This means Apple is literally going to take nearly 3x in fees from Patreon's customers than Patreon is taking from their own customers. My understanding is that the reason the number 30% is so magical is a historical anomaly. When software was physically distributed back in the day, 15% of the MSRP was reserved for the distributor and another 15% for the retailer. When these digital marketplaces were set up, the comp…
Had no idea about the history and the 15%/15% split but when the topic comes up I just remember how good the 30% seemed back in, what, 2008? It made perfect sense that this shiny new iOS platform would take 30% of a cheap app to ensure that it matches the high quality of iOS. These were little productivity apps and games at the time. This however - I just don't understand what the need is for an app at all for Patreo…
That's the other part of the surrogate war happening with mobile. The web was unregulated and hard to profit off of, so Jobs took great strides to push the "there's an app for that" mentality that overtook that age. This had the nifty side effect of killing off flash, but it's clear the prospects didn't stop there. Not to mention all the other web hostile actions taken on IOS to make it only do the bare minimum required to not piss off customers.
It very much could just be a website with no reliance on IOS as a dependency. But Apple clearly doesn't want that.