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

news.patreon.com

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

#541

Post by nomel »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #342
AlexandrB wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has quietly been one of the biggest culprits in the proliferation of subscription software. They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing. Subscriptions are also the easiest way to implement a software demo or trial in the App Store. Finally they use their control of the App Store to coerce anyone doing something different than monthly/yearly subscriptions into that model (as we see here). It sucks big time…

Don't forget censorship/banning of nude images. The tumblr fiasco (among others) was their doing.

That's not totally true. Twitter/X is fine, in this regard. The toggle is web based, but there's no censorship once it's toggled. The large amount of age restricted content on YouTube, with nudity, is another example.

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

#542

Post by AnthonyMouse »

brookst wrote: post #476
danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does? I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers? Looking at it that…

> Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value.

That isn't obvious at all. In both cases the distributor's margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there are a thousand, competition will force their margins down. Whether they're local or national.

Moreover, in this context Patreon is the national distributor who needs to distribute content to everyone whether they have iOS, Android, web or something else, and each of the platforms is a local subcontractor for a subset of the customers. Which leads to exactly the problem. The notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one another in this context is false, because to distribute to Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS customers you need Apple. You can't switch from one to the other because Google can't distribute to iOS customers. They're each a different market serving different customers, and then they collect a monopoly rent.

What the usual trope that analogizes this to Walmart or Target is missing is that "Walmart customers" are also customers of Target or Amazon, but the large majority of iOS customers are not also customers of Google Play or any other app store.

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

#543

Post by ToucanLoucan »

logifail wrote: post #534
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Importantly at one point he says that Apple lpatform brings in the most money to Patreon. I'm not surprised. The dirty little secret people won't talk about is that monetizing anything is so much easier on iOS because Apple users have, in some combination, more disposable income to offer, and are more willing to spend money. This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career, almost 11 years working in app…

> I don't want to get into that quagmire I'm not sure it's a quagmire: iOS devices are more expensive compared with the competition. I don't think this is up for debate. Given that, a null hypothesis might be that since their owners are happy to pay more for their device that they have more disposible income?

I don't think it's up for debate either, but it doesn't change that a lot of people I've interacted with, online, at work and even at conferences don't like talking about the... differences in monetizing on the two major phone platforms.

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

#544

Post by darknavi »

Volundr wrote: post #329
darknavi wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am missing something but Apple supports consumable purchases. Think any game with purchasable virtual currency. Can't Patreon support a ton of different-priced SKUs and let creators use those SKUs for one-off purchases?

I think what your missing is that these aren't one-off user initiated purchases. I back a couple of patterns that are a per-video model, so if the content creator produces 2 videos I'm charged 2x $amount that month. If they produce nothing I'm charged nothing. Apple doesn't provide a way of doing this. In the scenario you described I'd have to monthly count up how many videos said content creator produced and manuall…

Ah yeah. I definitely was not aware that's how it worked. I was thinking user-initiated purchases, not purchase-on-demand.

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

#545

Post by nomel »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #322
derefr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author now assumes the burden with each new release of maintaining and testing V1 (that’s with all the feature flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like insanity to me.

> One at a time.

That would be a choice, not a requirement. It's literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with it. It would be trivial to have "V1 full app unlock" feature be the same as "V2 full app unlock" feature.

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

#546

Post by Terretta »

simonh wrote: post #505
xyst wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If only we haven’t defanged the regulatory agencies …

Broken up in what way, and how would it help?

If it was an open platform, then Apple couldn't charge any more than Steam which is on an open platform, because nobody would pay that much unless forced to.

Wait, Steam charges more?

Never mind.

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

#549

Post by EMIRELADERO »

gretch wrote: post #523
brigadier132 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place. This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking. Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.

> Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own. They do decide, right when they buy their phone.

You know that's not what the OP meant.

"Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own."

It should be able to be decided while owning it, not before. The point is that a phone that doesn't give the user the same level of control over the software that the manufacturer has simply should not exist. It should not be left to market forces.

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

#550

Post by Terretta »

danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

> Does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?

This isn't a Creators/Patreon/Apple phenomenon, this is a consumers/distributors/(publishers|labels)/creators phenomenon.

See page 12:

https://articles.unesco.org/creativity/sites/default/files/m...

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