Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#571

Post by ixaxaar »

riscy wrote: post #429
Hamuko wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has thankfully figured out that there's good money in online sales so they'll in fact get a cut if you buy stuff on Safari, although only if you use Apple Pay and even then they only get a miniscule 0.15% (or less) cut. I imagine this is because they don't have the technology to skim off all transactions yet and laws prohibiting excessive processing fees.

Does there exist a payment processor that takes zero cut?

UPI in India has 0 fees, currently doing about 52% of all digital transactions in the country.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#572

Post by ryanbrunner »

ribit wrote: post #564
pcnix wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we place a responsibility on competition in the market to favor consumers by reducing prices and preventing companies from having excessive margins. Allowing a single marketplace means there's no competition, and we're not sure if 15% is a fair rate at all. I could make the assertion that I'd be able to provide everything that Apple does, but with a much lower cut, but this can't be put to the tes…

Do you really think that there will be more competition? I fear what will happen is that the big corps will set their own stores to distribute their own apps, and that's pretty much it. The user won't see any difference in pricing. The small dev will be hurt because each store will make less money and will likely implement price increases to compensate.

We don't have to speculate - the desktop OS world has exactly this structure - an open ecosystem with a first party app store that ships with the OS, but the ability for other app stores to exist or even for developers to ship their products independently.

In practice you still see a decent amount of activity on the official app store, along with some other major app stores, and a relatively small amount of independent distribution. There's still a good amount of small independent developers shipping apps (both on the stores and independently), and there's not a ton of evidence of price increases - in fact there's a very large amount of free software being distributed.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#573

Post by maccard »

jdkoeck wrote: post #510
ribit wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have difficulty following this argument, especially the "stealing" part. App Store does not just randomly take money from the devs. App Store also provides a service. They do world-wide payment and VAT processing, refund processing, discovery, distribution, user login management, APIs, distributed cloud storage, etc. It costs money to run these things. As a small-time developer, I think this is a great deal for 15%…

Again, it’s crazy people defend Apple on this. Apple is not just providing a payment platform, it’s forcing you to use it. As a developer, you should be free to use any payment platform you want in your app, like on the web. Let the user decide. End of story.

> Let the user decide. End of story.

The value proposition of iOS is that the app store is the place to go, and that my experience will be seamless. I want a centralised place to manage my subscriptions. Here's an example:

I subscribed to NYT Cooking in the web a few years back. I went to cancel only to find out that I have to phone them. If I subscribed on an app store it would have been one click and done. I'm actually still subscribed to it.

Why is your choice more important than my choice?

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#574

Post by zer0zzz »

andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

I can understand some perspectives of the Apple-defending crowd. Apple being the popular yet closed-end-to-end platform experience does kind of provide a level of balance in the industry that wouldn’t exist otherwise. I personally think it’s silly to look at Amazon or Google as an example of openness.

I think it’s also kinda weird to label Apple as a monopoly unless you mean a monopoly on revenues. They seem to actively swerve away from getting over 50% share of anything.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#575

Post by ribit »

dns_snek wrote: post #558
ribit wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have difficulty following this argument, especially the "stealing" part. App Store does not just randomly take money from the devs. App Store also provides a service. They do world-wide payment and VAT processing, refund processing, discovery, distribution, user login management, APIs, distributed cloud storage, etc. It costs money to run these things. As a small-time developer, I think this is a great deal for 15%…

> You want to do distribution or payment processing? Take care of it yourself. Yes! That's exactly what everyone wants. > Joe the indie developer instead is dead in the water. No, Joe the indie developer will happily use one of the most popular alternative app stores that fits their needs and doesn't rip them off with fees.

> No, Joe the indie developer will happily use one of the most popular alternative app stores that fits their needs and doesn't rip them off with fees.

What would these be? Last time I checked, the "champion of the people" Epyc charges 12% and pushes the charges for some payment methods onto the buyer. And it seems like they still haven't turned profitable, even with their bare-bones store model.

Stripe (one of the most popular payment processors) will take 9% from a 5$ purchase just for payment processing. This doesn't include tax processing or any other stuff, all that you have to pay extra. A customer wants a refund? You are eating the cost.

I just don't understand how any of this stuff people are talking about is realistic. I am not aware of a single commercial payment processing solution that will end up under 12-15% for small charges, while offering much less value to both the developer and the user compared to App Store. And I don't understand why people expect that this solution will suddenly magically pop up if Apple allows alternative stores.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#576

Post by dwaite »

kelnos wrote: post #490
sircastor wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people think of the App Store as a bazaar that Apple runs on its property, and it’s a 15-30% charge to setup a tent and sell your wares. Others think of it as Apple’s general store where they carry your app as a product, and you pay 15-30% for a place on the shelf. The concept that Kroger (for instance) has a monopoly of customers in its own store is ridiculous. There are other stores, and other bazaars. What an…

That analogy doesn't work, unless Kroger is the only grocery store that's permitted to exist. There are no other stores, or other bazaars. If you want to sell an iOS app, your only option is the Apple App Store. Apparently the courts don't believe this is a monopoly, presumably because you can also choose to toss your iPhone and buy an Android phone instead. I disagree with that reasoning; to me that's like if Whole…

> Apparently the courts don't believe this is a monopoly, presumably because you can also choose to toss your iPhone and buy an Android phone instead.

You also have the entire internet, no tossing required.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#577

Post by dwaite »

guax wrote: post #455
basch wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that Apple APIs and SDKs are Apple writing at least half of everyone’s apps for them. They manufacture all the pieces, and people can arrange them differently. Playing Apple 30% is recognizing that a good chunk of the code running in any app is developed and maintained by Apple.

By imposition of the platform. If people could choose to use apples SDK for 30% or react native 3000 revenge of the javascript for free, they would not bat an eye and go for the latter.

React Native is a (sophisticated) Javascript wrapper around Apple's platform.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#578

Post by d3vmax »

This made sense earlier when the app store started, now with abundant bandwidth and reduced cost of hosting, and increase in number of developers/apps and other player/markets, they should reduce it to 5%. It is like how we treasured 5 mb internet on mobile devices, now we use that in a sec.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#579

Post by SllX »

dwaite wrote: post #557
SllX wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that difficult to follow. As I recall, and feel free to correct me on the chronology if I get something out of order, it went something like this: - Epic pushed an update to Fortnite at some point to the App Store that would allow them to issue an update from the server side to enable a flag to offer Epic’s own payment processor where you could buy in-game currency from them instead of IAP. They then issued…

> Apple has not chosen to re-enter a business relationship with Epic, and has rejected Epic’s offers to do business with them. It’s a simple as that. Apple's public comments to the point have been that Epic is free to resume publishing under the developer program if they abide by the developer agreement, and Epic's CEO has stated they have no intention to do so. Agreeing to the program terms would seem to put them in…

Really? How recent is this? I was pretty much under the impression that Apple was done with Epic, but I would be happy to be wrong here. If they can’t come to terms, they can’t come to terms, but it would be nice if they could.

> Agreeing to the program terms would seem to put them in a position where they can either argue they have standing or that they have been caused harm, but not both.

Agreed.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#580

Post by maccard »

andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

> It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple

It's incredible to me that people arguing against apple here don't realise that they're arguing to allow another billion dollar company to do what they want, and that their own opinion is the only one that could possibly be valid

If you want an open ecosystem with alternative app stores, head on over to Android. The value of iOS to me is the app store and related ecosystem.

Post reply on HN