How much time do we have till Apple blocks addresses of services that provide web apps instead of iOS apps or just crippling web apps altogether even more than they are now?
Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#632The app store is not Home Depot or a book shop or Walmart. Apps are not cars or cans of soda or real estate. Can we cut the bad analogies and talk about what is real? These analogies do nothing to clear anything up and lead to insanely stupid irrelevant discussions about entirely different things.
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does? I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers? Looking at it that…
> Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it's pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value. That isn't obvious at all. In both cases the distributor's margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there are a…
> The notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one another in this context is false, because to distribute to Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS customers you need Apple.
It is still competition even in this context, it just happens on a slightly slower cadence. The Apple customers, by and large, are paying good money to avoid Google's app store because they believe Apple is a better steward on net.
Every time I buy a phone I have to ask if Apple's bad software decisions outweigh the costs of signing up with Google. So far the answer has been one sided in Apple's favour. Consideration of things like this with Patreon come up at phone purchase time.
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally, the Apple Store would be a separate company from Apple phones. A user gets to choose which store they want to use on their phone. Along with other things like which map app is the default. This way, the different stores could compete - by charging lower fees or offering more services. Like the android store does a bare-bones check of the app and so it only charges 10%. Apple checks every app throughly, so…
What a cluster fuck that would become. I can see it now: needing to have 15 different stores with subscriptions to get apps who all have different deals with different apps for exclusivity. No thanks.
I think an important aspect is that exclusivity deals should just be illegal in general.
In that scenario, or with movie streaming right now, the different stores/platforms don't actually compete with each other. They are in a money throwing contest over who can get the most exclusive licences.
Their actual product, streaming a video to your device, isn't relevant to competing at all.
This is also the sole reason why I will refuse to install the epic games launcher. They whine about steams dominant market share while they try to force people to use their platform. Instead of actually competing with Steam, because that would require epic to make a better product and that needs effort.
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your "nobody" is doing all the work. Steam distributes to Windows, but you aren't required to use Steam to distribute to Windows, and then many people don't . Adobe isn't paying Valve to distribute their suite. Epic doesn't use it for Fortnite. Random enterprise software developers have nothing to do with it. It's like pointing to the existence of people who willingly buy a BMW as a justification for forcing everyone…
Adobe isn't paying Apple either. You buy Adobe from Adobe, "Get" Adobe from Apple, and log in with an email. Also, a minority of consumers by headcount choose Apple. A majority of wallet share is spent by those who do choose it. That's behind most of the sour grapes.
48% (uk) ain’t no minority. This is a duopoly
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#636Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…
One important feature is that in the Apple store the consumer is sure that the unsubscribe button works immediately. Not weird tricks to keep you subscribed forever.
This should be a federal law, and if such button does not exist than a email or letter should be a legally mandated fallback.
Taking money after cancellation should be treated as thert
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#637Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…
Only people who have zero understanding of the value of distribution in business would write this. Apple provides tremendous value to app developers.
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#638Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…
One important feature is that in the Apple store the consumer is sure that the unsubscribe button works immediately. Not weird tricks to keep you subscribed forever.
I hate when companies try to draw out or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe, it's a huge issue with subscription services. I'm really encouraged about recent pushes to ban this kind of behavior.
That being said, I've just checked and Patreon does not appear to block or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe from a creator. It's two clicks, you hit "cancel membership" and then the confirm button.
I'm open to claims that Apple's system might still be marginally more convenient (you do have to go to the actual creator page in order to unsubscribe, which is a little inconvenient, I guess).
But is it so much more convenient that most users would literally pay 30% extra on every one of their subscriptions in order to use it? And even if it is, isn't that something that users should be able to choose as an educated decision instead of it being Apple policy for Patreon to not be allowed to tell users in the app that other payment methods exist?
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#639Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…
Let's take this to an extreme. Imagine an app that does little except thread together the basic UI components provided by iOS. In other words, something that most people here could write in an afternoon. Now imagine it ends up on the Apple marketplace. Given how much work goes into building iOS, the UX, and the app store, by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees. The person who created the app just spent a…
I wonder how much of the software you're proposing Apple get paid 99.9% for is open source? (Including the xkcd-famous "one guy in Nebraska" who's been doing his thing for over 20 years)?
How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid?
https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
And all the stuff not listed there too, like OpenSSH, curl, all those little things that pretty much _every_ OS uses?
And the predecessors? BSD, Mach, FreeBSD...
Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
#640Why does patreon really have to be an app though? It works just fine as a mobile site and it doesn't do anything complex that would require it to be an app. And this goes for most services with an app, the main reason they have apps (and try to force their users to use those) is to collect more data from the user as an app has more opportunity to do this than a mobile site. Of course for a supposedly 'noble cause' ap…
I’ll note their app actually sucks at least for reading serial fiction from a few people I subscribe to.
What does require an app though is sending notifications. As a result I have their app just to receive notifications of new chapter releases, then go read the post on the website.
If Apple stopped locking this functionality into applications then something like Patreon could just be a website that you pin on your homescreen.
Now another alternative is email notifications but I will tell you email sucks and most people won’t bother with it. If I start allowing notifications from my mail client I’ll get a ton of notifications that I don’t give a crap about. There is a real spam problem there which application based notifications don’t have.