201–210 of 250 posts
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It’s pretty easy to integrate Stripe as a payment processor and they only take 3%
Don’t forget the + $.30. That is the most material part of transaction fees on small purchases, such as $.99 If not for the bulk discounts they must get, they would lose money at 30% of a $0.99 sale.
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> The cost via your own account on Stripe But it's not the cost for operating the payments gateway. It's the cost for the channel. The real world equivalent is supermarkets, retailers etc charging for products to be stocked on their shelves. Customer acquisition is extremely expensive and difficult and stores expect to be compensated for it.
> It's the cost for the channel. Except it's not. People don't download Uber or Netflix because of the app stores. Epic demonstrated unequivocally they could get installs without Google involved as an intermediary. The app store value at this point is singularly it their platform-specific monopolies, and the fact that you have no choice but to play ball to do business on mobile. > The real world equivalent is superma…
Personally, I am far more likely to try out a subscription if I can do it through the app store, as I don't have to hand over my credit card details, and I know I'll be able to easily cancel.
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> Given that so much of Apple's profits are from extortionate App Store fees Apple earns ~20% of their revenue from all their services not just App Store [1] Given they don't break out their App Store profit numbers I think you should provide your source. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
I'm the OP and I just compared what Apple gets from the App Store (around $21.7m estimated in 2020 which I saw in Barron's, but it's probably an overestimation since I don't think it takes into account the 15% rate below $1m) to Apple's 2020 profits ($57.4m). It's really a back-of-napkin thing, just meant to show the similarity in scale, and how damaging it would be to companies if this revenue went away.
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That's not actually the truth. You can go to F-Droid, or Cydia, Amazon or one of the dozens of SEA app stores that exist. You have plenty of options. Your argument is basically that Wal-Mart is everywhere, so Wal-Mart should be forced to serve you on your terms.
Epic is suing Google over direct and considered anti-competitive action preventing alternative stores from taking hold, and they might have a case. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22632804/epic-google-laws... Meanwhile, you reference Cydia (my alternative to the App Store), but I am myself suing Apple for over their efforts to lock us out competing on iOS. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/10/cydia…
It made my experience of owning my first (and last) iPhone so much better - thanks very much for that, always a fan. Iirc, I was also able to buy one or two apps there, but my memory may be hazy.
I hope you're successful with your Apple lawsuit.
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Credit card transactions take far less, and they deal in legitimate risk (chargebacks, stolen cards, fraud, etc). As developers, we don't even need app stores. They're an artifice that got shoved down our throat by trillion dollar mega corporations. A taxation clearinghouse. You can distribute the same program bytes from anywhere, most notably the web. It's Steve Ballmer's old dream of taxing all software. There's ju…
> Credit card transactions take far less, and they deal in legitimate risk (chargebacks, stolen cards, fraud, etc). For high volume merchants. For mom and pop shops they usually pay a fixed fee + %. For transactions under $5 they can lose money on a sale which is why you quite often see minimum purchase prices or discounts when paying with cash. In some states however there are no laws protecting small businesses and…
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PWAs have acceptable (but not full) support on iOS 14 and 15, you just are forced to ask customers to “press the share button then press add to Home Screen” for it to install to the Home Screen like a regular app.
"Acceptable" is a stretch. There is no way of discovery, say via the App Store. There is no "Add to Home Screen" button (apps can only tell users to open safari settings and do it themselves). There are no push notifications or background sync/fetch. No way to play background media. Full screen doesn't work for anything outside of video. Only a small part of the web manifest file is recognized. The cache limit is a t…
Anybody is free to create a site listing PWAs. The fact that PWAs aren’t listed in the App Store does not mean that there is no way of discovering PWAs.
> There is no "Add to Home Screen" button (apps can only tell users to open safari settings and do it themselves).
This is wrong. You press the Action button in the main Safari toolbar and select Add to Home Screen. You don’t have to go into Safari settings at all.
> The cache limit is a tiny 50MB, which will be purged in 7 days.
That’s not correct. The seven day limit is for websites when you use Safari but don’t visit the website. PWAs added to the Home Screen get their own counter separate to Safari, and since every time you open it you visit the site, the usage limit is effectively infinite.
"When we started Android and Google Play more than a decade ago, we made a bet that a free and open mobile ecosystem could compete with the proprietary walled gardens that dominated the industry."
Do people today really believe that "the industry was dominated by proprietary walled gardens" in the past? The whole thing pretty much started with iOS and Android (Android isn't exactly an open ecosystem compared to Windows, Linux or even macOS).
The google play subscription API is probably the worst I ever had to integrate with. For example * Response leaves out historic data (i.e. a subscription doesn't show it was paused, had a trial, etc. once they're over) * Fetching the subscription state frequently returns data inconsistent with previous results (e.g. the start date of the subscription keeps changing, the expiry date keeps jumping around), so piecing t…
And the API has a huge omission: you can't get a list of all subscriptions! That's something every other subscription API provides and important for many reasons - planning, accounting, marketing, etc. There's no way to export a dump, feed, etc. I still think I'm missing something, but my StackOverflow question on it remains unanswered ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48606203/list-all-play-s... ).
> That's something every other subscription API provides
I don't think Apple and Amazon provide such an API either.
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And Apple likes to pretend that there are no better payment options. I would prefer to subscribe via PayPal, because it's easier to cancel via them than via Apple's iTunes corpse.
I don’t understand? Settings -> AppleID -> Subscriptions? It’s on your phone? You don’t have to use iTunes at all? I wouldn’t have even thought to use iTunes? Unsubscribing is the easiest thing in the world - much easier than PayPal. It’s right there in the Settings app.
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On the desktop, ton of apps don't do their own payments. It takes quite a lot for a company to be able to process their own payments. That's why you see a lot of pay with PayPal, Amazon, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc. So I think for sure people will still offer Apple Pay. The difference is that there'd be competition now, so Apple would be forced to reduce their margins to the minimum, maybe close to cost price to compe…
It’s pretty easy to integrate Stripe as a payment processor and they only take 3%