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If Apple gets commission, the sale took place on Apple's cyberturf, all of which can be identified as being their app store.
The user's Apple device where they made this purchase is effectively a branch location of the that store.
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>So, why is it okay to install whatever you want and pay for it directly on desktops, but on phones it is not? On desktop you have similar stores like Steam. The store takes a 30% cut from all sales on the platform and they require apps on the platform to use their payment processing so that they can take that cut. The difference between Windows and iOS here is that third party stores can be installed without being l…
PC platform: Steam doesn't care if (case in point) Eagle Dynamics allows direct downloads from their website of DCS World - in fact they embrace it, by offering account linking APIs. So on PCs, unlike on iOS, users can buy their content as they choose. And it's not as if Microsoft forces everyone to use their (exceptionally crappy) store either.
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You don't have to be the most popular to be a monopoly. Not even close.
I think I misunderstand what mono implies in monopoly then. If there is another - more popular provider. Isn’t it at the very least a duopoly? Or are we redefining words now?
Whether that’s a market considered relevant from an antitrust point of view is the big question.
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It'll probably need to be another lawsuit since it's in the developer agreement. Via user lolinder ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39020745 ): > Apple is already pretty clear in its developer agreement [0] that the 30% commission is for "its services as Your agent and/or commissionaire" (Schedule 2 3.4), not for its services as a payment processor. They are contractually allowed to take the 30% fee out of paym…
To add, I'm not sure what legal basis there is for "you're charging too much". My only guess is filing against Apple and Google jointly for being a duopoly, but Epic has made it extremely hard to do something like this because of their existing jury trial against Google which gives a lot of concessions to third-party app stores in terms of functionality.
I.e. Epic's goal here isn't about whether Apple charges 99% or 1% rather it's about allowing other payment methods (theirs in their case of course) to compete with equal footing regardless what Apple wants to charge to do it through them instead.
I've got to say, Apple definitely lost me on this one. This feels bad enough that despite having an iPhone since the iPhone 3G, I'll likely jump ship when I need to upgrade unless they make a U-turn on this move. EDIT: Wow, getting downvoted for saying Apple is losing me as a customer with this move is surprising. I don't understand how people on Hacker News of all places want conformity of thought. I switched from u…
You’re also not the customer in this situation — you’re talking not as a developer but as an end-user without any mention of a subscription service that you pay more for because you’re on iOS, or mention of an app you want to side load.
And, you might switch back to iOS after experiencing Android. Your comment says basically nothing, except that you got rattled by reading the news. It doesn’t have to do with “conformity of thought”.
Also, editing to complain about downvoting is just asking to get more downvotes.
A 27% cut will make a 3rd party payment service a non starter for all but the biggest app. For small players a 3% savings isn't worth the administrative overhead of paying apple separately. Apple is begging for another lawsuit over this.
Apple doesn’t see their cut as “payment processing and hosting”. They see it as the cost of selling for their platform.
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> Apple has always been adamant that the fee is for the service of using the App Store, not the payment processor So charge developers for the service of using the App Store, perhaps with a per-download cost. To "give away" the service of the App Store only to recuperate your costs (and then some) via payment processing is just daylight robbery.
In the US, highways are almost all free but ”payment” is roughed charged through gasoline taxes. You also pay for sewage service based on how much water you use, not how much sewage you produce, based on the assumption that most of your water goes into the sewer. Charging customers by some other correlated proxy is not robbery; it’s just practical. Which is exactly why the court had no issues with the arrangement.
Given that this is the US legal/political system, that question is being fought out in various proxy fights, but by looking at the largely equivalent situation in the EU and the DMA, you can see what’s really at stake here.
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This was always what the outcome was going to look like. People have been talking ever since the ruling as though dodging Apple as a payment processor was going to magically exempt developers from the full 30% fee, but that was never going to happen and it was never the intention of the ruling. Apple argued from the very beginning that the 30% was its fee for running the App Store, marketing the apps, and storing and…
> Apple argued from the very beginning that the 30% was its fee for running the App Store, marketing the apps, and storing and delivering the app bundles. The in-app payment system was a convenient way for Apple to collect its commission and a way for Apple to create a unified payment experience for its customers, but it was never the Achilles heel for Apple's business model. Is it just me or does this argument seem…
Am I getting this right? Say I use Stripe as my payment processor. Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30, then Apple takes 27% so I'm at 29.9% + $0.30 being taken out of however much I charge for my app? For a $10 app, $0.30 is 3% putting the fee at 32.9%. For the privilege of paying 2.9% more, my users get to see a scary privacy message and when I bill the customer a year later for a subscription, there's a 20-30% chance that t…
Oh absolutely it is. But all app store developers are complicit in enabling that monopoly. What should happen is that all app store developers withdraw their apps until Apple sees the light. But that won't happen because every app store developer will be pitted against their competition in a race to the bottom who will accept the highest fees that Apple is going to impose and sooner or later you'll be back at that 30…