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When people look at this issue they tend to fixate on the 30/15% 'tax'. Is it fair? Is it not? The commission is not nothing, obviously, but misses a larger po
by swerling 6y ago
When people look at this issue they tend to fixate on the 30/15% 'tax'. Is it fair? Is it not?
The commission is not nothing, obviously, but misses a larger point.
Apple did to Hey what they did to our company. One day we submitted a minor upgrade for an app that had been on in the app store _for years_, a bugfix release, and they told us they would not publish it or any subsequent submission unless we add IAP to the app.
We would be happy to pay apple some fair fee to place our app in their store. We all understand that it's not a charity. But that's just not what apple is doing
here, or not the whole story.
They took an app that was _already_ in their store for years, and froze updates on it. That approach forced much of our company to stop whatever it was they were working on and implement IAP _now_. Mobile devs, backend devs, accounting, marketing analytics/funnelling were all affected. There would be no bugfix releases until that feature was added.
The implementation of recurring payments in Apple's IAP is quite different from that of other payment processors like Braintree or Stripe. As such it has added a lot of complexity to our backend services, and has sucked a huge amount of time from our developers, accounting, and from our analytics team. All so we can implement a feature we _already had in our products_ and were happy with, just their version of it.
We incorporated IAP in the fall of last year, but we are _still_ trying to digest it into our company, still refining how we handle their subs, still mitigating some mistakes we made in the our initial implementation. And their remain some unresolved question for us on the how best to do accounting and market funneling.
The media continue to fixate on the 30% commision, as do must of the comments in this thread. But the issue is that Apple does this by imposing the commission on apps that _already_ have huge sunk costs on there platform, going back years, that already have tens of thousands of users (at least in our case), and then one day send back a bugfix release with a letter that says 'if you want to put an update to this app on our platform, add IAP to it. Now.'
- cm277 6y agoAgreed. Apple is an oligopoly providing a service that has become more or less 'must have' So are Google/Facebook in their markets. Oligopolies that are 'must have' already exist. They are called utilities and they are regulated. A lot. And taxed, a lot. Silicon Valley succeeded, they billed an empire (multiple ones actually). They were amply compensated and justly so. It's time for regulators and the taxmen to step in (as with any new territory/market).
- falcolas 6y agoUnpopular opinion: What else do you expect Apple to do with applications that are no longer in compliance with their rules and regulations for the platform? They could make you happy and grandfather applications in, but then that creates a different "rage" inducing scenario for new applications. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with their platform rules changes, the change was made, and now needs to be enforced.
- jacobr1 6y agoQuestion on the background: did Apple announce this change long in advance and this start enforcing it (as advised) after the window for remediation elapsed? Or was it sudden? A sudden change is just bad form if that was the case.
- falcolas 6y agoDisclaimer: Not an app developer, for either mobile platform. I heard about this change about a month ago on a couple of news platforms. Specifically, I heard that Apple would be requiring apps which have out-of-app purchasing mechanisms to offer the same products via in-app purchasing. Also, this is a remediation period. Existing apps aren't being taken down (short of repeated version update submissions which don't comply with the new rules), the new updates are simply being held to the new standard.
- swerling 6y agoApple announced it way back in about 2011 or 2012. Here is the sequence of events for our company: 2012-ish: apple requires IAP be an option if you have payment subscriptions. This date might be slightly off, I think it was way back then. 2014-ish: We launch an app that has no recurring subs. So we are still in compliance with their terms. 2017: We add a concept of membership, with braintree managing the subscriptions. Unbeknownst to us, we are now in violation of their terms. 2019: Apple notices the subs, and freezes our app updates So we were indeed in violation of their terms, ones they had made known long before. We did not know it, but we were. Apple let us know 2 years after the fact by preventing us from publishing a bug fix release.
- 6y ago
- noelsusman 6y agoIsn't this a key to Apple's success though? One of the differentiators between Android and iOS is Apple's willingness to bring their boot down to enforce a more consistent user experience by any means necessary. If that means playing hardball with developers then so be it.
- stepstop 6y ago> to bring their boot down to enforce a more consistent user experience by any means necessary. If that means playing hardball with developers then so be it. As a consumer, no. I want both options, but I don’t want my phone choice to force some development team to be under the barrel of a gun