Divide and conquer. It's gaming and software apps now. It'll be bank transactions and commerce later on.

A 1% "Apple Platform Safety Fee" on Robinhood wouldn't surprise me....

Sounds like you’re complaining about a hypothetical future where they charge less than Visa and MasterCard?

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...

No, in this world they will charge on top of Visa and Mastercard.

What about funding your robinhood account from your bank and not a card, so neither you nor robinhood pay transaction fees?

Bank rails still cost money on a per transaction basis.

ACH costs a few cents per transaction. I’ve never seen a company pass this on to their customers.

> If they did it with bank transactions, Apple Pay, Venmo, Robinhood, etc then people would be up in arms.

Would they? Don't they literally already do this too?

Isn't Apple Card https://www.apple.com/apple-card/ them literally skimming off the top of every financial transaction, despite them doing nothing but provide a branded whitelabeled Goldman Sachs Mastercard? (admittedly, a very pretty fancy card)

I don't think the general population will ever be terribly up in arms with Apple's behaviour anymore, so long as Apple keeps forcing other businesses to hide Apple's taxes/fees/cuts for them.

A credit card with standard transaction fees and interest is very different than taking 30% of every transaction on the platform while also having the power to forbid venders on the platform from increasing their prices to make up the difference.

> A credit card with standard transaction fees

But they're only standard because the credit cards asserted these fees, we got used to them, and now they seem obvious, right? (I remember plenty of merchants who used not to accept credit cards to avoid the fees, but, whether by bank pressure or just the weight of expectation, there aren't many of those any more.)

It surely won't be too long until these fees are 'standard' too, in the sense that they're totally usual and customary, whether or not they're reasonable.

> (I remember plenty of merchants who used not to accept credit cards to avoid the fees, but, whether by bank pressure or just the weight of expectation, there aren't many of those any more.)

It's a difference between small merchants and large merchants. Small merchants still feel free to refuse cards or charge higher prices when you use them. Large merchants aren't free to refuse (too much of a customer loss) or to charge (against the credit company terms).

Absolutely agree, but it's not that much different than expecting a tax on every Venmo/PayPal/Robinhood transaction on the store (if I'm reading this correctly, this is a thing Cook just implied they might do in sworn testimony today)

At the end of the day it's all about power, price and value. A small transaction fee to handle payment processing is reasonable, since everyone creates value for everyone somewhere.

A tax for existence on a platform is just rent seeking and increases prices for everyone but Apple. That's not desirable and likely illegal.

The worst case scenario is Spotify-cation of services where Apple used the App Store to identify popular services, counters with their own, and then charges extortionate fees such that they cannot compete with Apple's native services. I would be concerned if we start seeing an Apple Brokerage.

Apple Pay doesn't have a direct competitor in Venmo since Venmo is about payment processing between people who don't normally deal with credit card processing, and cross platform functionality is the biggest value prop. Apple Pay isnt a threat unless it works on all platforms equally.