely often is ends up under the control of a cartel.
The problem is that the proposed new definition of "monopoly" generally goes something like "any company who has a product that I like and does anything at all with that product that I don't like." Like, regardless of what the iPhone's market share is, if I like to use my iPhone, but I don't like one aspect of the iPhone, that means that Apple is acting like a monopoly because they're not completely honoring my personal preferences and the only option I have is to switch to another smartphone which I don't want to do.
The issue is more that they are conglomerates - they control the device, the discovery mechanism, the payment mechanism, and the identity mechanism. In each of those areas, they may or may not be a monopoly - but together their broad control creates an anti-competitive environment.
How would you like the definition of a monopoly to change? Or to avoid sniping over details if you're not sure of a definition text, how would you like it to change and to what objective?
Why would we want to change a term that is used in countless legal and economic contexts just to dumb down the definition for the sake of a few people who haven’t bothered to do a bit of light reading on the topic?
Have you any idea of how many laws would need to change, not to mention all the academic papers, legal and academic commentaries and textbooks?
I'm sure it won't put a stop to it, I love to read discussions about "Does company X engage in anti-competitive behavior and are they a big enough player that it's a problem". That seems to be a much more useful discussion (i.e. it gets at "do they need to be reigned in by We The People") than "are they a monopoly" which is just bickering over what words mean (with some shades of "if they _were_ a monopoly, then We The People should do something about it).
At the end of the day, who cares if they are a monopoly or not - you don't have to be a monopoly to be in a position to do Bad Stuff to The Market.
You are very confused.
Courts don't make calls as to whether companies are monopolist in general. The judge doesn't even try to do that (though someone is trying to make it seem like they have).
They make a call about whether a company has monopoly power in a specific market defined in a specific case.
In this case, the court does not believe Apple is a monopolist in a specifically defined digital gaming market.
That has no bearing or relevance on whether they are a monopolist in some other defined market (or even on a different day in the same market!)
That quote is a bit of a cherry pick resulting a wide interpretation that isn't supported.
The actual ruling is something more like "Epic failed to prove that Apple is a monopoly in the market the judge decided is the relevant market: digital mobile gaming transactions".
Here are the relevant sections of the ruling:
> The Court disagrees with both parties’ definition of the relevant market.
> Ultimately, after evaluating the trial evidence, the Court finds that the relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store. The mobile gaming market itself is a $100 billion industry. The size of this market explains Epic Games’ motive in bringing this action. Having penetrated all other video game markets, the mobile gaming market was Epic Games’ next target and it views Apple as an impediment.
> Further, the evidence demonstrates that most App Store revenue is generated by mobile gaming apps, not all apps. Thus, defining the market to focus on gaming apps is appropriate. Generally speaking, on a revenue basis, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenues. This 70% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of all App Store consumers. These gaming-app consumers are primarily making in-app purchases which is the focus of Epic Games’ claims. By contrast, over 80% of all consumer accounts generate virtually no revenue, as 80% of all apps on the App Store are free.
> Having defined the relevant market as digital mobile gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple’s conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrustconduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist. Case Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.
> Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.
>I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Are those threads arguing about a legal definition, because if not then this would have little impact on them. Even if they are arguing form a legal perspective, it would have to be within the same legal system as this court and thus could be argued for other legal systems. And even then one can argue the judge is wrong, look at how many judges end up being wrong based on appeal results. Technically you can't be sure which judge is actually wrong, you know which one is in the court that overrules the other, but you can still point out that the disagreement means one of them is wrong even if you can't say definitely which one is.
> I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want!
Edit: excerpt from the ruling is:
"Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. (...) The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
> It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour
Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business in creating a competitor to a market for a platform they and they alone created?
If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem to exist. If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
Apple is in several markets in the same time and using its position in one to control the competition in another.
There are limits to what you can do in a vertically integrated business stack, especially when you invite third parties to participate in pieces of that stack.
As a consumer, I can't have a phone for every software vendor I want to purchase from, that's obviously ridiculous. If Apple wants to create a marketplace, it has to allow certain things to happen in that marketplace. If the App Store was an entirely separate business not tied to hardware, the restrictions would be significantly less.
> Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business
(emphasis mine)
Nobody said anything about Apple assisting other businesses. They could easily just let everything be, but instead, Apple is going out of their way to prevent competition.
Imagine if your favorite Linux distro only allowed you to install software from their package repos, and you had to jump through tons of hoops to install software from outside their repos, and adding other repos was impossible.
I know you'd say "I'd just switch distros!", but in the mobile world, you effectively only have two choices.
I don't think anyone is saying that they need to provide support for third-party payment processors themselves, but their rules can't restrict someone else from supporting them.
I don't know why that would be controversial.
Imagine a world where Google required a 30% cut of everything bought through Chrome. How is what Apple's doing any different from that?
Because end-users own their phones, and Apple restricting the ways software can be loaded onto the phone is robbing those users of their rights. The same applies to game consoles and other similarly locked-down devices.
If I buy a table, I can choose to stain it a different color, or put a tablecloth over it, or cut the legs off, or burn it for firewood. I have the right to use it however I want for whatever purpose I want, because I own it. For some insane reason bootlickers are willing to throw such rights out the window the moment you try to apply them to computer hardware and software.
>If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem
What about the sucker that bought the phone? why the company that created the device should decide what the owner can do?
Isn't ironic Apple prevents someone showing you a link to the product webpage and the explanation is that you are too stupid to be let opening a webpage from the app = will they remove the web-browser ?
Because it's vertical integration and refusal to deal. To me, it's very similar to the Hollywood anti-trust case, when movie studios used to own movie theaters. By your reasoning, those theaters should have just made their own movies?
> . If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
What do you even think a monopoly or anti-competetive behavior is?
During the standard oil trials, would you support the argument of "If people don't like it, they can go build their own railroad!"?
Do you simply not believe in any forms of monopoly law? Because your argument could be used in literally any monopoly trial, if you actually believe it.
Apple goes beyond not facilitating other businesses; they actively ban other app stores (because the only legit way to get an app store on an iPhone is to install it from their app store).
Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior
I don't think we need a new word for this. What you've described is a cartel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel]. To the extent that they restrain trade, prohibit competition, or artificially increase costs on consumers, cartels are already illegal in the US.
How does this differ from traditional brick and mortar retail? The retailers posed a barrier to selling to consumers at scale and wholesale prices, I think, were closer to 50% of retail markup.
Sure, manufactures could find small retailers and build a following from there, or find ways to market direct to consumers. But it seems like that is still true, if not even easier in the modern age. So what is different. I ask this not rhetorically, clearly there are differences. Is the scale the difference? Was it always wrong and we just didn't see it a clearly? Is the smaller number retailer the major factor?
> It's a new game, and we need new definitions. [..] Famgopolies (FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior) behave different than monopolies.
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
So, Apple was in the wrong about forcing app devs to use their payment processor (and taking a 30% cut at the time - 15% or 30% now), and they have to change that.
But Epic was also in the wrong when they tried to go around this rule, and they have to pay 30% on every transaction they made after their update in which they used direct payment?
But if Epic didn't try to go around the rule and loudly complain, there would be no judicial case, and no ruling forcing Apple to change?
I guess the judge's logic is that Epic could have sued without breaching the contract first, even if the contract was actually illegal. I don't agree that it should work that way, but the damages are immaterial. The bigger issue is: can/will Apple permanently terminate Epic's developer account for breach of contract and prevent them from releasing Fortnite despite this ruling, and possibly even cause problems for Unreal on Mac? It seems to me that they can.
I think this is unlikely. Mac gamers need Unreal more than games developed using Unreal need Mac users. Mac is an incredibly niche market for games - they're not going to rewrite their game using a different engine to run on Mac, and Apple knows that.
Of course, Apple could decide they don't give a shit about native Mac games, why don't you play our iOS games, but that just seems petty.
The judge explicitly said, yes, they can (page 179):
The relief to which Apple is entitled is that to which Epic Games stipulated in the event that the Court found it liable for breach of contract, namely:
(1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment; and
(2) a declaration that (i) Apple’s termination of the DPLA and the related agreements between Epic Games and Apple was valid, lawful, and enforceable, and (ii) Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion.
This may very well kill Epic's Unreal Engine business (at least on Apple platforms) if they no longer have the necessary licenses to use Apple's developer tools.
The ruling explains the logic near the last page of the decision -- it's basically "Epic didn't have to break their contract in order to sue". I think it's the judge slapping Epic on the wrist for grandstanding, even though they basically-won.
Epic only has to pay out ~$4 million for their "damages" so it's largely moot and ceremonial for them. Nevertheless, I agree with you that it seems contradictory.
They seem to have ruled only that you can’t prohibit links to alternative payment methods (which would not be IAPs). You can still prohibit alternative actually IAPs, so Epic’s alternative IAPs must pay the fee.
Edit: Note that this a descriptive statement regarding the ruling, not a normative statement of my opinion.
I am unclear about this actually. I think the actual injunction will be a separate document released soon. But here's the judge's description in the ruling:
> a nationwide injunction shall issue enjoining Apple from prohibiting developers to include in their Apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP
Obviously this would seem to imply that developers are allowed to accept payment from alternative systems to unlock digital content in apps. But it doesn't explicitly say that. All it explicitly says is that developers can link to alternative payment systems. I hope the actual injunction is more explicit.
Readit News
1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone. 2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year.
The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. All Apple has to do is to make the rates competitive enough, that after considering building their own purchases system, factoring in sales tax and VAT, most developers will happily just opt for Apple's system if the rates make sense. Many people are putting up with 30% already — bringing the rates down to something reasonable with an upgrade path to put them on par with payment processors like Stripe (with VAT and Billing and Radar) or Paddle will just increase revenues for them.
The moment they drop rates and ease restrictions apps that are not being built because of these rules will get built, and these apps will gladly pay the market rate of 5% to 10% for a full service payments system.
The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do for web payments. Apple’s offerings are quite polished so I don’t think they’ll fall out of favor but it’s going to reduce their profit margin and I’m sure the number of people who will use alternatives is much greater than zero.
Any iOS devs care to weigh in? Apple's system could just as easily be a godawful mess. No personal experience but I've seen people online complaining about how StoreKit sucks.
They've had in-app purchases since 2009 and no competitive pressure from other SDKs, because they can block them with app store policy instead of needing to offer a better product. That sounds like an easy environment for it to become an afterthought; the people using it have no choice in the matter if they want to be on the App Store.
But also just take a look at the number of subscriptions we all have these days - Entertainment stuff (Spotify/Music, Netflix/streaming, HBO, Xbox Live), Donations (Charity, Github Sponsors), Software (Password managers, backup solutions, Jetbrains, Adobe), Membership (Prime/equivalent, internet, mobile), ... yada yada yada. It's a huge unwieldy list.
I have tried my best to keep at least all the app ones in iTunes/Apple (in my case - weather app, dating apps, productivity apps). My alternative is I just won't subscribe. I'm sick of the subscription economy as it is. This would be the last straw. If Bumble tells me I have to give them my cc info and have to call them to cancel (like NYT does), I just won't subscribe.
Essentially I'm subscribed to some of these apps because I'm not being forced against my will to stay subscribed using terms and conditions that are outrageous (looking at Adobe with its annual contract).
If its a Gacha or something, you then are getting some in-game currency, that you then have to redeem for the item you wanted. The extra steps are really annoying, and if its a company I trust, it would be easier to give them my info to smoothen things up (big if, mind you)
Let's say you want to sell your original product on Amazon, but you also have your own fulfillment center and a storefront on your website. What if Amazon removed you from their store, because your instruction manual included a URL to your website, and it was against the rules to tell your customers that you accepted payment outside of Amazon's ecosystem in any way.
That's what Apple did with software, though suspiciously they left the largest, most litigious companies like Amazon alone, because they've been free to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases of physical products for years now.
I am also an irrational cheap skate so if I see Apple around but more, I won't subscribe at all.
My guess is that a lot of people see it that way.
This is all stuff Apple can design around or codify into their approval standards, obviously. Which is why it's imperative they act on their own so they can dictate how it shakes out rather than having a poorly considered implementation forced on them by regulators.
the apple developer ecosystem (with regards to subscriptions and app purchases) in my experience has been quite awful for a multi trillion dollar company. really bad API docs, really poor experience around understanding what is even happening in their black box. i'm honestly astonished at how "unfinished" the whole experience feels. something like Stripe is on another level
Merchant using letsencrypt need to validate domain every 3 by hand. And that "feature" even exists on their document.
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There are externalities to each choice, of course, but the correct answer is, actually, the obvious one. Apple is not in the right on this one, from any perspective. If they care about their users and developers: they'd drop the commission. If they cared about their revenue and investors: they'd drop the commission.
Fortnite's protest should have been the wake-up call for the people dead asleep at the wheel of their App Store division. Epic very likely would have stayed on the App Store indefinitely at 15%; the issue has metastasized, and now Tim Sweeny has taken the stance of "alternate payment frameworks or nothing", but I'd bet every dollar I've got that if Fortnite's IAPs were at 15% before they left, they'd still be on the App Store. Everything is about money at the end of the day; Apple doubled-down, so now Epic had to double-down.
Imagine a commission so reasonable that Netflix could sell its subscriptions there; that Amazon could sell books; that Fortnite could (maybe) return, and the next triple-A gaming hit that hadn't even considered mobile because of the commissions. That's the money Apple is leaving on the table. These companies WANT their products to be easy to buy; nothing makes that easier than App Store IAPs. There's a number that could work for everyone, but Apple comes to every negotiating table with their fingers plugged in their ears yelling "nah nah nah I can't hear you 30%"
Apple's App Store policies throughout the 2010s will go down in history as the biggest blunder big tech has ever made. I am absolutely certain of this. They're throwing away an empire that could last a hundred years, because they think they're invincible. Tim Cook literally said, under oath, "we don't know how profitable the App Store is". They've publicized proudly about how they employ five hundred whole people to do hundreds of thousands of App Reviews. This is not malice or greed; its complete and total incompetence. Why are investors not OUTRAGED at Apple's leadership?!
This isn’t about fees and it’s not even (just) about Apple - Apple is just a relatively unsympathetic defendant for them to fire their opening shot. As noted, Microsoft fees are 30%, Google fees are 30%, etc, and yet Apple was singled out (with those companies actually jumping onto the lawsuit against Apple too).
This is, more generally, about prying the Apple platform open, and other similar platforms like it. Remember, Epic didn’t start this suit over anti-steering clauses, the real goal here was epic getting their own third party store, which means they don’t have to pass an Apple review before being able to request permissions that let them mine data/etc. Thats a way bigger prize than (checks notes) 30% of 12 million dollars.
I wonder how much of this hard-headedness is on the App Store division and how much of it is Tim. Or just Apple Hubris.
The only way the 30% would make sense is if publishing on the App Store was free. But of course it isn't, you need to pay a yearly fee for that.
Add to that the fact that App Store purchases are riddled with fake cards and usually draw a much higher MDR from merchant accounts. If people are rejoicing that they can just hook up their Stripe and world will be rainbows, they are in for a shut down email pretty soon.
I, as a customer, don't want to pay many companies directly. The prime example is any news publication. There are many I'd happily pay for except (like gym memberships it seems) it can be incredibly difficult to cancel. I won't reward that model so they get none of my money.
The _buyer_ experience with Apple's IAP is mostly good, but I would argue that the developer experience is downright horrible. Working with subscriptions and IAP receipts is clunky. You can only use one of about 100 SKUs, which makes it difficult to offer discounts and customized pricing at the higher price tiers, where the gaps between amounts are quite large. Until recently, it wasn't even possible for developers to issue refunds!
Even if Stripe charged 30%, I would choose them every time over Apple's IAP.
I have implemented subscription using many APIs (stripe, PayPal, processout, Apple, Amazon, Android...) And Apple is by far the shittiest.
And you cannot even refund your own customers...
Note that Apple is charging 15% for small developers ( https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s... ) - not 30%.
Stripe's rates are $0.30 + 3% ( https://stripe.com/pricing ). Paypal is a quite a bit better at $0.09 + 5% for micropayments.
For a $0.99 IAP through Apple (with all of the associated infrastructure to handle IAP) that would cost $0.15 to the developer.
That same purchase through Stripe would cost $0.33... and the developer would need to provide some way to handle IAP. Paypal would be the same as through Apple.
That "set up some way to handle IAP" is going to be interesting too.
OK but like, dark patterns exist and everybody knows users don’t like them. Developers use them anyway because they’re profitable. Yeah I guess you feel bad but the bags of money help dry those tears.
If there’s no chance of customers altering their decision )because you have something exclusive for which there is no substitute, or no good substitute) then there’s very little downside to dark patterns. And this is true even for something as banal as a newspaper subscription, where you would think there’s a lot of substitutes.
Payment processors and their networks are infinitely more complex and resource intensive than a mobile app distribution store, and their commissions tend to only be between 1% and 3% per transaction.
First of all - citation? Have you run a mutli-billion$$ App Store with hundreds of millions of individual customers, and the associated support channels etc?
Secondly, Apple is also providing those 'infinitely more complex' payment processing services on top of the App Store, so even if true, your argument is kinda moot.
For a US company and a US customer, that's 4.99% + $0.09 for each transaction. For a $0.99 transaction, that's 15% of the total.
> Call this function from account settings or a help menu to enable customers to request a refund for an in-app purchase within your app. When you call this function, the system displays a refund sheet with the customer’s purchase details and list of reason codes for the customer to choose from.
Most of the revenue Apple makes is from top apps and top brands, which is why they had no problem cutting the rates to 15% for the little guys already, the little guys are a tiny slice of the overall pie.
There is no way this will overall increase Apple's revenue, especially as companies concentrate on building solid 'Apple fee avoidance' funnels. Not to mention that many pay-for apps will very likely convert to free to download and then push the user to pay for the app externally to the app store as a 'one time lifetime subscription'.
This is going to cause a massive revenue loss for Apple if it stands.
Speak for yourself. I am from India, and we already have much better payment systems then Apple's:
1. All our debit / credit card are chip-based.
2. No card transaction can happen without the PIN. Some online transactions require both a PIN and a password.
3. For any online transactions, the payment processors often support the following options to pay - using debit / credit card, directly from our bank account (Net Banking with 2FA), Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ( https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview ) which is another online digital payment mode that even allows for easy peer to peer payment between parties and umpteen online / mobile digital wallets.
4. Best of all, using any of these payment modes won't allow Apple any access to my financial data.
(And naturally Apple supports none of these popular modes in India because otherwise Apple would come under closer scrutiny from indian regulators.)
As far as App Store commissions are considered, from a developer's perspective Apple can go screw themselves if they want anything more than what competing payment processors charge. (Like Epic, I am disappointed that consumer rights weren't considered at all - ultimately it is us owners / users of Apple devices that pay these 30%-50% or whatever commission!)
I have an app like that that's already done and in the app store. We would love to take advantage of Apple Pay for subscriptions, but the 30% tax means we literally can't. We'd have to jack our prices so much that the cost becomes prohibitive, and if we take the 30% hit ourselves we'd basically be giving things away for free.
If the cost would drop to somewhere in the 5-15% range it's a whole new ballgame.
EDIT: For anyone who's wondering – we basically use the same strategy as Netflix et al, the app is useless unless you already have an account and in order to get one you have to sign up elsewhere. We don't have links or information on how to sign up, you have to just magically end up on our site or have an account added through one of our partners.
Apple only takes credit card in most countries. This makes sense in countries where credit cards are the norm, but not in countries where credit cards are not the norm and far from ubiquitous.
OTOH, external payment providers (eg: stripe) often integrate with local payment mechanism.
In my case, local payment mechanisms are far simpler, easier, and secure. Using a credit card requires me moving money into my Wise account before I can pay anything, adding so many extra steps. Not to mention that I have to remember to transfer money every month before subscriptions get charged.
Plus, the whole online payment system with credit cards is utterly unsafe: share your "secret number" with all merchants and pray none of them leak it or overcharge you.
cutting prices that drastically will most certainly not increase revenue. in a competitive market, pricing is near/at the price elasticity equilibrium. in a monopoly situation, pricing is much beyond that point, in the company's favor. you're suggesting they move prices in the opposite direction, which would most certainly impact revenue negatively. note that these are not nascent, high growth markets where the growth rate can overwhelm the price elasticity dynamics.
the court should be mandating broad, open, and honest competition, not dictating prices, which is will practically always get wrong in some way. price is a signal for how competitive a market is, not a lever to drive competition.
I’m much more likely to subscribe to something via the Apple store than I am through any in-app service.
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They have this brilliant Apple Pay workflow that's almost completely unused in IAP — it bothered me that we couldn't just use Apple Pay to purchase a Spotify subscription directly in-app. Perhaps soon we'll see this.
I have been paying for things online for decades now and never once have I used Apple's payment system. I assure you, plenty of us will use payments not provided by the fruit company.
And to have to just through countless hoops to unsubscribe.
Looking at you, annoyingly hard to unsubscribe from, New-York Times.
Including Apple's
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The silent majority – the users – will always prefer to go through Apple. But HN seems to be full of user-hostile devs (as you can tell by looking at all the downvoted comments here who speak from a user’s PoV) who only hear the companies that want to break down the garden’s walls to prey upon users.
Relaxing that model will lead to better apps overall because finally you can invest and charge appropriately, you just need to trust yourself to not pay in apps you don't trust.
We just don't want to be vilified and forced to bow to the giants because of a few bad apples
No. All Apple has to do is amplify a few horror stories, for example people using [any competitor]’s renewable subscriptions and not being able to unsubscribe. Or amplify a story of a virus/malware on, hopefully, Epic or Steam.
This is certainly what makes you choose a MORE expensive product, that’s certainly why I buy my fire extinguishers $200 instead of $50 for the same model (but a trusted source). Apple should be able to keep a more expensive margin based on reputation alone.
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I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it's unfortunate we have to make a tradeoff at all.
Hopefully, this move will put downward pressure on Apple's payment infrastructure that incentivizes devs to keep using Apple payments because it's the same fee structure as whatever 3rd party they might move towards.
Besides, isn't the competition here what we want? Apple IAP are still easier, and probably will convert at a higher rate than pushing a user outside the app to do the payment on a website, so there's still incentives for developers to use them. If Apps switch away from IAP, then Apple is incentivised to actually compete (imagine that!!) and make something better that developers actively want to use.
It says something about the state of competition where Netflix can just say "no, we no longer want people to sign up on an iPhone and give us money". That says they don't think IAP is good, and Apple should actually work on building something that companies want to use.
In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.
It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.
Depends what you mean. The subtlety that is always lost in these conversation on HN is how deep does the competition have to go? I don't think anyone seriously argues that iPhones do not have viable competition in the smartphone market. And yet, if I as a consumer want to use a smartphone which places strong restrictions on third-party developers (which is one of the most significant reason I use iPhones and recommend them to friends and family), somehow those restrictions are considered "anti-competitive." If these restrictions are lifted or prohibited, that clearly removes one of the key differences between iPhones and their competitors (mostly Android phones), and it baffles me that this could be construed as a more competitive smartphone market for consumers.
But it's not guaranteed to be, which is a huge loss for the app store IMO.
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Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see the ruling as forcing Apple to lose money.
If I were Apple, I would have gone nuclear early on, and eliminated all % fees but made the annual fee per app of $X to each developer (whatever $ makes sense) and then you can collect money however you want. This would likely kill a lot of small app developers, but the big ones would not care. The ruling makes Epic a big winner, but everyone else loses in the long run, because Apple (and Google) will find a way to recover lost revenue.
Some people also want to have 1000 app stores allowed. Good luck with that one... imagine having to build an app store just for your app, or supporting 25 different app stores.
At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.
Do you not buy things online currently? Do you not use Amazon, or Lyft, or Netflix, or Spotify?
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
I think this is a fair argument, and I believe also shows that if options are available, that is where us as a consumer have our freedom. I also personally like the ability to quickly pay when needed for things using Apple, but in return - if I was able to pay for it because another offer, or option, or something was presented to me that was easier, I would totally take that that too. However, I can see how that would be a loss for the people writing and maintaining the app and the associated services.
The problem I see is that this swinging at the moment between a single payment gateway and every payment gateway out there is a huge pendulum that is swinging to the extremes of both, neither side actually gets anything good out of it.
It would be lovely in a world where the option was to use Apple + an external, and letting users decide what they feel safe with. Some will be happy going direct with Apple, some would be happier with <insert payment style here>.
I think it is mentioned below, I can see larger companies immediately dropping the Apple method because it loses them the extra profit, and just making the ecosystem harder. People lose faith in paying for services, and then another service comes along, charging 30%, and we are back where we started.
So yeah, IMHO, it is good it is being recognised, but at the same time, its going to be a bumpy ride.
It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.
If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.
When you sell something through Apple, depending on the location of your user, Apple will act as Agent or as a Commissionaire. This makes everything easy, even for a solo developer. Sold an in-game coins in France? Apple collected the money, paid the VAT to the French government. If you do this through your own means, you will need to establish a relationship with the French government so that you can pay them the VAT that you have to collect from your users.
This will ultimately benefit large companies who can jump through the hops of managing all this, putting the independent developers in a disadvantaged position due to the high barrier of entry into improved margin(compared to Apple Store where everyone gets the same cut) payments. In some places you can be required to send a printed receipt to the user.
It would not be fun to watch, let's say Zynga, collecting their low cost payments across all their portfolio by making users sign up once and having indie games instantly losing a payment or falling back to high commission options because users are tired of entering payment info for each game.
Sad day for the little guy. Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission or is it Epic, Netflix, Spotify who will benefit from this? Unless you do low margin commission work (like platform where you take a cut, i.e. online tutoring) the %30 commission is a non issue.
Game crystals don't really have a cost, so %5 cut or %30 cut doesn't really matter that much. However, one company having access to the %5 and other not having access to it will change the landscape because the large company will be able to advertise more thanks to its better margins, wiping out the rest.
It sounds like you should be using some kind of service that does that for you, maybe even provided by Apple?
> Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission
Independent devs seemed pretty happy overall with the 15% concession they already got as a result of the legal scrutiny on Apple. No doubt they'll enjoy further improvements to the terms once there is an actual threat of switching.
Apple will probably pivot quickly to allowing you to use Apple Pay for this. A small commission and metadata is better than nothing at all.
I do think this will have some effect that you describe (e.g. perhaps Epic suffers a breach in their payment system) on the end user side but it’s not as bad as the android store situation. if anything it will make iOS users more attractive to devs as they can now keep a larger percentage of IAP sales.
But when IAP costs less than 30% I expect all paid apps to go the IAP route.
It's just another payment processor. It often shows up beside "add a credit card" in apps. I use it to order food, pay for rideshare, buy tickets, etc.
https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/7159343?hl=...
Buying physical goods and services may not count, in the same way that they don't count on the Apple App Store.
this is not an unresolvable issue though. Apple could force developers to make their payment option as the default payment option similar to how they forced devs to use Sign in with Apple (when they have third party login). Big companies like PayPal could provide an SDK which can be used by devs to complete trasaction similar to web. I could think of many more ways to solve this issue.
Lowering prices increases the number of jobs available, and the only cost is that Apple loses some amount of it's astronomical profits.
In all likely hood things will get worse for consumers. I will definite not buy apps requiring custom payment platforms. Hopefully it’ll settle on stripe companies will offer multiple payment methods rather than trying to force their own.
I look forward to it making Apple lower its IAP fees for everyone. I’d still like to use their infrastructure, but without the enormous fees (15% for small devs is still huge).
If App A requires you to use their payment gateway and App B uses apple pay, use App B.
I imagine this will cause a sort of race to the bottom where apple will lower its own fees to match.
Do you think the banks are going to foot that bill? Of course not: it's us, the consumers.
Are you willing to have everything be a bit more expensive, for everyone, so that you, apple users, can have something a tiny bit more convenient?
Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30) is willing to eat this fee, presumably because of the benefits of vastly lower fraudulent transactions and chargebacks.
There are also standards like Web Payments.
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edit: I was instantly downvoted without any discussion, which doesn't add to the conversation. The reason I ask is because that's what the key value add is of Apple's IAP - I know that my payment method is accepted on the app store.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have gotten greedy...
This is the problem with major companies that think they can just control everything. Then when the government steps in they say what they were doing is anti-competitive and suddenly the consumers now have to bear the brunt of the negative aspect of full on competition. Had Apple just been reasonable and not charged egregious fees from the get go, this wouldn't have been an issue.
And you're almost always better off making that change yourself.
Big publishers have their own payment processing pipelines. Apple's is just extra overhead. Smaller publishers still (IMHO) can see a lot of benefit from Apple's 30% cut. It's those large publishers who are most likely to challenge your rules in court or lobby against you.
If the very largest publishers were paying 10% as a Preferred Partner instead of 30%, they would be a lot less willing to challenge the status quo when they might lose that privilege.
We've already have ridiculous workarounds for Apple's policies here like how you can bypass it to buy directly from Amazon through the app for physical goods. The carve out for digital goods is and was always a tortured post facto justification.
Where once the 30% cut funded the App Store (when it was small). It's clearly transitioned to being a massive profit center and Apple executives couldn't see past the short term revenue to see the writing on the wall. Woops.
"So, what did you do this quarter?"
"Oh, I reduced the revenue of the whole company by 7% to reduce future risk to our revenue stream."
There's only downside, and no upside to your career by doing this. Much better to wait for external forces to do it and then it's nobody's fault.
If I guessed right, Apple's income probably won't go down much. I would rather use Apple payment system. Lots of other people will also. It is simple and allows me one-stop management of subscriptions and purchases. Some folks won't of course, but it is the easiest choice.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-us-developers-a...
The only reason to defend yourself is if you legitimately think what you're doing is defensible.
There is no guarantee that Apple wont be sued even with 10% cut so why not charge 30% and make money till the sun is shining.
From what I understand that Apple does do this. It's just not public information, and EPIC rejected the offer.
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Bundling the OS with hardware
Enforcing an App store
Dictating/Castrating Browser on mobile
And the list goes on.
I'm not saying this as a ding on Apple products, because I genuinely appreciate them, but I think at the same time Apple has resorted to creating roadblocks rather than innovating.
Is this really an issue? I agree Apple has been pretty shady but this is a facet of any hardware you buy today from any manufacturer. Now, preventing/obfuscating the install of _other_ OS software, I agree, total bullshit.
You could, maybe, make the argument that what Apple does is anticompetitive, but in the laptop space they are the ones being hurt by a monopoly, not the ones who benefit.
Not just mobile, but iPad Pro and iPads too.
What about bundling camera, speaker, screen, processors etc? They are selling a product. You don't complain about car companies bundling 4 wheels and a motor.
And Microsoft was a signatory to this lawsuit arguing Apple should have to open up but their store is “different”…
(Should oil companies be penalised for the damage they have done to the environment just in terms of promoting plastic?)
Is this anticompetitive if it's a fundament of old business model back from 80s?
PayPal, you confirm checkout total, login to paypal, confirm subscription or price. Done.
Stripe, you can use their standard checkout page, autofill your card info, or just use Apple Pay to confirm the subscription/item, pay. Done.
What's changed is just giving developers that flexibility. Ultimately saving them money, they can hire more devs, and make their products hopefully cheaper (and better).
Most consumers will still have no idea that their checkout is not happening with Apple, and it's happening elsewhere (aside from PayPal Checkout being obvious with their checkout/login flow).
Apple could absolutely adapt their native subscriptions SDK to support the status of a third-party app, though I doubt they ever would. They tried to do this with streaming services (HBO, Netflix, etc.), but they shut this down recently
So no, I don't think the flow will remain nearly as seamless as it is today, and that's disappointing to me. I don't pay for much IAP-wise (though I do order plenty of DoorDash), but I guess this will give me even less motivation to buy crap I don't need.
That only works the first time. Now, I'm running out of kids and you'd be astounded at how little value they hold once you get to fifth born.
The only ones who can save money on third-party payments are big developers or apps that charge a lot of money. For usual $0.99-2.99 in-app buys, you won't be saving much, in fact, you are likely to pay more. And of course, you have to do VAT, refunds and other things yourself. I just don't see how a small dev is benefiting here. I'd rather pay Apple's 15% and be done with it.
But I did not think that Epic had a particularly strong chance of getting an injunction like this.
I hope that the takeaway people take from this is "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case", and not, "the judge was always obviously going to issue this injunction." I still personally think knowing what I know now, if I went back to the start of this case I still wouldn't be able to confidently predict this injunction.
But maybe other people are better at reading court signals than I am.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-12/epic-appl....
It's not a surprising outcome whatsoever if you followed the trial.
Apple's recent concession on this was reading the room and realising this is the likely outcome.
I didn't read a "compromise" as indicating that an injunction was particularly likely, and most of the commentary I read on HN at that time didn't read it that way either.
I think people are looking back with the benefit of hindsight at something that was not by any means a generally assumed outcome, even from people who were covering and talking about the trial on HN itself or on other social media sites I followed.
A hint that the judge is curious about finding middle grounds in a lawsuit is definitely not a promise of a permanent injunction.
I had multiple discussions, with many commenters on hacker news, where people were way too certain about the court case, when clearly it could have gone many different ways (Thus, I agree with you that "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case" ).
It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
The current definition of a monopoly.
Whether the current definition of a monopoly needs to change.
If you are mixing the two arguments discourse can go nowhere because you're substantively discussing cause and effect. The current definition of a monopoly needs to change, imo, then we can talk about whether Apple is a monopoly.
I'm also interested in discussing conglomerates and whether they are good or bad, and how to control them similar to monopolies, but that discourse can't be had until we can agree on something like the definition of a monopoly.
Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors (<<super>> shady).
That's the root of the problem in many cases.
Of course, this needs to be coupled with stronger anti-cartel enforcement. Because tech is rarely a pure monopoly, but extremely often is ends up under the control of a cartel.
However, I fear most efforts would start with "Companies X, Y, and Z need to be categorized as monopolies. Let's write rules to fit"
I wrote more about that here: https://www.tinker.fyi/6-break-up-tech-conglomerates/
But everyone always becomes substantially less interested in topics once it becomes hashing out legal language. Which is why we pay lawyers well.
Have you any idea of how many laws would need to change, not to mention all the academic papers, legal and academic commentaries and textbooks?
At the end of the day, who cares if they are a monopoly or not - you don't have to be a monopoly to be in a position to do Bad Stuff to The Market.
Seems like that just makes "it's a problem" do all the work.
Even if they aren't a monopoly, they shouldn't be allowed to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
They make a call about whether a company has monopoly power in a specific market defined in a specific case.
In this case, the court does not believe Apple is a monopolist in a specifically defined digital gaming market.
That has no bearing or relevance on whether they are a monopolist in some other defined market (or even on a different day in the same market!)
"The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
Unlikely. While there may now be a legal decision in place it will still be argued whether or not it was the correct one.
The actual ruling is something more like "Epic failed to prove that Apple is a monopoly in the market the judge decided is the relevant market: digital mobile gaming transactions".
Here are the relevant sections of the ruling:
> The Court disagrees with both parties’ definition of the relevant market.
> Ultimately, after evaluating the trial evidence, the Court finds that the relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store. The mobile gaming market itself is a $100 billion industry. The size of this market explains Epic Games’ motive in bringing this action. Having penetrated all other video game markets, the mobile gaming market was Epic Games’ next target and it views Apple as an impediment.
> Further, the evidence demonstrates that most App Store revenue is generated by mobile gaming apps, not all apps. Thus, defining the market to focus on gaming apps is appropriate. Generally speaking, on a revenue basis, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenues. This 70% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of all App Store consumers. These gaming-app consumers are primarily making in-app purchases which is the focus of Epic Games’ claims. By contrast, over 80% of all consumer accounts generate virtually no revenue, as 80% of all apps on the App Store are free.
> Having defined the relevant market as digital mobile gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple’s conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrustconduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist. Case Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.
> Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.
Are those threads arguing about a legal definition, because if not then this would have little impact on them. Even if they are arguing form a legal perspective, it would have to be within the same legal system as this court and thus could be argued for other legal systems. And even then one can argue the judge is wrong, look at how many judges end up being wrong based on appeal results. Technically you can't be sure which judge is actually wrong, you know which one is in the court that overrules the other, but you can still point out that the disagreement means one of them is wrong even if you can't say definitely which one is.
Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want!
Edit: excerpt from the ruling is: "Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. (...) The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
We need strong federal antitrust enforcement. This only worked because Apple is based in California, which has stricter rules.
Dead Comment
The argument is not "bigger". It is exactly the same. If we're not a monopoly (Apple), how can we be anti-competitive?
Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business in creating a competitor to a market for a platform they and they alone created?
If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem to exist. If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
Maybe I’m just naive.
There are limits to what you can do in a vertically integrated business stack, especially when you invite third parties to participate in pieces of that stack.
As a consumer, I can't have a phone for every software vendor I want to purchase from, that's obviously ridiculous. If Apple wants to create a marketplace, it has to allow certain things to happen in that marketplace. If the App Store was an entirely separate business not tied to hardware, the restrictions would be significantly less.
(emphasis mine)
Nobody said anything about Apple assisting other businesses. They could easily just let everything be, but instead, Apple is going out of their way to prevent competition.
Imagine if your favorite Linux distro only allowed you to install software from their package repos, and you had to jump through tons of hoops to install software from outside their repos, and adding other repos was impossible.
I know you'd say "I'd just switch distros!", but in the mobile world, you effectively only have two choices.
I don't think anyone is saying that they need to provide support for third-party payment processors themselves, but their rules can't restrict someone else from supporting them.
I don't know why that would be controversial.
Imagine a world where Google required a 30% cut of everything bought through Chrome. How is what Apple's doing any different from that?
If I buy a table, I can choose to stain it a different color, or put a tablecloth over it, or cut the legs off, or burn it for firewood. I have the right to use it however I want for whatever purpose I want, because I own it. For some insane reason bootlickers are willing to throw such rights out the window the moment you try to apply them to computer hardware and software.
What about the sucker that bought the phone? why the company that created the device should decide what the owner can do?
Isn't ironic Apple prevents someone showing you a link to the product webpage and the explanation is that you are too stupid to be let opening a webpage from the app = will they remove the web-browser ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Anti-trust_Case_of_1...
What do you even think a monopoly or anti-competetive behavior is?
During the standard oil trials, would you support the argument of "If people don't like it, they can go build their own railroad!"?
Do you simply not believe in any forms of monopoly law? Because your argument could be used in literally any monopoly trial, if you actually believe it.
Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior
Sure, manufactures could find small retailers and build a following from there, or find ways to market direct to consumers. But it seems like that is still true, if not even easier in the modern age. So what is different. I ask this not rhetorically, clearly there are differences. Is the scale the difference? Was it always wrong and we just didn't see it a clearly? Is the smaller number retailer the major factor?
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
[1]: https://theceme.org/richard-godden-platform-capitalism-nick-...
So, Apple was in the wrong about forcing app devs to use their payment processor (and taking a 30% cut at the time - 15% or 30% now), and they have to change that.
But Epic was also in the wrong when they tried to go around this rule, and they have to pay 30% on every transaction they made after their update in which they used direct payment?
But if Epic didn't try to go around the rule and loudly complain, there would be no judicial case, and no ruling forcing Apple to change?
This is weird to me.
I think this is unlikely. Mac gamers need Unreal more than games developed using Unreal need Mac users. Mac is an incredibly niche market for games - they're not going to rewrite their game using a different engine to run on Mac, and Apple knows that.
Of course, Apple could decide they don't give a shit about native Mac games, why don't you play our iOS games, but that just seems petty.
The relief to which Apple is entitled is that to which Epic Games stipulated in the event that the Court found it liable for breach of contract, namely:
(1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment; and
(2) a declaration that (i) Apple’s termination of the DPLA and the related agreements between Epic Games and Apple was valid, lawful, and enforceable, and (ii) Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion.
This may very well kill Epic's Unreal Engine business (at least on Apple platforms) if they no longer have the necessary licenses to use Apple's developer tools.
The logical ruling would be to force Apple to pay reparations to all the app developers that they have illegally forced to pay for the app store.
Edit: Note that this a descriptive statement regarding the ruling, not a normative statement of my opinion.
> a nationwide injunction shall issue enjoining Apple from prohibiting developers to include in their Apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP
Obviously this would seem to imply that developers are allowed to accept payment from alternative systems to unlock digital content in apps. But it doesn't explicitly say that. All it explicitly says is that developers can link to alternative payment systems. I hope the actual injunction is more explicit.
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