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Europe Wants Apple and Google to Fix In-App Payments Problem

40 points by jcr 12y ago

spindritf 12y ago
Another non-issue like cookies.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  It's clear you don't have children who play on a tablet.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Why would children should have a tablet in the first place? Can't they just play on consoles?
    - mahouse 12y ago
      Well, that's pointless, now that most games in consoles offer in-app purchases, in the form of DLCs, etc.
      - JetSpiegel 12y ago
        Why do they need Internet connections?
        mahouse 12y ago
        Because most games, even those for young kids such as Pokémon, have multiplayer capabilities.
  - hxw 12y ago
    Should Apple and Google be responsible for what the children are doing on a tablet/mobile phone? Does not an in-app purchase require the password for an account connected to a credit card?
    - samuel 12y ago
      Not by default, at least in Android.
      - hxw 12y ago
        Ah, I didn't know that.
    - drdaeman 12y ago
      IIRC, on Android the password isn't required if a payment was done recently (like in 15-20 minutes). That's fairly convenient if you're a sole account user and you went on a shopping spree, but if you share the device/account with someone... The complaint I've read was that if a kid persuades parent to pay for an in-game option then for a brief time they can (intently or not) make further purchases without proper authorization. Or something along those lines. Not sure whenever this is still the case nowadays or had already been fixed - last time I've made payments on Play Store was months ago.
      - kuschku 12y ago
        Per default not, it just asks you every time you enter the password if you'd like to enable that 15 minute feature.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    So, the real issue is allowing to preform in-app payment by unauthorized party, not the "free" labeling (which is disguising and disgusting in my opinion, but is an old marketing trick that doesn't seem to have obvious solution).
  - spain 12y ago
    Set some parental controls? Don't authorize them to use your credit card? Don't let them use the device at all if there's nothing else you can do? I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids but you can prevent it without any government intervention with a little responsibility on your part. You wouldn't give your child a credit card and let them loose in a toy store either.
    - mfringel 12y ago
      Ignoring everything in that last statement after the "but", you say: I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids Agreed. Google is doing something about that.
    - watwut 12y ago
      The trouble with parental controls used to be that they worked differently then advertised. Parent configured password, but there was grace periods of password-less 15 minutes after each buy which was not explained to user. You had to follow tech news to know about it. Or, parent configured password, but the password was required only for app store, not for IAP. Apple store does not allow you to download anything, not even free apps, if you do not have credit card set up. So, if you wanted anything on that device, you had to configure it there. Essentially, parental controls are getting better slowly, but only lately and under pressure of regulators. The other issues are already existing regulations about marketing targeted at children and when the word "free" is a lie. EU restricts kids targeted advertisements in general and has rules against lies in advertisements. A lot of debate is friction about whether app stores should follow the same rules as everybody else and how to interpret those rules in apps.
      - mitchty 12y ago
        I think ios8 will really help out with the whole situation of needing credit cards to be tied to an account. Not that that helps right now but I tested it out and it is pretty damn impressive. Glad I don't have kids right now though so I don't need to deal with it at all. >.<
NietTim 12y ago
Yes, this is pretty old news...
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
In app purchases exist because there is no free market for apps - everything is purchased through two portals, who set the expected prices and act as unsupervised quality controllers. Because the prices are so low in app purchases and super-star hits are the only ways to profit. If there was a free market here, there would not be any need for this, products would be priced at sustainable levels, and I as a parent would never ever ever purchase a game that had in app purchases. I would rather that I could download apps from anywhere and there was still a rating and quality mechanism. Many options exist for that. But I will take this as an alternative I think the European Union has this weird attitude that a free market works the best and where there is no free market then there should be regulation to guide the path towards the ideal, or there should be protection against the excesses of the unfree market. I, in the main, agree. It all kind of depends on your definition of free and regulation.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  How would an open market fix this? Consumers have shown they no longer want to pay for anything. Movies, music, or apps. There are some people though who are happy to pay large amounts of money. In-app purchases allow those people to spend and the people who don't want to pay don't have to. In a more open market consumers still wouldn't want to pay for apps so in-app purchases would still be necessary.
  - perlpimp 12y ago
    At least giving way for paid upgrades should sort of fix that, giving developers genuine motive not to produce this crap. I have been annoyed by upgrades to apps that litter screen with triggers to buy new stuff. For example flightradar24 I bought a full version of the app. In an update they positioned tiggers on every city to get me to buy upgrade for every city to view departure and arrival time. Suddenly my app is visually broken and I have to pay for the upgrade to fix it. And I can't even downgrade. I really don't care about departure/arrival schedules for airports... this does not seem right to me. I guess that breaks one of the core rules of the interface design - of least surprise. (or recurring one that turns into a severe irritation).
  - 12y ago
Mithaldu 12y ago
A small note that bears repeating: Most of the big money-maker IAPs are so devious because they sell the same thing that people 20 years ago got from gaming magazines: Cheat codes. The difference: These cheat codes work only once.
- stickydink 12y ago
  20 years ago it was perfectly normal for kids to be pouring money into arcade machines in exchange for 5 minutes of gameplay. Then be be told to pay more, fast, or lose all progress. Doesn't seem very different to me?
  - patrickk 12y ago
    Well those kids didn't have their parents' credit card hooked up to the arcade machine.
  - kevingadd 12y ago
    The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins in to play, and you put more coins in to continue when you lose. If you were good, pretty much every arcade game out there could be completed on one credit. It wasn't terribly unusual for someone to get good enough to do that. F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely. Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill has zero bearing on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon-building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive barriers as a lever to get you to spend money. Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion. In comparison, F2P games are designed around the assumption that players will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who do pay, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.
eric_h 12y ago
It seems to me as though iOS 8 addresses all the concerns raised here (at least regarding "[Apple having] no firm commitment and no timing hav[ing] been provided for the implementation of such possible future changes.")
sergiotapia 12y ago
Great news. My kids ask me to buy a game for him on our iPad and when I find a free game, I don't want my kid coming back to me 20 minutes later with a screen asking to buy more 'tokens'. Fuck that. Thank you Google for leading the way with this. Free should be free as in the entire thing for free. Or let me pay for the damn thing once and let me go about my day.
cheepin 12y ago
I like the idea, but I'm worried about Google getting bullied into policies, especially on their own ecosystem.
chrismcb 12y ago
This really sucks because now it will be harder to find these free games. Just because you can't control you or your kid from in app purchases why must everyone else suffer?

40 points by jcr 12y ago

spindritf 12y ago

Another non-issue like cookies.

danmaz74 12y ago
It's clear you don't have children who play on a tablet.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Why would children should have a tablet in the first place? Can't they just play on consoles?
  - mahouse 12y ago
    Well, that's pointless, now that most games in consoles offer in-app purchases, in the form of DLCs, etc.
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      Why do they need Internet connections?
      - mahouse 12y ago
        Because most games, even those for young kids such as Pokémon, have multiplayer capabilities.
- hxw 12y ago
  Should Apple and Google be responsible for what the children are doing on a tablet/mobile phone? Does not an in-app purchase require the password for an account connected to a credit card?
  - samuel 12y ago
    Not by default, at least in Android.
    - hxw 12y ago
      Ah, I didn't know that.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    IIRC, on Android the password isn't required if a payment was done recently (like in 15-20 minutes). That's fairly convenient if you're a sole account user and you went on a shopping spree, but if you share the device/account with someone... The complaint I've read was that if a kid persuades parent to pay for an in-game option then for a brief time they can (intently or not) make further purchases without proper authorization. Or something along those lines. Not sure whenever this is still the case nowadays or had already been fixed - last time I've made payments on Play Store was months ago.
    - kuschku 12y ago
      Per default not, it just asks you every time you enter the password if you'd like to enable that 15 minute feature.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  So, the real issue is allowing to preform in-app payment by unauthorized party, not the "free" labeling (which is disguising and disgusting in my opinion, but is an old marketing trick that doesn't seem to have obvious solution).
- spain 12y ago
  Set some parental controls? Don't authorize them to use your credit card? Don't let them use the device at all if there's nothing else you can do? I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids but you can prevent it without any government intervention with a little responsibility on your part. You wouldn't give your child a credit card and let them loose in a toy store either.
  - mfringel 12y ago
    Ignoring everything in that last statement after the "but", you say: I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids Agreed. Google is doing something about that.
  - watwut 12y ago
    The trouble with parental controls used to be that they worked differently then advertised. Parent configured password, but there was grace periods of password-less 15 minutes after each buy which was not explained to user. You had to follow tech news to know about it. Or, parent configured password, but the password was required only for app store, not for IAP. Apple store does not allow you to download anything, not even free apps, if you do not have credit card set up. So, if you wanted anything on that device, you had to configure it there. Essentially, parental controls are getting better slowly, but only lately and under pressure of regulators. The other issues are already existing regulations about marketing targeted at children and when the word "free" is a lie. EU restricts kids targeted advertisements in general and has rules against lies in advertisements. A lot of debate is friction about whether app stores should follow the same rules as everybody else and how to interpret those rules in apps.
    - mitchty 12y ago
      I think ios8 will really help out with the whole situation of needing credit cards to be tied to an account. Not that that helps right now but I tested it out and it is pretty damn impressive. Glad I don't have kids right now though so I don't need to deal with it at all. >.<

NietTim 12y ago

Yes, this is pretty old news...

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

In app purchases exist because there is no free market for apps - everything is purchased through two portals, who set the expected prices and act as unsupervised quality controllers. Because the prices are so low in app purchases and super-star hits are the only ways to profit. If there was a free market here, there would not be any need for this, products would be priced at sustainable levels, and I as a parent would never ever ever purchase a game that had in app purchases. I would rather that I could download apps from anywhere and there was still a rating and quality mechanism. Many options exist for that. But I will take this as an alternative I think the European Union has this weird attitude that a free market works the best and where there is no free market then there should be regulation to guide the path towards the ideal, or there should be protection against the excesses of the unfree market. I, in the main, agree. It all kind of depends on your definition of free and regulation.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
How would an open market fix this? Consumers have shown they no longer want to pay for anything. Movies, music, or apps. There are some people though who are happy to pay large amounts of money. In-app purchases allow those people to spend and the people who don't want to pay don't have to. In a more open market consumers still wouldn't want to pay for apps so in-app purchases would still be necessary.
- perlpimp 12y ago
  At least giving way for paid upgrades should sort of fix that, giving developers genuine motive not to produce this crap. I have been annoyed by upgrades to apps that litter screen with triggers to buy new stuff. For example flightradar24 I bought a full version of the app. In an update they positioned tiggers on every city to get me to buy upgrade for every city to view departure and arrival time. Suddenly my app is visually broken and I have to pay for the upgrade to fix it. And I can't even downgrade. I really don't care about departure/arrival schedules for airports... this does not seem right to me. I guess that breaks one of the core rules of the interface design - of least surprise. (or recurring one that turns into a severe irritation).
- 12y ago

Mithaldu 12y ago

A small note that bears repeating: Most of the big money-maker IAPs are so devious because they sell the same thing that people 20 years ago got from gaming magazines: Cheat codes. The difference: These cheat codes work only once.

stickydink 12y ago
20 years ago it was perfectly normal for kids to be pouring money into arcade machines in exchange for 5 minutes of gameplay. Then be be told to pay more, fast, or lose all progress. Doesn't seem very different to me?
- patrickk 12y ago
  Well those kids didn't have their parents' credit card hooked up to the arcade machine.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins in to play, and you put more coins in to continue when you lose. If you were good, pretty much every arcade game out there could be completed on one credit. It wasn't terribly unusual for someone to get good enough to do that. F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely. Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill has zero bearing on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon-building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive barriers as a lever to get you to spend money. Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion. In comparison, F2P games are designed around the assumption that players will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who do pay, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.

eric_h 12y ago

It seems to me as though iOS 8 addresses all the concerns raised here (at least regarding "[Apple having] no firm commitment and no timing hav[ing] been provided for the implementation of such possible future changes.")

sergiotapia 12y ago

Great news. My kids ask me to buy a game for him on our iPad and when I find a free game, I don't want my kid coming back to me 20 minutes later with a screen asking to buy more 'tokens'. Fuck that. Thank you Google for leading the way with this. Free should be free as in the entire thing for free. Or let me pay for the damn thing once and let me go about my day.

cheepin 12y ago

I like the idea, but I'm worried about Google getting bullied into policies, especially on their own ecosystem.

chrismcb 12y ago

This really sucks because now it will be harder to find these free games. Just because you can't control you or your kid from in app purchases why must everyone else suffer?