If Apple wins appeal, they’ll happily and quickly reinstate the fees. It’ll be the app developers who then get stuck paying the fees because, as you mentioned, their users will be used to it and there’s no going back.
The extent to which "it's our platform so you don't have any rights" has been applied is ridiculous.
Might as well ask if unicorns are real. Apple only wins the appeal if they bribe the judges. The only reason they've gotten away with it for so long is the U.S. DOJ was unwilling to enforce antitrust laws after the Microsoft debacle.
4 years ago some people were still swallowing the security or privacy argument, and users didn't understand what they were missing. This time any of these facades will be broken to death.
I'm curious about what happened.
Your discoverability is massively impaired, we already knew that. You also give Apple 30% of your cash.
Free app + external web purchase = maximum discoverability at 0% tax.
When things get more advanced, that web purchase link will be an authenticated URL - meaning one click to open the web browser already logged in. Register a protocol handler, remember their card information (or, ironically, use Apple Pay), and one tap in the app, a flash of the web browser, and they’re back in the app with purchase complete.
Apple needs to address this at WWDC. In the US and EU, there are zero, heck, negative advantages of selling on the App Store. All pain, all fees, no benefit of any kind. That’s a big deal.
Higher conversion rate.
b) Buying a product through IAP is one click. Versus having to go to a signup page, provide details, enter credit card details, wait for credit card verification flows etc. The drop off in conversions during this can be often greater than 15%.
c) Apple's centralised subscription management has been extremely useful and consumer friendly. Versus having to now deal with NY Times style scam tactics for every subscription again.
By the effort developers putting into payment-flows I would say they aren't, but depending on the volume it could be purely for short-term gain.
They will blame the app developers for raising prices.
Bottom line: I wouldn’t expect many discounts here.
Plenty of them already do. Google's services (YouTube Premium and others), for example, are $5/mo more expensive if you purchase them via Apple IAP. Spotify memberships are 30% more expensive on Apple. There are countless other examples. They just weren't allowed to advertise the cheaper option on iOS until now.
Even if a particular list price doesn’t change, I’d expect more frequent and deeper sales.
In a less competitive market for a good or service (due to lack of antitrust enforcement) there should still be discounts, in proportion to the residual competitiveness. E.g. the mobile game market is very competitive, so I’d expect more discounts vs. the video entertainment market where there has been a lot of aggregation.
I've also heard Netflix has suspended all in app subscriptions and is only going to link to their website for sign ups. I'm unsure if that will translate into savings, but I suspect you're going to see more of this behavior as well.
The 30% / 15% tax is very real and companies that don't have to pay that will be better positioned in the long run, so I imagine even if the price is the same, they'll be able to pocket more revenue doing this as well
I suspect this won't affect games much, except for the exceedingly big ones like Fortnite, but I treat that as a whole separate sector at this point.
This means a lot! It reveals how long developers were waiting for this day to come.
What, why? They can complete the purchase flow in a browser instead of the app. What is lost?
I'm not convinced;
Planned obsolescence, repair issues, phone-home privacy issues, vendor lock-in, etc
Apple is certainly innovative which helps consumers, but that's about it. The rest is bare minimum for the price point.
It's literally a major difference in their fundamental business models.
Sure, they changed the rules on paper, but who's policing their algorithm? Nobody. They can tank my keywords overnight and call it "normal fluctuation."
FAANG will be fine, but indies? Gentle reminder that ASO funnels have no customer support. Might just suddenly "stop working."
Anyone else afraid to pull the trigger on this?
Now if Amazon could also fix the incredibly frustrating, long-standing bug of their iOS app where tapping the screen anywhere does not turn pages, but instead toggles through "page numbers" -> "time left in chapter" -> "time left in book" etc., I'd be happy with it.
I've never seen that bug. Now, if you tap it near the bottom on the left-hand side, it toggles through that, by design (just as it does on the Kindle tablets)...
Drives me crazy, and I only swipe to turn pages at this point, which prevents it, but is somewhat uncomfortable.
They could also implement that independent of the injunction, which applies to steering rules.
They actually can't, not with the latest ruling that unlocked this Kindle change. Apple annoyed the judge enough with their shenanigans that she shut this down, too. The ruling reads (emphasis mine): "Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users *nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases*."
You still need that to get on the platform. They could charge based on the relative size of the business. Why not charge Netflix 50K? They won't give up the platform and the consumer - even for Netflix - likely wouldn't enjoy going to the web browser exclusively.
Perhaps that pushes more PWA's but really, I doubt the big corps would balk at this.
Their scale would need to be exceedingly reasonable to keep the smaller shops from rioting though.
Apple wants to mandate a review? That's fine. Charge developers for the reviewers' time with a reasonable profit margin, and Apple _already_ charges $100 a year for access to the AppStore.
Unfortunately the article does not answer what the button does, which is quite relevant.
Does it send the user to the amazon website (which would be allowed under the new rule)? Or does it complete the purchase inside the app using the credit card Amazon has on file for the user without paying Apple anything (which would be quite the affront towards Apple)?
I'd have expected it to actually make the purchase using my card on file with my Amazon account, just like the physical Kindle does.
> By selecting ‘Get Book’ within the Kindle for iOS app, customers can now complete their purchase through their mobile web browser.
Perhaps it’s because I have a membership that they’re allowed to bypass the Apple store somehow? I never thought about it until just now.
The fact that it took LEGAL ACTION to get basic functionality that existed on Kindle e-readers from day one speaks volumes about how these tech giants operate. They'll happily degrade user experience to avoid paying each other's extortionate fees while pretending it's about "ecosystem integrity" or some other corporate doublespeak.
And let's not forget Apple's brilliant solution to the court ruling - a slightly smaller 27% tax instead of 30%! How generous! This whole situation perfectly illustrates the duopoly stranglehold that's been choking app developers for years.
The most telling part? Amazon "probably isn't going to change its mind about avoiding Apple's 30 percent cut." So even with the court ruling, we're still stuck with a half-measure solution because two trillion-dollar companies can't figure out how to play nice without extracting maximum profit at users' expense.
Wake me up when either of these companies actually puts user experience ahead of their bottom line.
Everyone screaming about how happy they are about this seem to be ignoring the fact that Apple is not a charity
OTOH, every Apple owner I know has an AppleCare plan. And has had to use it. Multiple times. For nearly every device they own. And this is a sample population of over a thousand over more than a decade.
Yes, Apple service is great. I couldn't tell you what Dell Service is like, or Lenovo, or HP, because I've never had to use them. PC laptops and Android phones...just work.
And given that Androids are more popular in the parts of the world where reliability is essential, it's pretty clear that most of the world agrees that Apples are the inferior device.
In general I think centralized stores are customer friendly but anti developer. As a less controversial example, see how many gamers will wait months or years for a game to leave the Epic game store and go on Steam.
Also this is an article about Kindle adding an option which wasn't there before. Apple wasn't getting the money either way.
This comes off as incredibly bought-in to Apple PR, and if you’re not on their payroll, I don’t understand why you’re carrying water for them so aggressively.
First of all, the incredibly high margin hardware more than “pays for” the development of all the parts that make that hardware useful including iOS. We all know this.
Apple makes a tremendous amount of profit, both gross and net. This will dent their top line and their bottom line a bit. It will not make the iPhone a money-losing platform. “Not making as much pure profit as your near-monopoly status might theoretically allow you to if there were no antitrust laws” does not imply “that money will have to be made up somewhere.” They may end up being only “wildly, amazingly profitable” instead of “wildly, absurdly, amazingly profitable.” They don’t “have to” make up any particular amount of money.
Whether that upsets their shareholders including their mega billionaire CEO, is just the breaks. It is quite fitting for a group of people who enjoyed all those amazing profits from Apple’s monopolistic behavior so far — money that I might point out, isn’t even being required to be paid back.
they're lucky they're not being made to pay it all back, plus interest
iOS has gotten progressively worse every year since 2012. It may not be the worst idea to turn off the tap.
Which, presumably, means their legal teams examine the case and think that the appeal won't succeed.
Though there is always the possibility that it was relatively inexpensive to implement, and the increased sales in the meanwhile during the legal battle will outweigh the cost of changing it.
Android devices and PC laptops don't need service plans. But as you've demonstrated, Apple products do. Even the $4500 ones.
Per the article: "Apple can no longer collect a 27 percent commission on purchases made outside of apps or restrict how developers can direct users to alternate payment options"
This now allows folks to direct users to alternate methods. Before this the Kindle app would just say something along the lines of "you can't get a book here, please use the website".
> 3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
> 3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.
The bit about the (formerly required in the US) entitlement is:
> Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to create or manage an account.
They required you use a trackingless, generic URL that was unvarying per user, so you probably didn't run into it super often. Offhand, the Kobo app did use it.
Also, problem solved, just use Apple Pay on the checkout page. Ironic, but royalty free, and one-click to enable in Stripe.
The justification would be something like, "a more equitable and transparent system that aligns costs with platform usage and developer access to the user base, while also potentially fostering a more diverse and competitive app ecosystem" (generated)
For C, customers can choose to continue using Apple's subscription management if they think it's worth the 30% premium that Apple charges. Or Apple could reduce the price to something more reasonable (Stripe Billing offers a similar feature set and costs 0.7%).
I love having a single dashboard for all my subscriptions and having an easy way to cancel them.
I’m sure it’s substantial over the years. As for point C, I really don’t care, every monopoly has had at least some advantages. We could make this even better by giving Visa a monopoly and having them build a web portal.
Hi, it's me, a Banana. I promise I'm a real life human being though and not being paid by anyone relevant to this.
The way Apple has set this up is generally preferentially friendly to consumers over developers. Since I'm a consumer in this situation, not a developer, that benefits me.
The developers put up with it because that's the only way to access Apple's customer base. Presumably if we remove that requirement and allow them to do less consumer-friendly things that are more profitable they will choose to do so. Since I'm a consumer in this situation, not a developer, that does not benefit me.
So yes, even if I had to pay Apple's fee, I see an extra $2-4/mo as a rounding error on some service for a $1500 device and don't mind paying it to have the 800 pound gorilla going to bat for me. I have never have to deal with confusing or misleading subscriptions, length unsubscribe processes full of dark patterns, "oops we forgot", terrible customer support, or anything else.
I'm happy for this to be a choice, but I'm worried it _won't_ be a choice--developers will switch off on to other payment providers and abandon Apple's subscriptions/payments. I'd be fully behind this if it were a requirement that you had to _also_ offer subscription through Apple, even at some sort of premium.
Price sensitive folks go to MVNOs with off brand or lower spec devices - the equivalent to Dr Thunder at WalMart.
Apple is dominant in the US because they got their ass kicked in the services space by Google and learned their lesson. iCloud is an incredible platform today.
There’s really two androids. “Fancy Android” with Samsung Galaxy and Nexus - nice phones whose users seek them out. “Dumb Android” with customers steered by price or phone guys getting spiffed. The users don’t know or care about the device and have low value. The reality is, as with soda, the cheap product is marginally cheaper, but less pleasant and usually a poor value.
Up till now, situations like Kindle were just weird quirks to most people and most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you why you can’t do this very normal-seeming thing on iOS. If/when Apple takes it away, it’ll be obvious to everyone what’s going on.
No one is blaming Apple for it.
Niche app that sells at a higher price than your average app. Ie my users have disposable income but the Android users don’t like to pay for higher priced apps like iOS users will.
I'm thinking more about web versus AppStore. AppStore discovery just sucks.
- you haven't updated the app in a long time - you're somewhere outside the United States
Is either of those true?
Maybe having the newest model the week it comes out confers some status amongst those who can tell the difference. Everyone else just slaps a case on it and no one knows what generation you have.
- Substantially poorer performance
- Keyboard is less accurate
- YouTube videos can’t be played on the lock screen without some tricks
- Apple Maps (it is basically at parity now, however).
- Translate feature doesn’t have a copy button
- The storage bug
- No option for manual cache clearing
- SMB protocol doesn’t work with Windows and doesn’t display error messages
- File transfers are substantially more complicated than they used to be because they want you to pay for iCloud (the workaround here is installing VLC which gives you a drag-and-drop folder you can use through iTunes)
- Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)
I haven’t used the most recent versions of iOS so I don’t know if some of these have been addressed.
Sure it does. It’s labeled “Copy Translation”. It’s the first button under the translation for un-editable text.
> - Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)
Apps that aren’t working in the background shut down effectively as soon as they lose focus. Don’t let the list of screenshots fool you – those aren’t running. Don’t waste your time swiping them away.
I’m talking about the Translate app, not the in-line translator. If your text exceeded a certain length in the Translate app you couldn’t even select it. They might have fixed it in subsequent versions, but I wouldn’t know.
Just selected text. Pressed translate. It says “copy translation”…
Opened up image. Translated text. Pressed copy translation.
> Keyboard is less accurate
I actually find androids default keyboard less accurate when typing or using the predictive text. I use the swipe to text all the time on iPhone.
> - Multitasking (apps should shut down after some time spent idle, instead they have to be manually closed)
lol no
> - No option for manual cache clearing
Never needed to clear cache?
It sounds like you just don’t like apple to be honest. Finding things to nitpick. I have a pixel phone and iPhone so I can do testing and while I have no issues with the pixel. I much prefer iOS. It just works, feels more consistent, and the phone is faster than the pixel despite it being a iPhone 13. It’s still as fast as when I bought it, while the pixel just feels slow compared to when I bought it a year ago, and it’s mainly used for testing…
This is obnoxious and you’re wrong about it.
> It sounds like you just don’t like apple to be honest.
Astute, I don’t.
> It just works
It doesn’t.
Waiwaiwait. Hold the phone.
That’s GOOGLE’s decision, not Apple’s. This whole thread is a circle jerk about how Apple doesn’t let developers do what they want. It’s a general purpose computer and all that. This is an example of what happens when Apple doesn’t prevent developers from doing something anti-consumer.
No one but irrelevant nerds think this. And the market has demonstrated this time and time again.
Most people think of phones as being console-like entertainment devices. And aren't interested in scams, malware, virus checkers etc that are needed in a free for all model.
And on iOS there are no virus protection apps, period.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.an...
> And on iOS there are no virus protection apps, period.
iOS has Avast, Avira, Lookout, etc. There are many, many virus protection apps on iOS.
It appears you don’t understand how iOS apps work. Have you ever tried building one?
For instance up until now you probably refused to register to Netflix or any other system that manages payments and subscription outside of Apple, and you can keep doing so.
Same way you probably didn't register PayPal integration that would have shifted part of the cancellation/refunds to PayPal. You of course didn't integrate PayPay either.
Basically you can keep being Apple only, as you always did. From the discovery documents, Apple didn't seem to give a damn about these and only discussed revenue regarding their policies, but you're free to see what you want in Apple's behavior.
i could buy different hardware, but apple is abusing their monopolist markets on order to buyout the good chips and prevent other hardware manufacturers from having access to equivalent tech.
if theyre gonna buy up all of a TSMC process, i should be able to run android on an iPhone
(Admittedly, I'm now waiting for the stories of users being surprised when they paid their FartTorchPRO app subscription via paypal.ru and finding their credit card details all over the darkweb.)
If it’s about security and privacy only, demand the ability to check out in an app using Apple’s own payment platform. Watch Apple squirm.
As for the subscription convenience, I know how to make this even better. Let’s give Visa and Stripe a monopoly on all transactions, and then have them build a unified subscription portal. Awesomeness!
https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com/post/...
I am not shedding any tears over developers not being able to nag me about why I’m cancelling, for example.
Same goes for all the shenanigans mentioned about variable pricing for different users.
I think a lot of devs are out of touch with what customers want: transparent pricing, easy cancellation, not worrying about the store running off with my credit card. How the costs are split up between Apple and the devs is jury not something anyone cares about.
Amazon has an incredibly generous return policy. This is a strange argument to make for the Kindle app.
Presumably a high end SoC.
I don't recall that defense saving Microsoft back in the day.
If you had cancelled Prime any time before mid-2023, you would not say this. Because if you had, you'd know Amazon Prime requires four successive cancellation screens where they change the position of the correct button to press each time. (And then a button which if you press immediately resubscribes you.)
Amazon itself referred to its cancellation process as Project Illiad: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...
You are not engaged in a good faith discussion. Peddle this nonsense to someone else.
Transferring you to a "customer loyalty specialist" when cancelling is also illegal if you refuse.
Don't worship Apple because they're a bit more "consumer friendly" (while cashing in 30% for the privilege!!) when you could have everything be customer friendly for free just by electing honest politicians.
If i were an app developer, maker of Skinner box games, or selling virtual products, i would feel differently. But I’m not, and allowing Amazon to extract more margin in exchange for cheapening my experience does nothing to benefit me.
Observe: 0.7 * 1.3 = 0.91.
And haha to the Dilbert.
