121–130 of 371 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about billing this cost plus some margin to the app developers instead of taking a cut on everything?
That adds quite a bit of overhead (administration, accounting, etc.), which in turn would increase the costs even more. It is much easier to wrap it into the transaction itself instead of having to track, invoice, and collect the cost in a separate transaction.
>Does a new payment method on mobile mean purchases there are less safe? >No. Thousands of apps on the App Store approved by Apple accept direct payments, including commonly used apps like Amazon, Grubhub, Nike SNKRS, Best Buy, DoorDash, Fandango, McDonalds, Uber, Lyft, and StubHub. We think all developers should be free to support direct payments in all apps. [0] All of these services provide something physical. You…
If you follow Tim Sweeney and Epic's history surrounding "app store cuts", you'd know that they've always stood on the side of developers. The EGS stands among the lowest app store cuts of any marketplace, at 12%, and Tim has become visibly angry during public appearances concerning Apple, Google, etc and their 30% cut.
Additionally, we're talking about a platform that disallows any alternative installation and distribution mechanisms. The PC ecosystem is vibrant, unlike the forced one-app-store on iOS and the defacto-one-app-store on Android. If a developer wants to control their cut on Windows, they can sell via their own site, or itch.io (which allows developers to select what percentage itch.io receives), or Steam and their 30% cut, or wherever they'd like.
This puts Apple in a very tough spot. Last week, Tim Cook was questioned in an antitrust hearing re: Apple's anticompetitive practices (along with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai). The spotlight is already pointing right at them, so any move they make here is going to be noticed by lawmakers. If they remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple will probably be seen as the bad guy. After all, Epic is not…
I'm scared of that though. Although on one end I would like to buy my kindle books straight from the app and play xcloud games, I'm thinking of the dodgier companies. Right now I have little to worry about when I leave my kid playing a game, all the payment need to go through Apple or at least the offending app will not stay up for too long. I want Apple to be forced to come up with a fairer solution (eg: same api, b…
>Does a new payment method on mobile mean purchases there are less safe? >No. Thousands of apps on the App Store approved by Apple accept direct payments, including commonly used apps like Amazon, Grubhub, Nike SNKRS, Best Buy, DoorDash, Fandango, McDonalds, Uber, Lyft, and StubHub. We think all developers should be free to support direct payments in all apps. [0] All of these services provide something physical. You…
> All of these services provide something physical. You can't buy Kindle Books, for example, on Amazon's app on iOS. This a bit disingenuous. I don't see how it's disingenuous, the question was "are these purchases less safe". They said "No, and here are some examples". Whether the item is physical or not, I don't see how it makes the transaction "less safe"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does provide value thats the thing, it's relatively easy to setup IAP and subscriptions, IMO they can keep the 30% but they should just allow apps to offer other payment methods.
> IMO they can keep the 30% but they should just allow apps to offer other payment methods. Would this just result in every app being free, but using (non-apple) IAP to gain access to any content beyond the opening screen?
If I were Apple, I'd make my payments optional. They're so seamless that as a customer, I'd probably still use them unless I were getting a substantial discount to do otherwise, and sometimes even then. They could do something like give developers the option to sign up to use it exclusively for a reduced rate. It'd be one less bullet for the anti-trust regulators, and app store revenues are only about 4% of Apple's revenue anyway.
Indeed this is huge, well it will be huge if the app is still in the store by tomorrow ... I wonder what apple will do? I wonder if apple greenlighted this? If they didn’t get this greenlighted, I wonder how they bypassed the Apples app review process (in app updates instead of a store update?)?
I can’t wait to see how all of this unfolds, years ago I was part of a team that built a music app that got refused in the app store because we had included payments via a credit card processor, bypassing the 30% apple tax and today I’m in the process of building another app which is impacted by this … I also imagine companies like spotify are following this very closely
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That adds quite a bit of overhead (administration, accounting, etc.), which in turn would increase the costs even more. It is much easier to wrap it into the transaction itself instead of having to track, invoice, and collect the cost in a separate transaction.
They already bill all developers yearly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All of these services provide something physical. You can't buy Kindle Books, for example, on Amazon's app on iOS. This a bit disingenuous. I don't see how it's disingenuous, the question was "are these purchases less safe". They said "No, and here are some examples". Whether the item is physical or not, I don't see how it makes the transaction "less safe"?
Physical goods need to be shipped somewhere that a thief can receive them. Digital goods don’t. That makes it much easier and safer to make fraudulent purchases for digital goods.
But if you are a valid consumer, making a valid purchase with your card, the purchase being fraudulent is not the concern.
The "safety" implication is that any company that is not Apple will lose your payment information, or your payment info will be intercepted, etc.
There are many companies who are perfectly capable of handling PCI that are not Apple.
I love how they are "passing the savings down to us" from a non existing digital item that they set the price of. Ugh. Anyway, this should be absolutely fascinating to watch how the antitrust cases against the app stores go!
how come you would pay for the sounds recorded off musicians, but not the pictures/animations made by game developers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to Epic, they are/were offering developers a better deal than Steam. And they've done far more for gaming over the past decade than Valve, which hasn't been able to successfully innovate in the last two.
I don't see how that's relevant to the cut a company takes for running a game store. Epic is only able to offer such a low % take on sales since they're subsidizing their store with the money they get from UE and Fortnite; Valve is already running their store sustainably and at a profit, much like how Epic would be if they weren't "angel investing" into their own product.
Steam hasn't improved or fixed serious bugs for years because they have had no serious competition, all while taking a massive cut from developers' sales. On top of that, their game development stagnated and they really haven't given much back to gamers or game developers aside from a common store front and launcher (both of which suffer from numerous technical failures and poor engineering).
Meanwhile, Epic has developed kickass games and licensed the kickass engine behind it to game devs for pretty reasonable terms, and recently removed them wholesale for games under $1mm in revenue and waiving the license fee for release on their store (so they're not double dipping on the same games' revenues).
Epic has consistently worked to deliver better products cheaper to consumers and to make them easier to create for developers.
If we take a holistic view of what Epic has done versus Valve, we can excuse them a bit for buying an exclusive here or there to kickstart adoption. It's baffling to me that they even need to, because their software runs laps around Valve's.