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

A lot of this disconnect has to do with values.

Please understand I don't in any way mean to pick on you. The comment has 8 paragraphs that are mostly a description of how property rights work. Analogies to how they worked in other markets, examination of the law, etc. This detail is all very clear and I appreciate it because it helps me understand your point of view.

It is less clear to me, why the current situation of property rights is good. Of course many bad things (and for that matter many good things) have been done in the name of how property rights worked at one time. But in democratic societies we decide how things work, so in that sense we are the author of things like property rights, we decide how we want them to be based on our values.

> If you think Apple has failed to comply with some law in the way they implemented their products, I'd appreciate some clarity about exactly what you think Apple has done wrong, and how that should be redressed.

I don't know if they have "broken the law" but there are certainly similarities to historical situations.

You discuss game consoles and licensing games. I might suggest from Sega v. Accolade that a hardware marker's ability to license games exclusively was quite controversial at that time, was ultimately reversed by courts.

In DOJ vs MS, Microsoft was convicted as an illegal monopoly for (among other things) illegally bundling software with Windows, and using technical means to keep Netscape off the platform.

I am sure that Apple has great arguments for why they are different than these cases, and a lot has changed since then. At the same time, some things are similar. It's really about our values. Is the law about encouraging companies to innovate new ways to lock out all their competitors? Or is it about helping competitors? Or helping the large companies? Society has not yet decided, so the question has no answer.

> What kinds of requirements should be put on manufacturers? Under what criteria should they apply and to what devices?

Personally? My designer regulation is one where we have a tiered regime which gets worse the bigger you are.

So, for a small startup that serves basically nobody, we have the current regime, or maybe even we remove some things. There's still regulation on things like HIPAA and SEC rules, fraud, etc. I would also be in favor of much stronger privacy regulation, and limiting arbitration clauses, mostly because a lot of adtech is fly-by-night.

Once you reach some threshold, we regulate at a basic level. This is probably defined as some combination of revenue, daily active users, units sold, subscribers, employee/contractor headcount, but let's just call it a $10m company. Here you fill out a form once a year with an address the regulators can write letters to you, send in your EULA and privacy policy, and there's a list of basic rules like "don't sell user data", "make your software accessible", that are mostly on the honor system unless someone complains in which case the regulator writes you letters.

As we go up in orders of magnitude it becomes a bigger deal. By the time we get to FAANG, you have a regulatory team looking at individual products full-time, the same way we have inspectors in food or finance or anything else. For Apple specifically, maybe "users can jailbreak their device, subject to certain warranty consequences", "all first-party apps will only use public APIs", "developers of first-party apps will find out about new APIs the same time as everyone else", etc.

My account is a five year old business account. My most recent refund I issued was Aug 2019. A line item on the PayPal statement was called "Fee Reversal" for $12.46 USD

However, a read of their current policy shows it's no longer the case - so I'll likely get dinged on my next refund.

Small business owner here...I use Wave for accounting. They absolutely do refund the fee. Shame on the processors who don't refund it, and shame on those who hasn't been doing that since the beginning (Strip, Paypal...) because they are knowingly sticking it to small business owners. I've used Wave for 4.5+ years and this is how I've known it.

"Regardless of the type of payment you received, the full amount that the client paid will be refunded to the client by clicking on the refund button at the bottom right-hand corner of the transaction details."

https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004056523-...

I'd argue that if 10% of your paying customers are refunding your product, you have a product problem.

It’s highly country dependent. Card present transactions are still several percent in many countries.