8 ms·

The world where Apple is just completely fine with Apple users paying $13 instead of $10 for a subscription if they do it through an app is an interesting one.

• Rinzler89 2y ago
  Apple users (I'm not one of them) seem fine with that arrangement.
  • GaggiX 2y ago
    Apple is making sure that it is not easy for Apple users to find out about this fee.
    • EricE 2y ago
      Hardly! The fee has been a hot topic of discussion since day one.
      • akudha 2y ago
        Hot topic of discussion where? Amongst developers, right? How many non-developer Apple users are aware of Apple’s shenanigans? I doubt not many. Even if the end users are aware and accept it, that doesn’t make Apple right. We as a society accept a lot of things - from the security theatre at airports (last week, I saw photos of passengers taken, for domestic flights) to Amazon workers peeing in bottles. As long as we get our crap the same day, we’re good with some unfortunate souls peeing in bottles. If it bothered us, we’d stop shopping at Amazon, for example. All this to say, we’ve been trained very well to tolerate and even accept a lot of bad behavior if it helps with our laziness. Doesn’t mean it is right though
        • EricE 2y ago
          https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-plans-new-fees-restrictions-downloads-outside-app-store-wsj-2024-01-24/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-plans-new-fees-rest... https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/apples-decision-to-charge-27-commission-on-external-payments-draws-criticism/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/apples-... https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/do-you-have-to-pay-the-apple-tax-its-complicated/ https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/do-you-have-to-pay-the... Yes, there is far more discussion in tech/nerd spaces, but it's also being talked about in non-tech areas too.
          • Workaccount2 2y ago
            If you talk to people with iphones on the street of Anytown, USA, they will tell you that Apple is good because it doesn't ruin picture quality in texts like the androids do. That is who the average iphone user is.
          • olyjohn 2y ago
            Well no kidding. But posting 3 links isn't really evidence that the "normies" of the world have any understanding of what is going on.
      • jdgoesmarching 2y ago
        Nobody is discussing this outside of tech and nerd spaces
        • nozzlegear 2y ago
          It could be that nobody cares outside tech and nerd spaces.
  • HDThoreaun 2y ago
    Apple users mostly don’t know about the fee and almost all of them didn’t know about it when they joined the apple ecosystem.
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      When you're born into a cult, it's much harder to see it or the outside world objectively.
  • FireBeyond 2y ago
    In a survey of my non-technical friends, only a very small minority seemed to know that Apple took any cut whatsoever.
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      How would they know and why would they care?
      • FireBeyond 2y ago
        Good question. But reading this thread and every one of these has multiple people saying "Apple users know and choose to have this experience, we've opted in."
• talldayo 2y ago
  We have to go further than that. Naming and shaming Tim Cook hasn't changed anything from Butterfly keyboards to cringeworthy "mother earth" interviews to exploitative Chinese manufacturing schemes. Apple doesn't speak your language, you can only communicate to them by showing them a world where they hurt. So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
  • nsxwolf 2y ago
    Butterfly keyboards are gone.
    • talldayo 2y ago
      All it took was four years, an impending major redesign and a few class-action lawsuits over switch failures. Apple was definitely super responsive about that one. Or maybe it was their courage speaking.
      • dangus 2y ago
        While that's all very true, I find it notable to point out that the company stopped making butterfly keyboards 5 years ago. The folks out there that are still bitter about this really need to find something else to occupy their mindspace. In related news, I just got my keyboard settlement check!
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • talldayo 2y ago
          I'm not bringing it up apropos of nothing; it's evidence that Apple doesn't listen to blatant (and epistemically correct) outcry from their customers when they make a mistake. When the Butterfly keyboard released people were literally shocked; I remember getting messages from people asking if their Macbook keyboard shipped broken after the honeymoon phase wore off. There were SGA members on Twitter bemoaning how they hated their job on the new laptop; programmers everywhere plugging in USB-C keyboards to make their Starbucks workstation tolerable. It was inconceivable that you'd pay a price premium for thinness when all it got you was a miserable keyboard and thermal issues. For crying out loud; you just got your settlement for a hardware flaw Apple doesn't admit exists 8 years after they shipped the flawed product. Mankind cannot sustain this pattern of business refusing to back-down from demonstrably harmful practices that their customers can identify and isolate. The Butterfly keyboard is a microcosm of how Apple ships deliberately flawed products in an attempt to market a solution they are exclusively qualified to sell. And despite all this, people still rush to Apple's aid like it's wrong to call them out for being so greedily obstinate. The reality distortion field is still in full effect.
• sebazzz 2y ago
  Usually schemes like this have terms like “you’re not allowed to offer a cheaper price outside the ecosystem”.
  • neongreen 2y ago
    My understanding from reading the Apple v Epic court documents is that Apple is unique in that it doesn’t force cheaper prices outside the ecosystem. I might be wrong though.
    • dopamean 2y ago
      This has got to be helpful in arguing in court that there's nothing wrong with the apple tax.
    • alwa 2y ago
      I vaguely recall them imposing an anti-steering kind of provision, though, didn’t they? Where you can do what you want on your own channels, but you can’t tip off the iOS user to that fact at the point of sale in the app? I vaguely remember the courts being unimpressed with that requirement, and Apple maliciously complying with the judgment by allowing something hilariously minimal and uninformative, like “one tiny in-app link to your main website but you can’t say the word ‘cheaper,’” something along those lines. (Edited to add: yes, sounds like that came post-Epic, and involved an even more Dantean set of caveats than I’d remembered. Among other things, not only can there be no more than one link, but that one link can only ever appear in one place in the app, it can’t “discourage” in-app payment, and its one appearance can’t be during the payment flow: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/16/apples-app-store-anti-steering-rules-are-gone-but-the-replacement-isnt-much-better https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/16/apples-app-store-... )
  • lovethevoid 2y ago
    In Apples case they changed that several years ago so you can definitely charge your Apple users more. However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
• kmeisthax 2y ago
  The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax. In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying. The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times. [0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
  • dangus 2y ago
    I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department. The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot." The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
    • heavyset_go 2y ago
      Global marketshare is irrelevant, Apple has over 60% of the mobile OS market in the US and are responsible for 70% of all mobile app sales in the US.
    • NekkoDroid 2y ago
      > The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant. *The US will let corporations do whatever they want while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges.
      • bilbo0s 2y ago
• xnorswap 2y ago
  Wouldn't Apple users have to pay $14.29 for there to be $10 left after a 30% cut?
  • NekkoDroid 2y ago
    Yes: https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1822996361551184290 https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1822996361551184290
• wmf 2y ago
  From Apple's perspective they say they are helping their customers with things like making subscriptions easy to cancel and Apple thinks that's genuinely worth 30%. The fact that Apple doesn't want their customers to know they are paying more is an interesting wrinkle though.
  • nicolas_t 2y ago
    That's funny, I actually hate Apple's subscriptions because they are a pain to cancel. My wife has an iphone, she travels regularly to different countries for work. Because apps on apple store regularly have country restrictions (apps are not available in different countries), she has multiple apple accounts to deal with that. Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription. Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
    • imchillyb 2y ago
      What you’ve described is not an Apple problem but a specific use case scenario that is in direct violation of Apple user agreement. Apple’s policy is one account and other family sharing or child accounts.
      • nicolas_t 2y ago
        First, please show me where exactly in the user agreement having two different accounts in different countries is a violation. I've looked and I can't find it. Don't go inventing violations of user agreements... Second, what I've described is a problem that a lot of people have because seemingly no one at Apple understands that if you move between countries for work and need to have access to banking (or any other apps that are specific to that country) in those countries, the only way is to have different IOS account per country. And it's even somewhat supported in ios, if she needs to redownload an app that was deleted due to lack of space, ios prompts her for that specific account's password (not the one I'm currently logged in). So it's somewhat shoddily supported. Nowhere near as good as android, where you can be logged in to multiple accounts and just click on a a menu and chose which account to use.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago
  Previously, Apple specifically prohibited charging more though AppStore for services that are available to be purchased elsewhere. I'm not in the mood to sift though current version of Apple's legalese, but I'd be surprised if they dropped this requirement, that'd be very uncharacteristic of them.
  • perfectstorm 2y ago
    they didn't prohibit charging more for App Store purchases, they prohibited mentioning it in the app. i.e, you cannot mention something like 'purchase this in-app product for $3 cheaper on our website'.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago
      To be more specific, previously they prohibited telling about any other ways to buy elsewhere: "Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other thanuse in-app purchase, except as set forth ...", And that includes sending promotional emails if said emails were gathered via app.
• zchrykng 2y ago
  It is actually 14.29. To give Apple 30% of the new payment, have to increase your original price by 42.9% or so.