461–470 of 825 posts
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What percentage is acceptable to you? Perhaps all percentage based transactions are rent seeking and should be made illegal. I’m on board.
Any percentage is accessible, Spotify just can't be forced to use it. Don't wanna use Spotify's own billing system? Don't use Spotify, there's Apple music. Voila. Competition.
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Is it fair to call Apple's platform rent-seeking? I think a 30% cut is certainly far too much but I wouldn't call it rent-seeking. The platform itself provides a lot of value and they are entitled to charge something for it.
I agree. There is a lot of value in discovery. Just being on the App Store puts software in front of peoples eyeballs who otherwise may not ever know it exists. Is discovery worth 30%? I honestly don't know, but it's worth something.
Lots of comments around the line of "ok maybe 30% is too much, but we can all agree they offer a valuable service, so what percentage should they take ?" Uhhhh, not a percentage ? Do you imagine AWS billing you a % of your revenue instead of a given price for a given service ? Give a price to be listed in store, to be reviewed, to be downloaded by a user, ... And let company pay what they owe you. Let them pay throug…
Your argument applies equally well to payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.) and, as a society, we seem to be okay with them just taking ~2% of Revenue despite their underlying costs (largely) being a flat fee. I'm not saying it's okay, simply that there's precedent fairly ingrained in our economy.
Additionally, a 2% fee is nearly inconsequential. If Mastercard and Visa demanded 30%, there would be literal riots.
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Should add, the ruling is not really about the validity of the 30% fee. What EU seems to argue is this: 1. Apple is in phone business, Spotify music. So far so good... 2. Then apple wants to get into the music business too. Now they have an unfair advantage since Spotify must pay 30% to apple while apple music "pays" 0%. So apple use their dominance in one area (phones) to get an advantage in a totally different area…
Original article didn’t make that case, or present this side of the EU’s argument. If that were the EU Commission’s line of thought, it would be wrong on the basis of its presuppositions alone by trying to categorize these two companies into what businesses they are in and screwing up the timeline. Apple has been in the music business longer than the iPhone has existed, even in prototype form, and longer than Spotify…
Lots of comments around the line of "ok maybe 30% is too much, but we can all agree they offer a valuable service, so what percentage should they take ?" Uhhhh, not a percentage ? Do you imagine AWS billing you a % of your revenue instead of a given price for a given service ? Give a price to be listed in store, to be reviewed, to be downloaded by a user, ... And let company pay what they owe you. Let them pay throug…
Your argument applies equally well to payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.) and, as a society, we seem to be okay with them just taking ~2% of Revenue despite their underlying costs (largely) being a flat fee. I'm not saying it's okay, simply that there's precedent fairly ingrained in our economy.
If Apple was not making it mandatory to go through them, it would be another story from my point of view.
Note that payment processor fees are massively regulated in the EU as well, with very low limits. So by that precedent the EU coming and saying "30% is way too much" wouldn't be out of nowhere.
Lots of comments around the line of "ok maybe 30% is too much, but we can all agree they offer a valuable service, so what percentage should they take ?" Uhhhh, not a percentage ? Do you imagine AWS billing you a % of your revenue instead of a given price for a given service ? Give a price to be listed in store, to be reviewed, to be downloaded by a user, ... And let company pay what they owe you. Let them pay throug…
Your argument applies equally well to payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.) and, as a society, we seem to be okay with them just taking ~2% of Revenue despite their underlying costs (largely) being a flat fee. I'm not saying it's okay, simply that there's precedent fairly ingrained in our economy.
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I agree. There is a lot of value in discovery. Just being on the App Store puts software in front of peoples eyeballs who otherwise may not ever know it exists. Is discovery worth 30%? I honestly don't know, but it's worth something.
Unless you're big enough to get featured, App Store discovery is pretty bad. Search has always been spotty and has not improved much. Meanwhile, if you want to associate your app with a keyword you can pay Apple (again) for iAds. This sometimes leads to competitors shoving their way to the top of the search screen when you're searching for a specific app name. Something that's pretty infuriating for me as a customer…
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That fact is key to the advantage that the iPhone ecosystem offers. I, and millions of users like me, like the closed garden. I’m effectively outsourcing the duties implied by caveat emptor to Apple. I don’t have the time/inclination to check the safety & honesty of each app developer.
"millions of users like me, like the closed garden." Alcapone was popular, but he was still a criminal and a murderer
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Apple is now a monopoly. They shouldn't be allowed to run an App Store, and they should probably have their services division peeled away into a separate company. All of the mega tech monopolies need to be broken up. What business do any of them have being movie studios, advertising firms, car dealerships (Apple?), banks, and fifteen different marketplaces rolled into one? This is absurd. Tech would be better if neit…
>They shouldn't be allowed to run an App Store, and they should probably have their services division peeled away into a separate company. I think the ship has sailed on App stores. They're just better than the alternative and consumers are used to them. I'd consider them an integral part of the OS. The problem is the fees. 30% is excessive especially so for in-app purchases where the customer is already acquired. Th…
If you mention Tencent fee in Tim Sweeny Twitter you'll get instantly banned.
Amazon's Twitch also takes 50%. But everyone's mad at Apple since they produce products and services everyone buys, even Google engineers mostly use iPhones and Macbooks.
Who should pay for this work? How would you go about accounting for it when calculating the “cost” of operating App Store? Is it fair to say that all this cost should be capitalized into the hardware price of an iPhone, given that most customers use only a small subset of the features on iOS? Should developers be charged by API call, similar to the business model of a cloud platform?