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Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

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Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bet if you polled most people, even non-Apple customers, they'd be okay with paying a little extra for the convenience of an app store. The problem is that it's 30%.

The problem is that it's the only option across the OS. There's no reason this option couldn't exist with other options, built by the app developer so it cost Apple nothing.

The problem is that the fee is not charged to the Apple user on a line item in addition to the content price. Like all markets are supposed to operate. It's information hiding.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#282
post #261
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing. What would this mean, exactly? You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game. And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions. And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and t…

What's missing is you pay for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it's yours forever. Then when CS3 comes out you can upgrade with a nice discount.

Ah, alright.

There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things:

1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read

2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E.

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Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1.

Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them.

With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.)

Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX.

The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever.

The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I would call a guy who created a low-fat vegetarian fad diet that doesn't seem to have a basis in any understanding of nutritional science a "well respected doctor," but sure. I would argue that whatever good Steve Jobs did by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he could have done more by also taking good medical advice and treating his cancer.

His type of cancer is very hard to treat. So it isn't clear that taking good medical advice would have done anything (often there isn't anything they can give), but it wouldn't have hurt.

False. Out of all pancreatic cancers, his type of cancer is the most likely to respond to prompt treatment, especially in the extremely lucky case when it's discovered early, like in his case. His decision to wait 9 months with surgery caused his cancer to grow, and increased the likelihood of it metastasing - which indeed happened as the cancer spread to his liver.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#284
post #253

As a Patreon user who primarily subscribes on a per-creation basis, I will be ending all of my affected subscriptions if they make this change. That was kinda the whole point of Patreon for me. I can support my creators but only if they actually produce some content. If they take a long break, they don't get any money from me, but they will also get paid automatically if and when they come back.

I use this model as a creator and I just hope/assume that my users will use the website instead of an app. It doesn't remove the per-creation model, it just makes it absent from the iOS app.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#287
post #125

Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open standards. Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download thing that could've been a Web site. In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive…

AFAICT, all the best things on the internet came from people giving things away; although usually with some kind of way to send them money later.

Open core, Royal Road / Patreon pipeline, Linux itself…

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#288
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department. The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot." The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about prese…

Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power. Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitru…

>27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power.

27% Worldwide

And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android device makers.

In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly when your closest competitor is at 24%.

And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone.

80 fucking 7 %

To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#289
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could add an API for 3rd party subscriptions to integrate with that screen. But Apple prefers to insinuate that you either pay them 30% or get scammed, and there is absolutely no option in between.

30% is too high. Charge whatever Visa charges.

You mean for Apple to charge that on top of the Visa charges, which Apple is paying out of the 30% now, I assume? Apple is the merchant of record for App Store txns and pays all the transaction fees, as well as all their other costs, out of the 30%. (I don't know how much all that adds up to, but the total is strictly greater than sum of the credit card fees.)

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a far from monopolistic US market share for mobile devices. They might be one of the largest single vendors, but if I want to go buy a new smartphone that has decent app and service support from the marketplace, I can absolutely do that without giving so much as a penny to Apple.

Apple has just over 60% of the US market share and employee a whole arsenal of tactics to create artificial friction with other platforms in order to increase that market share.

That's big, but in the minds of most, that's not a monopoly. Duopoly with Google, sure, but convincing a court of a monopoly when a lot of people in that court have living memory of Windows being 80%+ of the total OS installs in the country is going to be a tall ask, especially considering that didn't even stick, long-term, as a rationale to keep MS under the original terms of its punishment.
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