Apple's ecosystem is the 8th wonder of this world. Nowhere else you can put a logo on a piece of cloth or aluminum wheel and sell them for hundreds of dollars. Greatest capitalist company of all time.
Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
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Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t see why any developer should be allowed free rein on anyone else’s platform Is it a "platform" the way a console is or is it a public marketplace? I'd think the distinction comes down to size relative to the rest of the market. If I run a private club that caters to a only a few people I'm not impacting anyone else. Whereas if I run a giant chain of so called "private clubs" that in reality 50% of the town…
You quoted a sentence fragment that, when read in isolation, conveys a position I emphatically reject. To answer your question directly: I contend that when it comes to operating a marketplace for interactive entertainment, an iPhone is no different from a Nintendo Switch, and if you want to impose rules, they must be imposed equally. For all other apps, I think Epic made some valid points.
The quote was not intended to frame your position in any particular manner. Simply to provide context so it was clear what I was responding to.
I take two issues with your response.
First and foremost, the point I raised was specifically about the size of an operation relative to the overall market. You haven't addressed that. You say you see no difference but don't explain why. It seems obvious to me that larger players will require different regulations than smaller players due to having different effects on the market.
Second, Apple doesn't operate a marketplace for games. They operate a general purpose market that includes apps for anything and everything. Compare a 1000 sq ft mom and pop game shop to a 400k sq ft big box retailer that sells groceries, liquor, clothing, home goods, yard tools, just about everything except for literal building materials. It wouldn't be reasonable to treat them the same way.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#393When the App Store first launched I think 30% was pretty fair fee for Apple to collect, but that was a long time ago, and before IAP/Subscriptions. Apple might still be entitled to some percentage but they've expanded to cover more and more things (like this Patreon change or Kindle back in the day) and now we have moved far, far beyond the pale. Apple (perhaps like all corporations but I'm focusing on Apple) is a gr…
It was the opposite. US mobile operator stores charged upward of 50% to sell stuff on their feature phones, with cherry on top in the form of paid submissions.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do they need to install a PWA? We do mobile friendly Web UIs, that is enough. Their customes, employees, go to the respective company website, get a responsive UI for their device, done, the services require to be online anyway.
It’s about convenience in most cases; an “app” to tap on, not a URL to remember and enter or a bookmark to save, name, file, and locate. Just like apps in general, PWAs are mostly a mobile heavy modality. Bookmarks and the browser is largely still fine on laptop/desktop, but even there you see the app design language start prevailing with things like bookmarks and “recent sites” being presented like app icons.
I swear it is so alien to me. Tapping on an app is equivalent to tapping on a link in my bookmarks.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft don't really have an equivalent to iOS so let's compare oranges to oranges: macOS vs Windows. On macOS, Apple don't take a 30% cut on Steam purchases. Steam take 30% however. There's a big difference - when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something and they legally can charge. I don't actually have an opinion on whether 30% o…
> when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something Is it? We spent several decades of the PC world, MSDOS and Windows, with zero platform license fees or approvals. This was hugely beneficial for innovation, and this is why everyone hates the sudden rise of platform landlordism.
You're perfectly entitled to distribute a macOS app with your own paywall, the same as ever. Nothing has changed from that perspective.
Rent-seeking on SaaS platforms is far worse I think, e.g. $30 per month for 10GB of data in a recent offering I was looking at, and who knows where the data are. Some datacenter in a foreign land with a mad king probably.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#396Isn't Patreon effectively a sort of payment processor? So how is this different from Apple demanding a 30% cut of transactions conducted by (for example) Paypal? (Assuming Paypal has an iOS app ofc, I have no idea.)
They also host and serve videos. Not sure about other media
Good point. That makes them a combined platform and payment processor. So it seems to me the logical question would be, shouldn't they just break the platform part out then? But isn't that exactly what their percentage fee amounts to? So Apple should be entitled to 30% of their (IIRC) 5%, right?
Really they ought to further split that out into "processing fee" and "platform services fee" and Apple would then be entitled to 30% of the latter.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#397How long until they make the argument that they're entitled to 30% of your salary because you use Apple hardware to do your work?
Isn't it strictly worse that they're already thinking they're entitled to 30% of your salary because your clients use Apple hardware? You can change what you use, you can't change what they use.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What is absurd is finding yourself paying 30% on every digital item purchased on a smartphone app. It would never even occur to us that Microsoft takes a 30% margin on Steam, yet that is what happens on webtoon apps.
Remember when software was sold in a box with a paper manual in a store? Before App Store and steam, retailers and publishers of games and software also took their share of the revenue from the work software developers created.
Their cut wasn’t small.
If the government stepped in to regulate the sales of software (to protect developers and consumers?) do you think: A) apps will cost less B) the government won’t want their cut
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s reductio ad absurdum It's not, it's just factually wrong. If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee. That's reductio ad absurdum. Lol.
> If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee. Apple could absolutely do this. They could say that professional medical use of macOS requires a commercial license, and the price of that commercial licence could be linked to revenue. Doctors - or rather their hospital IT/procurement departments -…
If that were legally enforcable, which is almost certainly not the case, Microsoft and Google could do the same, making your argument moot in this context.
Re: Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
At that time 30% was not something you would consider high in contrast to the situation before the advent of app stores.
This is outrageously wrong. Back in 2011, the pricing model for "an app in your pocket" was 99 cents. The universal pricing model of apps was a one-time fee and the pricing range was that of an mp3 roughly. 30% of that is a lot. App sales worked only in volume. If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentia…
I was thinking about something comparable, where there is a digital storefront, payment processing, security, delivering, installing on all my devices and so on...
Steam comes to mind. They take 30% (and I think 5% for credit card or whatever).
So I do not think that "outrageously wrong" is characterizing my remarks adequately.