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Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

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Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#491

Post by ghosty141 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #25
yurishimo wrote: post #15

I'm really happy to see this moving forward, but I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay. I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appeali…

Just to be clear here (and this fact doesn't really detract from your point) - Apple Pay is very different to Apple's In App Purchases. Apple Pay can be used anyhere, and it could still be used if a company rolls their own purchase system on their website that they link to from the app. Apple only gets a very minor % cut of Apple Pay transactions, from the bank, compared to Apple IAP where Apple gets 30% from the dev…

>isn't the competition here what we want?

In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.

It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#492

Post by alickz »

pupppet wrote: post #210

I don't see developers dropping their price now they can use their own payment processor. All I see is me, the user, having to struggle through using their janky home-made payment processors as I pay and/or try to end my subscriptions.

>All I see is me, the user, having to struggle through using their janky home-made payment processors as I pay and/or try to end my subscriptions.`

You could just not use the app if you don't like their payment processor.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#493

Post by shagie »

rfrey wrote: post #418
acdha wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll get no argument from me that Apple's system is pretty good from a consumer standpoint — that's the primary reason why I predicted that it'd remain popular. It's really nice knowing that you can nuke a subscription without getting some dark patterns trying to talk you out of it. On the other hand, it's really easy to imagine that you'd see something like “$9.99 IAP; $7.99 direct from Epic/Amazon/Google/Netflix/…

I suppose that would only happen if Apple were very uncompetitive in price. In the example above, the options would be equivalent to the company if Apple only dropped their cut to 25% and the competition was free. Assume Apple dropped to 15% and the competition was 10% - then it would be 9.99 IAP, 9.63 on Amaozon/Stripe/Netflix, which probably wouldn't be worth the consumer confusion.

Doing some back of the envelope "what would it take to do micropayments with PayPal"

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

A micropayment is 5% + $0.09. For a $0.99 purchase, this is about 15%.

I would expect other payment processors to be similar.

This also leads to the question of "how do you maintain the in app purchases?" Is it an account on a website that has 100% uptime? Does it work for solo games when there's no network connectivity?

This works for Epic (big company, lots of payment processing already). It doesn't work for SmallGamerInc that would find that they'd need to do a bunch of other stuff to get it working that incurs more costs than what Apple offers.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#494

Post by yyyk »

Judge seemed to have reached into the narrowest possible ruling, a reasonable decision in a case which is likely to be appealed by both sides.

Apple learnt that the monopoly definition argument doesn't prevent rulings against anti-competitive practices, and Epic learnt that if it wants to attack App Store fees it needs to bring an objective criteria to the table and have it accepted.

The judge skirted the App Store issue, but I never felt that was important: IMHO, 99.999% of iPhone users would have used Apple's store even if alternate stores were available; The only alternative store with any chance of success would have been an OSS store - hardly what Epic wanted.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#495

Post by ghosty141 »

BackBlast wrote: post #138
coldcode wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways? Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see…

Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much? At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning s…

>Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?

Most in-App purchases are in the range of 1-5$. If I pay a couple of cents more to have a unified experience, yeah sure.

It'd be interesting to see how much users spend on in-App purchases. For me it's almost nothing, maybe 1 purchase a year? The big money is probably in the free2play market where players spend a lot to buy booster packs or "gold".

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#496

Post by yyyk »

selykg wrote: post #200
BackBlast wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much? At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning s…

I would. I'm very careful about what I pay for anyway. If you want me to pay for your product it needs to be something that brings me real value. Even then I limit myself, as I only have a certain amount to spend anyway, so you're competing with other products for my limited amount of budget. Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service. It's consistent as well, which means I don't have to keep hunting th…

>Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service.

This doesn't require Apple's payment monopoly. IAP would just need to make an API call to some 3rd party API. Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#497

Post by anonfornoreason »

cush wrote: post #88
yurishimo wrote: post #15

I'm really happy to see this moving forward, but I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay. I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appeali…

I highly doubt there will be any win for consumers. App developers probably aren't going to reduce their prices by 20%

Not financially (we wouldn't lower prices), but I would immediately start to hire 4 more developers if they went from 30% down to 5%.

Lowering prices increases the number of jobs available, and the only cost is that Apple loses some amount of it's astronomical profits.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#498

Post by ricardobeat »

danShumway wrote: post #464
simonh wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare they make their systems work so well together and easy to use.

That's not really what lock-in means. An example of lock-in is making a conscious decision not to port iMessage to Android, specifically because it would make it easier for iPhone users to move to Android[0]. Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in. Purposefully making Apple products work worse with other systems, phrased within the company as a way to punish users who switch, is the k…

How easy is it to migrate from Google’s Messages app to iMessage?

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#499

Post by mdoms »

sudhirj wrote: post #223

Think Apple has already seen the writing on the wall - both S. Korea & the US are now probably going to push back against the IAP restrictions, and they can / should do a couple of things, which might actually increase revenue. 1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone. 2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year. The thing is no customer wants to use any c…

> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system.

I have been paying for things online for decades now and never once have I used Apple's payment system. I assure you, plenty of us will use payments not provided by the fruit company.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#500

Post by jackson1442 »

maccard wrote: post #98
madeofpalk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear here (and this fact doesn't really detract from your point) - Apple Pay is very different to Apple's In App Purchases. Apple Pay can be used anyhere, and it could still be used if a company rolls their own purchase system on their website that they link to from the app. Apple only gets a very minor % cut of Apple Pay transactions, from the bank, compared to Apple IAP where Apple gets 30% from the dev…

> and it could still be used But it's not guaranteed to be, which is a huge loss for the app store IMO.

Agreed. I think a fair plan would be

* lower IAP to 15% with an option to pay a higher dev license fee to lower it to maybe 7-10%.

* require that any IAP has an _option_ to use Apple’s IAP system within day 20% of the offsite price

* physical goods stay on the same system, but potentially offer some kind of carrot to implement Apple Pay

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