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

Did I miss something? Did Apple acquire Patreon?

As a Patreon user who primarily subscribes on a per-creation basis, I will be ending all of my affected subscriptions if they make this change. That was kinda the whole point of Patreon for me. I can support my creators but only if they actually produce some content. If they take a long break, they don't get any money from me, but they will also get paid automatically if and when they come back.

> They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing.

What would this mean, exactly?

You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.

And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.

And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.

If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.

What's the missing revenue model here?

Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power.

Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android.

But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist.

As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does.

[0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use.

[1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation.

[2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.

[3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.