Besides, isn't the competition here what we want? Apple IAP are still easier, and probably will convert at a higher rate than pushing a user outside the app to do the payment on a website, so there's still incentives for developers to use them. If Apps switch away from IAP, then Apple is incentivised to actually compete (imagine that!!) and make something better that developers actively want to use.
It says something about the state of competition where Netflix can just say "no, we no longer want people to sign up on an iPhone and give us money". That says they don't think IAP is good, and Apple should actually work on building something that companies want to use.
In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.
It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.
Apple couldn’t previously require payment flow through Apple’s payment systems, as evidenced by apps like Audible where you have no purchasing in the app and just have access to the content that you purchased through their website. Since Apple couldn’t outright force app vendors to monetize through Apple payment channels, their cudgel has been to ensure that app vendors have no way to link to external purchase options in the app, and hope that this was inconvenient enough for app vendors that they would choose to integrate with Apple’s payment channels. And it worked for most, but not all of them. Some apps, like Audible, just chose to live with having no way to sell anything from the app.
If Apple can’t even do that, they lose the ability to provide for their customers a consistent payment experience across apps.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/8/21506995/apple-forced-in-...
> “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”
> Today, Apple confirmed to us once again that the rule is more lenient than it sounds: “free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool” don’t need to use IAP as long as the apps themselves don’t offer purchases, and as long as the apps themselves don’t ask users to make purchases outside the app.
And developers will have the right to offer a cheaper non-centralized in-house IAP payment system, of course.
Apple pay is like a credit card, usable like one. IAP is the method by which apple forces app developers who sell through their app to pay the apple tax.
Depends what you mean. The subtlety that is always lost in these conversation on HN is how deep does the competition have to go? I don't think anyone seriously argues that iPhones do not have viable competition in the smartphone market. And yet, if I as a consumer want to use a smartphone which places strong restrictions on third-party developers (which is one of the most significant reason I use iPhones and recommend them to friends and family), somehow those restrictions are considered "anti-competitive." If these restrictions are lifted or prohibited, that clearly removes one of the key differences between iPhones and their competitors (mostly Android phones), and it baffles me that this could be construed as a more competitive smartphone market for consumers.
Malware isn't under the probe here; IAP is. Apple's behavior has been objectively awful specifically concerning the subject being discussed. Broadening the argument to Apple's desirable curation process is a misrepresentation of the issue.
People will continue to be able to enjoy the convenience of Apple IAP. Savvy users might seek better prices externally - but convenience does hold immense value. Developers can now also, as a pertinent example, ask for donations for open source projects without being taken down.
Had third party app stores/sideloading been allowed to happen as epic demanded, that would have made it impossible for any app sufficiently large enough to demand it from their users.
The risk here was very much a return to the Google/FB “gift cards for root access” scheme, minus the gift cards of course, if they had prevailed they would have just blocked web access to iOS and just demanded you root yourself for them if you want to use their service.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
Mayne then we would have PWAs that work the same way everywhere.
The existence of competition might even motivate Apple themselves to adopting new video codecs and image formats that weren’t invented inside of Apple Hq.
The plaintiff here is a developer, not a fan of any specific device.
"Just don't develop for the phone, then."
Great, who's going to pay out the lost sales?
Also, assuming I "just don't buy an Apple device," I can [legally] develop an app on my Windows or Linux device?
Only Google?[1]
In addition, there's a very steep slippery slope in use here. It is currently possible to sideload on Android, and has been since day one, and yet we don't see the kind of end result you have predicted.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/06/apple-hulu-special-api-...
> Apple's behavior has been objectively awful specifically concerning the subject being discussed.
Certainly not objectively. I would very strongly prefer an Apple ecosystem with no in-app purchases at all!
But it's not guaranteed to be, which is a huge loss for the app store IMO.
* lower IAP to 15% with an option to pay a higher dev license fee to lower it to maybe 7-10%.
* require that any IAP has an _option_ to use Apple’s IAP system within day 20% of the offsite price
* physical goods stay on the same system, but potentially offer some kind of carrot to implement Apple Pay
Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see the ruling as forcing Apple to lose money.
If I were Apple, I would have gone nuclear early on, and eliminated all % fees but made the annual fee per app of $X to each developer (whatever $ makes sense) and then you can collect money however you want. This would likely kill a lot of small app developers, but the big ones would not care. The ruling makes Epic a big winner, but everyone else loses in the long run, because Apple (and Google) will find a way to recover lost revenue.
Some people also want to have 1000 app stores allowed. Good luck with that one... imagine having to build an app store just for your app, or supporting 25 different app stores.
At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.
Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system, but I don’t play mobile games so I’m probably not representative of who this impacts the most.
The judge commented on that
>> "Apple created an innovative platform but it did not disclose its rules to the average consumer. Apple has used this lack of knowledge to exploit its position.
---
> Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system
You, as a consumer, will now have a choice, which you'll get to exercise! You will be able to send a market signal for products (either the service you might subscribe to, and Apple) to get better and attract more developers/users. This sounds like a win!
Not if I wasn't interested in having the choice to begin with. Now some apps will not be purchasable by me unless I go through their account flow, which I don't want to. It's strictly worse (for me).
They’re either already not on Apple’s IAP (Netflix or Spotify) or they are very sensitive to optimising conversions, and would pay a premium to give users an easier option (which Apple is now incentivised to lower)
App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.
Apple has never characterized the 30% as "payment processing" -- it's it's always characterized it as a commission, which the court affirmed and explicitly mentioned that Apple is allowed to pursue that commission, even if the developer chose to use another payment provider. Apple's IAP has been an enforcement mechanism for that 30% cut.
IAPs are only indirectly a product that app customers get a choice in; the primary customer is app developers who have vastly different interests. There may have to be a shift on some of these axes for Apple to compete on price.
IIRC, Epic was offering their in game currency more cheaply outside of the App Store, which Apple didn't like.
I bet plenty of people would use an alternate payment method to save money..right now they don't have that choice.
Every mobile game with a cash store would instantly give you a discount to go through a different provider.
Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service. It's consistent as well, which means I don't have to keep hunting through your site to find it because you hid the location of canceling behind "Please contact us to cancel" type crap.
Do I think Apple is charging too much for their cut? Yea, I do. But as a consumer, the benefits outweigh it. As a potential business owner, yea... I would be upset too.
This means that competition is working, because you would choose apple's IAP, over the third party, even if it was more expensive.
Aren't you heavily assuming these developers would even bother integrating apple's IAP? This ruling will allow the developers to completely go around apple and never use apple's IAP at all.
This doesn't require Apple's payment monopoly. IAP would just need to make an API call to some 3rd party API. Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?
This does not get you out of your contractual obligation to pay, if you have one. You could end up getting an annoying surprise from a debt collection agency a few years down the road. An important thing that Apple was able to provide that a credit card processor suspending payment can’t is to force the vendor to let you actually cancel the subscription, not just the payment.
Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
They can’t remove them, but they can prevent them from existing in the first place. It’s their platform, and they can and do make it a requirement that the app vendor’s subscription contract conform to a standard where ending the subscription from within Apple’s subscription management UI actually terminates all future obligations for the customer. This is why many subscriptions that are otherwise quite hard to end and involve deliberate inconveniences like requiring calling in during business hours can just be cancelled from the subscription page if they were started via the app.
> Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
This is just not correct. Vendors do this all the time, credit companies don’t care and have no policies against it, since it’s the customer’s responsibility to have a legal justification to tell the credit company to refuse charges, and the PR blowback is demonstrably nonexistent.
I prefer to subscribe to services through in-app purchases over the service's website itself because it's always easy to cancel subscriptions made through Apple, and I never forget I'm getting charged because I get payment receipts.
Most in-App purchases are in the range of 1-5$. If I pay a couple of cents more to have a unified experience, yeah sure.
It'd be interesting to see how much users spend on in-App purchases. For me it's almost nothing, maybe 1 purchase a year? The big money is probably in the free2play market where players spend a lot to buy booster packs or "gold".
> Judge seems alarmed at the extent to which impulse spending by "exorbitantly high spending gamers" drives App Store revenue.
> Says it's outside the scope of antitrust but says issue is "worthy of attention"
[1] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365652164493317
> "in most economic ways...the App Store is primarily a game store and secondarily an 'every other' app store"
[2] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365985800507394
This makes what is, IMO, an unjustified assumption: that competition in the payment scene will drive prices down for the same item based on payment method.
Instead, I think we'll see the same thing we see with the cash/credit card split: The same price regardless of your payment method, with price differences lining the publisher's pockets.
Honestly, yeah. I'm way more likely to click "subscribe at $5/mo using your normal payment flow" than go through a whole new account creation flow and wonder how cancellation will work somehow down the line or how trustworthy this vendor is with my data.
If I'm paying for a cross-platform service, I can happily use their own methods, but if I'm paying for an app-store only application which either runs only on iOS or macOS, good luck to them. I won't subscribe via their methods, because it makes my life more complicated.
This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing. The iOS App Store is filled with cheap apps, to the point where many people react to a one-time price of $9.99 as disturbingly expensive. Apps and games that are literally identical on iOS to other platforms are frequently cheaper in their iOS releases because that's what the market expects. So in practice, the 30% cost is usually being eaten by developers, not passed on to consumers. There's a lot of good arguments to be made for cutting that 30% share down to 15% for everyone across the board, but "now you'll only be charged $4.99 instead of $5.99 for this game you would have paid $14.99 for on the Switch version" just isn't one of them.
It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.
Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?
Do you not buy things online currently? Do you not use Amazon, or Lyft, or Netflix, or Spotify?
(I'm sure there will be some people upset at that kind of interfering overreach, but it's the kind of interfering overreach most of us would actually like.)
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
I think this is a fair argument, and I believe also shows that if options are available, that is where us as a consumer have our freedom. I also personally like the ability to quickly pay when needed for things using Apple, but in return - if I was able to pay for it because another offer, or option, or something was presented to me that was easier, I would totally take that that too. However, I can see how that would be a loss for the people writing and maintaining the app and the associated services.
The problem I see is that this swinging at the moment between a single payment gateway and every payment gateway out there is a huge pendulum that is swinging to the extremes of both, neither side actually gets anything good out of it.
It would be lovely in a world where the option was to use Apple + an external, and letting users decide what they feel safe with. Some will be happy going direct with Apple, some would be happier with <insert payment style here>.
I think it is mentioned below, I can see larger companies immediately dropping the Apple method because it loses them the extra profit, and just making the ecosystem harder. People lose faith in paying for services, and then another service comes along, charging 30%, and we are back where we started.
So yeah, IMHO, it is good it is being recognised, but at the same time, its going to be a bumpy ride.
It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.
If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.
Everyone: so could I get some regulation on [literally any exploitative startup practice”
HN, creepy smiling face: “haha eat shit”
The reaction to GDPR, or the Cali privacy law, or the Uber employee classification, or literally any other regulation* shows how hollow those words are. When anyone tries to regulate these sorts of things you’ll shriek like a banshee about how unfair these regulations are.
When you sell something through Apple, depending on the location of your user, Apple will act as Agent or as a Commissionaire. This makes everything easy, even for a solo developer. Sold an in-game coins in France? Apple collected the money, paid the VAT to the French government. If you do this through your own means, you will need to establish a relationship with the French government so that you can pay them the VAT that you have to collect from your users.
This will ultimately benefit large companies who can jump through the hops of managing all this, putting the independent developers in a disadvantaged position due to the high barrier of entry into improved margin(compared to Apple Store where everyone gets the same cut) payments. In some places you can be required to send a printed receipt to the user.
It would not be fun to watch, let's say Zynga, collecting their low cost payments across all their portfolio by making users sign up once and having indie games instantly losing a payment or falling back to high commission options because users are tired of entering payment info for each game.
Sad day for the little guy. Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission or is it Epic, Netflix, Spotify who will benefit from this? Unless you do low margin commission work (like platform where you take a cut, i.e. online tutoring) the %30 commission is a non issue.
Game crystals don't really have a cost, so %5 cut or %30 cut doesn't really matter that much. However, one company having access to the %5 and other not having access to it will change the landscape because the large company will be able to advertise more thanks to its better margins, wiping out the rest.
Pay With --- Apple IAP ($1.43) - Stripe IAP ($1.06) - Paypal IAP ($1.06)
They will add something like a bonus if you choose the alternative ones. I'm baffled why people expect that the margin will go to the user. Do you think that Epic sued Apple because altruism? To help users save money? They are are after the margins.
Because of the "Your Local payment" option, binary sizes will grow(Uber has this problem, they need to ship the framework of numerous payment providers on every market) or you will start maintaining different binaries for each country.
Also, each payment provider will come with its own rules. One will say "this is too close to gambling, no unless put this text next to the price to clarify" the other will be like "is this related to crypto, you can't do that", the next one will be "I think you must provide 3 months refund guarantee. Also, coins allowed boxes not allowed".
Then you will have to do the legal work for each country separately or work with publishers who do that for you for a hefty cut.
The business side of things is a full time job. That's why when you publish a book or release a song you tend to get tiny amount of the price payed.
I am afraid, this fragmentation has the potential to turn the App&Game business into Books&Music business where you don't make money unless you are superstar.
> Today, we’re also introducing a new way to pay on iOS and Android: Epic direct payment.
> When you choose to use Epic direct payments, you save up to 20% as Epic passes along payment processing savings to you.
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/news/the-fortnite-mega-dr...
That's normal business behavior. Why would it have to be "charity" or some kind of fake "PR stunt"?
Do some do it right? Sure! A lot will pocket the extra profit.
If it was 30% you would absolutely see gas stations advertising a hot deal 20% lower cash-only price to draw in customers.
As a result, unless you are a huge publisher you don't actually have a realistic chance to sell over alternate low-cost methods. This is not because you can't put the code there but because it will make the user experience so bad that a fraction of your users will proceed.
It's not about being technically possible but it's about being feasible. It doesn't matter that you can technically do it if not enough people want to play along and deal with it.
Then don't add the friction! Just continue to use Apple's payment system.
Nobody is forcing app developers to use different payment processors.
> but because it will make the user experience so bad that a fraction of your users will proceed.
Then don't use it! Just use Apple.
If you are an indie, you don't have access to the 180 million people, which creates uneven competition.
When the only payment in town is Apple IAP, you and Epic have the same margin. Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin with at about the same level of friction. If you need to match Epic's margin, you need to introduce friction.
Are there App devs on this site anymore? It feels like arguing with people who have no idea.
Yes they will... They will have access to same exact Apple In App Purchases feature that they had before.
> Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin
Ok, so then it is not about you having access to the exact same thing that you had before.
Instead, it is that other developers, have more money, and don't have to pay an Apple fee.
Thats pretty different.
You are not complaining about losing something. Instead, you are complaining that other developers, have to pay a lower fee than they had before. But you still have exactly the same thing as you had before.
Generally speaking, lowering costs are not something to complain about.
Lower costs are good.
It's simply not good for the smaller developers. How more clear I can be? Tough luck, go be a large corp then you say?
That is very different from companies paying less money to a multi trillion dollar company. Companies paying less to a multi trillion dollar company is a good thing.
It is dishonest to equate that to necessary government services being underfunded.
Lower costs are good. So no, I reject that this is bad for small developers.
It is most bad for apple, as they get less money.
> Tough luck
There is no tough luck. Smaller developers can continue to pay the same amount as they were paying before.
It’s so frustrating.
The only different is that now, some companies, have the ability of no longer having to pay large amounts of money to a multi-trillion dollar company (apple).
That is a win.
The fact that less companies have to pay many millions and millions of dollars, to one of the most valuable companies in the world, is a win.
And small companies, still have access to the same exact programs that they had before.
It sounds like you should be using some kind of service that does that for you, maybe even provided by Apple?
> Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission
Independent devs seemed pretty happy overall with the 15% concession they already got as a result of the legal scrutiny on Apple. No doubt they'll enjoy further improvements to the terms once there is an actual threat of switching.
The lower the commission, the better. That should be obvious, but it is not better if it comes at cost that is potentially much higher than the reduction of commission.
Apple will probably pivot quickly to allowing you to use Apple Pay for this. A small commission and metadata is better than nothing at all.
I do think this will have some effect that you describe (e.g. perhaps Epic suffers a breach in their payment system) on the end user side but it’s not as bad as the android store situation. if anything it will make iOS users more attractive to devs as they can now keep a larger percentage of IAP sales.
But when IAP costs less than 30% I expect all paid apps to go the IAP route.
It's just another payment processor. It often shows up beside "add a credit card" in apps. I use it to order food, pay for rideshare, buy tickets, etc.
https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/7159343?hl=...
Buying physical goods and services may not count, in the same way that they don't count on the Apple App Store.
Same distinction exists on Apple's side with IAP vs. Apple Pay. For example Apple Pay on the Web ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w... ) doesn't take anywhere close to a 30% cut. In fact it, like Google Pay, is also free for merchants, who just have to pay the normal payment processor fees. https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/apple-pay-for-small-bu...
this is not an unresolvable issue though. Apple could force developers to make their payment option as the default payment option similar to how they forced devs to use Sign in with Apple (when they have third party login). Big companies like PayPal could provide an SDK which can be used by devs to complete trasaction similar to web. I could think of many more ways to solve this issue.
Lowering prices increases the number of jobs available, and the only cost is that Apple loses some amount of it's astronomical profits.
I would absolutely take all the savings from the fee drop and hire as many people as it allowed, napkin calculations says that’s between four and five for me.
In all likely hood things will get worse for consumers. I will definite not buy apps requiring custom payment platforms. Hopefully it’ll settle on stripe companies will offer multiple payment methods rather than trying to force their own.
I look forward to it making Apple lower its IAP fees for everyone. I’d still like to use their infrastructure, but without the enormous fees (15% for small devs is still huge).
If App A requires you to use their payment gateway and App B uses apple pay, use App B.
I imagine this will cause a sort of race to the bottom where apple will lower its own fees to match.
Customers can choose what they want to succeed, but none of the choices should have strong moral implications. I shouldn’t have to choose between destroying the env. or not, or support crushing rival businesses or workers rights or not, etc.
So no, I don’t think it’s customers burden to have companies behave. Except if by “burden” you mean suing the companies collectively.
Do you think the banks are going to foot that bill? Of course not: it's us, the consumers.
Are you willing to have everything be a bit more expensive, for everyone, so that you, apple users, can have something a tiny bit more convenient?
Some businesses in my town still do this. When I see it, the only thing I think is "they must be committing light tax fraud". Maybe it's wrong, but I know what merchants pay for CC transactions and it doesn't justify the whining from business owners who have been accepting cards for decades and suddenly decided CC transactions were unprofitable because business is slumping /rant.
It is fairly common in geographies where CC providers can't litigate/enforce easily . It is not a penal crime, only a contract violation between two private parties and settled in arbitration/civil courts .
[1] Such Merchants also may commit tax fraud if they don't declare the cash income for tax purposes, that however is not directly related to Credit Cards or payment medium and usually even if they do commit tax fraud, they don't pass on their tax benefits for GST/VAT or Income Tax (10+% in most countries) to the customer.
> A PCN cannot stop you from offering your customers a discount or another incentive for using a certain method of payment, as long as you offer it to all your customers and disclose the offer clearly and conspicuously. For example, you can offer your customers a discount or a coupon if they pay with cash or a debit card rather than a credit card.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/new...
Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30) is willing to eat this fee, presumably because of the benefits of vastly lower fraudulent transactions and chargebacks.
There are also standards like Web Payments.
edit: I was instantly downvoted without any discussion, which doesn't add to the conversation. The reason I ask is because that's what the key value add is of Apple's IAP - I know that my payment method is accepted on the app store.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have gotten greedy...
This is the problem with major companies that think they can just control everything. Then when the government steps in they say what they were doing is anti-competitive and suddenly the consumers now have to bear the brunt of the negative aspect of full on competition. Had Apple just been reasonable and not charged egregious fees from the get go, this wouldn't have been an issue.
I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it's unfortunate we have to make a tradeoff at all.
Hopefully, this move will put downward pressure on Apple's payment infrastructure that incentivizes devs to keep using Apple payments because it's the same fee structure as whatever 3rd party they might move towards.