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> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself. Does

> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself. Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them? I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make. But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite. I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened. That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.

jcranmer 2y ago
This is kind of the crux of the matter to me. Apple, in this instance, is basically a credit card with a 30% transaction fee, and it's using its dominance in the mobile phone market to force everyone who uses their phone (via their app store policies) to use their credit cards instead of ones with 3% transaction fees, which is pretty classic behavior outlawed by antitrust legislation.
dwaite 2y ago
> Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them? In many markets, Apple does let a dev link users to external payments options. But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. They require a dev to track purchases made on that external system and pay a (slightly reduced) fee. You agreed to be audited to make sure you are making the proper payments. You may have to pay Apple a cut in more scenarios since the payment system is no longer cleanly isolated. In-app purchasing is not an expensive credit card processor. It is Apple’s simplest method of collecting their contractually obligated royalties. So this link is not cheaper if you are following your contract. It is cheaper to buy on your site when those users aren’t coming from the app. Note that it can still be worth a dev using an external payments options system for other reasons - it is just that a lot of them are dark patterns. Things like variable rates for different people for dating services, no-consent charging for gambling apps, gathering additional tracking information so you have additional ways to monetize the user, making unsubscribing from a service more difficult than Apple makes it, etc.
- danShumway 2y ago
  > But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. This is its own can of worms, but doesn't really change much about what I said above. That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Sometimes I misjudge the intent of a comment. Apple's restrictions on origination in places like the EU reinforce that Apple does not see these price increases as a tradeoff for quality that customers are willingly going along with, and does believe that if customers were able to be informed about alternative payment methods that already exist that are cheaper, they would take them. In instances where it can't hide alternatives from users, it imposes fees at the point where users are informed about those alternatives: fees that make it impossible for alternatives to be cheaper than Apple's own inflated cost. Apple's origination fees are a lot less about compensation and a lot more about making sure that on iOS, a less expensive payment option will never be offered. This is not the action of a company that believe that it is adding value to the purchasing experience, it is the action of a company that believes that its purchasing systems would not be chosen by many customers if they were fairly stacked up against existing alternatives.
  - dwaite 2y ago
    > That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Apple wants you to use their payment processor because it is more convenient than auditing/p and potentially suing companies for breaking their contractual agreement around revenue sharing. They force transactions where they collect a royalty through in-app payments, and actually forbid other transactions from using it (like booking an Uber). It is also a better end user experience. But you aren’t paying 30% for a particular end user experience feature. You are paying what Apple put into the agreement as what they think they are owed from the value their ecosystem provides. So Apple split their “payment processing” to 3% and their “using our tools, platform, store and infrastructure” to 27%. It’s certainly possible to undercut 3% for payment processing. The real problem is 27% of revenue excludes entire categories of services, but that isn’t something regulators can easily force - they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.

jcranmer 2y ago

This is kind of the crux of the matter to me. Apple, in this instance, is basically a credit card with a 30% transaction fee, and it's using its dominance in the mobile phone market to force everyone who uses their phone (via their app store policies) to use their credit cards instead of ones with 3% transaction fees, which is pretty classic behavior outlawed by antitrust legislation.

dwaite 2y ago

> Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them? In many markets, Apple does let a dev link users to external payments options. But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. They require a dev to track purchases made on that external system and pay a (slightly reduced) fee. You agreed to be audited to make sure you are making the proper payments. You may have to pay Apple a cut in more scenarios since the payment system is no longer cleanly isolated. In-app purchasing is not an expensive credit card processor. It is Apple’s simplest method of collecting their contractually obligated royalties. So this link is not cheaper if you are following your contract. It is cheaper to buy on your site when those users aren’t coming from the app. Note that it can still be worth a dev using an external payments options system for other reasons - it is just that a lot of them are dark patterns. Things like variable rates for different people for dating services, no-consent charging for gambling apps, gathering additional tracking information so you have additional ways to monetize the user, making unsubscribing from a service more difficult than Apple makes it, etc.

danShumway 2y ago
> But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. This is its own can of worms, but doesn't really change much about what I said above. That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Sometimes I misjudge the intent of a comment. Apple's restrictions on origination in places like the EU reinforce that Apple does not see these price increases as a tradeoff for quality that customers are willingly going along with, and does believe that if customers were able to be informed about alternative payment methods that already exist that are cheaper, they would take them. In instances where it can't hide alternatives from users, it imposes fees at the point where users are informed about those alternatives: fees that make it impossible for alternatives to be cheaper than Apple's own inflated cost. Apple's origination fees are a lot less about compensation and a lot more about making sure that on iOS, a less expensive payment option will never be offered. This is not the action of a company that believe that it is adding value to the purchasing experience, it is the action of a company that believes that its purchasing systems would not be chosen by many customers if they were fairly stacked up against existing alternatives.
- dwaite 2y ago
  > That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Apple wants you to use their payment processor because it is more convenient than auditing/p and potentially suing companies for breaking their contractual agreement around revenue sharing. They force transactions where they collect a royalty through in-app payments, and actually forbid other transactions from using it (like booking an Uber). It is also a better end user experience. But you aren’t paying 30% for a particular end user experience feature. You are paying what Apple put into the agreement as what they think they are owed from the value their ecosystem provides. So Apple split their “payment processing” to 3% and their “using our tools, platform, store and infrastructure” to 27%. It’s certainly possible to undercut 3% for payment processing. The real problem is 27% of revenue excludes entire categories of services, but that isn’t something regulators can easily force - they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.