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When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

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Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that low low price they'll also reject your app for random reasons and make it impossible to find in their store.

> For that low low price they'll also reject your app for random reasons and make it impossible to find in their store. So much the same as the other stores then. But the store feature I want to see from Apple is that if you provide the customer referral to your app yourself, Microsoft only takes 5%.

Microsoft is not in the business of making money from apps, right now they need growth, it might even be a question of hey so we need to keep the store running. I say only partly in jest but see them change colors if they ever get a dominant share.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#352

Add this to the long list of how the App Store doesn't serve the needs of application producers are their customers, and because the needs of these very important members of the app ecosystem aren't being served it really isn't serving Apple as well as it could either.

Their customers are not developers, never have been, and never will be.

We see what "serving developers" has done to the web in general - a genuine mess. Perhaps the fee is a bit much and the refund should come with a return, but as an apple product owner, I like the general experience of my iPhone and its app stores, and I don't want them to cater to devs over me.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#353

A Statement of Tim Cook for the House of Representatives claimed that "For the vast majority of apps on the App Store , developers keep 100% of the money they make." [1] How can this be even remotely true if Apple takes a 30% commission for every sale in the App Store? [1] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20200729/110883/HHRG...

Apple doesn’t take a cut from advertising, which funds the vast majority of apps.

That’s true, and makes a weird incentive for advertisements. Ads revenue is apple-tax free

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#354
post #74

I don't understand something here.. let's say I sold an app to someone for $100. 1. Someone pays me $100. 2. Apple takes 30%, so I only get $70. 3. Customer asks for refund and gets back $100. 4. Apple takes back the $70 from me. If Apple was skimming 30% off from the start, how does that affect me during a refund?

The tweet claims that step 4 is "Apples takes back $100 from me." So you have to cover Apple's share in the refund.

The tweets claim is false.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#355
post #74

I don't understand something here.. let's say I sold an app to someone for $100. 1. Someone pays me $100. 2. Apple takes 30%, so I only get $70. 3. Customer asks for refund and gets back $100. 4. Apple takes back the $70 from me. If Apple was skimming 30% off from the start, how does that affect me during a refund?

Apple takes back $100 from you. You now owe them $30 more than they ever paid you.

Nope.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is part of what is holding back iPad software. You can't charge $100 for Sketch and lose $30 when someone asks for a refund. Apple designed this around $1-$10 apps where losing $2 at volume is fine. What is worse, is that Apple doesn't remove the app from the user's device. When you get a refund of a paid app it is on the honor system for them to delete it. It is removed from their account, so they can n…

> What is worse, is that Apple doesn't remove the app from the user's device. This. Is. Ridiculous. We all know this is an intentional design decision by Apple and that they would absolutely not have designed the workflow this way if they had to dogfood their own platform.

> if they had to dogfood their own platform.

But Apple does sell one app through the iTunes App Store (Dark Sky, which they recently acquired). They sell several through the Mac App Store.

So, they do dogfood, but obviously they are not depending on revenue to survive here.

Side note: there are a bunch of apps listed under their developer that I had not seen before: Music Memos, Indoor Survey, Texas Hold'em, and Reality Composer.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#357
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they're not the same class of processor. The chain is like Your bank account -> visa/mastercard/discover -> PayPal's merchant bank account -> the person you're paying bank account PayPal only replaces the ccs when you pay with their wallet. Otherwise they're just orchestrating the money flow (because integrating with the CC companies is a gigantic PITA)

PayPal is not a credit card processor, it is Money transmitter, different legally Stripe on the other hand is a credit card processor, and as a merchant you get a Merchant account, the same like Authorize.net who used to be the largest online processor before Stripe. Back in the day (and I have been out of that market for over a decade) Authorize.net absolutely refunded processing fees on refunds

Authorize.net is not a payment processor but a payment gateway.

TSYS, Vantiv, PaymentTech are processors. your merchant account is usually with (i think) the acquiring bank that's part of the Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Discover network.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#358
post #299
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad that Apple can't remotely delete apps from my device. It would be somewhat dystopic if they had that capability.

There's more than one way to do this. If the purchase is refunded on the device, the app can be uninstalled at the same time; this is how Google does it. If the app is refunded on another device or in the browser, then all it takes is for the app store to keep track of app licenses (which it already does) and remove apps when their license disappears. It seems odd, though, that Apple wouldn't have an API that allows…

> that Apple wouldn't have an API that allows locking app functionally behind licenses;

This is what their subscription system does, though. I'm not familiar with their for-pay app setup, but for subscriptions you can monitor the receipt and see what it's status is. Perhaps you can't do it from there, but I know when even an free app is installed, you still get receipt information written to the device.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#359

This blew up, but like 5 comments down in twitter someone said it wasn't true.

It is true, and I don’t see anyone on that thread saying it’s not. I see a guy confused about whether it’s the consumer or developer that eats the fee - it’s the developer. This is exactly how it works: * Customer pays $10 * Apple owes developer $7 (to be paid in 4-6 weeks) * Customer asks for refund, Apple sends them $10 back * Developer owes Apple $3

It’s not true, I’ve been selling apps on the App Store fir ten years, never happened to me.

Re: When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

#360
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and if all car manufacturers bought engines from the same factory (TSMC), used the same satnav (except one brand, who had a slightly-worse in-house clone), and an accelerator and gearbox from exactly one source (Google search) would you be more concerned about anticompetitive behavior? What if the manufacturers were allowed to produce "accessories" like batteries, tires, and child seats that refused to work in any…

> Apple and Google may be competitors, strictly speaking, but the reality is they've pretty well carved up the market between premium buyers mostly concerned with fit+finish, prestige, and compatibility with other Apple devices, and the operating system and network infrastructure for, well, everything else. Somehow there are heaps of expensive android phones that sell just fine. The flagship Samsung phones cost more…

> Well no, there are tons of smartphone manufacturers with viable products

There are 2 viable software platforms.

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