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

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

news.patreon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

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

#761

Post by rembicilious »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #701
ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unfortunately this is in the nature of suppliers and retailers. Supermarkets make more profit on a litre of milk than farmers. Way way way more. Because they know farmers in practice have to sell _all_ their milk,…

Often milk is a 'loss leader' for supermarkets. They put it as far away from the entrance as possible so you have to walk through the whole store.

Is this really true? Maybe it just makes sense to put high demand refrigerated products in the refrigerated room near the loading dock where the refrigerated trailer is unloaded?

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

#762

Post by johnnyanmac »

api wrote: post #375
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…

They've certainly encouraged subscriptions but the big driver is the drive for recurring revenue, which can be valued up to 20X what one-time revenue is valued. In some cases companies with investors are instructed to not even care about non-recurring revenue since it doesn't matter. Revenue is recurring or it doesn't exist. Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern…

Can you imagine the hellscape Steam would be if they adopted this phlosophy? It may have fundamentally ended PC gaming as we know it. Literally throwing free money away.

>Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage

It won't alter this course, but given recent news I sure hope Biden can do one last kick to this stupid model. The biggest reason subscriptions do this is because so many forget to unsubscribe. An issue as old as fiat currency. discouraging recurring subscriptions could be the US's version of GDPR in terms of how utterly devastating it will be to companies.

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

#763

Post by johnnyanmac »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #444
kjkjadksj wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps are now forcing you to use their website skin even though its damn easy to offer a mobile web alternative that doesn't squander ever precious local storage.

Reddit is probably the worst at this, really annoying.

absolutely dreadful. It is quite literally unusable to use the mobile site. I don't even know why they bother hosting it.

Only site where I simply toggle desktop. And now FF mobile can even install RES so that helps mitigate the otherwise clunky navigation (though, I have been unable to enable cloud backup. I can restore local copies though).

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

#765

Post by johnnyanmac »

imzadi wrote: post #474
giancarlostoro wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to put an end to this is if more people stop installing apps that are just website skins, and just use the open web instead.

I don't think this is up to the consumer. The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all? It's not like consumers are clamoring for these apps. Everyone I know hates that you have to have an app for everything these days.

>The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all?

the sad reality is that mobile pretty much "solved" an issue corporations struggle with on web to this day. A closed down (i.e. no adblock), centralized (i.e. you can pay to game the platform to highlight your product), scalable system that can be easily and conveniently monetized. They don't like it, but those corps would 99/100 times take that 30% toll from Apple/Google to gatekeep the adblockers if it means they get more consistent ways to serve ads and subscriptions. That's why being open didn't change most company's decision to serve on Google Play vs an alternative store, nor on the web.

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

#766

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aeolun wrote: post #643
xnyan wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS market share is near 60% in the US and a bit over 25% worldwide. They can't afford to leave that on the table.

They can _not_ charge through iOS though. It’s a very small matter for me to navigate to the Amazon website to buy a new book, then load it up in the Kindle app.

I imagine they already crunched the numbers of doing the Spotify approach vs. kowtowing to Apple. Unlike Spotify and Amazon, Patreon does have non-negligible competition to consider who will take advantage of the more convenient payment.

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

#767

Post by johnnyanmac »

jzl wrote: post #668
kmeisthax wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store. In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off. Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.

I could be wrong, but I think you’re misinterpreting it. They could remove all billing from the iOS app just like eg Audible does. But I’m guessing they don’t want to. Patreon is looking out for themselves, not their creators or subscribers.

Hard to say. Audible, Netflix, and Spotify have a lot more weight to throw around. Enough that even Apple can't ignore it. I can see these being backdoor deals for them specifically.

Patreon from its very model does not. A very sad exploitation of the little guy, even if this is one of the biggest little guys.

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

#768

Post by marbartolome »

Not gonna defend Apple here, but I think it's also kinda sucky that Pateon is simply pushing the problem downward to the end users. They should have made a decision to either take the hit themselves or leave the apple store altogether. But of course this is too much to ask from a company who also has a dominant position in the market of creator revenue, so more enshitificacion for everyone.

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

#769

Post by nicolas_t »

imchillyb wrote: post #308
nicolas_t wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, I actually hate Apple's subscriptions because they are a pain to cancel. My wife has an iphone, she travels regularly to different countries for work. Because apps on apple store regularly have country restrictions (apps are not available in different countries), she has multiple apple accounts to deal with that. Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but And…

What you’ve described is not an Apple problem but a specific use case scenario that is in direct violation of Apple user agreement. Apple’s policy is one account and other family sharing or child accounts.

First, please show me where exactly in the user agreement having two different accounts in different countries is a violation. I've looked and I can't find it. Don't go inventing violations of user agreements...

Second, what I've described is a problem that a lot of people have because seemingly no one at Apple understands that if you move between countries for work and need to have access to banking (or any other apps that are specific to that country) in those countries, the only way is to have different IOS account per country.

And it's even somewhat supported in ios, if she needs to redownload an app that was deleted due to lack of space, ios prompts her for that specific account's password (not the one I'm currently logged in). So it's somewhat shoddily supported. Nowhere near as good as android, where you can be logged in to multiple accounts and just click on a a menu and chose which account to use.

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

#770

Post by fishbacon »

Seems like this just validates the idea that Patreon did not need to be an app. The website works just fine and I doubt people are using the app for discovery or content creation?

I know Patreon wants to capture as much of your time as possible, because they are now on the infinite growth destruction trajectory. So the app is going to stay and they will keep pushing it and probably remove features from mobile web because of it.

Imagine if Patreon was just a for-profit company and not a growth monster.

Post reply on HN