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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

#531

Post by webmobdev »

falcolas wrote: post #397
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…

> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything This makes what is, IMO, an unjustified assumption: that competition in the payment scene will drive prices down for the same item based on payment method . Instead, I think we'll see the same thing we see with the cash/credit card split: The same price regardless of your payment method, with price differences lining the publisher's pockets.

True that cheaper payment methods may not drive down the price of an app or in-app transactions. But as a user, you would be more satisfied knowing that that the $10 you are paying for an app (or for some transaction within it) is going to the creator of the app, rather than some arbitrary percentage (decided by Apple) of your money. As a user, you would even feel worse knowing that Apple simply pockets the remaining amount.

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

#532

Post by yyyk »

eropple wrote: post #298
acdha wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do fo…

Companies will want it, but I'm not sure users will. Apple does a really good job of warning me, I feel, and centralizing subscription cancellation etc., and that's huge. Like, if I have to go to your app--or worse, your website--to cancel a subscription? I'm gonna just not use your stuff, because I'm going to forget about it until you whack me for another year or whatever.

Apple doesn't need to monopolize payment to centralize subscription cancellation. More importantly, Apple's fee structure prefers cheaper trashy apps over expansive to produce quality apps. I hope users will feel the difference with an overall better app selection.

Example: Apple takes a flat 30% fee while Stripe takes (IIRC) 0.3 + Y% (when Y much lower than 30). So a cheap app will pay the same or less with Apple, but an expensive one will lose a lot with Apple. I know not all expensive apps are quality ones, but at least this model will be economical now.

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

#533

Post by endisneigh »

skohan wrote: post #515
endisneigh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually an issue though, given that Apple has never advertised their hardware as being "free-use"?

I can't speak to where it stands in the current legal framework, but personally I don't think the vendor of any product should have any rights to determine how it's used once the customer has paid for it.

Why not just stop buying products that can’t do what you want?

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

#534

Post by acdha »

tshaddox wrote: post #517
acdha wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do fo…

You can already buy stuff from the Amazon app using your existing Amazon payment method. All of this controversy is about in-app purchases of digital content.

That's what I was referring to. Try buying a Kindle book — you have to wishlist it (you can't even add it to your cart) and switch to a browser to actually buy it.

This is also why I mention Amazon a lot: while I favor ApplePay for purchases, there's a 0% chance that I want to use it for my Kindle purchases because simply owning a Kindle means I've already committed to use Amazon to buy content for it.

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

#535

Post by tshaddox »

hospadar wrote: post #272
smnrchrds wrote: post #10

> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.” It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thr…

I'm sure it won't put a stop to it, I love to read discussions about "Does company X engage in anti-competitive behavior and are they a big enough player that it's a problem". That seems to be a much more useful discussion (i.e. it gets at "do they need to be reigned in by We The People") than "are they a monopoly" which is just bickering over what words mean (with some shades of "if they _were_ a monopoly, then We T…

> "Does company X engage in anti-competitive behavior and are they a big enough player that it's a problem"

Seems like that just makes "it's a problem" do all the work.

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

#536

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

>In a separate judgment, the court affirmed that Epic Games was in breach of its contract with Apple when it implemented the alternative payment system in the Fortnite app. As a result, Epic must pay Apple 30 percent of all revenue collected through the system since it was implemented — a sum of more than $3.5 million.

Well, that seems rather BS. To even try for the antitrust case they were required to show how it would hurt consumers. So they did. Which went against Apple's rules obviously.

So it's decided that Apple isn't allowed to do what they were doing, but, Epic has to pay out a fine anyways? Would the case have even made it this far if Epic hadn't done this?

I'm sure Epic is happy to pay the $3.5 million in return for this, and other companies are surely just as pleased. But to have to pay it at all seems like a bit of a legal flaw here.

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

#537

Post by lostcolony »

dwaite wrote: post #519
cletus wrote: post #510

I've been saying this for years now: this is why Apple should've ushered in lower commissions on larger publishers themselves because otherwise a court, a regulatory authority or a legislature was ultimately going to do it for them. And you're almost always better off making that change yourself. Big publishers have their own payment processing pipelines. Apple's is just extra overhead. Smaller publishers still (IMHO…

But once the regulatory option is looming overhead, don't you risk having your changes conflict with what the ultimate regulatory judgement would be?

Sure; you also "risk" the regulating authority deciding it's no longer an issue. Best case, you get to frame the solution; worst case you get the same outcome, the regulator deciding, BUT with you having demonstrated willingness to address the issue.

The only reason to defend yourself is if you legitimately think what you're doing is defensible.

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

#538

Post by ethbr0 »

Spivak wrote: post #402
ethbr0 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And good. The more Apple and Google are forced to line item their charges for users, showing what each charge is for, the closer we get to a free market. The central evil of all of this has been the bundling of everything together, so that nothing can be independently valued. "30% is fair, in exchange for all the things we provide you", etc. Edit : As an example, in the US this is mandated for home mortgages. "T…

I mean you also assume that it will be line-item'd instead of "give us 30% of your revenue made through iOS" in the ToS to publish an app which has any paid features or content.

At least then, we'd be honest that it's extortion.

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

#539

Post by webmobdev »

coldcode wrote: post #85
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…

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…

> how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?

It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.

If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.

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

#540

Post by sneak »

toseupthrow wrote: post #360
acdha wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do fo…

On the other hand, I love how apple lets me use a visa gift card purchased in cash at the local convenience store. When trying to pay for a VPN service anywhere but the app, they reject the card, but Apple let me use it to purchase the subscription.

How did you get the phone number you used to create the Apple ID? Mint?
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