611–620 of 944 posts
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30% was always excessive. I suspect developers are looking for these workaround because of the 30%. If Apple had asked for, say, 10%, would there be as many developers looking for loopholes? I don't know. Apple perhaps should ask for compensation for "vouching for" the developer's app, hosting the app, distributing the app. But Steam shows us another model where the developer themselves pay a modest up-front cost to…
Steam takes 30% cut, though?
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There is no ideological argument for voluntary action here. The entire goal is to force regulators to step in. The debate over 'good vs. bad companies' is just online noise and rhetorical trik, no one on either side of the political spectrum wants these systems to be fixed voluntarily with corporate altruism.
But what are they even doing for regulators to have to step in? Making profits from someone selling their product in your market seems pretty valid to me. Are you saying this is anticompetitive to other possible app store storefronts like Google Play or something?
> Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up (the 2024 evidentiary hearing). To unveil Apple’s actual decision-making process, not the one tailor-made for litigation, the Court ordered production of real-time documents and ultimately held a second set of hearings in 2025.
> To summarize: One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive. Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing,and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Apple’s goal: maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. Two, the Court had prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct consumers to, other purchasing mechanisms. Apple’s response: impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full page “scare” screens, static URLs, and generic statements. Apple’s goal: to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
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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.
Microsoft threatened to take 30% margin on all Steam transactions. That's why Valve embraced Linux and made the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. Valve already takes a 30% cut of all Steam transactions. It's just corporations fighting to steal each other's revenue streams.
This is totally made up.
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I'd say that in the case of Patreon, any fee for Apple is unjustified. Apple can justify their fee on app purchases/subscriptions in the app store, but Patreon is not an app subscription, the money goes mostly from the patrons to the people they support. Ok, Patreon takes a cut to cover their operating costs, and also make a profit (not sure how profitable they are currently), but I really can't see how Apple, who do…
If a user almost exclusively uses the Patreon ios app to consume the artist’s content and likes to live inside the ios ecosystem for frictionless payments using the card on file/privacy/UX/whatever, then I feel apple should get to set the terms of engagement. If you were a chain store in a high end mall where customers cars were all parked for free by valets, mall staff knew their names, and generally made them feel…
Not that I like Google much more re: Android and locking down side-loading more than before.
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One company's margin, is other company's opportunity.
The problem is that Apple owns the platform and half of the mobile ecosystem. You can't just launch a competitive marketplace which could compete alongside Apple's app store, nor can you launch an alternative operating system. You have to launch a whole new smartphone stack complete with operating system, app distribution and app ecosystem.
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> certainly found elsewhere I agree that if someone discovered the artist elsewhere, Apple has weaker standing in claiming a huge commission. But if they found an artist elsewhere, they would also know that they can support that artist elsewhere and not through the iOS app. If the patron found them through the patreon iOS app and use the app to consume the artist's content, then clearly the patron has indicated that…
And if I access Patreon via Chrome on Windows, and use Chrome on Windows to consume the artist's content, clearly I prefer the Chrome and Windows experience, so Microsoft and Google should be getting their 30% cut, right? ... and of course the user found the artist elsewhere than the iOS app store. They found them on youtube, or reddit, or _possibly_ on the webview inside the patreon iOS app, which is also _not_ appl…
Sometimes I think the 30% was supposed to be 3% originally, and no one noticed the decimal was in the wrong place when they shipped it, and then people paid it anyway, so they kept it. 30% is just so unreasonable that it would be totally understandable if someone would believe this.
It’s egregious now but at the time it wasn’t crazy because software developers often made way less than that when going through traditional publishing routes. Plus everyone was just happy to be making money off the new platform.