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ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

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Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#221

Post by DenseComet »

manfredo wrote: post #203
whimsicalism wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that avoids the rent-seeking problem... how?

You can side load apps. You don't need to go through Google Play.

Well that's just the idea. In reality, most people only install apps from Google Play, and Google has decided that it also wants to enforce a 30% cut [1]. Sideloading provides an option, but for most developers, its not a realistic one (See: Epic putting Fortnite onto the Play Store after trying to get people to install by sideloading).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/technology/google-play-st...

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#222

Post by sascha_sl »

ProtonMail complaining about extortion? That's rich. I was a visionary user for 2 years, and then decided to move somewhere where IMAP/SMTP was a bit easier to do than to run a piece of Go that somehow still required half of Gnome to run.

The experience was full of dark patterns. There is simply no way to terminate at the end of your billing period (and I had an annual subscription). If you have custom domains, you lose them immediately upon clicking the unsubscribe button, as do you lose your only way to properly move data off the service (as they have still no export feature)

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#223

Post by danijelb »

coder543 wrote: post #89
powersnail wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering it's protonmail, email them the notification.

That's exactly the problem. Apple doesn't want any notification of this to be visible to the user in the app. The fact that the app handles the user's email isn't guaranteed to be a relevant distinction to the random reviewer who is tasked with reviewing the app. Apple has not spelled out clearly that this is okay for them to do, which means that it is a risk. The user would be receiving a literal iOS notification fr…

When I was using a trial of Hey email, I received an email about trial expiration and a link to upgrade to paid plan if I want to continue using it. When clicking the link, it opened in the in-app browser and you could enter your credit card details right inside. Idk if that's permitted by Apple or not, but if not, then Hey was lucky Apple didn't notice it.

However, I don't see how that can be solved. An email provider has every right to send an email to a customer informing them about anything, including a trial expiration and if that email contains a link, it is handled like a link from any other email in the app. It would be really silly for Apple to ask the provider to censor their user's inbox and hide a particular email they received.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#224

Post by ncr100 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #167

Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners. We (in this case the EU) should give it the same treatment we gave credit card companies. Cap their rates at 1% or whatever so they can cover the operational costs of their stores, stop them from b…

> Just imagine if Microsoft had taken a 30% cut from every developer who ever compiled software for windows

How does this relate to this discussion?

Just inserting "30%" into ANY financial transaction and drawing a comparison is a false equivalency.

If I could, I would downvote this.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#225

Post by donmcronald »

systemvoltage wrote: post #195
bsg75 wrote: post #43

I'm actually happier to pay a small premium for IAP based subscriptions because of the cancellation options. Having been subjected to asinine "retention" policies that make ending a subscription service an onerous and time consuming process (ex: NYT), and having seen first hand how a company purposefully makes subscription cancellations difficult, being able to open a single interface and click `Cancel` is a massive…

I think HN discussions have always been focusing on developer/business side of things but people don't realize that users - they don't care what happens in the backend. They care about the experience and Apple delivers, and then some. I think Apple's 30% can be debated but a vanishingly small slice of users know this and care about it, millions of users just want to do their thing with beautiful ease and experience.

I find it so weird because retail seems to be a huge race towards the lowest quality due to demand for the lowest prices. If you put 2 identical products in the retail world and charged +42% for one of them no one would buy it. My impression is that it’s tough to sell a much better product at higher prices.

The only way I can make it work in my mind is that from the users’ perspective there are no alternatives. IE: They don’t know it’s 30% off at the store down the road.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#226

Post by manfredo »

DenseComet wrote: post #221
manfredo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can side load apps. You don't need to go through Google Play.

Well that's just the idea. In reality, most people only install apps from Google Play, and Google has decided that it also wants to enforce a 30% cut [1]. Sideloading provides an option, but for most developers, its not a realistic one (See: Epic putting Fortnite onto the Play Store after trying to get people to install by sideloading). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/technology/google-play-st...

Sideloading amounts to downloading a .apk file and clicking yes on the prompt to install it. It's no more difficult than installing applications on Windows. I know firsthand that elementary school children are capable of sideloading apps.

IIRC Google offered Epic more favorable rates after it released Fortnite through side loading. Presumably this indicates that sideloading was a success and Google didn't want Epic to set a precedence that bypassing the Play store is feasible.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#227

Post by deleuze »

powersnail wrote: post #217
coder543 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Lawsuits against Apple's App Store policy enforcement are already in progress, but Apple has the best lawyers money can buy, and rulings are years away. If a substantial part of your business risked being terminated at the click of a button by some unelected person that you have never met, with no proper way to appeal such an unjust decision, you'd probably think twice abo…

At least part of the job of those lawyers is to tell Apple to not fight unlikely battles; or at least I hope. Apple wasn't crazy enough to go after Amazon Kindle app for asking the user to buy ebooks on Amazon.com, which bypassed Apple's system. Probably---hopefully---they aren't crazy enough to fight a email client for sending emails regarding upgrade plans.

Absolute 0% of those lawyers jobs is to tell Apple to not pursue litigation. Do you understand what the point of litigation is for a company this size? They have over $100 billion in cash, even the most expensive lawyers salaries is a drop in the bucket. They can afford to drag a company like Protonmail through the mud for decades if they want to.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#228

Post by simion314 »

pwinnski wrote: post #214
simion314 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is bigger then that. Apple takes a 30% cut(and the fanboys will say it is legal and fair and theoretically Apple could make it 99% and should still be legal) and on top of that cut they are forcing you not to inform the customer about alternatives, YES Apple prevents you to be informed by better reals and deciding for yourself what is better, so you could say that Apple is protecting you because you are t…

Yeah, Apple's practices are far from ideal, your insults aside, but I'm not sure how much of that is relevant here. On this thread at least, nobody seems to have mentioned percentages but you.

This is false, at the moment I wrote this comment the "Apple tax" was mentioned a lot. IMO the fact that is 3%, 30% or 99% is irrelevant . What is important is that Apple uses it's dominance to remove choice from users.

I am sorry if fanboy will hurt someone feeling, but if for example: Google (or Apple) would have a new rule that if you want your website to be opened in Chrome(or Safari) and not marked as malware you have to include Google Pay(or Apple Pay) and remove the Visa/PayPal and all the other payment options and some person would say "this is exactly what we wanted, no more choices - force everyone to a Google(or Apple ) tax , this choices are overwhelming my poor brain then tell me the correct adjective to describe this person that thinks removing choice and forcing the big coorporation way is the best thing.

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#229

Post by TaylorAlexander »

dpiers wrote: post #182
Barrin92 wrote: post #167

Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners. We (in this case the EU) should give it the same treatment we gave credit card companies. Cap their rates at 1% or whatever so they can cover the operational costs of their stores, stop them from b…

What about video game consoles? Early in a generation, they are sold at razor-thin (or negative) margins, with the expectation that the manufacturer will recoup losses from licensing fees over the life of the console and that costs will come down in later revisions. If manufacturers lose their substantial licensing fees, they would be forced to charge more upfront for the consoles which is objectively worse for consu…

Would it be objectively worse for consumers? You buy an expensive machine once every ten years and then the games would be more reasonably priced for that whole time? How can you say with certainty that would be worse?

Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

#230

Post by coder543 »

danijelb wrote: post #223
coder543 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the problem. Apple doesn't want any notification of this to be visible to the user in the app. The fact that the app handles the user's email isn't guaranteed to be a relevant distinction to the random reviewer who is tasked with reviewing the app. Apple has not spelled out clearly that this is okay for them to do, which means that it is a risk. The user would be receiving a literal iOS notification fr…

When I was using a trial of Hey email, I received an email about trial expiration and a link to upgrade to paid plan if I want to continue using it. When clicking the link, it opened in the in-app browser and you could enter your credit card details right inside. Idk if that's permitted by Apple or not, but if not, then Hey was lucky Apple didn't notice it. However, I don't see how that can be solved. An email provid…

> It would be really silly for Apple to ask the provider to censor their user's inbox and hide a particular email they received.

I agree completely. If Apple agrees, they should spell this out clearly in their terms.

As it is, Apple gets to selectively enforce this whenever they want, which is unfair to both app developers and users.

One likely danger of spelling this out from Apple's point of view is that someone might say the same thing about other messaging services besides email. Take Facebook Messenger, for example. Imagine that Facebook started offering a paid upgrade to Messenger. Why should Facebook Messenger care on which platform you're receiving an internally-generated call to action to upgrade to some hypothetical paid plan? It's not like they were intentionally targeting Apple users in this hypothetical scenario, and it should be their right to not have to censor messages they decide to send to their users just based on the platform being used. It's (hypothetically) just a regular Facebook Messenger message, after all, generated by some marketing system completely disconnected from both the app and the messaging platform!

One thing that confounds the issue for ProtonMail specifically is that the app only works with ProtonMail, and ProtonMail is operating both the frontend and the backend. It's not like the Gmail app that also lets you use other email accounts with it as a general purpose email client. This is why I chose Facebook Messenger as an example -- it is a messaging platform, but both the frontend and backend are operated by Facebook.

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