Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees.
It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that charges fair prices - because fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.
BUT... since fairness gets so often brought into conversations about Apple's fees, often with the implicit suggestion that Apple "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps and for (in heavy quotes) "creating" a market that they supposedly also don't have duopoly control over: does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
Like, if we're going to talk about what's egregious and what's not egregious, charging higher fees per-transaction than the platforms you are hosting seems like it might be a good indicator that things have gotten out of control.
> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
Well, there is a simple way to test this... just get rid of the Patreon iOS app and just use a web version. Why does patreon need its own app? Why can't it just be web based?
I wish fewer companies had apps. I don't need an app for everything. I don't need every hotel I stay at to have their own app, I don't need an app to order food at a restaurant.
So why do companies make them? Because people spend more money when they can just use the in app purchase functionality. It is CLEARLY worth the 30% to most companies, because they keep pumping out single use apps that would be better as a mobile web page.
Heh. I didn't even know there was a Patreon app. There is an issue though. A lot of people (not me) use phone as their main computing device. And Apple is well known for keeping web app experience subpar compared to native app experience. Safari is lagging behind all the other browsers regarding modern APIs support. Bugs are not getting patched for years. At the same time other web rendering engines are not allowed on the main official app store. The other app stores are hard to get to and I consider them non-existent for regular users.
So, platform developers have to take iOS support very seriously or miss a lot of profit.
How many of the apps you're complaining about are paying 30% to Apple? Hotels and restaurants definitely aren't.
Also a lot of companies make apps so they can get more tracking info. That value doesn't come from the Apple Store.
It's things like games that really get an advantage from being native and in the store. And that's largely a red queen's race, they need to stay on top and they'll pay out the nose to be the easiest install. Paying lots of money in a zero-sum situation doesn't mean they're getting much value in a more zoomed-out sense.
Actually Patreon has played it perfectly by offering an android app, ios app and a website, and increasing the prices on the ios app to cater for the fees. The next thing should be to provide a clear notice on the ios app that lower prices can be found on the other apps. Then they will be able to objectively tell how many people value the app store's value additions enough to pay extra
> It is CLEARLY worth the 30% to most companies, because they keep pumping out single use apps that would be better as a mobile web page.
Based on the context given in the OP, this conclusion does not follow and is not fair.
1. Patreon is passing the 30% on to customers by default, or allowing creators to pay for it out of their existing income, so Patreon isn’t making any value judgement at all. They are leaving it up to creators and users.
2. Even if they weren’t doing (1), there are other factors in play that don’t make this a fair “experiment”. Most notably that established platforms like Amazon and Spotify _don’t_ find the value here, contradicting your assertion that most companies do.
Note: I didn't think Apple historically allowed (1), which also invalidates the “experiment”, but maybe terms have changed recently.
Wondering about that, too - I always use the website on my ipad since a browser allows me to enlarge the font size when reading novels on Patreon (a feature that the app does not offer).
Patreon allows creators to for a fee serve additional media content via it's app which is agnostic of media type. (IE music, coding, youtube etc.)
Most people pay for things for convenience and perceived value.
There is very little convience or perceived value in having to go to a mobile/safari/ios website, log in, and then download a for example 1gig podcast tothen have to find it in my "downloads" and then play via some media player.
It's also an issue of onboarding and discoverability. Creators would see a marked reduction in subscriptions if Patreon was not allowed placement in the app store.
> So why do companies make them? Because people spend more money when they can just use the in app purchase functionality.
I assumed it was so they could skirt around the privacy built more consistently into web browsers. Or that they are still stuck in the "There's an app for that" era that I think we have collectively left behind.
> Why does patreon need its own app? Why can't it just be web based?
Apple & Google Pay is my guess. Which I don't use, just because it's rent seeking and leads to this.
I use the websites. Don't want to install bloody apps which request every permission available. My browser has most of those set to denied. Don't even ask for permission, outright deny.
There's an advantage to using in-app purchases when you doubt the developer, so either you think they're going to overcharge you or make it difficult to cancel. However this is not the case with Patreon
So I don't know what's the case here, but sounds like people who get confused by bubbles of different colors
Notifications. Performance. Responsiveness. Bandwidth. Offline access. And a lot of users simply find apps to be more convenient than browser bookmarks. I use the web interface for Patreon, but I can see why some users would want the app.
Why does Apple themselves have apps for things like maps, news, stocks, weather, video chats, etc? These all rely on web services and could theoretically be handled in the browser. I don't think any of these examples even provide users the ability to buy anything. Clearly Apple recognizes a value in some services being available through native mobile apps.
> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers?
Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value.
Looping back to the specifics, if Apple was the primary means that people discover Patreon and the creators on it, sure, it would make sense. But for Patreon specifically that's not the case (I think). The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.
> Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value.
That isn't obvious at all. In both cases the distributor's margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there are a thousand, competition will force their margins down. Whether they're local or national.
Moreover, in this context Patreon is the national distributor who needs to distribute content to everyone whether they have iOS, Android, web or something else, and each of the platforms is a local subcontractor for a subset of the customers. Which leads to exactly the problem. The notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one another in this context is false, because to distribute to Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS customers you need Apple. You can't switch from one to the other because Google can't distribute to iOS customers. They're each a different market serving different customers, and then they collect a monopoly rent.
What the usual trope that analogizes this to Walmart or Target is missing is that "Walmart customers" are also customers of Target or Amazon, but the large majority of iOS customers are not also customers of Google Play or any other app store.
> The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.
Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do.
Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for. Maybe some very low double digit percentage of these people will try to load a pwa from patreon.com
>is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers?
In the sense that [bigger company] can make more money and reach more people than [smaller company], yes. But if all they are doing is sitting there and using that bigger presence, you can see how that roads ends in antitrust.
>The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.
two big issues.
1. No one wins. Users lose the convinience of an app, Apple loses money from a potential large customer, Patreon loses views from being visible on the app store. It's just bad buzz all around for no good reason.
2. The underselling point that Apple has actively sabatoged web apps and PWA's which is part of why the DMA is coming down hard on them. We're well past a monopolistic power using its power to stifle competition.
Let's not pretend this trillion dollar company that already forces devs to use IOS hardware to develop (and took down their server OS's to boot), and charges a yearly membership to dev is scaping for cash here.
> Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees.
Unfortunately this is in the nature of suppliers and retailers.
Supermarkets make more profit on a litre of milk than farmers. Way way way more. Because they know farmers in practice have to sell _all_ their milk, not just some of it.
And what Apple really has, and knows it, is the only supermarket on the main road out of iBorough. And there are no corner shops.
Apple doesnt need to be broken up, they just need to be forced to open their devices. No proprietary apis that only they have access to, when you open the phone for the first time you should be able to pick what store to use and they have to allow alternative browsers
Nah, just Apple. Whenever any other tech company tries bullshit like this, alternatives pop up and people switch to them. When Apple tries it people make excuses for them.
I would probably sooner point out that by far the most money Apple makes off of their platform (and you don’t even have to look this up or have inside knowledge to know it is true) is from a TON of addicts gambling on gacha boxes in pointless video games. They are incentivized by predatory behavior.
Edit: seriously, even the casinos and bars will eventually tell you you’re done.
It wasn't surprising, but having hard facts always helps. Apple v. Epic revealed Apple makes 70% of app store revenue from mobile games, which is generated by less than 10% of app store users:
Not all parties to a transaction provide value to everyone in a transaction. A union, lawyer, real estate agent, etc is optimizing value for one party but not both. As long as one side of a transaction has a monopoly you can end up with “middlemen” favoring the side that picks them, thus why Ticketmaster still exists.
Patroon is chosen by content creators not customers as such its goal is creating value for content creators not customers. As a customer it’s providing negative value with their policies to immediately cancel service the instant someone unsubscribes rather than letting the month play out etc. Thus why their website can be so unbelievably terrible for customers and yet they stay in business.
So for customers Apple/Google/whatever may provide literally infinite more value not because it’s significant but because they are on their side.
Does Apple's change do anything at all to help alleviate any of the concerns you have?
You have fewer subscriptions options for creators (1st-of-month billing and per-release billing is going away, despite the fact that creators regularly use them to simplify the experience for subscribers). You're going to pay more (I promise you, creators on Patreon are not rich enough to swallow a 30% transaction fee on iOS subscriptions). You're going to use the same app that you were using before. And this will change nothing about when Patreon cuts off service when you unsubscribe (incidentally, I'm pretty sure this is a creator decision and creators can choose to extend benefits to the end of the month).
What is Apple doing that is making any of this better for you?
Maybe you sort-of marginally have an easier time unsubscribing? But it's not hard to unsubscribe from a Patreon tier, and it's difficult to argue that Apple is providing infinite value by organizing your subscriptions into a list.
What are you actually paying this fee to Apple for? They're "on your side" except in the sense where them being on your side creates any tangible or significant change in your experience using Patreon. Seriously, what about the iOS experience using Patreon is better (or even different) than the experience elsewhere?
> As a customer it’s providing negative value with their policies to immediately cancel service the instant someone unsubscribes rather than letting the month play out etc.
is this recent? I definitely remember my service playing out the month when I cancel subs. Because for most subscriptions period I cancel the moment I subscribe.
I think the caveat here is that you are charged on the first, no matter when you sub. Be it on the 2nd or the 28th. But generally I can still access that month's rewards, so it's still not as bad as it could be.
> Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees.
they are both rent seeking middle-men who abuse network effect, its just one has more power than another.
This gets brought up a lot in conversations about Apple.
In one sense, I agree with it. Patreon is a rent-seeking middleman who abuses network effects. 100%.
But the creators on Patreon who's income are going to be most affected by this don't care about which side of the debate is more likeable to you, and I'm kind of sick of pretending that policies that affect a huge swath of people (often people with limited options, virtually no power, and few backup resources) can be treated like popularity contests.
The video essayists, programmers, artists, authors, and indies doing weird, wonderful work supported through Patreon get their revenue squeezed even tighter, being forced to either bleed revenue or subscribers due to new fees, being forced to abandon revenue models and subscription models that Apple doesn't like.. and, I mean, honestly, "I hate both companies" just is not a valid or acceptable response to that situation.
The solution to rent-seeking middlemen is not to make more of them.
I am curious, do you think there is an ethical way to be a middleman like this? Would making some one-time fee of maybe $1000 be more or less limiting to potential content creators on Patreon? Would a subscription to keep the Patreon page up be better?
Ultimately, Patreon isn't fundamentally doing something that even a non-tech user can't whip up for their own website. May need to resort to a payment processor (another middleman) to get donations going, but it's possible. I can take my ball home.
Current factors on IOS make it impossible to do the same on IOS, even post DMA they want to rent-seek outside of the App Store. I think that's what makes IOS worse in my eyes.
> It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that charges fair prices - because fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.
I agree with you that the reality of markets is quite different to the "common sense" model. Unfortunately I rarely find either in the press or just talking to people myself, that anyone gets beyond this kind of price=cost(1+a little incentive) thinking.
> Does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
This isn't a Creators/Patreon/Apple phenomenon, this is a consumers/distributors/(publishers|labels)/creators phenomenon.
"Apple isn't being doing anything bad, they're just like the music industry" is a heck of an argument to make. Do you think the average person would argue that the music industry isn't exploitative?
I agree that Apple should be pressured to allow alternative modes of payment and/or lower fees in more cases. The duopoly problem you talk about is a real and serious issue.
But on this point:
> often with the implicit suggestion that Apple "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps
This is a huge misunderstanding about what these fees are actually for. I remember a time when major operating system updates cost a fair bit of money. The kind of free significant feature updates we see for phones these days were almost completely unheard of both in the PC and the phone market.
Apple now provides fairly significant feature updates for phones/tablets, going back many years. The App Store business model is what incentivizes this development. Doesn't matter if you don't buy a new phone.. they still make a fair bit of money on you when you use the App Store.
The App Store fees are not to cover hosting/review. It's a way to get a continuous revenue stream from the users of their hardware/software. There is only one realistic alternative to this business model: to use more advertising to extract value out of your users.. which is the path Microsoft and Google seems to be heading in. Neither is ideal. But IMO it's good that there are at least two options with different approaches to this, so we have a bit of choice.
A third alternative would be going back to paying for major OS updates. But I don't think that business model is viable anymore. People expect free updates.
Currently the majority of Apple's Safari revenue comes from Google search deals.
Do you believe that if Apple got rid of those deals, it would be justified in applying similar restrictions in Safari to support development of the browser? What incentivizes them to build a functioning browser? Is it feasible to have an Open web while incentivizing the massive amount of work required to build browsers and web APIs?
I don't know why you are getting downvoted except that your opinion is unpopular in this thread. It's a legit counterargument though. However, speaking for myself as an N of 1, the reason I buy an iPhone is because of the assurance that it will receive updates -- especially security updates -- for several years. Android doesn't seem to hold that promise.
One important feature is that in the Apple store the consumer is sure that the unsubscribe button works immediately. Not weird tricks to keep you subscribed forever.
I hate when companies try to draw out or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe, it's a huge issue with subscription services. I'm really encouraged about recent pushes to ban this kind of behavior.
That being said, I've just checked and Patreon does not appear to block or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe from a creator. It's two clicks, you hit "cancel membership" and then the confirm button.
I'm open to claims that Apple's system might still be marginally more convenient (you do have to go to the actual creator page in order to unsubscribe, which is a little inconvenient, I guess).
But is it so much more convenient that most users would literally pay 30% extra on every one of their subscriptions in order to use it? And even if it is, isn't that something that users should be able to choose as an educated decision instead of it being Apple policy for Patreon to not be allowed to tell users in the app that other payment methods exist?
> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
For people who would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon’s website? Sure, why not? That sounds like a niche market that Patreon would be completely unable to participate in without Apple’s help.
Sounds like a fun experiment. I'd be interested in Apple allowing Patreon to test that theory by disabling purchases within the app. Is this really about access to a niche user group of users who would never sign up elsewhere?
Apple seems to be very invested in forcing Patreon to either not be in the app store at all (and given the limitations of web apps, this is a significant penalty), or offer exclusively Apple payments in the app. Then Apple goes a step further with rules blocking Patreon showing links to other purchase methods in the app. These are not the actions of a company that believes that its users can be trusted not to make a purchase elsewhere.
If these users would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon's website, Apple wouldn't be scared of a link to the website payment options inside of the app. But they are scared of that, because they know that many of their users would choose to pay less online if they were informed about the choice or if Patreon decided not to offer payment options in the app.
I think the fact that Apple is (according to Patreon) not offering a choice of whether or not to accept payments in the app pokes a lot of holes in the idea that iOS users would never use a website to subscribe.
As a small b2c low cost subscription app provider I was initially taken back by the fees of the app/play stores.
However, after looking at the competitive international payment processing and tax management solutions available, the fees started to make a lot more sense. Just the fact that there's no transaction fee on top of the percentage they take makes charging a low monthly fee much more competitive. Once you add in not having to think at all about how much tax to charge in each local, how to report on it, etc, the cost side became much more reasonable.
And the reduced friction and trust concerns for users when they know it's apple managing their financial data instead of a small business is pretty significant as well as others have pointed out.
Would I like to be charged less for all these benefits? OF COURSE. Is the service they provide to smaller businesses with under $1mil in annual revenue a decent ROI? I think it probably is.
> fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.
The first part is undoubtedly true, but competition doesn't exist here either. That Apple is getting away with their anti-competitive practices is a full-blown scandal.
> for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps and for
More for creating the OS, releasing updates for free to all users, and licensing new and existing developer APIs for free to all iOS developers in perpetuity.
In lieu of their app store fee you get Unreal Engine-style licensing anyways where a percentage of your revenue becomes subject to royalties.
I don't know if that is a good comparison. Our realtor has spent a lot of hours over the past few years showing us homes and writing up more than a few losing bids. It's not constant attention, but so far it's all unpaid.
Let's take this to an extreme. Imagine an app that does little except thread together the basic UI components provided by iOS. In other words, something that most people here could write in an afternoon. Now imagine it ends up on the Apple marketplace. Given how much work goes into building iOS, the UX, and the app store, by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees. The person who created the app just spent a few hours and Apple spent bazillions of hours (amortized over many apps).
> by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees
No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they're putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon.
If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by that discussion.
The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple.
"You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.
But the app ecosystem is also a selling point for users to actually buy an iPhone, on which they already make a huge margin compared to the rest of the industry.
I wonder how much of the software you're proposing Apple get paid 99.9% for is open source? (Including the xkcd-famous "one guy in Nebraska" who's been doing his thing for over 20 years)?
How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid?
I don't like this action form Apple, but I don't agree with your assessment of market economics here.
The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests.
This is one of the key problems a free market economy solves. Price discovery is the intersection of what somebody's willing to sell something for, and what somebody else is willing to pay for it. Both of these parties will have a completely different idea of what's fair. That's why fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism, and I don't think any free market economist has ever advocated for it.
I don't think the parent comment's main point was about using fairness to judge anything - the two main good I questions I got from it are (a) does Apple provide more utility in hosting the apps than the entire Patreon service? and (b) if not, doesn't the fact that it costs more show that something, somewhere is very wrong with the economic model?
I'm a mild advocate of the Apple ecosystem in that I really like the fact it all works together pretty flawlessly for me, with many security headaches taken off my plate. (I'm always reminded of this when every ten years or so I think about trying to save money with a Windows laptop and come running back). But I think the parent comment's suggestion that this isn't about fairness as such, but whether that kind of arrangement is egregiously wrong hits home, and it does make me feel that this is the kind of weird economics that can only come from an unhealthy duopoly of iOS and Android.
What to do about it? I'm not sure the parent or I have any particularly good answers...
> The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests.
With respect, this sounds a little bit like you're agreeing with me?
Another way of phrasing "fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism" might be to say that fairness as a concept "doesn't exist" in the market, only competition: ie, what people are willing to pay to acquire a service from the available options they have before them, ideally within an environment where low barrier-of-entry to the market allows prices to fall if a service can be legitimately offered cheaper elsewhere, and where regulation sets the (occasional) market cap on how exploitative businesses are able to be. Fairness as a concept is not applicable to market prices: they don't get set because they are "fair", they get set because businesses calculate the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for products before going to a competitor (assuming there is a competitor to go to).
BUT, if people on HN insist on bringing fairness into discussions about anti-competitive behavior (which very often happens in discussions about the app-store), I think that Apple's fees in this case, and the impacts they will have on small-market creators, are unlikely to line up with most people's personal evaluation of "fair".
A sibling comment phrased this in a really good way, I think this is a situation where regardless of how you feel about fairness, you can look at the market outcome and think, "wait a second, something is not right here."
Would this view conclude that there should never be regulation of any sort? Or is there possibly a level of “fairness” that’s evident to the average person?
If we were having this conversation in the late 1800s I'm pretty sure that you would be arguing to me right now that the trans-continental railroad provides "tremendous value" to shippers.
It's become an increasingly common argument in discussions about Apple to phrase their value as one of "distribution", or sometimes less subtly as "access." But no one would ever credibly argue that the actual physical distribution costs, hosting, and bandwidth of the Patreon app is more valuable than the entire platform itself. That would be absurd. Instead, what people actually argue is that access to Apple users is the value that Apple quote-unquote "creates"[0].
I think a lot of people look at this and see it for what it is: rent seeking. But it's a marvel of the modern tech landscape that we've trained so many people to not only accept that they are the product for the platforms they use, but taught them to be proud of being a product. We've gotten people to come around to the idea that companies have done such a good job turning them into a product that the companies now somehow deserve some kind of special reward for doing so.
Excessive use of customers as bargaining chips inevitably creates bad incentives for companies, which become increasingly defensive of their "assets" and increasingly more and more hostile to consumer choice and freedom to move from ecosystem to ecosystem. These negative effects play out again and again in multiple industries both inside and outside of tech, to the detriment of both consumers and the overall markets. But when tech companies come up (whether we're talking about Apple, or Steam, or Nintendo, or whatever) -- for some weird reason people suddenly become very defensive about the rights of companies to treat them like cattle.
TLDR, no, access to iPhone users is not Apple providing value to app developers. It's just rent seeking.
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[0]: As if iPhone users would somehow stop using smartphones now if the iPhone went away.
> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
There is a video link on the page from the original post where the Patreon CEO explains and reiterates the issues.
Notably, at one point, he says that Apple Platform brings in the most money to Patreon.
So there, looks like Apple brings in the money for Patreon. Apple seems to want a cut of that.
> So there, looks like Apple brings in the money for Patreon.
Apple users bring in the money for Patreon.
I own an iPhone. I am not Apple, and Apple does not own me. Why should Apple be able to charge money for "access" to me, as if I were a prostitute and Apple my pimp? I'm simply using a computer, which I paid for.
"a cut of that" is doing a heck of a lot of work here to handwave the amount they're asking for.
A "cut" in this case means such a high percentage of the transaction that if Patreon didn't pass the extra cost on to consumers/creators, they would make negative dollars on each iOS subscription. That really genuinely does not strike you as odd at all?
It doesn't strike you as weird or maybe like a possibly negative market effect that Patreon as a platform should be more profitable for Apple than it is for Patreon? I think most people would say that's a signal that something might be going wrong.
> Importantly at one point he says that Apple lpatform brings in the most money to Patreon.
I'm not surprised.
The dirty little secret people won't talk about is that monetizing anything is so much easier on iOS because Apple users have, in some combination, more disposable income to offer, and are more willing to spend money.
This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career, almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on Apple is easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for good software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for the software they want.
There's a lot of reasons for this, many of them socioeconomic in nature that mark out the differences between your average iPhone user and your average Android user, and I don't want to get into that quagmire and be called elitist: all I'm saying is, when Patreon says the vast majority of patrons are buying from iOS powered devices, between iOS being easier to monetize and the general populace being on their phones far more than their computers; yeah that makes complete fucking sense to me. I believe him.
American-manufactured automobiles bring in the majority of money to drive-thru restaurants too. Should they get a cut of drive-thru restaurants' revenue?
If you can afford an iphone, you can afford sending money to a number of random strangers without seeing a blip in your monthly budget. That is pretty much the reality.
Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place.
>does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
I agree that the high proportion t of take between the two firms says a lot about the state of the market. It also says a lot about the users, and what they care about.
I think people are shocked by these outcomes because they aren't used to thinking about transaction costs as meaningful. Transfer, trust, and triangulation are critical parts of an exchange, and their costs can be even greater than the good itself.
> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?
I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make.
But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite.
I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened.
That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.
> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
You can't really argue that it's a fair choice when Apple does everything in their power to make going outside their walls a worse experience.
Case in point, they hobble WebKit, but also forbid any alternative to WebKit. Are users choosing WebKit? Nope.
> Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place.
This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking.
Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.
As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial support, the news is terrible: Patreon informed me that all creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use. The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time off, and only charge people when I release something, thus incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another platform, or come up with some other solution.
Apple has quietly been one of the biggest culprits in the proliferation of subscription software. They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing. Subscriptions are also the easiest way to implement a software demo or trial in the App Store. Finally they use their control of the App Store to coerce anyone doing something different than monthly/yearly subscriptions into that model (as we see here).
They've certainly encouraged subscriptions but the big driver is the drive for recurring revenue, which can be valued up to 20X what one-time revenue is valued. In some cases companies with investors are instructed to not even care about non-recurring revenue since it doesn't matter. Revenue is recurring or it doesn't exist.
Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.
This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.
> They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing.
What would this mean, exactly?
You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
Oh you too. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's really liked per-creation for years. "I pay my rent if I can do eight posts of comics pages/art/etc a month" was a good kick in the ass to keep working.
Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few Wordpress plugins.
Apps are now forcing you to use their website skin even though its damn easy to offer a mobile web alternative that doesn't squander ever precious local storage.
I don't think this is up to the consumer. The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all? It's not like consumers are clamoring for these apps. Everyone I know hates that you have to have an app for everything these days.
Yeah, though the problem with this is that from my experience with Android, the web version of Patreon is practically unusable. Not that the app is much better, they seem determined to come up with the most horrific UX anyone could imagine across all platforms, but it at least can somewhat consistently handle playing the podcasts I subscribe to without cutting out every five minutes.
I've seen some creators on Patreon "pause" their monthly subscription when they have nothing to release on a given month, so that patrons won't be billed for that month. That could be a workaround for your use case.
It’s bad, yes. It would be good if Patreon allowed sticking with the billing systems which Apple is forbidding, but I do understand that they may no longer be able to justify the business expense of maintaining them given the anticipated changes in usage patterns.
Practical suggestion:
Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
Yes, it's a reasonable workaround. I believe Patreon also allows creators to "pause" their account, suspending payments for an indefinite amount of time. So, I could just keep the account paused, then unpause for a month when I make a video. Although, I believe that Patreon doesn't want the per-creation model themselves, since charging the same amount each month is simpler, and easier to project revenue, etc, so they are probably just bundling this unpopular change with the Apple announcement.
I don't understand why Patreon has to drop the per-creation model. Can they not just not offer that on iOS, and continue it on other platforms? (Perhaps with a "convert from susbcription to per-creation" feature online?)
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.
User confusion - if they block users from subscribing to those creators on iOS they will inevitably have support tickets to deal with it. Hence their 16-month project to remove non-iOS-compatible plans.
hey, i answered your email about aleph last wednesday; no stress if you're answering slowly, i just wanted to check to see if it had fallen into your spam filter
unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments
How can another platform be better about this? Wouldn’t they be subject to the same thing? Or is there some component here that is not tied to the Apple demand?
That's a great question! How far does Apple's control extend into markets that are unrelated to their core business? I always prefer using mobile websites on my own android phone instead of downloading apps because of security concerns and general notification spamming, ads, and annoyances, and it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing "apps" with bookmarks. For the current situation, I may look into services like Nebula, doing PayPal directly, YouTube subscriptions and donations, or setting up an online store. Or even.... sponsored videos!! (just kidding)
I know what you are trying to do, but this is he host of an 800k channel. They already generate millions for youtube. Google will at best try to steer that channel to use Youtube's recent-ish dontation and memberships features.
No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.
I remember reading that per-creation billing is a very important feature for Patreon creators, because it removes the moral obligation to produce content just to justify a subscription.
If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated markets to change their own structure and products just to fit Apple's preferred billing flow.
Patreon has been trying to kill it for like half the time I've been using Patreon. They haven't offered it as an option for new campaigns for years, and their last redesign completely removed what little data was available in the web UI - you wanna know how much money you can expect? Download a CSV and do it yourself, we can't be bothered to give you even the simplest data of "your next three posts will be worth $x, $y, and $z" any more.
I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god finally we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn thing". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in making a Patreon-like that does offer it and recapitulating the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform, what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay their tithe or leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games's suits".
Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth Problems and says "sign me right the fuck up, convincing a bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a great way to spend a few years of my life", hey, I'll gladly give you input on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or something.
Patreon also stands to gain from this change. Come think of it, the new arrangement is a win for everyone involved - except the actual patrons ofcourse.
Not really. There are a lot of creators I watch who only make content once a year. Sometimes they'll have 2 videos a year if they're lucky. With the per creation model, I have no problems supporting them but if it's billed monthly then the price becomes a lot steeper. Alternatively they could reduce the cost to support them but then the fees becomes much higher for both the creator and patreon (29c + 5% IIRC).
Is there any evidence that Apple has actually made this "threat"? I'm not seeing anything other than what Patreon has claimed (and it seems that they are only recently going to begin to allow iOS purchases, which might mean they are bringing this upon themselves).
I am suspicious, because the specific change to per-creation billing is overwhelmingly positive for Patreon (and, as you pointed out, not for its users), from a business economics perspective (assuming they don't lose too many users over this). It also seems odd for Apple to press that point specifically.
The thing most aren’t thinking about is that per-creation billing is an absolute nightmare, and I don’t blame Apple for not supporting it. Can’t even begin to imagine the support nightmare/chargebacks etc.
It’s not all about the 30% cut.
If it was easy and trouble free, they would support it.
Imagine what a great time apps would have if Apple let them charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
> charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
It's a simple matter of user communication: you make it clear from the start that the billing will be unpredictable, and potentially provide a ceiling for monthly bills to let the user stop if it goes out of hand.
I follow per creation billing creators and it's fine. Amazon also offers an option to auto buy new volumes of a series.
The customer not knowing in advance how much they'll be billed isn't common, but it's not complex in itself.
Where did you read that? I worked at Patreon from 2018-2021 and per creation was a much smaller group than recurring during that time at least. (Think per creation was even disabled as an option for new sign-ups for a while.)
I'm surprised to hear this, I thought it was the main selling point of Patreon. I have per-creation subscriptions to a few people on Patreon who produce very high-quality stuff very infrequently, and I will probably cancel if they are forced to switch to monthly billing. Their stuff is great, but not so great that I'm willing to sign up for a monthly fee that I forget about and then realize 3 years later that they've stopped making stuff.
I don't have the source anymore, but it was an article about why Patreon is successful and other similar platforms/systems aren't. The per-creation billing option was described as a way for creators to create on their own schedule without having a moral or business requirement to produce enough content every month to justify a subscription. (The business requirement coming from the problem of one-month paying subscribers getting much more value than the creator can afford to give away at that price.)
I think what your missing is that these aren't one-off user initiated purchases. I back a couple of patterns that are a per-video model, so if the content creator produces 2 videos I'm charged 2x $amount that month. If they produce nothing I'm charged nothing. Apple doesn't provide a way of doing this. In the scenario you described I'd have to monthly count up how many videos said content creator produced and manually submit an order through the app... And users aren't going to do that. Hell, I'm not going to do that.
That's distinct from the existing per-creation billing in a few ways, with the most obvious being that the existing method is automated while consumable purchases require user input. Trying to create a SKU for every possible per-creation price is also just incredibly janky and hacky in a fundamental way that would never scale and would probably make accounting next to impossible.
The world where Apple is just completely fine with Apple users paying $13 instead of $10 for a subscription if they do it through an app is an interesting one.
Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think about it they must think very little of their customers treating them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple' should be remembered.
The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
[0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
…him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
Heh. Attempting to buy a book from the Kindle app was how I first became aware of these policies. Was fruitlessly searching for a buy button, but could not find anything. Did a web search to figure out why I was an idiot who could not spend my money. Only to discover that I was purposely getting a worse user experience because some mega corporations all wanted a taste of my transaction.
I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
>In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]
Not that I think Steve Jobs was a super nice guy, but he clearly cared about Apple's brand, including the part of about users and developers not thinking of them rapacious and hostile, which is sort of how I (and many others) view their pricing model today. I like to think he'd have seen how bad this choice has played out for Apple's brand and changed his position by now, if he were still around.
From Apple's perspective they say they are helping their customers with things like making subscriptions easy to cancel and Apple thinks that's genuinely worth 30%. The fact that Apple doesn't want their customers to know they are paying more is an interesting wrinkle though.
That's funny, I actually hate Apple's subscriptions because they are a pain to cancel. My wife has an iphone, she travels regularly to different countries for work. Because apps on apple store regularly have country restrictions (apps are not available in different countries), she has multiple apple accounts to deal with that.
Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription.
Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
I mean, this is exactly why I go out of my way to pay for subscriptions via the App Store whenever I have a choice. I don't want to go through some rinkydink "please don't cancel bro" cancelation process on somebody's website, I'd rather just open the App Store and cancel it in one tap. Not to mention the subscriptions and purchases are automatically shared with my wife.
Previously, Apple specifically prohibited charging more though AppStore for services that are available to be purchased elsewhere. I'm not in the mood to sift though current version of Apple's legalese, but I'd be surprised if they dropped this requirement, that'd be very uncharacteristic of them.
they didn't prohibit charging more for App Store purchases, they prohibited mentioning it in the app. i.e, you cannot mention something like 'purchase this in-app product for $3 cheaper on our website'.
In Apples case they changed that several years ago so you can definitely charge your Apple users more.
However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
My understanding from reading the Apple v Epic court documents is that Apple is unique in that it doesn’t force cheaper prices outside the ecosystem. I might be wrong though.
We have to go further than that. Naming and shaming Tim Cook hasn't changed anything from Butterfly keyboards to cringeworthy "mother earth" interviews to exploitative Chinese manufacturing schemes. Apple doesn't speak your language, you can only communicate to them by showing them a world where they hurt.
So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
In my eyes the most egregious aspect of this is it’s a financial transaction between two people that they’re taking a 30% cut of. I see 30% as fine for things like IAP for digital games and such, but somehow in this lens it feels wrong.
One proposal for a compromise that would feel fair: Apple gets 30% of the app creator’s take rate.
IE if patreon’s take rate is 8%, Apple should get 30% of that, not 30% of the full transaction. This could generalize to physical goods as well. It would require more reporting, but would feel more fair in the eyes of the creators and the users.
I run a similar service to patreon where I charge a flat $1 fee on subscriptions, regardless of the size of the subscription. A $50 sub suddenly getting only $34 after my $1 fee and apple’s $15 fee feels wrong. There’s no amount I can reduce my take rate to cover Apple’s take. But I’m entirely ok giving them $0.30 on my $1 take.
Basically - I’m entirely OK having 30% of my net profits taken by Apple. I’m not ok with 30% of my gross.
I expect Apple and platforms would not be happy with this model. Apple now has to trust that platforms are properly reporting their gross take. Platforms now have to give detailed financial records to a (potential) competitor.
The current situation with Apple as the middleman lets them ensure they get every dollar without any accounting shenanigans.
What if it isn't an app, though. They're still taking a cut of it, even though they're not paying for anything related to apple. The only thing apple is doing is hosting the patreon app, not the thing being bought.
And if you think that it should be different when buying something that runs on an apple device, logically that should also apply when buying it from a computer.
Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open standards.
Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download thing that could've been a Web site.
In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive on their hardware in various ways. (Often through foot-dragging when other vendors were trying to make Web apps a smooth experience, but sometimes also going out of their way to make Web work worse.) (See also: making kids look like losers to their peers in chat, if they don't have iPhones.)
Apple then imposes predatory rates and terms on other businesses who are pretty much forced to use the Apple proprietary app store, due not to the merits of the app store so much as Apple's dominance of hardware and conflict of interest when implementing open standards.
I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and how much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple can be. Or they have some idea, but pragmatically have to accept it. Also, this affords Apple a lot of money for really first-rate PR.
What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality. For example: Apple may only charge a few-percent administration and payment processing fee, and that's it; and they have to permit other app stores with first-class access to the system, as a compromise given the proprietary lock-in mess they've made. (Making them support other open standards better, even to the exclusion of prorietary ones, is more complicated.)
>What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality.
I imagine that part of it is that Apple's stock backstops a lot of activity in the financial markets. No one wants to kill the golden goose to protect "a bunch of Millennial and Zoomer phone addicts"; you have to remember, we're the cows everyone else is happy to milk dry for their own needs.
The EU had a tenuous relation with Apple from the start. Apple spent the past 20-odd years manipulating Irish subsidiaries to avoid paying a dime in taxes on any of their European operations. Despite being called out on it and partially settling the back-taxes in some jurisdictions, they still owe billions to multiple EU members they haven't payed back. There's no history of love, between Apple and Europe. They conspire against Apple because Apple conspires against them.
Then Apple had to kick the hornets nest and piss off the Dutch regulators with the Tinder case. Apple forfeit quickly but it set the stage for everyone else joining in on the fines. This was the perfect catalyst for the DMA and the DSA, which would be copied in other countries like Japan (which coincidentally also has tax feuds with Apple).
Good luck to the shareholders They won't take kindly to the news that the Apple of their eye is a big fruit-shaped bubble.
Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open standards.
Then Apple comes along,
Wow. I don't know if that's selective memory, or revisionist history, but you've got a huge dose of the stuff.
No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
> No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon […] disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
Absolutely astounding that removing transactions from the platform could result in being removed.
I don't know a ton about Patreon, but what if creators have exclusive content available via the app and use that to encourage fans to subscribe outside of iOS? What if creators start an education campaign on YouTube telling their fans to avoid subscriptions on iOS?
I wonder if Apple is playing with fire on this one. If the creator and influencer markets turn on them, I think it could have a non-trivial impact on Apple's brand, especially with younger generations. Many modern creators are also smart business people and they're not going to see much value in Apple taking 30% of their revenue when Patreon is already providing all the services they need for about 15% at the top end IIRC.
Right now I think the biggest change that could help the average consumer would be for legislators to allow, or maybe even require, app owners to split platform fees into separate line items. For example, something like:
Donation $1.00
Patreon Platform Fee $1.18
Apple Platform Fee $0.50
----------------------------
Total $1.68
When they respond Apple changes policy for EU users, not for anyone else.
Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have the ability to install apps using alternative app marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App Store.
Easy to fix, give creators an option to make all tiers cost one quadrillion USD on the iOS app (or whatever the upper limit is for in-app purchases). Technically they are complying with Apple's demands while also allowing creators to give Apple the finger.
I strongly suspect Patreon is playing fast and loose with the wording here. Note they say “if creators on Patreon disable transactions…” but not “if Patreon were to disable all transactions.” I’m pretty sure they could still go the Audible route where they remove all mention and links to billing options off app. But Patreon doesn’t want to go that route across the board, they still want people to be able to sign up for things in app.
I dislike Patreon because they keep making their UI worse over time but that said, I'm furious at apple for this. I like Patreon to allow creators to do per-creation schedule and I hate that Apple has enough power to impact me despite being an Android user (specifically because of these kind of behaviors).
So, to people who say that with only 27% of global marketshare there's no case for an antitrust lawsuit, well if they can impact users outside of their ecosystem, there's a clear case for antitrust.
Readit News
It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that charges fair prices - because fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.
BUT... since fairness gets so often brought into conversations about Apple's fees, often with the implicit suggestion that Apple "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps and for (in heavy quotes) "creating" a market that they supposedly also don't have duopoly control over: does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
Like, if we're going to talk about what's egregious and what's not egregious, charging higher fees per-transaction than the platforms you are hosting seems like it might be a good indicator that things have gotten out of control.
Well, there is a simple way to test this... just get rid of the Patreon iOS app and just use a web version. Why does patreon need its own app? Why can't it just be web based?
I wish fewer companies had apps. I don't need an app for everything. I don't need every hotel I stay at to have their own app, I don't need an app to order food at a restaurant.
So why do companies make them? Because people spend more money when they can just use the in app purchase functionality. It is CLEARLY worth the 30% to most companies, because they keep pumping out single use apps that would be better as a mobile web page.
So, platform developers have to take iOS support very seriously or miss a lot of profit.
Also a lot of companies make apps so they can get more tracking info. That value doesn't come from the Apple Store.
It's things like games that really get an advantage from being native and in the store. And that's largely a red queen's race, they need to stay on top and they'll pay out the nose to be the easiest install. Paying lots of money in a zero-sum situation doesn't mean they're getting much value in a more zoomed-out sense.
Based on the context given in the OP, this conclusion does not follow and is not fair.
1. Patreon is passing the 30% on to customers by default, or allowing creators to pay for it out of their existing income, so Patreon isn’t making any value judgement at all. They are leaving it up to creators and users.
2. Even if they weren’t doing (1), there are other factors in play that don’t make this a fair “experiment”. Most notably that established platforms like Amazon and Spotify _don’t_ find the value here, contradicting your assertion that most companies do.
Note: I didn't think Apple historically allowed (1), which also invalidates the “experiment”, but maybe terms have changed recently.
There is the simple solution taken by companies like Spotify and Netflix.
Have a free app for users, but only accept payments through your own website.
In which case, Apple doesn't get a dime.
because apple gimps their web browser capabilities & performance to incentivize developers to enter the walled garden
Wondering about that, too - I always use the website on my ipad since a browser allows me to enlarge the font size when reading novels on Patreon (a feature that the app does not offer).
Most people pay for things for convenience and perceived value. There is very little convience or perceived value in having to go to a mobile/safari/ios website, log in, and then download a for example 1gig podcast tothen have to find it in my "downloads" and then play via some media player.
I assumed it was so they could skirt around the privacy built more consistently into web browsers. Or that they are still stuck in the "There's an app for that" era that I think we have collectively left behind.
Apple & Google Pay is my guess. Which I don't use, just because it's rent seeking and leads to this.
I use the websites. Don't want to install bloody apps which request every permission available. My browser has most of those set to denied. Don't even ask for permission, outright deny.
So I don't know what's the case here, but sounds like people who get confused by bubbles of different colors
Notifications. Performance. Responsiveness. Bandwidth. Offline access. And a lot of users simply find apps to be more convenient than browser bookmarks. I use the web interface for Patreon, but I can see why some users would want the app.
Why does Apple themselves have apps for things like maps, news, stocks, weather, video chats, etc? These all rely on web services and could theoretically be handled in the browser. I don't think any of these examples even provide users the ability to buy anything. Clearly Apple recognizes a value in some services being available through native mobile apps.
If not, what’s the difference between it and an app?
I didn’t know there is an app and I don’t care.
Stop making apps when a website will suffice.
You may not like it but programmer reading news in HN is not common in global scale
plus mobile apps is just value added, same reason you have dekstop app vs webapp
I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers?
Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value.
Looping back to the specifics, if Apple was the primary means that people discover Patreon and the creators on it, sure, it would make sense. But for Patreon specifically that's not the case (I think). The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.
That isn't obvious at all. In both cases the distributor's margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there are a thousand, competition will force their margins down. Whether they're local or national.
Moreover, in this context Patreon is the national distributor who needs to distribute content to everyone whether they have iOS, Android, web or something else, and each of the platforms is a local subcontractor for a subset of the customers. Which leads to exactly the problem. The notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one another in this context is false, because to distribute to Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS customers you need Apple. You can't switch from one to the other because Google can't distribute to iOS customers. They're each a different market serving different customers, and then they collect a monopoly rent.
What the usual trope that analogizes this to Walmart or Target is missing is that "Walmart customers" are also customers of Target or Amazon, but the large majority of iOS customers are not also customers of Google Play or any other app store.
Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do. Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for. Maybe some very low double digit percentage of these people will try to load a pwa from patreon.com
In the sense that [bigger company] can make more money and reach more people than [smaller company], yes. But if all they are doing is sitting there and using that bigger presence, you can see how that roads ends in antitrust.
>The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.
two big issues.
1. No one wins. Users lose the convinience of an app, Apple loses money from a potential large customer, Patreon loses views from being visible on the app store. It's just bad buzz all around for no good reason.
2. The underselling point that Apple has actively sabatoged web apps and PWA's which is part of why the DMA is coming down hard on them. We're well past a monopolistic power using its power to stifle competition.
Let's not pretend this trillion dollar company that already forces devs to use IOS hardware to develop (and took down their server OS's to boot), and charges a yearly membership to dev is scaping for cash here.
Does Warner Brothers being more value to customers than AMC?
Unfortunately this is in the nature of suppliers and retailers.
Supermarkets make more profit on a litre of milk than farmers. Way way way more. Because they know farmers in practice have to sell _all_ their milk, not just some of it.
And what Apple really has, and knows it, is the only supermarket on the main road out of iBorough. And there are no corner shops.
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I think you mean we should de-FAANG the regulatory agencies.
FTC is more active than it's ever been under Liza Khan, particularly in this sphere
Edit: seriously, even the casinos and bars will eventually tell you you’re done.
It wasn't surprising, but having hard facts always helps. Apple v. Epic revealed Apple makes 70% of app store revenue from mobile games, which is generated by less than 10% of app store users:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/apple-vs-epic-70percent-of-a...
Patroon is chosen by content creators not customers as such its goal is creating value for content creators not customers. As a customer it’s providing negative value with their policies to immediately cancel service the instant someone unsubscribes rather than letting the month play out etc. Thus why their website can be so unbelievably terrible for customers and yet they stay in business. So for customers Apple/Google/whatever may provide literally infinite more value not because it’s significant but because they are on their side.
You have fewer subscriptions options for creators (1st-of-month billing and per-release billing is going away, despite the fact that creators regularly use them to simplify the experience for subscribers). You're going to pay more (I promise you, creators on Patreon are not rich enough to swallow a 30% transaction fee on iOS subscriptions). You're going to use the same app that you were using before. And this will change nothing about when Patreon cuts off service when you unsubscribe (incidentally, I'm pretty sure this is a creator decision and creators can choose to extend benefits to the end of the month).
What is Apple doing that is making any of this better for you?
Maybe you sort-of marginally have an easier time unsubscribing? But it's not hard to unsubscribe from a Patreon tier, and it's difficult to argue that Apple is providing infinite value by organizing your subscriptions into a list.
What are you actually paying this fee to Apple for? They're "on your side" except in the sense where them being on your side creates any tangible or significant change in your experience using Patreon. Seriously, what about the iOS experience using Patreon is better (or even different) than the experience elsewhere?
is this recent? I definitely remember my service playing out the month when I cancel subs. Because for most subscriptions period I cancel the moment I subscribe.
I think the caveat here is that you are charged on the first, no matter when you sub. Be it on the 2nd or the 28th. But generally I can still access that month's rewards, so it's still not as bad as it could be.
they are both rent seeking middle-men who abuse network effect, its just one has more power than another.
In one sense, I agree with it. Patreon is a rent-seeking middleman who abuses network effects. 100%.
But the creators on Patreon who's income are going to be most affected by this don't care about which side of the debate is more likeable to you, and I'm kind of sick of pretending that policies that affect a huge swath of people (often people with limited options, virtually no power, and few backup resources) can be treated like popularity contests.
The video essayists, programmers, artists, authors, and indies doing weird, wonderful work supported through Patreon get their revenue squeezed even tighter, being forced to either bleed revenue or subscribers due to new fees, being forced to abandon revenue models and subscription models that Apple doesn't like.. and, I mean, honestly, "I hate both companies" just is not a valid or acceptable response to that situation.
The solution to rent-seeking middlemen is not to make more of them.
Ultimately, Patreon isn't fundamentally doing something that even a non-tech user can't whip up for their own website. May need to resort to a payment processor (another middleman) to get donations going, but it's possible. I can take my ball home.
Current factors on IOS make it impossible to do the same on IOS, even post DMA they want to rent-seek outside of the App Store. I think that's what makes IOS worse in my eyes.
I agree with you that the reality of markets is quite different to the "common sense" model. Unfortunately I rarely find either in the press or just talking to people myself, that anyone gets beyond this kind of price=cost(1+a little incentive) thinking.
This isn't a Creators/Patreon/Apple phenomenon, this is a consumers/distributors/(publishers|labels)/creators phenomenon.
See page 12:
https://articles.unesco.org/creativity/sites/default/files/m...
But on this point:
> often with the implicit suggestion that Apple "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps
This is a huge misunderstanding about what these fees are actually for. I remember a time when major operating system updates cost a fair bit of money. The kind of free significant feature updates we see for phones these days were almost completely unheard of both in the PC and the phone market.
Apple now provides fairly significant feature updates for phones/tablets, going back many years. The App Store business model is what incentivizes this development. Doesn't matter if you don't buy a new phone.. they still make a fair bit of money on you when you use the App Store.
The App Store fees are not to cover hosting/review. It's a way to get a continuous revenue stream from the users of their hardware/software. There is only one realistic alternative to this business model: to use more advertising to extract value out of your users.. which is the path Microsoft and Google seems to be heading in. Neither is ideal. But IMO it's good that there are at least two options with different approaches to this, so we have a bit of choice.
A third alternative would be going back to paying for major OS updates. But I don't think that business model is viable anymore. People expect free updates.
Do you believe that if Apple got rid of those deals, it would be justified in applying similar restrictions in Safari to support development of the browser? What incentivizes them to build a functioning browser? Is it feasible to have an Open web while incentivizing the massive amount of work required to build browsers and web APIs?
And if so, what is different about native APIs?
My last Android phone was an HTC that came out with this promise of delivering Android updates within 15 days -- a promise they did not keep. https://www.engadget.com/2016-08-25-htc-one-a9-android-updat...
That being said, I've just checked and Patreon does not appear to block or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe from a creator. It's two clicks, you hit "cancel membership" and then the confirm button.
I'm open to claims that Apple's system might still be marginally more convenient (you do have to go to the actual creator page in order to unsubscribe, which is a little inconvenient, I guess).
But is it so much more convenient that most users would literally pay 30% extra on every one of their subscriptions in order to use it? And even if it is, isn't that something that users should be able to choose as an educated decision instead of it being Apple policy for Patreon to not be allowed to tell users in the app that other payment methods exist?
Taking money after cancellation should be treated as thert
For people who would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon’s website? Sure, why not? That sounds like a niche market that Patreon would be completely unable to participate in without Apple’s help.
Apple seems to be very invested in forcing Patreon to either not be in the app store at all (and given the limitations of web apps, this is a significant penalty), or offer exclusively Apple payments in the app. Then Apple goes a step further with rules blocking Patreon showing links to other purchase methods in the app. These are not the actions of a company that believes that its users can be trusted not to make a purchase elsewhere.
If these users would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon's website, Apple wouldn't be scared of a link to the website payment options inside of the app. But they are scared of that, because they know that many of their users would choose to pay less online if they were informed about the choice or if Patreon decided not to offer payment options in the app.
I think the fact that Apple is (according to Patreon) not offering a choice of whether or not to accept payments in the app pokes a lot of holes in the idea that iOS users would never use a website to subscribe.
However, after looking at the competitive international payment processing and tax management solutions available, the fees started to make a lot more sense. Just the fact that there's no transaction fee on top of the percentage they take makes charging a low monthly fee much more competitive. Once you add in not having to think at all about how much tax to charge in each local, how to report on it, etc, the cost side became much more reasonable.
And the reduced friction and trust concerns for users when they know it's apple managing their financial data instead of a small business is pretty significant as well as others have pointed out.
Would I like to be charged less for all these benefits? OF COURSE. Is the service they provide to smaller businesses with under $1mil in annual revenue a decent ROI? I think it probably is.
The first part is undoubtedly true, but competition doesn't exist here either. That Apple is getting away with their anti-competitive practices is a full-blown scandal.
The market exists through legal means, which also include mechanisms for fair competition.
More for creating the OS, releasing updates for free to all users, and licensing new and existing developer APIs for free to all iOS developers in perpetuity.
In lieu of their app store fee you get Unreal Engine-style licensing anyways where a percentage of your revenue becomes subject to royalties.
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No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they're putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon.
If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by that discussion.
The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple.
"You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.
How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid?
https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
And all the stuff not listed there too, like OpenSSH, curl, all those little things that pretty much _every_ OS uses?
And the predecessors? BSD, Mach, FreeBSD...
The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests.
This is one of the key problems a free market economy solves. Price discovery is the intersection of what somebody's willing to sell something for, and what somebody else is willing to pay for it. Both of these parties will have a completely different idea of what's fair. That's why fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism, and I don't think any free market economist has ever advocated for it.
I'm a mild advocate of the Apple ecosystem in that I really like the fact it all works together pretty flawlessly for me, with many security headaches taken off my plate. (I'm always reminded of this when every ten years or so I think about trying to save money with a Windows laptop and come running back). But I think the parent comment's suggestion that this isn't about fairness as such, but whether that kind of arrangement is egregiously wrong hits home, and it does make me feel that this is the kind of weird economics that can only come from an unhealthy duopoly of iOS and Android.
What to do about it? I'm not sure the parent or I have any particularly good answers...
With respect, this sounds a little bit like you're agreeing with me?
Another way of phrasing "fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism" might be to say that fairness as a concept "doesn't exist" in the market, only competition: ie, what people are willing to pay to acquire a service from the available options they have before them, ideally within an environment where low barrier-of-entry to the market allows prices to fall if a service can be legitimately offered cheaper elsewhere, and where regulation sets the (occasional) market cap on how exploitative businesses are able to be. Fairness as a concept is not applicable to market prices: they don't get set because they are "fair", they get set because businesses calculate the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for products before going to a competitor (assuming there is a competitor to go to).
BUT, if people on HN insist on bringing fairness into discussions about anti-competitive behavior (which very often happens in discussions about the app-store), I think that Apple's fees in this case, and the impacts they will have on small-market creators, are unlikely to line up with most people's personal evaluation of "fair".
A sibling comment phrased this in a really good way, I think this is a situation where regardless of how you feel about fairness, you can look at the market outcome and think, "wait a second, something is not right here."
This is one of the key problems a competitive free market economy solves. The distinction is particularly relevant in this case.
It's become an increasingly common argument in discussions about Apple to phrase their value as one of "distribution", or sometimes less subtly as "access." But no one would ever credibly argue that the actual physical distribution costs, hosting, and bandwidth of the Patreon app is more valuable than the entire platform itself. That would be absurd. Instead, what people actually argue is that access to Apple users is the value that Apple quote-unquote "creates"[0].
I think a lot of people look at this and see it for what it is: rent seeking. But it's a marvel of the modern tech landscape that we've trained so many people to not only accept that they are the product for the platforms they use, but taught them to be proud of being a product. We've gotten people to come around to the idea that companies have done such a good job turning them into a product that the companies now somehow deserve some kind of special reward for doing so.
Excessive use of customers as bargaining chips inevitably creates bad incentives for companies, which become increasingly defensive of their "assets" and increasingly more and more hostile to consumer choice and freedom to move from ecosystem to ecosystem. These negative effects play out again and again in multiple industries both inside and outside of tech, to the detriment of both consumers and the overall markets. But when tech companies come up (whether we're talking about Apple, or Steam, or Nintendo, or whatever) -- for some weird reason people suddenly become very defensive about the rights of companies to treat them like cattle.
TLDR, no, access to iPhone users is not Apple providing value to app developers. It's just rent seeking.
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[0]: As if iPhone users would somehow stop using smartphones now if the iPhone went away.
There is a video link on the page from the original post where the Patreon CEO explains and reiterates the issues.
Notably, at one point, he says that Apple Platform brings in the most money to Patreon.
So there, looks like Apple brings in the money for Patreon. Apple seems to want a cut of that.
Apple users bring in the money for Patreon.
I own an iPhone. I am not Apple, and Apple does not own me. Why should Apple be able to charge money for "access" to me, as if I were a prostitute and Apple my pimp? I'm simply using a computer, which I paid for.
A "cut" in this case means such a high percentage of the transaction that if Patreon didn't pass the extra cost on to consumers/creators, they would make negative dollars on each iOS subscription. That really genuinely does not strike you as odd at all?
It doesn't strike you as weird or maybe like a possibly negative market effect that Patreon as a platform should be more profitable for Apple than it is for Patreon? I think most people would say that's a signal that something might be going wrong.
I'm not surprised.
The dirty little secret people won't talk about is that monetizing anything is so much easier on iOS because Apple users have, in some combination, more disposable income to offer, and are more willing to spend money.
This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career, almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on Apple is easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for good software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for the software they want.
There's a lot of reasons for this, many of them socioeconomic in nature that mark out the differences between your average iPhone user and your average Android user, and I don't want to get into that quagmire and be called elitist: all I'm saying is, when Patreon says the vast majority of patrons are buying from iOS powered devices, between iOS being easier to monetize and the general populace being on their phones far more than their computers; yeah that makes complete fucking sense to me. I believe him.
>does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
I agree that the high proportion t of take between the two firms says a lot about the state of the market. It also says a lot about the users, and what they care about.
I think people are shocked by these outcomes because they aren't used to thinking about transaction costs as meaningful. Transfer, trust, and triangulation are critical parts of an exchange, and their costs can be even greater than the good itself.
Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?
I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make.
But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite.
I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened.
That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.
You can't really argue that it's a fair choice when Apple does everything in their power to make going outside their walls a worse experience.
Case in point, they hobble WebKit, but also forbid any alternative to WebKit. Are users choosing WebKit? Nope.
This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking.
Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.
It sucks big time.
1. Download seemingly cool app on iOS (free with potential payments)
2. Go through a 30min quizz
3. Required to subscribe for $150/year to start using the app
It’s not free, it’s false advertising
Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.
This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.
What would this mean, exactly?
You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
What's the missing revenue model here?
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Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few Wordpress plugins.
I guess I assume Patreon would mention if it didn't.
Practical suggestion:
Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.
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unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments
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You can sideload, but the duopoly exists and they're shaking 99.9% of users down for every dime they can get out of them.
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2. Now you're at PayPal's tender mercies, which... well, you do you, but I wouldn't advise it.
How long until YouTube (Google) demand "their" cut of your Patreon income? What will you do then?
No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.
If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated markets to change their own structure and products just to fit Apple's preferred billing flow.
I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god finally we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn thing". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in making a Patreon-like that does offer it and recapitulating the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform, what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay their tithe or leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games's suits".
Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth Problems and says "sign me right the fuck up, convincing a bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a great way to spend a few years of my life", hey, I'll gladly give you input on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or something.
Like the best one they've had, bundling every charge for the month into a single transaction so that $1 payments aren't wasting a huge percent.
I am suspicious, because the specific change to per-creation billing is overwhelmingly positive for Patreon (and, as you pointed out, not for its users), from a business economics perspective (assuming they don't lose too many users over this). It also seems odd for Apple to press that point specifically.
It’s not all about the 30% cut.
If it was easy and trouble free, they would support it.
Imagine what a great time apps would have if Apple let them charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
It's a simple matter of user communication: you make it clear from the start that the billing will be unpredictable, and potentially provide a ceiling for monthly bills to let the user stop if it goes out of hand.
I follow per creation billing creators and it's fine. Amazon also offers an option to auto buy new volumes of a series.
The customer not knowing in advance how much they'll be billed isn't common, but it's not complex in itself.
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Can't Patreon support a ton of different-priced SKUs and let creators use those SKUs for one-off purchases?
Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think about it they must think very little of their customers treating them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple' should be remembered.
In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
[0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
This is the difference I'm getting at: "We want a cut but our users shouldn't have to pay more" vs "We want a cut and our users can pay for it"
Which is why it's specifically the approach of Tim Cook's Apple to it's customers.
You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.
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Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription.
Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
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So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
One proposal for a compromise that would feel fair: Apple gets 30% of the app creator’s take rate.
IE if patreon’s take rate is 8%, Apple should get 30% of that, not 30% of the full transaction. This could generalize to physical goods as well. It would require more reporting, but would feel more fair in the eyes of the creators and the users.
I run a similar service to patreon where I charge a flat $1 fee on subscriptions, regardless of the size of the subscription. A $50 sub suddenly getting only $34 after my $1 fee and apple’s $15 fee feels wrong. There’s no amount I can reduce my take rate to cover Apple’s take. But I’m entirely ok giving them $0.30 on my $1 take.
Basically - I’m entirely OK having 30% of my net profits taken by Apple. I’m not ok with 30% of my gross.
The current situation with Apple as the middleman lets them ensure they get every dollar without any accounting shenanigans.
Guitarist sells $10/mo subscriptions to their guitar tabs through the Patreon app.
Why should these be considered any different?
And if you think that it should be different when buying something that runs on an apple device, logically that should also apply when buying it from a computer.
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Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download thing that could've been a Web site.
In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive on their hardware in various ways. (Often through foot-dragging when other vendors were trying to make Web apps a smooth experience, but sometimes also going out of their way to make Web work worse.) (See also: making kids look like losers to their peers in chat, if they don't have iPhones.)
Apple then imposes predatory rates and terms on other businesses who are pretty much forced to use the Apple proprietary app store, due not to the merits of the app store so much as Apple's dominance of hardware and conflict of interest when implementing open standards.
I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and how much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple can be. Or they have some idea, but pragmatically have to accept it. Also, this affords Apple a lot of money for really first-rate PR.
What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality. For example: Apple may only charge a few-percent administration and payment processing fee, and that's it; and they have to permit other app stores with first-class access to the system, as a compromise given the proprietary lock-in mess they've made. (Making them support other open standards better, even to the exclusion of prorietary ones, is more complicated.)
Here is an awesome graph (scroll down 1 page) charting out the 3 options -- 1 web, and 2 overtly expensive for iOS.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/27991664769677...
I imagine that part of it is that Apple's stock backstops a lot of activity in the financial markets. No one wants to kill the golden goose to protect "a bunch of Millennial and Zoomer phone addicts"; you have to remember, we're the cows everyone else is happy to milk dry for their own needs.
The EU had a tenuous relation with Apple from the start. Apple spent the past 20-odd years manipulating Irish subsidiaries to avoid paying a dime in taxes on any of their European operations. Despite being called out on it and partially settling the back-taxes in some jurisdictions, they still owe billions to multiple EU members they haven't payed back. There's no history of love, between Apple and Europe. They conspire against Apple because Apple conspires against them.
Then Apple had to kick the hornets nest and piss off the Dutch regulators with the Tinder case. Apple forfeit quickly but it set the stage for everyone else joining in on the fines. This was the perfect catalyst for the DMA and the DSA, which would be copied in other countries like Japan (which coincidentally also has tax feuds with Apple).
Good luck to the shareholders They won't take kindly to the news that the Apple of their eye is a big fruit-shaped bubble.
Wow. I don't know if that's selective memory, or revisionist history, but you've got a huge dose of the stuff.
No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).
Open core, Royal Road / Patreon pipeline, Linux itself…
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon […] disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
Absolutely astounding that removing transactions from the platform could result in being removed.
I don't know a ton about Patreon, but what if creators have exclusive content available via the app and use that to encourage fans to subscribe outside of iOS? What if creators start an education campaign on YouTube telling their fans to avoid subscriptions on iOS?
I wonder if Apple is playing with fire on this one. If the creator and influencer markets turn on them, I think it could have a non-trivial impact on Apple's brand, especially with younger generations. Many modern creators are also smart business people and they're not going to see much value in Apple taking 30% of their revenue when Patreon is already providing all the services they need for about 15% at the top end IIRC.
Right now I think the biggest change that could help the average consumer would be for legislators to allow, or maybe even require, app owners to split platform fees into separate line items. For example, something like:
Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have the ability to install apps using alternative app marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App Store.
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They had to remove payments completely so that it's a "free standalone app".
So, to people who say that with only 27% of global marketshare there's no case for an antitrust lawsuit, well if they can impact users outside of their ecosystem, there's a clear case for antitrust.
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