Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 583 posts

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#151

Post by wslh »

I have mixed feelings about this and understand there are cases where it is unfair and where it is a fair penalty.

I see the case where your child spend money via an in-app purchase in Roblox. Where The kid buys USD 1k in robux and the Roblox app never complain... Where we are using two factor authentication and all kind of measures to protect credit card purchases. So, I think you can blame Roblox or Apple for not adding these measures. This is like a dark pattern hidden in the "frictionless" payments via apps.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#152

Post by quotemstr »

simonh wrote: post #101
bronzeage wrote: post #8

App stores need heavy regulations. It's not only Apple but Google and even steam to a small extent. Apple is of course the biggest offender as they heavily guard their monopoly with code signing enforcement. This shouldn't have been legal. They are the very definitions of predatory competition squashing monopolies.

The iPhone is an Apple product. The App Store is an Apple product. The libraries and development tools needed to create iOS apps are Apple products. Traditionally the company that develops a product gets to decide what features that product has. There are various laws that require a product be safe to use, is not misrepresented and does what it is advertised to do, but beyond that there are very few actual features o…

Power is power, and power needs to be accountable to those subject to that power. A company that makes commodity screws and bolts has no power over me: I can find a different commodity screw and bolt company. A company providing key tech infrastructure had quite a bit of power over me. We live in an information society. Why should a few people in the bay area unilaterally get to kick people out of that society?

Common carrier regulations on railroads provide a model for regulating critical tech infrastructure that happens to be privately held. I'm as big a fan as it gets of the capitalist market-based way of organizing society, but even I acknowledge that at large scales, companies need to play by a different set of rules, one that makes them accountable to the public. The alternative is essentially the subversion of democracy. You can take a purist approach to corporate autonomy all the way to its natural feudal end, but I'm not going with you.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#153

Post by simonh »

terrortrain wrote: post #126
simonh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone is an Apple product. The App Store is an Apple product. The libraries and development tools needed to create iOS apps are Apple products. Traditionally the company that develops a product gets to decide what features that product has. There are various laws that require a product be safe to use, is not misrepresented and does what it is advertised to do, but beyond that there are very few actual features o…

It's different when TV manufactures put Dolby in charge of advertising and supporting the feature. Then charge them a cut of their profit, with little to no recourse or dispute mechanisms. Besides that, it could be argued that running software is the feature. What software does is not a feature of the iPhone. Like a recipe is not a feature of a stove. We are buying the device, it's a tool, and we should control how i…

Apple's view is that the third party software that runs on their phones, which they provide to you and which they charge you for, very much is a feature of their phones.

I agree it's a tool and you should control how it's used, but you're demanding that Apple implement specific features for you that they don't want to implement. How do you intend to coerce them into doing that? Who gets to specify precisely how those features are implemented?

I agree that what you do with your phone after you bought it should be up to you. If you can find a way to jailbreak it, I think you should be allowed to do that. In fact I've jai-broken iPhones and iPod Touches before. However I don't think I have a right to tell apple how they make their products, or to force them to implement features for me that I get to specify.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#154

Post by munk-a »

jaywalk wrote: post #31
kumarvvr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will not cost them money, per se. Apple is keeping money from you.

Seems like a pointless technicality. If somebody refunds my $100 app and Apple "keeps" $30 from me, that means the next person who buys my app only earns me $40. I've lost $30 either way.

Or if the same person buys the app again later (maybe using a different Apple ID) then you lose 60$ out of the money they would have paid for your app - to view it a different way.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#155

Post by codegeek »

seancoleman wrote: post #147
chadlavi wrote: post #102

Payment processors generally don't refund fees on payments when the payments are refunded, this isn't new. It's remarkable mainly because (a) it's 30%, not 3% and (b) the App store doesn't position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one. If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that w…

Stripe does refund their fees with a transaction refund. I understand this may be novel for the payment processing industry though.

No stripe doesn't. They used to but not for a while now. At least not for our SAAS business where we do close to 1M ARR. Am I missing something ?

https://stripe.com/docs/refunds

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#156

Post by fasicle »

seancoleman wrote: post #147
chadlavi wrote: post #102

Payment processors generally don't refund fees on payments when the payments are refunded, this isn't new. It's remarkable mainly because (a) it's 30%, not 3% and (b) the App store doesn't position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one. If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that w…

Stripe does refund their fees with a transaction refund. I understand this may be novel for the payment processing industry though.

Is this true? From their docs [1]: "There are no fees to refund a charge, but the fees from the original charge aren’t returned."

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/refunds

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#157

Post by ejo4041 »

ikeboy wrote: post #136

Amazon does the same thing. You can lose more on a return than you make on a regular order. Amazon makes more on many orders than sellers do.

Amazon FBA seller here. I came to look for the Amazon comment. Their returns are pretty messed up and hurt the sellers. Customer can return for any reason and the seller has to eat it. Often times it is very hard to track returns down if people return the wrong stuff. If it's broken or damaged, amazon will side with the customer 100% of the time. On top of all that, if you dispose of a damaged, non-sell-able item, they will list it in amazon warehouse, we agree to that in the TOS by having an FBA account.

If someone knows how to work with their system better regarding returns, let me know.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#158

Post by shi314 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #94
bitexploder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when we didn’t have app stores. All we really need is decentralized app publisher trust. Centralized app publishing will always be abused by the publisher in the long run. It’s just too powerful and tempting to not stack the deck in your favor as the app store owner.

What if the choice really is to only make things lucrative for restrictive shop owners vs malware authors? So far those have been the only two options.

What if choice to maximize revenue by all means. Like creating extra costs for developers or creating obstacles for developers who have lucrative business and it wants to control it too.

Btw, curating is basic responsibility of every storefront. It's something even your Brick and Mortar Store does.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#159

Post by perl4ever »

dragonwriter wrote: post #128
cwhiz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't how monopolies work or are defined or classified. Revenue has nothing to do with market control. Even if we rewrite the dictionary and legal texts, Apple would be part of a duopoly, not a monopoly. If you try to redefine monopoly to mean that Apple has a monopoly over their own platform, then you better start lawyering up because essentially every company in America has a monopoly. I think people want Appl…

> Even if we rewrite the dictionary and legal texts, Apple would be part of a duopoly, not a monopoly. If Apple has pricing power because people don't move to competitors, they are a monopoly in the eyes of the law no matter how many players are in the same commonly-described market segment and what their sizes are. > If you try to redefine monopoly to mean that Apple has a monopoly over their own platform If that pl…

>If Apple has pricing power because people don't move to competitors

I'm not taking sides, or claiming I'm an expert on economics, but isn't the question with monopolies always "what is the market, and what are the competitors"? If you accuse someone of being a monopoly, they will always define their market as widely as possible, but if you are an antitrust lawyer trying to win a case against them you will define it as narrowly as possible. There's always a sufficiently wide or narrow definition for either side to win. And every business has some pricing power and some friction for their customers. Everyone talks about investing in companies that have a "moat" which seems to be understood as something more than many companies have, but less than a monopoly.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#160

Post by tomduncalf »

Had a look and it seems that Google do refund the transaction fee, which I think adds weight to the argument that is unfair behaviour by Apple:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

"Google will return the transaction fee to you. You'll see the returned transaction fee on your next earnings report."

Post reply on HN