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Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

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Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#181

Post by lxgr »

munk-a wrote: post #152
mynameisvlad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Google are providing a service, so why exactly should they not get a cut of revenue? To be clear, 30% is too much, but aside from payment handling and taking on fraud risk as a result of that (3-4% is generally the industry standard for card not present transactions), they provide a subscription management/payment API for IAPs, as well as app packaging and distribution, reviews, etc. That certainly is worth…

Isn't the fraud risk still generally born by credit card companies at the end of the day? I think we can legitimately talk about the costs of maintaining the app-store as a marketplace, and we can talk about the future costs of providing updates free of charge in perpetuity and orchestrating the infrastructure to host those various downloads... but that's about where their service offering ends. App review is a joke,…

> Isn't the fraud risk still generally born by credit card companies at the end of the day?

No – for online/e-commerce payments, the liability is generally with the merchant, not the card issuing bank.

If it was about risk/fraud, debit cards would be an economic non-starter, as their interchange is capped to 0.05% + 0.24$ for almost all issuers.

EU issuers also get by (probably not too comfortably so, but still) with the recently introduced interchange cap of 0.3%/0.2%.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#182

Post by mynameisvlad »

munk-a wrote: post #152
mynameisvlad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Google are providing a service, so why exactly should they not get a cut of revenue? To be clear, 30% is too much, but aside from payment handling and taking on fraud risk as a result of that (3-4% is generally the industry standard for card not present transactions), they provide a subscription management/payment API for IAPs, as well as app packaging and distribution, reviews, etc. That certainly is worth…

Isn't the fraud risk still generally born by credit card companies at the end of the day? I think we can legitimately talk about the costs of maintaining the app-store as a marketplace, and we can talk about the future costs of providing updates free of charge in perpetuity and orchestrating the infrastructure to host those various downloads... but that's about where their service offering ends. App review is a joke,…

> Isn't the fraud risk still generally born by credit card companies at the end of the day?

Absolutely not, the bank initiates a chargeback, which the payment processing network directs back to the one who handled the payments. They generally are then tasked with "proving" the purchase is authorized. Enough chargebacks, even fraudulent ones, and the payment provider cuts ties with you (although, at Google scale, I don't see this happening) as you're too great a risk.

> App review is a joke, the rating systems on both platforms as absolute trash and often gamed by publishers (remember Uber's in app prompt about how many stars you'd give them that forwarded you to the app-store if you gave them 5 and otherwise just offered you an internal complaint form if you gave them anything else? Everyone does that).

The implementation being a joke doesn't mean it's not a service with COGS that need to be accounted for.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#183

Post by desiarnezjr »

munk-a wrote: post #152
mynameisvlad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Google are providing a service, so why exactly should they not get a cut of revenue? To be clear, 30% is too much, but aside from payment handling and taking on fraud risk as a result of that (3-4% is generally the industry standard for card not present transactions), they provide a subscription management/payment API for IAPs, as well as app packaging and distribution, reviews, etc. That certainly is worth…

Isn't the fraud risk still generally born by credit card companies at the end of the day? I think we can legitimately talk about the costs of maintaining the app-store as a marketplace, and we can talk about the future costs of providing updates free of charge in perpetuity and orchestrating the infrastructure to host those various downloads... but that's about where their service offering ends. App review is a joke,…

Nope. All fraud and chargebacks go back to the merchant/seller. The processor will immediately hold those funds in question pending a dispute or resolution around the fraud or chargeback.

On top of that there's a hefty fee for any fraud or chargeback that's not refundable even if it's resolved in your favor. Usually in the range of $40 per instance.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#184

Post by bsimpson »

nerdjon wrote: post #45

As a user, why would I choose this? I only see a benefit to developers for this, but from a user prospective going with another system is a downgrade. Assuming google works like Apple (correct me if I am wrong), disabling a subscription should be able to happen from a central location with a click or 2. If I instead go with the billing through a company not only do they now have my credit card information, but I have…

Tinder offers a discount if you subscribe through the web.

I got upsold into their 6 month package. You were supposed to get 5 super likes per day (which shows your profile to someone and tells them you like them; otherwise, you wait to maybe sometime show up in their feed and hope they pay attention). After I paid, they changed it to 5 per MONTH. It effectively made my subscription worthless, but unless I go through the hassle of contesting it on my CC, I have no recourse.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#185

Post by goosedragons »

cglong wrote: post #177
nimbius wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. both of these companies --google and apple-- have leadership that see this as a hill to die on. Apple looks ready to go to the guillotine for the right to gouge startups, while Google seems more amicable to try obfuscation tactics to keep their hand in the cookie jar. my opinion: a couple million dollars invested in F-Droid might do the world a whole lot of good. if you were say, epic, you might consider an a…

I keep wondering why Epic (and Valve for that matter) haven't tried bringing their own stores to Android.

Epic sort of tried. They have three games in the Epic Games App for Android and for a while the only way to play Fortnite on Android was through their app or Samsung's.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#186

Post by lxgr »

nerdjon wrote: post #83
olau wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that a consumptionist attitude is popular these days, but as a user of something like Spotify I would surely prefer as much as possible of my monetary contribution ending up with Spotify and the musicians instead of in the hands of a company controlling the market place. To the people who think the exorbitant fees are okay: Imagine a world with no cash. Now the payment card companies decide they want 30% of al…

Then let's focus on lowering that percent instead of making the situation worse for consumers. However to be clear, that percent is in the same area that game consoles and I believe Steam (someone correct me?) charge. And we accept that. When the 30% rule for the App Store came down, our smart phones were basically the same as a game console. Most people did not expect these devices to become the central part of all…

> Then let's focus on lowering that percent instead of making the situation worse for consumers.

The only viable path towards finding a fair price for this service (apparently deemed essential and basically a steal by Apple and Google, but worth less than nothing by many app developers) would seem to be competition.

Why not offer both, explicitly allowing for different prices, special deals only for non-store subscriptions etc.?

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#187

Post by olliej »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #115
nerdjon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then let's focus on lowering that percent instead of making the situation worse for consumers. However to be clear, that percent is in the same area that game consoles and I believe Steam (someone correct me?) charge. And we accept that. When the 30% rule for the App Store came down, our smart phones were basically the same as a game console. Most people did not expect these devices to become the central part of all…

> than sure the percent needs to be lowered and I am not arguing that Yes to 0% and any percentage of revenue should be made illegal. Google and Apple can charge whatever fixed values they want or even charge based on a wide variety of vectors but a % of revenue should be explicitly illegal that kind of blatant rent seeking is a quintessential example of something the government needs to stamp out.

Apple provides software updates for devices for years after they been paid for. Apple and google both providedthe CDN bandwidth for incredibly popular “free” software for which they do not receive a penny.

The revenue from paid services covers that support.

Would I prefer the cut was lower, but at the same time the 15% (for most)-30% cut seems to match every other platform

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#188

Post by drbacon »

xwowsersx wrote: post #72

Why do/should I, as a Spotify subscriber, care about this at all? I don't understand why there's so much fanfare around this. I feel like I'm missing something basic here...

I actually don't think of this as a consumer issue at all. You probably shouldn't care, but I can see why some consumers might care (e.g. how many entities have their credit card on file, concerns about privacy, a desire to allocate as much money as possible to artists...).

I think of this as a developer issue. There's good money being the middle man for transactions. Did consumers really care about the Epic/Apple IAP issue? Were there iOS users clamoring to use Epic's payment platform? I never really heard the consumer voice in that discussion. I did hear a lot of developer voices that cared about their right to charge consumers without Apple's 30% transaction cut.

Re: Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

#189

Post by madeofpalk »

nerdjon wrote: post #45

As a user, why would I choose this? I only see a benefit to developers for this, but from a user prospective going with another system is a downgrade. Assuming google works like Apple (correct me if I am wrong), disabling a subscription should be able to happen from a central location with a click or 2. If I instead go with the billing through a company not only do they now have my credit card information, but I have…

> As a user, why would I choose this?

On iOS you do not have that choice with many apps because they (fairly) do not wish to fork over 30% of revenue.

So if this was introduced to iOS, the choice would be "Sign up for Netflix in the app" or "Not at all". You just do not have the option to use centralized billing on iOS with Netflix. "You download the app and it doesn’t work".

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