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.
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> 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.
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.