> If you have not switched to subscription billing by this November, your fans will not be able to purchase new memberships in the iOS app.
Basically, you just won't be able to make purchases via the iOS app. Which is just really not great for creators.
The per-creation billing is where this really stinks. I much prefer to have this all managed in Patreon rather than Apple. I'll be able to manage just fine, but this is going to cause confusion. Honestly, this is why the web is so important. At least you can still use the website to get around paying for this.
Whatever you get as a Patreon patron isn't typically a physical product, unlike something you buy on Amazon (generally speaking) or a physical car ride. It's closer to a Netflix or a newspaper subscription, and Apple wants 30% of those too.
Arbitrary Apple rules. Apple decided that "physical" goods & services in app purchases don't get taxed (e.g., clothes, uber rides). Digital goods do because they feel like they can get away with it which is why you can't buy eBooks from Kobo or Amazon on iOS, can't buy or rent movies from Google on iOS. People will tell you this is for "safety" and to keep you from getting scammed but there's nothing stopping malicious actors from creating apps that promise to ship physical goods and just don't. At least with digital goods you should get whatever you pay for immediately after purchase.
In many cases, it isn’t even a “purchase“ in any reasonable sense of the word - it’s a donation. Supporters don’t get anything other than knowing they’re helping a creator keep making something they like. This is akin to Apple wanting a 30% cut when you send your buddy $5 through Apple Pay. With this, Apple isn’t just interfering in business relationships, they’re interfering in personal relationships.
I’ve been pretty sympathetic to Apple in their tangles with the EU - I want my phone to be a locked-down appliance. But this is too far- it’s clear that Apple both has a lot of power and is abusing it.
The line is "can you use the purchase solely in the app distributed through Apple's infrastructure". I think their fee is outrageous, but that does seem like a defensible line.
Except they're stepping far over that line! You can use a Patreon subscription on all platforms, same as a Spotify or Netflix or Kobo... and yet they want a cut even when they have no part in the payment processing. Totally indefensible imo.
No, I think you misunderstand. It's not "can you use it elsewhere?", it's "if the user chose to, could they use the purchase solely inside the context of the Apple ecosystem?"
That is, if someone wants to, they can use Patreon's iOS app, not interact with Patreon in any other way, and get all of the benefits available to patrons.
I do wonder if a workaround here is buying a physical postcard from a patreon creator that comes with a free monthly subscription. A 50c mailed card would be cheaper for any subscription above $2.
I'm not sure you'd need to ship it. You're buying a 1/100,000 share of a physical postcard that exists at the Patreon offices. You can visit the office and see the postcard displayed out front under glass. It just so happens that buying such a postcard includes a free month's subscription to a Patreon creator.
Is there a reason why Patreon doesn't just pull out of the App Store? Whenever I got Patreon rewards, I'd just get them in an email notification and the link there took me to the website. Worked great without having to download an app.
The 30% fee is steep, but conversion rates using in-app purchase are astronomical compared to regular webpages with a credit card form. Everyone hates it (developers, I mean), but it works very well.
In case anyone wants to know why this is: it's because
1) I don't have to enter credit card information
2) Apple allows me to cancel subscriptions in a central location as soon as I sign up
If your service forces me to auto-renew my subscription, I'm probably not gonna buy it.
Patreon has been pushing an app-based approach for awhile now; every email I get from them has callouts to open the notification in their app.
I don't know why they badly want this - presumably for more user tracking, or because studies show that people engage more, or whatever - but pulling out of the app store would be at odds with this desire to push everyone into their app.
My assumption would be that if you have a company's app installed it allows them to spam you with marketing notifications for different things. Much harder to do when you can only use emails, because too many emails can get you put into spam.
Sources seem to be pretty consistent in saying that on average, native app users are significantly more profitable for companies than web users. While I'm sure that's partially because the most dedicated users of a given service are the most likely to install the native app, an app does afford more opportunity to collect data about the user and to attempt to grab the user's attention.
As a user, I strongly prefer websites for this sort of thing. I'll pay attention when it suits me, not when the service wants me to. It does explain why Patreon wants to have an app though.
Yeah I can't understand why people think that inviting new middlemen into their transactions is acceptable. It's time to stop prostrating ourselves to these companies.
Apple has given me a simple way to manage many of my subscriptions, a single pane of glass, which I appreciate. I'm fine paying a little extra for that.
It would be more valuable to me if Apple didn't charge too much, which turns away service providers.
It's not a Google-specific attitude - it's the value proposition of all middlemen everywhere.
Facilitation of transactions and assuming the risk.
It's worth it to many. I gladly pay Apple the extra 30% or whatever because it adds up to <$10 per month for me and I don't have to jump through hoops to cancel subs.
It's fine for App Store developers to complain about their costs of doing business like any other business. I'm not sure what the point of bringing up nonsensical hypotheticals like bank payments is.
Except this is a clear racket and not a regular cost of doing business. Imagine Microsoft tomorrow deciding to require 30% of even a fraction of things happing on windows. Imagine Apple trying to do this on the Mac. It's laughably anti-competitive and the only reason they're not doing it on the Mac is because it would expose the absurdity of the situation on iOS.
That, and Apple probably requires a shit load of third party utilities that do "naughty" things like read the file system or be "not sandboxed" in order to actually get any work done. They need the Mac to write APIs to charge people 30% on the App Store for the iPhone.
The point is that since they keep broadening what they do want 30% of, we expect the next thing they'll do is removing the exception for physical goods.
What if, instead of 'subscribing' for $10, you purchase a grain of sand for $10.
The grain of sand is available for collection from somewhere, doesn't matter where because nobody would bother to collect it. Your physical purchase comes with free access to digital content.
Its funny, because this is the exact opposite of how some cannabis dispensaries operate in Washington DC. It is illegal to sell cannabis there, but not to posses or to gift it. So you buy a $50 QR code that lets you access "digital art", and they give you a free 1/8 of cannabis with your purchase as a "gift".
This is the old eBay shipping trick. Ebay charged vendors a percentage of the product sale price, but nothing on shipping. So I'd often buy posters for $0.99 with $14.99 shipping (US Media Mail shipping was a lot lower than that).
At Apple, that will take at least 5-10 years before they get to that state. Siri is barely usable beyond simple “create reminder” or “set timer” queries/commands.
Hope by then, we see government intervention and break up big tech
Close. They already get a % whenever you use Apple Pay. In fact, it's part of why the EU demanded Apple provide NFC APIs to allow third-party replacements of the built-in Wallet app.
>Q: What fees does Apple charge merchants for using Apple Pay?
>Apple does not charge merchants any fees for accepting Apple Pay payments. However, merchants may still be subject to fees from their payment processor or bank. Remember, credit cards and debit cards are behind each Apple customer purchase.
>Apple Pay fees are generally lower than traditional credit card processing. Credit card issuers charge small businesses substantially more. As such, many SMBs ask employees to encourage Apple Pay transactions.
>Merchants, on the other hand, aren’t charged at all to use Apple Pay on physical and eCommerce transactions.
Looks like Apple Pay is cheaper for everyone except banks:
>Major banks such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Capital One are unhappy with their cut from Apple. So much so that they’ve formally requested that Visa, “change the way that it processes certain Apple Pay transactions.” In other words, pay Apple less in transaction fees.
This website has a better breakdown of costs under the "What are the fees" section, but no firm figures, and the only estimate is from 10 years ago:
I remember reading that per-creation billing is a very important feature for Patreon creators, because it removes the moral obligation to produce content just to justify a subscription.
If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated markets to change their own structure and products just to fit Apple's preferred billing flow.
Patreon also stands to gain from this change. Come think of it, the new arrangement is a win for everyone involved - except the actual patrons ofcourse.
Is there any evidence that Apple has actually made this "threat"? I'm not seeing anything other than what Patreon has claimed (and it seems that they are only recently going to begin to allow iOS purchases, which might mean they are bringing this upon themselves).
I am suspicious, because the specific change to per-creation billing is overwhelmingly positive for Patreon (and, as you pointed out, not for its users), from a business economics perspective (assuming they don't lose too many users over this). It also seems odd for Apple to press that point specifically.
Apple has been on a crusade against all payments not going through them for many years. I absolutely believe this is Apple’s fault, although I would have expected this to have happened much sooner.
I am a creator on the per-creation model and I got a very unambiguously worded email from Patreon this morning basically saying "if we want to be on the iOS store, Apple requires that we remove all billing methods that are not compatible with their payment method, and yours is not; in November 2025, you will be switched to the one billing method that Apple allows us to still have. If you would like to start earlier go to this link and hit this button to start the process." They used more words but they were very clear that this is a thing Apple is imposing on them as the price for being on the iOS App Store.
Right but just because they said it doesn’t mean they’re not playing fast and loose with the messaging. I’ve never heard of a single app where the off-app billing affected the inclusion of the app in the store. I mean maybe it’s true but that seems like it would be breaking new ground in App Store rules. I suspect Patreon is playing semantics here but would be happy to see evidence otherwise. To be clear, I’m taking about the case where Patreon could decide to show no billing details or links at all in the App Store, just like eg Audible. I think the problem is that Patreon still wants to offer billing options in the app.
> I’ve never heard of a single app where the off-app billing affected the inclusion of the app in the store.
most apps don't do payments like this to begin with.
>To be clear, I’m taking about the case where Patreon could decide to show no billing details or links at all in the App Store, just like eg Audible.
To be frank, I don't think Patreon has the same market force as Audible. Audible can definitely appeal to apple and make a deal that others don't get. Maybe Patreon did desire some of this, but I do put the blame on Apple. This is hardly the first time they arbiriarily played hardball.
Apologies, I somehow missed the memo three years ago that Audible turned on in-app purchases(1). I was thinking of the pre-2021 policy.
I’m still pretty sure that if an app has zero financial interactions at all in the App Store that Apple has no limitations on how the app’s financials work outside of the app. But I can understand that once you want to do anything in app, Apple might have restrictions on hybrid models.
> I think the problem is that Patreon still wants to offer billing options in the app.
We probably will never know which of Apple or Patreon is guilty, unless Apple is forced to yield it in a future discovery, or is raided by some agency in a probe.
Not really. There are a lot of creators I watch who only make content once a year. Sometimes they'll have 2 videos a year if they're lucky. With the per creation model, I have no problems supporting them but if it's billed monthly then the price becomes a lot steeper. Alternatively they could reduce the cost to support them but then the fees becomes much higher for both the creator and patreon (29c + 5% IIRC).
Patreon doesn't lose anything to Apple - they give creators on Patreon a choice - charge Apple users more to cover the 30%, or eat the loss. I don't know what Patreon's take is, they are going to take the same either way. However they know their customers and users will lose from this and it is good for them to look out for their customers (it doesn't costs them much)
Customers leave when prices rise above their willingness to pay. Some customers will realize on their own that they can bypass Apple's fee by subscribing through the browser, but most won't (since Apple forbids even mentioning this trick).
Only if the users follow. If users decide they won't use the mobile web then patreon and the creators they represent lose. Nobody knows for sure, but there is a general belief that users will not follow (or at least enough won't follow).
Perhaps, although that requires experimenting the new fee model first.
It's too big of a decision to take without actual numbers, and having gone through it for a few months also helps on the communication side: on the surface Patreon at least gave it a try, and there's even a chance users are pissed off enough by the new model to campaign for that change and defend the move to their fans.
But patreon earns off of those purchases, right? And since a 30% price increase deincentivizes purchases for customers, they'll have less purchases.
Or, of course, eating the 30% fee yourself deincentivizes you to use the platform (or upload content as regularly) if you opt for that one
I'd say it's a loss for everyone involved except for Apple. Since Apple now gets a cut from all transactions its hard for me to see this as anything else except hostile and arrogant
Patreon's take will not be the same. Apple's fee is charged first. So for all the creators that don't raise prices, Patreon is also getting 30% less, because they charge flat fees. And every creator that does raise prices will probably end up with fewer patrons, or patrons donating less, and will probably have a similar effect.
It also just kinda harshes everyone's vibe when they eventually realize they're being gypped and paying a lot more than others for the same thing, and that can cause people to just unsubscribe.
I believe Patreon's fees are a percentage of the total cost. i.e. if the payment is $10 and Patreon takes 10%, they'll still get $1, Apple get's $3, and the creator gets $6.
I'm not sure how Patreon will explain things to their creators, but no matter what the effect will be similar; about 30% less income for Patreon and creators alike.
According to App Store rules, you're not allowed to disclose the App Store fee to users. So Patreon is not allowed to explain to users that 30% is going to Apple, nor to explain that there are other options. I'm not sure if Apple regulates messaging to creators as well.
I think what your missing is that these aren't one-off user initiated purchases. I back a couple of patterns that are a per-video model, so if the content creator produces 2 videos I'm charged 2x $amount that month. If they produce nothing I'm charged nothing. Apple doesn't provide a way of doing this. In the scenario you described I'd have to monthly count up how many videos said content creator produced and manually submit an order through the app... And users aren't going to do that. Hell, I'm not going to do that.
That's distinct from the existing per-creation billing in a few ways, with the most obvious being that the existing method is automated while consumable purchases require user input. Trying to create a SKU for every possible per-creation price is also just incredibly janky and hacky in a fundamental way that would never scale and would probably make accounting next to impossible.
Where did you read that? I worked at Patreon from 2018-2021 and per creation was a much smaller group than recurring during that time at least. (Think per creation was even disabled as an option for new sign-ups for a while.)
I'm surprised to hear this, I thought it was the main selling point of Patreon. I have per-creation subscriptions to a few people on Patreon who produce very high-quality stuff very infrequently, and I will probably cancel if they are forced to switch to monthly billing. Their stuff is great, but not so great that I'm willing to sign up for a monthly fee that I forget about and then realize 3 years later that they've stopped making stuff.
I don't follow one-off creators like that, to me the selling point of Patreon was that I could support 20 different creators each with $1-$2/mo, with 4000+ fans in aggregate it supported their lifestyle. And by billing monthly, it meant that the card fees were spread among all the creators so that 50% of the $1 didn't go to the bank/VISA, basically making microtransactions feasible.
They're also killing the once-a-month billing so that use case is also gone. I'm not sure who Patreon is for anymore.
I don't have the source anymore, but it was an article about why Patreon is successful and other similar platforms/systems aren't. The per-creation billing option was described as a way for creators to create on their own schedule without having a moral or business requirement to produce enough content every month to justify a subscription. (The business requirement coming from the problem of one-month paying subscribers getting much more value than the creator can afford to give away at that price.)
The thing most aren’t thinking about is that per-creation billing is an absolute nightmare, and I don’t blame Apple for not supporting it. Can’t even begin to imagine the support nightmare/chargebacks etc.
It’s not all about the 30% cut.
If it was easy and trouble free, they would support it.
Imagine what a great time apps would have if Apple let them charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
> charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
It's a simple matter of user communication: you make it clear from the start that the billing will be unpredictable, and potentially provide a ceiling for monthly bills to let the user stop if it goes out of hand.
I follow per creation billing creators and it's fine. Amazon also offers an option to auto buy new volumes of a series.
The customer not knowing in advance how much they'll be billed isn't common, but it's not complex in itself.
Patreon has been trying to kill it for like half the time I've been using Patreon. They haven't offered it as an option for new campaigns for years, and their last redesign completely removed what little data was available in the web UI - you wanna know how much money you can expect? Download a CSV and do it yourself, we can't be bothered to give you even the simplest data of "your next three posts will be worth $x, $y, and $z" any more.
I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god finally we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn thing". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in making a Patreon-like that does offer it and recapitulating the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform, what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay their tithe or leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games's suits".
Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth Problems and says "sign me right the fuck up, convincing a bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a great way to spend a few years of my life", hey, I'll gladly give you input on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or something.
The world where Apple is just completely fine with Apple users paying $13 instead of $10 for a subscription if they do it through an app is an interesting one.
Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think about it they must think very little of their customers treating them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple' should be remembered.
Hot topic of discussion where? Amongst developers, right? How many non-developer Apple users are aware of Apple’s shenanigans? I doubt not many.
Even if the end users are aware and accept it, that doesn’t make Apple right.
We as a society accept a lot of things - from the security theatre at airports (last week, I saw photos of passengers taken, for domestic flights) to Amazon workers peeing in bottles. As long as we get our crap the same day, we’re good with some unfortunate souls peeing in bottles. If it bothered us, we’d stop shopping at Amazon, for example.
All this to say, we’ve been trained very well to tolerate and even accept a lot of bad behavior if it helps with our laziness. Doesn’t mean it is right though
If you talk to people with iphones on the street of Anytown, USA, they will tell you that Apple is good because it doesn't ruin picture quality in texts like the androids do.
Good question. But reading this thread and every one of these has multiple people saying "Apple users know and choose to have this experience, we've opted in."
We have to go further than that. Naming and shaming Tim Cook hasn't changed anything from Butterfly keyboards to cringeworthy "mother earth" interviews to exploitative Chinese manufacturing schemes. Apple doesn't speak your language, you can only communicate to them by showing them a world where they hurt.
So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
All it took was four years, an impending major redesign and a few class-action lawsuits over switch failures. Apple was definitely super responsive about that one. Or maybe it was their courage speaking.
While that's all very true, I find it notable to point out that the company stopped making butterfly keyboards 5 years ago. The folks out there that are still bitter about this really need to find something else to occupy their mindspace.
In related news, I just got my keyboard settlement check!
I'm not bringing it up apropos of nothing; it's evidence that Apple doesn't listen to blatant (and epistemically correct) outcry from their customers when they make a mistake. When the Butterfly keyboard released people were literally shocked; I remember getting messages from people asking if their Macbook keyboard shipped broken after the honeymoon phase wore off. There were SGA members on Twitter bemoaning how they hated their job on the new laptop; programmers everywhere plugging in USB-C keyboards to make their Starbucks workstation tolerable. It was inconceivable that you'd pay a price premium for thinness when all it got you was a miserable keyboard and thermal issues.
For crying out loud; you just got your settlement for a hardware flaw Apple doesn't admit exists 8 years after they shipped the flawed product. Mankind cannot sustain this pattern of business refusing to back-down from demonstrably harmful practices that their customers can identify and isolate. The Butterfly keyboard is a microcosm of how Apple ships deliberately flawed products in an attempt to market a solution they are exclusively qualified to sell. And despite all this, people still rush to Apple's aid like it's wrong to call them out for being so greedily obstinate. The reality distortion field is still in full effect.
I think you’re really blowing this out of proportion and treading into conspiracy theory territory. I don’t think this is at all an example of a deliberately flawed product, that’s a tall accusation.
I don’t think any corporation goes into product design hoping to give out free repair service and settle class action lawsuit claims.
Remember that when Apple finally introduced the 2019 MacBook Pro that reverted the keyboard design, it was only 3 years after the original 15” MacBook Pro butterfly model came out. It’s not like they were sitting on their hands for an extremely long time ignoring their customers as you accuse. They completely reverted the design in about 3 years and seemingly forced their lead designer into retirement.
As far as admitting the problem exists publicly, offering proactive refunds, etc, find me a public corporation that will do that and I’ll give you a pot of gold. And recall that the service bulletin and offer to provide free repairs is an acknowledgment of the problem.
There's nothing "theoretical" about it. Apple has a history of deliberately designing their products so they are both fragile and impossible to traditionally repair. Examples:
1. iPhones (starting with iPhone 6) being constructed to have fragile and DRM-encumbered components (display, battery, camera)
2. Macbook topcases with unibody constructions that can only be replaced as a single $600 finished assembly
3. Macbook bottom chassis for using glue instead of tapped screws to prevent safe disassembly and repair
4. Airpods being entirely impossible to service in any way (and conveniently removing the 3.5mm jack for alternatives)
5. Vision Pro being designed to stop functioning if non-essential features like the eye-tracking or the glass panel up front are broken.
Why is this a conspiracy? Because we can easily prove Apple knows about the pressure they're creating for customers. At first it was AppleCare that capitalized on these insecurities, giving the rich a solution that doesn't even repair their Apple products in the first place. Before being criticized for it, Apple themselves did not even want to repair Apple products. They'd rather trash your old one and give you a new one. Then the criticism came in, and instead of designing their products better Apple creates a new first-party repair program with worse DRM problems. Worse yet, they're still forcing you to buy entire component assemblies to fix a single broken part. Did your display's power IC break? That's a $2 Texas Instruments component you'll be paying $150 to get replaced. Don't forget your $49 repair kit rental. $200 to fix a $2 part.
You might say this is all very smart, on Apple's behalf. Too much so; with the DRM scheme they've created it's impossible for you to do cheaper repairs even if you wanted to. You have to buy first-party components, and even donor-boards won't work as sources of cheap spare parts. So Apple went out of their way to stop third-parties from being capable of performing profitable repairs. They've prevented users and repair shops from buying the components they need and using software they have blocked you from even attempting to fix things yourself. Sound like John Deere yet?
You know why Apple takes 3 years to sheepishly fix a mistake they don't admit exists? Because they make money off it. People stuck on old models are forced to get one with a usable keyboard. Hell, before they started (2 years after shipping btw) the free repair program as a response to lawsuits, they were charging users for new keyboards. It's a racket; you would have to be actually blind to look at Apple's history of behavior and assume it is not arranged for profit over any other single value.
BTW, this is not my opinion but instead a re-hash of the criticisms that Apple-certified repair stores have levied against Apple. People have been complaining about this since 2016 and if you step outside HN you may notice that people care about Right to Repair.
Apple laptop chassis generally have 4 years in the market before refreshes anyway so although it felt like they were pressured and it took 4 years it was more it was shown to be faulty when it hit the market and then the next iteration arrived on schedule and fixed the issue.
Still shocking such a bad an sonically ugly keyboard launched though.
My understanding from reading the Apple v Epic court documents is that Apple is unique in that it doesn’t force cheaper prices outside the ecosystem. I might be wrong though.
I vaguely recall them imposing an anti-steering kind of provision, though, didn’t they? Where you can do what you want on your own channels, but you can’t tip off the iOS user to that fact at the point of sale in the app?
I vaguely remember the courts being unimpressed with that requirement, and Apple maliciously complying with the judgment by allowing something hilariously minimal and uninformative, like “one tiny in-app link to your main website but you can’t say the word ‘cheaper,’” something along those lines.
(Edited to add: yes, sounds like that came post-Epic, and involved an even more Dantean set of caveats than I’d remembered. Among other things, not only can there be no more than one link, but that one link can only ever appear in one place in the app, it can’t “discourage” in-app payment, and its one appearance can’t be during the payment flow:
In Apples case they changed that several years ago so you can definitely charge your Apple users more.
However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
I don't think that's unreasonable - the user found your app through apple. Imagine if I sold tools, and I hung out in Home Depot next to our tools display telling people "hey, if you buy them directly from me, you can save 30%"
It's arguably unreasonable in a physical space but this is virtual space we're talking about.
In more open ecosystems like the web browser, you can literally install extensions that tell you where you can buy something for cheaper. I'm sure Amazon, Walmart, and friends would love for that to be impossible.
The virtual space only "belongs" to Apple because they've deliberately walled it off.
In Patreon's case, I don't think the user found the content "through Apple". The customer found the creator, and the creator said "Pay me through Patreon". The user, only having an iOS based device is now trapped by Apple's restrictions on the transaction, which brings dubious benifits to the table.
That horse has left the barn. But if there was a conceivable way and leverage to get a cut on paid content on the open internet, I'm sure apple would find a way to coerce money from those visits too.
One analogy: By offering only Fairplay DRM on iPhone, they get a cut that might otherwise have gone to Google (widevine), Microsoft (playready) or some other third party.
When was the last time you bought any large item from a physical store that didn't come with advertisements in the packaging for direct services?
If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the outside of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart, there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking Apple Ipad from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its direct services once you start using the product.
People bring up this comparison all the time and it's very simply not true. You can advertise direct services inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the store page, Apple is saying that you can't advertise alternative platforms in the app itself.
There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on whether a physical product you buy from them can have an advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the box or software that comes with it.
If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart. After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right? Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases? That's how Apple sees the world.
Looks close - those services are typically not the same as what you can get at Walmart. You can get parts, but often the device itself isn't sold (instead they list places you can buy). Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart. Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).
Walmart does, in fact, sell devices, and Apple uses their devices to advertise third party services to Walmart customers which compete (e.g. Amazon app)
> those services are typically not the same as what you can get at Walmart.
Several things:
A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.
B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).
C) Is your implication that if Walmart did open up a music streaming service that suddenly it would be improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices purchased from Walmart? Because that's a wild thing to suggest.
D) Just re-stating B more directly: Apple advertises direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store - a direct competitor to Walmart's tech hardware sales - for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging for devices that are bought from Walmart.
Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not be able to link to this page within an iOS app.
There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.
> Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.
I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an Apple store.
> Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).
Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But amazingly, somehow less egregious than what Apple is doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive does a company have to be in order to be worse than Walmart? That's almost an accomplishment.
I have been using patreon for 5 years, and I "found" it via the artists I like who use it as a platform. If I buy my first iPhone tomorrow and download the patreon app, that's not because apple helped me discover anything.
It might even be vice versa: in theory, as an Android user you might have learned about this thing called "iPhone" in an Patreon banner promoting the fact that Patreon can be downloaded through the Appstore.
You should be able to list the individual components of the final price which might then include "30% Apple app store fee" for having your customers be more informed about what they spend their money on.
The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
[0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges
There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct.
We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved.
People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is.
But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
> Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly"
Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position.
Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
How is that insulting to the judge? If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market and exercise monopoly-like control. Especially considering all the colluding occurring.
* If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market*
Not if your competitor, android, controls 70% of the market.
That's what I meant about being insulting. In court, when we're making these kinds of claims, we shouldn't talk about what could be, we must talk about what is.
The Brown Shoe Company merger in the 1960s was shot down, even though it would only control around 7% of the nation’s shoe supply.
It’s important to not just consider the quantitative impact of the monopolist (percent of market share) but also the qualitative components (is it vertically integrated? is it hurting consumers?).
I’m not sure whether or not Apple is a monopolist, but I certainly think there are some arguments.
US Antitrust law generally is about pricing, collusion (over pricing or market access), and competition more so than just monopoly power. It is straight up not illegal to be a monopoly, only to abuse the position.
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts. You can buy a Brother printer and not have to buy paper or toner from them, why should I have to buy my apps from Apple? And to be clear, that is precisely how Apple thinks of the relationship between the user and the app. Apple owns that relationship. They mediate. They manage. They facilitate. No one else. Users don't buy apps. Users pay Apple. Apple pays the app developers.
> I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts.
Epic tried to make this argument in court and failed, mostly because tying is generally not illegal if the consumer is aware of the tie when purchasing and has the option to purchase an alternative product without such a tie.
In other words it would be absolutely legal for Brother to sell a printer that only uses Brother-branded paper and toner, because if you don't like those restrictions you can simply go and purchase a non-Brother printer instead.
The real answer is just don't use apples stuff. The fact that you can fairly trivially just get an android phone and a windows/Linux computer and do pretty much everything demonstrates that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on anything.
I was an iPhone guy. Switching to Android was honestly trivial.
Apples biggest crime IMO is doing everything possible to hide the 30% tax from common knowledge, not that they charge it.
> Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices.
Market share is irrelevant, though. As we can see in this article, the ability to force an unrelated business to transform its business model to fit your needs is monopoly power.
Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power.
Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android.
But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist.
As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does.
[0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use.
[1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation.
[2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.
[3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
I'm not going to fall all over myself defending Apple, but it's not as cut and dry as being a price gouge. Apple spent mountains of money on R&D to create wildly popular consumer devices, build and maintain the systems, build and maintain infrastructure, security systems, app distribution systems, and operate payment systems.
There's no reason Patreon must use Apple's store. They could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site. iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content, and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if the services Apple is offering do have value, and people are just arguing about the bill.
I don't have an explanation from Patreon as to why they didn't ship a webapp, but I can at least provide some plausible explanations.
The thing is, while iOS is only 27% of the global phone market, that percentage increases when you look at high-value customers. That is, the people with disposable income to spend on fancier phones[0], the people who pay for apps, and the people who would, most critically, donate to an artist's recurring crowdfunding campaign. This isn't even something I made up, it's specifically one of the allegations in the DOJ's lawsuit against Apple.
Now, you are a counterparty to this $3tn megacorporation[1] who owns all your customers. Said corporation is altering the deal: you either bill through our royalty-bearing[2] payment processor or we kick you off the platform. You have two options:
- Upend large sections of your business model to comply with Apple guidelines, including killing an unusually quirky billing model some fraction of your creators make use of, or,
- Leave the platform where all your creators' customers are, hope said creators can get people to follow along through Apple's convenient and extremely discoverable six-step process[3] to install a PWA, and enjoy degraded access to push notifications[4], having to fight Google SEO spam for discoverability, and the ongoing business risk of Apple having complete and total editorial control over how your webapp works on iOS[5].
I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
[0] To be clear, high-end Android phones cost more than iPhones now, but iPhone is still a status symbol.
[1] Incidentally, this is about half the current budget of the US government.
[2] Apple's argument in the Epic lawsuit was that the 30% is a copyright royalty for the use of iOS, which doesn't quite make sense but the judge bought it.
[3] Navigate to the website, press the Share button, scroll down to "Add to Home Screen", fill out the form to name your new home screen icon, tap "Add", relog into the PWA again
[4] Yes, I know iOS added push notification support. I'll believe it when the Google Fi PWA actually notifies me about text messages on my iPad.
[5] Yes, this risk is higher for webapps. Apple can't modify submitted apps after-the-fact (just refuse to host them), but they can modify webpages behind your back by changing Safari. To quote Cory Doctorow: "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." If users can block ads, Apple can block whatever else they want, too.
> I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
This is just hand-waving away my point, though: they can absolutely be on iOS through the browser and nobody has to pay Apple a dime. The fact that they've done the math and decided they must be a distributed iOS app in the Apple App Store means it offers undeniable value. Whether or not it 'screws over creators' is incidental to Patreon, their business model is extracting revenue from creators. Of course they're going to chafe at competition and make sure creators blame Apple for the business expense Patron is passing on to them.
> Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition.
Not sure how this myth keeps getting perpetuated. The antitrust laws that are relevant to the lawsuits against Apple (specifically Epic's and the DOJ's) absolutely care about market share for the purposes of proving monopolization or attempted monopolization under the Sherman Act.
(Yes, technically it is true that some antitrust violations can occur with low levels of market share, such as price fixing, but those are not really relevant to the lawsuits against Apple.)
I don't know if I would call a guy who created a low-fat vegetarian fad diet that doesn't seem to have a basis in any understanding of nutritional science a "well respected doctor," but sure.
I would argue that whatever good Steve Jobs did by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he could have done more by also taking good medical advice and treating his cancer.
His type of cancer is very hard to treat. So it isn't clear that taking good medical advice would have done anything (often there isn't anything they can give), but it wouldn't have hurt.
False. Out of all pancreatic cancers, his type of cancer is the most likely to respond to prompt treatment, especially in the extremely lucky case when it's discovered early, like in his case. His decision to wait 9 months with surgery caused his cancer to grow, and increased the likelihood of it metastasing - which indeed happened as the cancer spread to his liver.
Sure, but toward the end he decided to move away from potentially helpful medical treatments and toward junk science.
Also, this guy is not an oncologist, advocates for a vegan diet that is extremely high in carbs (and fiber, granted), and is thus not exactly a disinterested party presenting good scientific research.
An operation or anything else may not have saved Steve Jobs. But doing nothing and hoping it goes away definitely didn't.
The government and medical establishment has watched as cancer rates have risen over the last few generations. They're getting better at treating the things yes, as they help us get more over it.
Take mammograms for example. Some European countries have stopped using them all together because even the US admits it raises the likelihood of getting breast cancer. But the US medical system will tell you it's worth increasing your chances of breast cancer from mammograms, because they help you catch breast cancer you may have gotten in other ways earlier, thus making it more treatable.
Not a bet I would take personally. But women are rarely told that. Every women I've told that to is shocked.
So far as I can tell this is simply not true. There was a report made in Switzerland that suggested mammograms were ineffective, but that report appears to have been flawed and its recommendations were never implemented. Swiss doctors still recommend mammograms for women over 40.
The point here, though, is that even if mammography were ineffective at identifying cancer or had large false positive rates - which no reputable medical body has suggested is the case - medical and surgical intervention would be the proper treatment, because they work and are effective for those forms of cancer.
There is also simply no evidence that Western medicine is causing more cancer. I would believe that there are diets that can decrease the likelihood of it, but there is also not evidence nor any known mechanism by which a diet can cure cancer once it exists.
> The McDougall Program is a transformative and life-saving 12-day online medical program designed by Dr. McDougall. For over 35 years, this program has been helping individuals reverse chronic illness and take charge of their health.
"chronic illness", very specific! And in only 12 days! Wow.
Okay, it doesn't get any better when you get specific:
Osteoporosis (no, you can't reverse that, though with diet AND medication, you can slow it). Arthritis, same. Cancer? Ooh, that's a bold claim, "this diet will reverse cancer". Multiple sclerosis, same.
My friend went on this diet, but wasn’t able to stay on it.
It did reduce his high blood pressure and he was able to go off the medication he was on.
He told me to look into it but I am not on any medication and am older than my friend; he dropped the issue when I pointed out that both of my parents had lived years longer than Dr. McDougall.
>In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]
The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law. At some point (which we've already passed) both governments and corporations are so big and all-controlling that they act as one, and there is no "keeping them honest". Consumer rights go out the window because nobody is willing to enforce them when being a good government employee precludes becoming a corporate employee later on.
Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
>The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law.
I don't see that at all. A very small government that is willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far. It's just that the will is not there.
Not that I think Steve Jobs was a super nice guy, but he clearly cared about Apple's brand, including the part of about users and developers not thinking of them rapacious and hostile, which is sort of how I (and many others) view their pricing model today. I like to think he'd have seen how bad this choice has played out for Apple's brand and changed his position by now, if he were still around.
You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course, the guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine?
I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this, both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
> You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course
Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what happened to the company afterwards. He was more right than they were.
> guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine
Hilariously irrelevant.
> both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple
I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate, when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting around the rate while small developers had to pay it. Nobody, in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60% fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
Both him getting fired and possibly dying earlier are directly related to the fact that the man does not easily change his mind. For his company, this turned out to be the better way, yes. For his body, it may have been better to go some other way. Either way, the point is that Steve Jobs does not easily change the course that he himself set.
…him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
Heh. Attempting to buy a book from the Kindle app was how I first became aware of these policies. Was fruitlessly searching for a buy button, but could not find anything. Did a web search to figure out why I was an idiot who could not spend my money. Only to discover that I was purposely getting a worse user experience because some mega corporations all wanted a taste of my transaction.
From Apple's perspective they say they are helping their customers with things like making subscriptions easy to cancel and Apple thinks that's genuinely worth 30%. The fact that Apple doesn't want their customers to know they are paying more is an interesting wrinkle though.
That's funny, I actually hate Apple's subscriptions because they are a pain to cancel. My wife has an iphone, she travels regularly to different countries for work. Because apps on apple store regularly have country restrictions (apps are not available in different countries), she has multiple apple accounts to deal with that.
Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription.
Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
First, please show me where exactly in the user agreement having two different accounts in different countries is a violation. I've looked and I can't find it. Don't go inventing violations of user agreements...
Second, what I've described is a problem that a lot of people have because seemingly no one at Apple understands that if you move between countries for work and need to have access to banking (or any other apps that are specific to that country) in those countries, the only way is to have different IOS account per country.
And it's even somewhat supported in ios, if she needs to redownload an app that was deleted due to lack of space, ios prompts her for that specific account's password (not the one I'm currently logged in). So it's somewhat shoddily supported. Nowhere near as good as android, where you can be logged in to multiple accounts and just click on a a menu and chose which account to use.
I mean, this is exactly why I go out of my way to pay for subscriptions via the App Store whenever I have a choice. I don't want to go through some rinkydink "please don't cancel bro" cancelation process on somebody's website, I'd rather just open the App Store and cancel it in one tap. Not to mention the subscriptions and purchases are automatically shared with my wife.
Previously, Apple specifically prohibited charging more though AppStore for services that are available to be purchased elsewhere. I'm not in the mood to sift though current version of Apple's legalese, but I'd be surprised if they dropped this requirement, that'd be very uncharacteristic of them.
they didn't prohibit charging more for App Store purchases, they prohibited mentioning it in the app. i.e, you cannot mention something like 'purchase this in-app product for $3 cheaper on our website'.
To be more specific, previously they prohibited telling about any other ways to buy elsewhere:
"Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other thanuse in-app purchase, except as set forth ...",
And that includes sending promotional emails if said emails were gathered via app.
If nothing else, to get consistent notifications from the creators you are a patron of, as Apple dragged their feet on web app notifications for many years, and they are still crippled and unreliable.
mmmhmmm, indeed. You need to consider the mentality of the people who chose to live this way. Most don't want want to type an address into a browser, ever, they want to tap an app.
I don't think it's anything to do typing the address. It's that there are a lot of people out there who don't understand what a web browser really is, how a web page is distinguished from an app, or how to get something from a web browser to their home screen.
See also: people who copy and paste images into Word documents before attaching them to emails. Same mental model disconnect.
For sure, I was using a simplistic description. My point is that my experience (and it's just my experience) is that many people don't care to understand what a browser is or how to use it properly, they want apps. I stress this is just my experience but I'm one of those people who tries to (unsuccessfully) teach them. They just don't care (though I'm probably a bad teacher).
And yes, see also people who print emails so they can scan them XD
I can read my email on my phone, and also get it to notify me when I get a new one from a particular address. It's not as easy as installing an app, but it's really not that hard either.
Even webbrowsers can use push notifications for webapps IIRC, so that would also be a thing (ignoring that Apple kneecaps PWAs, dunno if they allow this).
I love Apple stuff. I'm all in, iPads, iPhones, AirPods, Apple TVs, HomePods various *Books everywhere.
I wish Patreon had more apps. It's a pain to watch videos on my TV. I have to mirror my iPad and keep tapping the screen to keep it from locking and ending the session.
But they're being forced to use a payment platform that they don't want to use and have to alter/drop one of their best features to do it.
Feels like getting a dry cleaning bill from the guy who stabbed you.
It sounds like the problem is that you're using a combination of devices that makes it unusually hard to just play a video from not-your-TV on your TV.
I agree with your sentiment. I tried the app a few years ago and found it offered nothing of value. Most content you can get by supporting an artist is best enjoyed outside the app anyway, like goodies they send in the mail or high-res art that looks better on a bigger screen.
The only use cases I can think of for an app are 1) Socializing with other supporters who support the same artist, and 2) Searching other creators on Patreon and discovering similar artists you could support.
But Patreon's social features were (still are?) terrible, which is why all the creators took their social communities to Discord instead. And ever since the beginning, Patreon has opposed adding search. So their app, to me, is totally worthless. I'm astonished they're still in business.
What do you do on Patreon that only a application could do, and not a website?
I subscribe to a bunch of Patreons, and most of them are videos (which I can view on a website) or they're downloadable assets I use my PC for accessing anyways, wouldn't make sense on mobile no matter app or website.
For what? Clicking a “pay this person $5 a month” button? Maybe commenting on a post or watching a video? I don’t see how the platform could affect that in any significant way.
The app is better for viewing the content you paid for. Patreon is not just for subscribing to creators. They also deliver content. This isn't hard to understand.
Any sort of audio/video control for sure, which is a substantial portion of patreon content. Also, if you want to support offline content, it's nearly impossible to do it in a browser.
Hell, Jobs originally wanted there to be no iPhone SDK, and for everyone to create webapps. Man, that would have been a better world. Initially it would have sucked, but the mobile web platform would have improved so much faster, and APIs for doing native-y things would have been complete and useful 15 years ago.
> Has the world entirely forgotten about websites?
Perhaps, if only the segment of the population forced to use a browser that didn't support PWAs for over a decade. I can see why they would forget about websites over a long enough period of time.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
This is confusing to me, does this mean Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify will be in violation as well? None of these companies allow subscription or digital goods transactions in their iOS apps.
I’m not sure why Patreon couldn’t replace the “subscribe” button with a “wishlist” button within the iOS app. They could add a link that opens your wishlist in the browser too. It turns what should be 1 click into 3, but it seems far more sensible than accepting the 30% fee.
Admittedly, I also wondered about this. I'm taking Patreon at their word (for now), but I would welcome Apple making some kind of statement indicating that Patreon is allowed to disable payments in the app.
And if it is true that they're not allowed to disable payments, I would also love to know what's special about Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify (other than their size) that would allow them to "get away" with the same behavior.
One could create a web app based Pateron and use the web based push notifications. https://imgur.com/a/JccxAIs for the process for how to do this on an iPhone.
The challenge (as always) is accessibility and discoverability. The functionality is all there.
This is part of Apple's argument why they think they are owed 30%. They have built and nurture the most affluent set of mobile users with a CC ready to charge. A company leaving Android is ho hum, but leaving iOS is business ending. How valuable then is it to be on iOS? 30%?
I'm not making a judgement on right or wrong, but I see many people just thinking about infrastructure and not realizing Apple sees iOS user base as one that would not exist without them. And, they want to get paid for access.
Should Microsoft get 30% of everything you do on a computer? That'd be utterly absurd. Apple already got paid for those users when the user bought the device. Why do they get a share of the profits of a completely independent transaction between two other parties? It's ridiculous.
> Should Microsoft get 30% of everything you do on a computer? That'd be utterly absurd.
This is what happens on consoles today. Apple views the iPhone as a closed and complete ecosystem where licensees are allowed to write apps - like a console. The hardware, OS, and App Store are viewed as a single entity and not distinct.
Not saying I agree, but it's important to understand Apple's argument. Given the ruling from the Epic case I think Apple will win the majority of any action taken against the AppStore (not a monopoly, business terms are irrelevant). IMO where Apple is vulnerable is interop like with messaging. I can only guess Apple's lawyers think the same, hence Apple's fairly recent push into RCS.
Except no, actually, it isn't. Neither Xbox nor PlayStation attempt to collect a 30% royalty from any of the streaming apps nor block them from steering.
Consoles have a significantly more harmonious relationship with the developers, whereas Apple's is drastically more abusive. This is not an insignificant difference, both morally and legally.
We don't have numbers on how much Patreon usage comes through the Apple app.
Patreon does.
I'm inclined to think the "write off the iOS app entirely" option was one of the very very first things they pondered, and the odds are that it's pretty clear that was going to be a very, very expensive option.
Putting it in quotes is misleading, they are actually being forced:
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
> Putting it in quotes is misleading, they are actually being forced:
They're not literally forced, they have a choice: A) abide by the rules of the platform or B) leave the platform.
I agree that it's shitty by Apple, but if you start playing the game (being on the AppStore), don't be surprised when you have to continue playing the game by adjusting how you do things.
Let's not forget that if Apple created something called "Apple Creators", they would instantly gain 100% of the market share because there would be no fee (assuming feature parity)
This forcing apps to use your payment platform through extortion is anti-competitive. Full stop.
Don't they already have this for podcast subscriptions? I feel like this is a direct move to get more customers over to Apple Podcasts, which can now be 30% cheaper for customers.
Patreon should just remove the ability to subscribe from the app, and just offload the process to Safari. Let Patreon users purchase their memberships using Apple's own browser app. Let Apple decide if they want to try to take 30% of all transactions made using their browser and see how that works out for them.
Yes. If you have a link to a site that has the ability or even another link to another place where you can buy something, Apple will block publishing of your app. They pulled this on us earlier this year after three years of publishing with no problems. All we had was a link to our support site, which had a link to our main site (where you could buy a subscription), the latter we had to remove or they refused. In fact, if we even try to give users materials on subscription details or talk about (not even providing a link) how to find those details, Apple blocks it. They need to get smashed with the antitrust bat hard.
This isn’t allowed in the US, not sure about the new EU rules regarding this specifically. Best they can do is show a “deduction” only on web/other platforms that shows they’re getting it cheaper than iOS iirc.
>Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.
>remember, Apple’s fees are only in the iOS app. Your prices on the web and the Android app will remain completely unaffected.
If this means Apple will take 30% of funds I send to Patreon, then time to dump Apple Pay.
Yet another reason I avoid Apple, seems they are in a race with Microsoft to be the biggest abusers to their users.
Without commenting on the appropriate level of charges, Visa and Apple provide very different services. For example, with Apple, you get administration of taxes in many locales as well as dealing with currency exchange. Also, I don't think sellers have to deal with chargebacks, although Apple might have their own version of a chargeback, but I am not sure.
> Also, I don't think sellers have to deal with chargebacks, although Apple might have their own version of a chargeback, but I am not sure.
They absolutely do, just through Apple, "Disputes".
Apple will refund the user the full purchase price (that's fun, $10 app, you get $7 after the Apple cut, and on refund, you have to refund $10, so you're actually out money).
And too many disputes will get your developer privileges restricted or revoked.
You mean for Apple to charge that on top of the Visa charges, which Apple is paying out of the 30% now, I assume? Apple is the merchant of record for App Store txns and pays all the transaction fees, as well as all their other costs, out of the 30%. (I don't know how much all that adds up to, but the total is strictly greater than sum of the credit card fees.)
What would you pay to have access to the most affluent mobile users with CC's preloaded and ready to buy? That's what Apple is charging for. It must be worth quite a bit since people either pay or complain up and down they are forced to pay it or they don't have a business.
IIRC, the judge in the EPIC case even said there was no issue with 30%.
> Apple could add an API for 3rd party subscriptions to integrate with that screen.
They could. And the third parties would absolutely ignore it or make it a front door to their own subscription management, which could mean anything from something as simple as the current iOS subscription management (highly unlikely) or a link that opens a browser page that tells you to call a given phone number to cancel your subscription that is always "experiencing high call volumes" and "thanks you for your patience" after half-an-hour on the phone.
A service that is effectively un-cancelable really is the dream product: the person doesn't want it, so they don't actively use it (meaning you have no expense in providing it), but also don't want the hassle of putting up with your "are you sure?" tactics to cancel. Businesses make hundreds of millions of dollars annually on hard-to-cancel subscriptions in the US.
I'm just saying, it's a strawman argument to claim that Apple is doing this to "protect users". That's what they want you to think, but they're actually doing this to make a massive amount of revenue at the cost of literally everyone in the market, users and creators alike.
Edit: Econ 101 - the more inelastic the demand, the more the tax burden falls on consumers. One would assume that demand for Patreon is relatively elastic, at least when compared to things like food, housing, transportation, etc. Thus most of this tax burden will actually fall on the producers (i.e. Patreon and the creators), which explains why they're not willing to just take the 30% cut and will instead charge more for Apple users.
I would prefer to see them forced by legislation (like the Digital Markets Act) to allow some sort of fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing on the App Store. Ideally they would be required to allow third-party marketplaces and self-signed app distribution, then marketplace competition could push their take rate towards 0%.
I understand that some things are hard to cancel and some companies are malicious about this. Back in the pre-app days, this came up with "free samples" and gym memberships. The general solution back then was to either (a) not get scammed or (b) use a unique credit card that you could easily cancel. With the advent of things like Privacy cards, you can pretty easily do this without an App Store intermediate.
That said, they could keep the benefit for users and the fee for Apple Pay, but then not require that apps exclusively use Apple Pay. They could even require that all apps call an API to issue some scary warning that the subscription will not be manageable in your Apple Pay dashboard, make sure you trust this app developer, are you sure you want to continue? etc etc
Plus there are plenty of other billing services that can do this. I already mentioned Privacy cards. If you sign up for PayPal recurring payments, they also have an authorizations dashboard that you can easily use to revoke payment permissions. Neither of these companies needs to charge a 30% fee to offer that. Both charge somewhere around the "standard" CC fee of 3%.
Honestly, that's the one thing I don't want out of all of this... a secondary iOS app store.
There's real value for me, the family IT guy, not having to worry about my parents, who are in their mid-60s and not tech-savvy, getting told by their "friend" through email to download malicious software to their iOS devices. Right now, you just can't do that. If something wants to execute code on an iOS device, it has to do so through somewhat-sanitized means. It's not 100% foolproof, but getting malicious executables onto an iPhone without someone knowing about it is currently beyond the capability of most threat actors.
Is it as open or cheap as us tech people would like? No. But if I want that, I go buy an Android device.
That's fine, but that doesn't happen on Android where the restrictions are more lax. (Well, it does, but in rates that are too low to justify imposing the excessive measures iOS employs)
I empathize with your struggle, but it's a pathetically weak argument against letting Apple continue abusing their position. If your parents are clicking on random email or SMS links, that's an issue outside of your OS security policy. They could be autofilling their credit card details on a malicious site in Safari or iMessaging their SSN to someone with a spoofed CallerID. My parents both use Android and let me tell you, worrying about them activating Developer Mode on their phone is the last thing I go to sleep worried about. In a post-Pegasus world you and I both know there are bigger fish to fry.
Do your parents a favor, talk to them about digital security if you're actually worried about them. Your other choice is to let reductive paranoia consume you until you're only comfortable when their web browser and contacts list is locked in a straitjacket.
I'll bet if you polled most people, even non-Apple customers, they'd be okay with paying a little extra for the convenience of an app store. The problem is that it's 30%.
But that's not designed in a way which considers that despite the app bringing in millions in total revenue, each individual creator makes far less than that.
The problem is that it's the only option across the OS. There's no reason this option couldn't exist with other options, built by the app developer so it cost Apple nothing.
The problem is that the fee is not charged to the Apple user on a line item in addition to the content price. Like all markets are supposed to operate. It's information hiding.
And yet the point of this post is that, thanks to Apple's dominance, all users will lose the "pay per finished production" payment option regardless of whether they use an iPhone or not.
The beauty of capitalism is that you can choose the color of your car as long as it's black.
You act as if all the iPhone Patreon donations would've rolled in regardless of the app / app store, but also that Apple is somehow going to kill it. It's logically inconsistent.
1. If Apple plays a key part in getting those donations, then the 30% is not a problem: the content creator is not getting 70c on the dollar; the content creator is getting 70c instead of 0c. Apple gets people to donate that wouldn't otherwise have done it. There's a ton of money flowing through the Apple ecosystem purely because Apple made it a premium experience.
2. If Apple does not play a key part in getting those donations, then the 30% is still not a problem: the content creators / app makers / Patreon can simply switch to some other platform and get the same results.
The beauty of capitalism is that we used to have horses and shoes only, then black cars became an option, and now you can buy any color you like. I guess some people think they appear to be clever, thoughtful, and fair-minded finding an issue with every step forward.
HN is incorrigable. Life is not a bipolar axis of capitalism and communism like a 60s propaganda film. Since the beginning of the United States, taxes and regulation have been used to protect the market from abuse and harm. You are privately allowed free enterprise, but said free enterprise does not protect you when you break the law. If you sell an illegal firearm to someone, the legal nature of the transaction doesn't cover for the fact that you're violating export restrictions and municipal law. It's the basic communitive property.
You can jeer when the FTC throws your favorite corporation a yellow-card, but what else are you going to do? Europe's not going to stop, Apple hasn't payed taxes to half their jurisdictions in God knows how long. Japan doesn't care since Apple schemes ways to avoid their hardware duty. Your broader point can be whatever you make it, but the world doesn't owe you shit if you deliberately organize a criminal racket.
I don't have any Apple devices, but as a Patreon customer, I'm going to be affected by this requirement that Apple is forcing upon Patreon.
The entire point of this article is that Apple is abusing their market power to force other companies to do things that affect people who are not even Apple customers.
But regardless, your argument is laughably wrong. We don't have "countless other brands". We have iOS and Android. They are not fungible. There are pros and cons to both platforms, and sometimes it's impossible to reconcile a showstopper negative on one platform with a different showstopper negative on the other. Or to reconcile a must-have feature on only one platform, even though that platform also has a showstopper negative.
Yes, it's nice that there are many Android manufacturers, but they are still largely very similar products, with the "differentiation" being annoying most of the time, not a benefit. The idea that we have "choice" is hilarious.
Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a smartphone at all" as an alternative, my respect for their opinion drops to zero.
Patreon built their organization partly on how easy it is to get donations from Apple users through the app ecosystem. As an Apple user, I personally spend a lot more on apps every month than in my pre-Apple days because it feels secure, easy, and premium.
So even as a non-Apple user, you benefited from Apple's system. The same is true for Patreon, and for the content creators.
As for your complaints about the dearth of ecosystems, I guess the rest of the world can only apologize to you for not pouring even more hundreds of billions of dollars into developing an ecosystem that fits your requirements * just so *. (By the way, I was talking about phone brands, nice work shifting the goalposts)
> Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a smartphone at all" as an alternative, my respect for their opinion drops to zero.
Well, I am devastated. But "no smartphone" is indeed one of the options, as is "Apple smartphone", "Samsung smartphone", "flip-phone", and many others. Can't find one that is perfect in every way? Welcome to the real world.
While I agree that the peace of mind for subscribing through a service like Apple or Google is nice (or any other service that you know will be easy ahead of time), Patreon's model is the same. It's really easy to subscribe and unsubscribe from individual creators. There's no benefit to the user from adding Apple into the mix.
If you find this much value in it then you'd be happy to be shown the alternatives at -30% the cost and you'd still use it. But Apple doesn't allow users to see this information.
Yes but the EC is busy fighting Apple on it. Until now the conversation was mostly focused around app developers, but of course it has implications for the actual activity behind every app (like the creators using Patreon and alike)
If apple was a young startup, struggling to get market share, or struggling to turn a profit, I can understand why they might want a cut of profits here.
But they literally have more cash than anyone in the world... why bother with this?!
Ah, but isn't it the other way around? If you are a young startup without market share (but well funded), you don't care about the extra margin. Uber was cheap before it killed the taxis.
They have to make more and more money or their stock goes down. This is the gross world we live in now. There’s a reason Warren Buffett sold half of his Apple holdings. They’ve squeezed blood from the turnip about as much as you can.
As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial support, the news is terrible: Patreon informed me that all creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use. The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time off, and only charge people when I release something, thus incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another platform, or come up with some other solution.
If we're being honest, private backroom deals based on a variety of business factors and debates. Venmo is Paypal, Paypal has Musk's and Thiel's deep pockets. They can and will settle something.
There is no real line, just imaginary ones apple draws arbitrarily.
So the negative point value, currently -1, tells me that I am asking a rhetorical question and I should have said that I'm asking a rhetorical question.
Back on topic:
I am an expert on in-app purchases circa 2020 and do know that there's no working around it unless you have a deal with Apple. Used to be my job.
Paypal or any other financial transaction entity Is all the same to Apple, the user is sending their money while using an apple hosted app, and apple wants to make sure that users don't get fleeced! So Apple taxes those transactions ostensibly to provide oversight Services.
So the only way for patreon to get around this is to not mention in their app that you can also sign up on you know patreon.com To give money, and to allow users who have signed up and sent money on patreon.com to use the iOS app.
In fact, how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template? There are other payment providers.
>how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template
they probably exist already (minus payment processing). Network effects take hold as usual, though. Patrons are more willing than average to jump, but I can see hesitation signing up and adding payment for a new/unknown website
and honestly all payment providers suck in some unique way. Though most of the fault lies in Visa/Mastercard. That's a monopoly we need to tackle one day.
I've heard horror stories about Patreon as well. Your best bet is probably to spread your risk by being on Patreon, Ko-fi, PayPal+Web, YouTube memberships (if you do video) etc.
managing so many fronts with such different medium (you can host all media on patreon, only really videos on YT but also more limited videos than patreon. then you can't host at all on ko-fi), sounds like a pain both logistically and financially.
How can another platform be better about this? Wouldn’t they be subject to the same thing? Or is there some component here that is not tied to the Apple demand?
That's a great question! How far does Apple's control extend into markets that are unrelated to their core business? I always prefer using mobile websites on my own android phone instead of downloading apps because of security concerns and general notification spamming, ads, and annoyances, and it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing "apps" with bookmarks. For the current situation, I may look into services like Nebula, doing PayPal directly, YouTube subscriptions and donations, or setting up an online store. Or even.... sponsored videos!! (just kidding)
> it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing "apps" with bookmarks.
I think there are several reasons users gravitate to apps, but the biggest pain point apps mitigate is the login UX. I'd wager that you use a password manager, most people do not and cannot be convinced to do so. With an app, one can create an account and log in once, then stay logged in and never think about the password again until they get a new device, at which time the password can be reset via email and then immediately forgotten.
It’s bad, yes. It would be good if Patreon allowed sticking with the billing systems which Apple is forbidding, but I do understand that they may no longer be able to justify the business expense of maintaining them given the anticipated changes in usage patterns.
Practical suggestion:
Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
Yes, it's a reasonable workaround. I believe Patreon also allows creators to "pause" their account, suspending payments for an indefinite amount of time. So, I could just keep the account paused, then unpause for a month when I make a video. Although, I believe that Patreon doesn't want the per-creation model themselves, since charging the same amount each month is simpler, and easier to project revenue, etc, so they are probably just bundling this unpopular change with the Apple announcement.
Patreon doesn't have a choice. Apple is too large to give up having an iOS app - too many customers will just walk away instead of using the alternative (or so they think - but I don't blame them for not being willing to experiment - if they are right it will cost a lot of customers)
Well there is a choice, but it is questionable if suing will or will not result in any change. Even if they win in court it will be several years and millions of dollars in legal fees, and it isn't clear they will win.
They can _not_ charge through iOS though. It’s a very small matter for me to navigate to the Amazon website to buy a new book, then load it up in the Kindle app.
I imagine they already crunched the numbers of doing the Spotify approach vs. kowtowing to Apple. Unlike Spotify and Amazon, Patreon does have non-negligible competition to consider who will take advantage of the more convenient payment.
I've seen some creators on Patreon "pause" their monthly subscription when they have nothing to release on a given month, so that patrons won't be billed for that month. That could be a workaround for your use case.
It does not. Apple do all the billing. You have no mechanism to link up users and bills or change users billing. The only way would be to notify all subscribers to cancel their subscription, hope they do that, and then notify them all to resubscribe afterwards, which would obviously be catastrophic for subscription revenue, as well as a terrible user experience.
I wonder why Patreon isn't hammering this point more if that's the case. This seems to me to be an almost bigger problem than the loss of the per-creation billing.
Not that losing per-creation billing is good, but Patreon has been threatening it for a while, and there are ways it could in theory be simulated. But this makes it effectively impossible for creators to go on vacations, take a sabbatical, whatever... without continuing to charge patrons. It's a really commonly used mechanism from what I've seen, this would be a loss of a really important flexible tool for creators.
I'm not distrusting you, I just feel like I'd like to see some confirmation from Patreon before I start making accusations about it. Maybe they have some deal or know something about a future unreleased API that I don't know?
But losing the ability to pause a Patreon page would be a very, very big deal. Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from. That's something that people should be talking about if it's the case.
Patreon does not require creators to pause payments when they go on break.
But that should obviously be a choice that is available to creators, for a variety of reasons. They might be treating Patreon more like a subscription service than a donation platform. They might have personal psychological hang-ups (read about why per-creation pricing is so popular with some creators). I would criticize Patreon if it forced creators into that decision. Forcing them out of that decision is also worth critiquing.
It ought to be a creator's choice when they do and don't charge their patrons. It is not Patreon or Apple's job to decide with that level of detail what the relationship between a creator and their fans should look like. And creators who voluntarily decide (for whatever reason) to temporarily pause charging fans are not doing anything wrong.
To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators. This is a feature that creators heavily use, by their own choice, because it helps them psychologically or because they prefer this style of interaction with fans, or for whatever reason because they don't have to justify their decisions to anyone, least of all commenters on HN.
> Patronage is a specific thing.
Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform. Patreon hosts a wide variety of creators who approach audience interaction in a variety of ways. This has always been the case.
It's wild to me that you're going to jump on here gatekeeping creators off of Patreon, and to act like it's somehow improper for me to suggest that the significant portion of the creator-base on Patreon that uses the platform in a way that makes them happy... should be allowed to keep using it that way.
People have this weird habit of taking creators who are making in many cases at or below minimum wage doing things that they love and subjecting them to purity tests about whether or not they're living up to some platonic ideal of what some random person on the internet personally believes fan-creator relationships should look like.
Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
> doesn't get the idea behind patreon
The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them. Your aesthetic attraction to the idea of a donation platform is not really relevant to that goal. You're not sticking up for creators if you gatekeep how they interact with fans. And your ideal of how patronage is defined has never been the exclusive model for how Patreon as a platform has worked -- nor is it consistent with the model that Apple is forcing creators into.
> To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators
I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.
This would be an anti-feature for me because if it's implemented then there is pressure to pause payments when I don't create for whatever period of time I estimate is "too long" for some average patron. What a freaking can of worms. Turns creators into service providers.
> Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for
Tiers is basically "choose how much change you can spare to support me". Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
> both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform
Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees. If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche. You'll make more money too
> Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
This is not providing a service in return for money. I create, my choice. You want to support me, your choice. Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have then it's too much money for you, choose a smaller amount. Or don't pay at all. You don't have a responsibility to pay.
See also Github sponsorships.
> The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them
By definition not. There is no generic "creator". People are different. "Comfortable" is different for different people. Patreon is focused on one specific model. They sorta try to do more ("pay per post") but that's feature creep and worse than using a dedicated platform. As patron I hate "pay per post" bc I have to do some math to even tell how much I'm paying you. Just obscurity for no good reason. As creator, see above.
> I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.
Great. Not to be blunt here, but if you're not on Patreon then who the heck cares what your opinion is on this? I feel like it's kind of reasonable to care more about the opinions of the creators using the platform than the creators not on the platform.
As far as I can tell, this "anti-feature" has existed for the entirety of Patreon. Features like pay-per-post are not new, they're not Patreon expanding or losing its way. Quite the opposite, Patreon has tried multiple times to get rid of some of these features, and they were stopped because of creator backlash. Learn the culture of the place you're criticizing.
And maybe this just isn't the platform for you? But it's a wild thing to go to a platform that has always worked in a certain way -- a platform that you are not using as a creator -- and to say, "oh, this is an anti-feature." Who are you to decide that?
> Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
Great. That is a thing that creators are allowed to do. It is not representative of the entire platform, and it's kind of gross to dismiss the concerns of creators who don't work that way.
> Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees.
What in the heck does it mean to "cheat" on fees? Patreon works great as a subscription platform, and people have used it that way for years, and both creators and fans benefit from it. This isn't a sport, it's not a bad thing for creators to be able to support themselves. I am genuinely thrown off by the idea that someone would look at a creator building things that an audience loves and say, "but they didn't do it fair."
> Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have
Very literally nobody has said that you do. What I've said is that other creators do not have a responsibility to ask you how they should create or how they should engage with their fans.
They don't have that responsibility. You can go off and create however you'd like. You can even use Patreon and not pause your service. Patreon has zero requirements to send regular updates. I follow and support creators who put out one update every year. I kick a few dollars a month to a creator who has not posted an update in nearly two years. Do what you want, but stop getting mad at other creators because they're using a platform in a way that has always been officially supported and allowed by the platform.
> If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche.
Or -- and this is going to be difficult to hear -- creators can do what they want because they don't answer to you. It is wild to me that you are trying to dictate who is allowed to use Patreon as a creator... as someone who is not even on Patreon. Since when do you get to decide who does and doesn't belong inside of a community that you are not even a part of?
> Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
I don't care what you call it, I don't think quibbling over semantic definitions matters more than people's livelihoods.
> By definition not. [...] Patreon is focused on one specific model.
I mean, no, objectively not, given that Patreon supported exclusive tiers and rewards from the very beginning. I'm sorry if you thought it was focused on something different, but creators on the platform have literally never universally treated it as a donation model. Your idea of what you'd like Patreon to be has nothing to do with what it has always been. Of course, Patreon can be treated as a pure donation platform, and many creators do. And of course, some creators who do treat it as a donation platform still choose to make use of paused payments or pay-per-post, and have written en-length about how that's better for their personal ...
Pro tip, don't overuse the word "creator". We are just normal people. And literally no one cares if you are on Patreon or not.
Then, chill. No one is telling anyone what to do. But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature. Like standing it's original idea and not wanting to compete with a bazillion alternatives like Twitch/Bandcamp/Etsy in each niche. Like not turning creativity into a service business. Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
Patreon's original idea included the features you're calling antifeatures.
You are imagining a fictional version of a platform that has never existed and getting mad that the real platform has lost its way from the fictional platform that only lived in your head.
The original idea that you're upset about Patreon abandoning existed only in your head. It has always been a platform for both pure donations and for transactional subscriptions. It was never the idea to serve one of those communities exclusively. That is a thing you have imagined.
> No one is telling anyone what to do.
> if you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche
Sure.
> But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature.
Patreon offers the feature. This is a conversation about whether Apple might remove a feature that Patreon chooses to offer.
I don't know how to make that clearer? Again, the platform you are imagining does not exist; there is no version of Patreon that was positioned against creator services or the ability to pause transactions or per-creation payments. Yes, Patreon could choose not to offer these services.
But they did choose to offer them.
And only one person here showed up and got really mad about the fact that Patreon used the word "patron" in relation to a service they have as far as I can tell, always offered.
> Like not turning creativity into a service business.
> Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
I don't know if you get to tell people to chill at the same time you're calling anyone who uses Patreon in a way you don't like a hustler, accusing them of ruining creativity, and questioning their ability to know what they do and don't want?
And again, only one person here is mad that Patreon is... doing what they have always done, under the direction of a community that wants them to do it, despite what people who are not part of that community want. Only one person showed up in an unrelated comment thread and said, "stop calling it patronage if a creator chooses not to take someone's money for a month."
I mean, yes, it is irritating and frustrating to hear someone who's not using Patreon as a creator badmouth a significant portion of the community that is doing stuff that people love, and to belittle them and tell them that they don't know what they want or they're hustlers and shouldn't be on the platform. If it means something to you that it's irritating to hear that, congrats! That is irritating and annoying to hear. I'm not sure what that proves, but yes, good job. Belittling creators will make people mad at you, you have cracked the code.
> Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from.
I wouldn't assume this until confirmed. The way I read these news is the typical Apple scenario, where if you subscribe from the app, there's an added 30% subscription fee and a loss of all control from the subscription by Patreon, all control and all limitations handed over to Apple, all subscription cancellations, all billing complaints, everything.
But you can still have a parallel system without the fee on the web, the cannot be advertised or guided to it from the app (at least this used to be the case), but it's also as usual completely handled by the developer.
Patreon is probably removing the on-purchase pay model even on the web because it's inherently incompatible with the basic Apple model and would cause a major disconnect in what the user can expect.
But I don't think the scenario with paused subscriptions is quite the same. Patreon would simply allow them to be paused, while if subscribed with Apple, the button on the web could simply be disabled or gone, or heck, the entire subscription page on Patreon gone, with just info text "This subscription is managed from your device". I mean, many devs do it like that at least.
Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the website. Send them updates when people post new content.
I've never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS. I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I'd want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my email, and if they're long enough I click a link and read the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.
The app's useful for audio posts. But mostly it's just an extra chance for them to make money. Push notifications, the home screen icon, etc. Most people I know, their inbox is barely functional due to the marketing emails, and they're reliant on features like Gmail's "Important" which only highlights real people, not Patreon content.
You're not the average user, and if the average user gets a billing email and hasn't bothered to read their content email, visit the site or open the app, they are more likely to end their subscription.
Aside from many users not being familiar with PWAs and not wanting to install them, I believe they’d also have to drop support for older iOS versions, as for example PWA push notifications were only added in iOS 16.4.
Given Apple's back and forth history allowing or not allowing and limiting or not limiting PWAs, I'd be hesitant to risk my business model on them. Which is exactly what Apple wanted I guess
I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill my password but same page as a PWA it won't.
I also did some testing with macroquad [1] and I was finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just didn't work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there's no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.
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PWAs just can't do the same things that native apps can. This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle man between them and their customers?
PWAs are only able to be limited by technical measures, not business measures. For instance, anti-fingerprinting logic wouldn’t be needed in an App Store. There, Apple can say if they find out you are fingerprinting users without going through Apple’s specific ATT user consent process, you are in violation of our developer agreement and may be permanently banned from the store.
Each update of an app is reviewed, while a website can change completely at any moment (or have different versions served for different people). This is why for instance web extensions are heavily reviewed and audited.
This means they are pretty fundamentally different models.
The prompt for location is different for example because Apple enforces you are using the location information you gather for a specified reason, and has the aforementioned business penalties for misuse, and has tied all that to a real world identity. The browser can’t know if the page asking for location data is for mapping, for marketing tracking, or so that someone can drive to your home. The two features are going to look and behave distinctly.
I know PWAs can't do many things that apps in general can. But people were suggesting that Patreon should just be a website and not an app. And that's why I said PWA. If you can be just a website, you can be a PWA and be a bit better than just a website.
There's another erm... "creator oriented" Patreon-like service that works entirely through the web. Specifically to avoid Apple and Google's cut. And they seem wildly successful, although perhaps the type of content may influence user's decisions.
It's probably a generational divide now. For many middle/younger gen z and the upcoming Gen alpha, apps "are" the web. Not having an app to look at may as well not exist. Especially true of IOS users.
I’ve been trying to figure this out. Just guessing since I have limited Patreon usage.
They don’t want to just be a payment middleman for creators, they want to be “sticky” like Facebook.
So they might add things like chat, media playback (with DRM), creators being able to post with notifications. Maybe you can sign up for additional private streams or even 1-on-1 sessions (like a gamer offering tutorials).
But by having an app to consume digital services, Apple says you have to provide a way to pay for services in the app (because that’s apple’s revenue model, a portion of software sales and resulting digital goods and services off of the App Store)
Sure Apple allows it. However it is much easier to have a good UI experience with a custom app than a web app. Some people also think they must have an app for everything and so even if there is a good web experience they will demand the app anyway.
That will be just great when Apple finds a creator doing that during App Review and bans Patreon over it. Patreon is going to be forced into the position of policing it for Apple, I'd guess.
> However, the rulings established that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.
> Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure.
True, but Android at least allows alternative app stores, and there are a few. Obviously it's not as easy as the native store, but if enough developers are dissatisfied, there is a way out.
My understanding is that Patreon does not use Google's payment system and isn't subject to a cut of the revenue. This is why the article says "Your prices on the web and the Android app will remain completely unaffected".
At least until 2025 when Google implements the exact same policy change. Every questionable hardware choice Apple does is something Android vendors or Google Play copies within a year.
Remember when Samsung made fun of Apple for removing the headphone jack?
unlike Apple who has managed to dodge scrutiny, Google is being reemed hard by the US courts over multiple antitrust issues. It may happen eventually, but I think the courts doing their jobs will stall such pivots. The last thing they want to do is make their store sound more like a monopoly.
I know what you are trying to do, but this is he host of an 800k channel. They already generate millions for youtube. Google will at best try to steer that channel to use Youtube's recent-ish dontation and memberships features.
No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.
I don't understand why Patreon has to drop the per-creation model. Can they not just not offer that on iOS, and continue it on other platforms? (Perhaps with a "convert from susbcription to per-creation" feature online?)
User confusion - if they block users from subscribing to those creators on iOS they will inevitably have support tickets to deal with it. Hence their 16-month project to remove non-iOS-compatible plans.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.
This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the web. I think there is some age/line where on one side, your first instinct is to open the browser on your phone and navigate to a website, and on the other side of the line, you open the app store and navigate to an app.
Personally, I agree. I want better/first class mobile websites over an app. I don't want apps for most things. That said, I didn't grow up in a mobile first/mobile only era.
> This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the web
I don’t think age is the driver. For most people, for the last decade, all software in their phone has come from the App Store. Everybody is trained to check there first. Even if you think to google it first, you’re just going to get App Store link in the top results. Company’s own site might be at the top and you’ll instinctively look for the ‘get on App Store’ badge when you click through.
Some small number of android power users are the only people that really know that downloading an app from not the App Store is possible.
following this to its logical conclusion you would never install an app if they offered a web version which also means if you get a DM from a creator on pateron you have to load the website instead of easy access to your app drawer.
It's 2024, if you want a viable business that caters to mobile users, you need an app. There are users who don't care or even prefer the web version, but we're a minority.
Apps in certain categories (ebooks, music, video, news) can choose to not support purchasing at all in apps, or to use in-app purchases.
Outside these categories (eg a email account as a service, group classes) you are expected to always have in app purchasing.
There have been interesting ways people have explored getting around this, but obviously Apple thinks they should be paid what they are contractually obligated.
Having control of distribution means it is easy on Apple’s side to solve disagreements. You only see it brought to lawsuit by the other side (e.g. Epic’s lost case in the US)
I could be wrong, but I think you’re misinterpreting it. They could remove all billing from the iOS app just like eg Audible does. But I’m guessing they don’t want to. Patreon is looking out for themselves, not their creators or subscribers.
Hard to say. Audible, Netflix, and Spotify have a lot more weight to throw around. Enough that even Apple can't ignore it. I can see these being backdoor deals for them specifically.
Patreon from its very model does not. A very sad exploitation of the little guy, even if this is one of the biggest little guys.
I wonder if you could argue this is comparable to Amazon allowing you to buy some things in the app but not others, like ebooks. Obviously Amazon is much bigger but I don’t see why an app shouldn’t be able to allow buying some things but not others. Especially when the limitation is from Apple’s functionality like in this case, rather than their fee like in Amazon’s.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
This is truly egregious. "At risk"? This is sheer blackmail.
"Nice store you have here. It'd be a shame if anything... bad were to happen to it. A 30% cut for our legitimate businessmen's club should assure you peace of mind... "
hey, i answered your email about aleph last wednesday; no stress if you're answering slowly, i just wanted to check to see if it had fallen into your spam filter
unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments
Apple has quietly been one of the biggest culprits in the proliferation of subscription software. They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing. Subscriptions are also the easiest way to implement a software demo or trial in the App Store. Finally they use their control of the App Store to coerce anyone doing something different than monthly/yearly subscriptions into that model (as we see here).
> They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing.
What would this mean, exactly?
You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things:
1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read
2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E.
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Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1.
Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them.
With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.)
Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX.
The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever.
The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.
Re: feature entitlements shared through a shared SSO auth backend and/or Group Container — yes, apps do this. Mostly this is in app "suites" where you can IAP a feature entitlement in one app in the suite, and the entitlement should then become available to the other apps in the suite. (I think the Omni Group apps do it? Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Re: multi-edition shared apps — I'm not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.)
ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?
So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author now assumes the burden with each new release of maintaining and testing V1 (that’s with all the feature flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like insanity to me.
That would be a choice, not a requirement. It's literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with it. It would be trivial to have "V1 full app unlock" feature be the same as "V2 full app unlock" feature.
@jayd16 - it’s been a few years since I read the Apple Developer Agreement but at that time downloading code and executing it within your app was forbidden by the agreement. A sensible security safeguard IMO.
AFAIK, even the iSH developers were never given a proper explanation. iSH was actually removed a few years back[0] and then reinstated with an apology but no policy changes or clarifications.
This was before the change to allow Delta on the App Store, too.
There's a lot of nuance here. Some of it is ours, some of it is on Apple's side. Before I get into it I will say that most of what I say about Apple's side is largely not a position they will clarify or take publicly, and some of it is our interpretation. When iSH was removed from the store we did push them to clarify this in the App Store Review Guidelines but they chose to not do so.
When you run an App Store that involves human review the big problem you have is apps that mask their behavior during review and then end up breaking the rules later. My understanding is that the "don't download code" policy is intended to prevent this, at least in spirit. I think, at least at the highest level of the company, the intent is to keep to somewhere near this at least for submissions made in good faith and not prone to opening them up to a slippery slope. There are distinctions here, though, and policy enforcement is also complicated.
My (and iSH's) position is that "code" should be interpreted very broadly, including native code (which the platform blocks from loading anyways) but also things like embedded webviews updated server-side or those "code-push"/"run JavaScript in an interpreter in your app" things. And going even beyond that, I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
From this perspective you will note that code isn't even really the interesting part here, it's the behavior changing that matters. So this leads naturally what we have described as "scripting apps", which download code but do not change their behavior. Their entire point is to download code. Like, App Store is an app store, regardless of whether you download TikTok or Google Maps from it. iSH is a a Linux environment. Nothing you will do in the app will change that. And notably we have zero ability to change that ourselves, short of submitting a new app. It's not like we can just add Windows emulation as a downloadable JavaScript package without going through review. From our discussions with leadership, I think they agree with us on it, but are not willing to commit to it publicly, because then people will take creative bad-faith interpretations of it to argue what a feature of the app versus something a user does in the app is, or something like that. Or they just want to hold all the cards and reserve the right to take this away. Either way I strongly disagree with them doing this, but for now iSH remains on the store.
You will note that the changes we make (see our blog post about repositories: https://ish.app/blog/default-repository-update) continue to support that position. Again, I cannot say for sure whether this is the interpretation Apple uses, or if they even have a consistent position. It's just an attempt on our side to show good faith. As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment (it says code therefore your app for coding is bad). But again, this is just our experience; we have no idea if Phill will hit his head tomorrow and decide to pull iSH tomorrow because he thinks Linux is the child of the devil.
What you've said largely tracks with my interpretation of Apple's actions here.
> I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
After Epic added direct purchase gated behind a feature flag to Fortnite, I'm genuinely surprised Apple didn't start requiring full control over and documentation of all downloadable configuration files as part of App Review.
While being vaguely on the side of review being not very useful I would agree with Apple doing that if only to make their position more consistent, even though I am sure every developer would riot if this was the case. (Although I vaguely remember someone saying we provided feature flags to Apple when we submitted builds at Twitter. But do take it with a grain of salt, since I wasn't on the release team and my view of them is vaguely positive in that I think they generally didn't try to use tricks to get through review.)
Odds are their "front line" reviewers are not highly technical, so Apple wouldn't want to commit to that. They are more than large enough to afford a few inefficiencies and pick fights the few times something like iSH "slip in".
>As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment
A sadly universal experience. Especially when the not-so-secret is that that frontline is often contracted or outsourced. They do not understand (by design) the subtleties of submission of creative content. They are simply cheap help to do the bare minimum to remove liability, and if a few false negatives happen during that time, oh well. thousands of other apps in the sea.
So like everything else, if you havev the money, clout, or simply sheer persistence (which shouldn't be necessary) then you can force yourself to someone who can actually help. But few will get there, even with persistance.
Lot of stuff can skirt by until it doesn't. That's how stuff like Beeper suddenly explodes into a kerfluffle in a matter of days over some dang blue bubbles.
The model is the "old school" model for software sales.
The first version you sell to a user at full price and offer a discount for upgrading (something like 40% off). It lets the customer pick when they feel the value prop is worth the cost and lets you offer a loyalty incentive to the user.
Right now the choice is "keep paying for it to keep working" or "fully price for every upgrade".
Bundles can be used for upgrade pricing, you put the new version up for full price (ie. $20) and and a bundle with the new and old version (ie $30, for a 50% discount on it) for those who own the old version. When you buy a bundle you don't pay for the one you own.
Are there any examples of apps that do that? As a consumer, I haven't ever heard of an app that offers this (e.g. goodnotes, LiquidText, MarginNote, Audulus and Things have new major releases and don't seem to do this)
Couple of the old school macOS dev houses tried this once this hack became visible and little birdies said the hack WAI. (ex. OmniGroup)
Since then, people have backed off.
If you're going to this much work to help users workaround Apple nonsense, you really care about helping them save money, and the support + refund costs of people accidentally buying the bundle with the old version they don't need is > just building out your own server-side system, versus a combinatorial explosion of bundles in the App Store that creates a confusing minefield for users.
By jumping through hoops, tying unrelated tools together, confusing users, and reaping an extra $10 you didn't want to take + support costs thereof, yes, it is possible. It is not what we expected or asked for when we started asking for this in 2007 (we = iOS devs).
Free upgrades are problematic themselves: once you've saturated your market (a good place to be, right?) you no longer have income to provide upgrades.
I don’t exactly remember how it went but ~5 years ago Goodnotes 5 came out and they offered a “bundle” of Goodnotes 4 and 5 together at the same price of Goodnotes 5. Maybe owners of version 4 had some kind of discount on the bundle because they already owned half of it?
There are several vendors who do this, for instance 1Password and the Omni Group both do. You have an in-app purchase option that is unlocked by a previous receipt. The challenge is that Apple does not provide tools to help or guidance. They do indeed think e.g. requiring users to buy an upgrade to keep the app working on a new annual iOS version or macOS version is a bad model for users.
Panic even had an upgrade for MAS users when they released their new version of the now defunct Coda outside the MAS (for sandboxing reasons).
They added "in app purchases" indicators in the store for this. I use it all the time. "In app purchases" on something that claims it's free is not free.
Apple's longstanding App Store guidelines always forced a certain level of "quality" and good customer experience, yet they're now allowing apps that are the exact opposite.
Most of these apps use dark UX patterns to trick new users into scammy free trials which convert to $100+/yr subscriptions after 1-3 days. These apps also make it difficult to close out of the subscription window, or make it seem like you have to subscribe when you don't.
It's entirely contradictory to everything Apple once stood for in justifying their gatekeeper App Store experience.
Apple could easily ban these types of scammy UX patterns, but they won't because it benefits them. That's my point.
In the days of the ipod every single user of it I encountered had apple's UX wipe their music collection.
But maybe that was by design as they decided to call their music shop by the same name as their ipod management software. That is the essence of Apple's UX. Shiny destruction of your property. It remains so.
The UX everyone wanted was copying files onto and off the device presented as storage on any computer it was plugged in to.
That's not totally true. Twitter/X is fine, in this regard. The toggle is web based, but there's no censorship once it's toggled. The large amount of age restricted content on YouTube, with nudity, is another example.
They've certainly encouraged subscriptions but the big driver is the drive for recurring revenue, which can be valued up to 20X what one-time revenue is valued. In some cases companies with investors are instructed to not even care about non-recurring revenue since it doesn't matter. Revenue is recurring or it doesn't exist.
Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.
This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.
Can you imagine the hellscape Steam would be if they adopted this phlosophy? It may have fundamentally ended PC gaming as we know it. Literally throwing free money away.
>Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage
It won't alter this course, but given recent news I sure hope Biden can do one last kick to this stupid model. The biggest reason subscriptions do this is because so many forget to unsubscribe. An issue as old as fiat currency. discouraging recurring subscriptions could be the US's version of GDPR in terms of how utterly devastating it will be to companies.
Yeah, though the problem with this is that from my experience with Android, the web version of Patreon is practically unusable. Not that the app is much better, they seem determined to come up with the most horrific UX anyone could imagine across all platforms, but it at least can somewhat consistently handle playing the podcasts I subscribe to without cutting out every five minutes.
Apps are now forcing you to use their website skin even though its damn easy to offer a mobile web alternative that doesn't squander ever precious local storage.
absolutely dreadful. It is quite literally unusable to use the mobile site. I don't even know why they bother hosting it.
Only site where I simply toggle desktop. And now FF mobile can even install RES so that helps mitigate the otherwise clunky navigation (though, I have been unable to enable cloud backup. I can restore local copies though).
Which apps? The only one I know about is Reddit, where the web version is crippled compared to the app. (You can’t read all the comments). But old.reddit.com works fine on mobile - even if you have to constantly zoom in and out.
ultimate-guitar.com is a big offender. The mobile site jams lots of things in your face to and get you to download the app (including an entire fake tab page that you can't interact with but can scroll past on iOS devices). Then on the mobile site you can't tap on any of the chords to see the fingerings (very important!).
You can if you choose to request the desktop site, but then you get an obnoxious bar going across the middle of the page blocking some of the tab.
If you fold and finally download the app, you're greeted with a 10+ page unskippable questionnaire that after you're done ends with a paid subscription call to action. If you then force close the app, and open a tab link from the browser into the app, you are finally allowed to view a tab.
Bonza went under because Qantas/Virgin maintain a lock on airport "slots" in the primary markets of Melbourne and Sydney.
That's why every day, there are flights from both airlines that are "cancelled" and everyone moved to the next flight. Qantas got so outrageous that they were selling tickets for "flights" that they knew were never going to fly.
Australia's airport and airline "markets" are monopolies (airports) combined with oligarchies (Qantas/Virgin).
Like most consumer industries in Australia, there is a natural oligarchy or regulated market size, thing supermarkets (Coles/Woolworths + Aldi/IGA), banks (the "big 4"), Fuel, Hotels/Pubs, etc.
Uber lets you use mobile web. You try that on lyft they text you a link to download the app. As a result a bookmark to mobile web uber lives on my phone rather than the 300mb lyft app.
I don't think this is up to the consumer. The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all? It's not like consumers are clamoring for these apps. Everyone I know hates that you have to have an app for everything these days.
>The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all?
the sad reality is that mobile pretty much "solved" an issue corporations struggle with on web to this day. A closed down (i.e. no adblock), centralized (i.e. you can pay to game the platform to highlight your product), scalable system that can be easily and conveniently monetized. They don't like it, but those corps would 99/100 times take that 30% toll from Apple/Google to gatekeep the adblockers if it means they get more consistent ways to serve ads and subscriptions. That's why being open didn't change most company's decision to serve on Google Play vs an alternative store, nor on the web.
Oh you too. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's really liked per-creation for years. "I pay my rent if I can do eight posts of comics pages/art/etc a month" was a good kick in the ass to keep working.
Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few Wordpress plugins.
It is, but monthly subscriptions are too "sticky". There are creators that haven't released anything for several years, but they still earn thousands of dollars from their patrons, because people don't really care about saving $5 a month.
At the same time, people do care about spending an extra $5 on top of $50 they already spend on patronage, so new creators in the same field find it harder to amass a sustainable number of patrons.
Is it really a problem? Right now I am skint so every time I sub I unsub from someone else. Patreon makes it super easy. It shows how much I spend on who and I can see who was inactive for years.
Patreon launched in May 2013. I joined after one of my fans asked me to set one up so they could give me money; my first post there is in February 2014. My account is on the "founders" plan, which has Patreon taking 5% ("plus applicable fees and taxes") rather than the 8/12% (plus applicable fees and taxes) that's what they offer now. Does that qualify me for "OG Patreon" status?
Pay-per-creation mode was available then. It might have even been the only mode. I can't recall for sure. It's certainly the one I chose, if there was an option, and I haven't changed that for ten and a half years. Looking at archive.org's earliest capture of the site (June 2013), it says this:
Pledges are only charged at the beginning of each new month based on whether the artist created any content that the artist specifically labels as supported content after your pledge. Artists can, of course, post new content that doesn't count as supported content.
You'll get notified each time the Content Creator posts new content that the artist specifically labels as supported content, but you won't get charged each time. Artists can also, of course, make posts on their activity feed and even upload new content that isn't labeled as supported content. Charges are aggregated and done once at the beginning of each new month, and you can edit/cancel your patronage at any time. Additionally, you can set a max limit for how much you'll be charged, so you never need to worry about paying for too much content!
This sure makes it sound like the original model was pay-per-post. There's nothing in there about a monthly subscription. "Support me through a monthly recurring tip" existed back then via Paypal's tip jars and some creators were getting by on it but it was a much harder sell before Patreon came along.
Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open standards.
Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download thing that could've been a Web site.
In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive on their hardware in various ways. (Often through foot-dragging when other vendors were trying to make Web apps a smooth experience, but sometimes also going out of their way to make Web work worse.) (See also: making kids look like losers to their peers in chat, if they don't have iPhones.)
Apple then imposes predatory rates and terms on other businesses who are pretty much forced to use the Apple proprietary app store, due not to the merits of the app store so much as Apple's dominance of hardware and conflict of interest when implementing open standards.
I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and how much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple can be. Or they have some idea, but pragmatically have to accept it. Also, this affords Apple a lot of money for really first-rate PR.
What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality. For example: Apple may only charge a few-percent administration and payment processing fee, and that's it; and they have to permit other app stores with first-class access to the system, as a compromise given the proprietary lock-in mess they've made. (Making them support other open standards better, even to the exclusion of prorietary ones, is more complicated.)
Since at least the 1980s, IT had the concepts of "open systems" and "interoperation", to support market competition and innovation. And we later did things like the Web and other open standards.
Then Apple comes along,
Wow. I don't know if that's selective memory, or revisionist history, but you've got a huge dose of the stuff.
No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
> No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).
>What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality.
I imagine that part of it is that Apple's stock backstops a lot of activity in the financial markets. No one wants to kill the golden goose to protect "a bunch of Millennial and Zoomer phone addicts"; you have to remember, we're the cows everyone else is happy to milk dry for their own needs.
The EU had a tenuous relation with Apple from the start. Apple spent the past 20-odd years manipulating Irish subsidiaries to avoid paying a dime in taxes on any of their European operations. Despite being called out on it and partially settling the back-taxes in some jurisdictions, they still owe billions to multiple EU members they haven't payed back. There's no history of love, between Apple and Europe. They conspire against Apple because Apple conspires against them.
Then Apple had to kick the hornets nest and piss off the Dutch regulators with the Tinder case. Apple forfeit quickly but it set the stage for everyone else joining in on the fines. This was the perfect catalyst for the DMA and the DSA, which would be copied in other countries like Japan (which coincidentally also has tax feuds with Apple).
Good luck to the shareholders They won't take kindly to the news that the Apple of their eye is a big fruit-shaped bubble.
Due to their app store monopoly, Apple is probably one of the few companies whose version of enshittification often involves enshittifying the products and services of other companies.
A big part of it is restrictive and onerous standards on cellular firmware that act as a compliance moat for Apple and Google (and seem designed to enable surveillance more than anything), but if we fail to get open-source alternatives via commonsense regulatory reform the antitrust guns need to come out. When smartphones are often the only authentication mechanism accepted by major payment providers, workplaces, and other contexts that most people can't opt out of, a (fairly cozy, collaborating as often as they compete) duopoly on viable operating systems is unacceptable
Strongly agree, but the existence of platform-integrated DRM is a moral hazard that current incentives don't seem to have a mechanism for overcoming, and the only mechanisms that seem to work require open or at least regulated platforms
1. Some iOS users don't realize there even is a web browser, and only look for apps. If there's not an app, they give up.
2. The patreon app has features like playing music and video (patreon rewards), notifications (new posts and messages and such), etc.... and while those features would work for a webpage on android, they either don't work on iOS, or are more difficult to implement, buggy, and feel "non-native" for the user.
Notice how the other two replies assumed "web page" didn't mean "using safari on iOS". If hacker news commenters have trouble with the concept of "using a webpage, not an app, on iOS", what hope does the general populace have?
I think one of the reasons Apple feels entitled to do this is almost monopolistic US market share. People should stop buying iPhones for this, but it's not hard to foreseen it won't happen.
Apple has a far from monopolistic US market share for mobile devices. They might be one of the largest single vendors, but if I want to go buy a new smartphone that has decent app and service support from the marketplace, I can absolutely do that without giving so much as a penny to Apple.
Apple has just over 60% of the US market share and employee a whole arsenal of tactics to create artificial friction with other platforms in order to increase that market share.
That's big, but in the minds of most, that's not a monopoly. Duopoly with Google, sure, but convincing a court of a monopoly when a lot of people in that court have living memory of Windows being 80%+ of the total OS installs in the country is going to be a tall ask, especially considering that didn't even stick, long-term, as a rationale to keep MS under the original terms of its punishment.
I don't think this simplistic view of "monopoly" is all that useful today. This article, IMO, is proof of that: Apple is forcing an unrelated company to change something fundamental about how they take payments, which (negatively!) affects that company's customers (both patrons and creators), even those who do not use Apple products at all.
If that's not abuse of market power, I'm not sure what is, then.
I'm sure Patreon is just itching to take on the wealthiest company's legal department. Even the wealthiest nation states are struggling to reign this in.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon […] disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
Absolutely astounding that removing transactions from the platform could result in being removed.
When they respond Apple changes policy for EU users, not for anyone else.
Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have the ability to install apps using alternative app marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App Store.
I don't know a ton about Patreon, but what if creators have exclusive content available via the app and use that to encourage fans to subscribe outside of iOS? What if creators start an education campaign on YouTube telling their fans to avoid subscriptions on iOS?
I wonder if Apple is playing with fire on this one. If the creator and influencer markets turn on them, I think it could have a non-trivial impact on Apple's brand, especially with younger generations. Many modern creators are also smart business people and they're not going to see much value in Apple taking 30% of their revenue when Patreon is already providing all the services they need for about 15% at the top end IIRC.
Right now I think the biggest change that could help the average consumer would be for legislators to allow, or maybe even require, app owners to split platform fees into separate line items. For example, something like:
Donation $1.00
Patreon Platform Fee $1.18
Apple Platform Fee $0.50
----------------------------
Total $1.68
I strongly suspect Patreon is playing fast and loose with the wording here. Note they say “if creators on Patreon disable transactions…” but not “if Patreon were to disable all transactions.” I’m pretty sure they could still go the Audible route where they remove all mention and links to billing options off app. But Patreon doesn’t want to go that route across the board, they still want people to be able to sign up for things in app.
Easy to fix, give creators an option to make all tiers cost one quadrillion USD on the iOS app (or whatever the upper limit is for in-app purchases). Technically they are complying with Apple's demands while also allowing creators to give Apple the finger.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread> If you have not switched to subscription billing by this November, your fans will not be able to purchase new memberships in the iOS app.
Basically, you just won't be able to make purchases via the iOS app. Which is just really not great for creators.
The per-creation billing is where this really stinks. I much prefer to have this all managed in Patreon rather than Apple. I'll be able to manage just fine, but this is going to cause confusion. Honestly, this is why the web is so important. At least you can still use the website to get around paying for this.
why do some purchases get exempt and not others?
And Patreon sure feels a lot more like those -- you're sending money to a creator.
Sometimes you get extra content, but sometimes you don't.
I’ve been pretty sympathetic to Apple in their tangles with the EU - I want my phone to be a locked-down appliance. But this is too far- it’s clear that Apple both has a lot of power and is abusing it.
That is, if someone wants to, they can use Patreon's iOS app, not interact with Patreon in any other way, and get all of the benefits available to patrons.
If your service forces me to auto-renew my subscription, I'm probably not gonna buy it.
I don't know why they badly want this - presumably for more user tracking, or because studies show that people engage more, or whatever - but pulling out of the app store would be at odds with this desire to push everyone into their app.
Instead, I suspect they saw the money that patreon made and want a (30%) slice of that pie.
Browsers can have things like adblockers that keep you from collecting a very valuable commodity: data.
As a user, I strongly prefer websites for this sort of thing. I'll pay attention when it suits me, not when the service wants me to. It does explain why Patreon wants to have an app though.
Apple has given me a simple way to manage many of my subscriptions, a single pane of glass, which I appreciate. I'm fine paying a little extra for that.
It would be more valuable to me if Apple didn't charge too much, which turns away service providers.
Same reason people use credit cards or Gmail or hell Patreon. It reduces the number of counterparties you have to deal with and trust.
Facilitation of transactions and assuming the risk.
It's worth it to many. I gladly pay Apple the extra 30% or whatever because it adds up to <$10 per month for me and I don't have to jump through hoops to cancel subs.
What if, instead of 'subscribing' for $10, you purchase a grain of sand for $10.
The grain of sand is available for collection from somewhere, doesn't matter where because nobody would bother to collect it. Your physical purchase comes with free access to digital content.
So Patreon would have to actually staff a location somewhere that distributes the sand.
> staff a location
still costs less than 30% of all ios revenue
Hope by then, we see government intervention and break up big tech
>Q: What fees does Apple charge merchants for using Apple Pay?
>Apple does not charge merchants any fees for accepting Apple Pay payments. However, merchants may still be subject to fees from their payment processor or bank. Remember, credit cards and debit cards are behind each Apple customer purchase.
>Apple Pay fees are generally lower than traditional credit card processing. Credit card issuers charge small businesses substantially more. As such, many SMBs ask employees to encourage Apple Pay transactions.
>Merchants, on the other hand, aren’t charged at all to use Apple Pay on physical and eCommerce transactions.
Looks like Apple Pay is cheaper for everyone except banks:
>Major banks such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Capital One are unhappy with their cut from Apple. So much so that they’ve formally requested that Visa, “change the way that it processes certain Apple Pay transactions.” In other words, pay Apple less in transaction fees.
This website has a better breakdown of costs under the "What are the fees" section, but no firm figures, and the only estimate is from 10 years ago:
https://www.applemust.com/how-apple-pay-makes-money-merchant...
If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated markets to change their own structure and products just to fit Apple's preferred billing flow.
I am suspicious, because the specific change to per-creation billing is overwhelmingly positive for Patreon (and, as you pointed out, not for its users), from a business economics perspective (assuming they don't lose too many users over this). It also seems odd for Apple to press that point specifically.
most apps don't do payments like this to begin with.
>To be clear, I’m taking about the case where Patreon could decide to show no billing details or links at all in the App Store, just like eg Audible.
To be frank, I don't think Patreon has the same market force as Audible. Audible can definitely appeal to apple and make a deal that others don't get. Maybe Patreon did desire some of this, but I do put the blame on Apple. This is hardly the first time they arbiriarily played hardball.
I’m still pretty sure that if an app has zero financial interactions at all in the App Store that Apple has no limitations on how the app’s financials work outside of the app. But I can understand that once you want to do anything in app, Apple might have restrictions on hybrid models.
1 - https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/16/you-can-now-buy-audiobooks-di...
We probably will never know which of Apple or Patreon is guilty, unless Apple is forced to yield it in a future discovery, or is raided by some agency in a probe.
It's too big of a decision to take without actual numbers, and having gone through it for a few months also helps on the communication side: on the surface Patreon at least gave it a try, and there's even a chance users are pissed off enough by the new model to campaign for that change and defend the move to their fans.
Or, of course, eating the 30% fee yourself deincentivizes you to use the platform (or upload content as regularly) if you opt for that one
I'd say it's a loss for everyone involved except for Apple. Since Apple now gets a cut from all transactions its hard for me to see this as anything else except hostile and arrogant
It also just kinda harshes everyone's vibe when they eventually realize they're being gypped and paying a lot more than others for the same thing, and that can cause people to just unsubscribe.
According to App Store rules, you're not allowed to disclose the App Store fee to users. So Patreon is not allowed to explain to users that 30% is going to Apple, nor to explain that there are other options. I'm not sure if Apple regulates messaging to creators as well.
Can't Patreon support a ton of different-priced SKUs and let creators use those SKUs for one-off purchases?
They're also killing the once-a-month billing so that use case is also gone. I'm not sure who Patreon is for anymore.
It’s not all about the 30% cut.
If it was easy and trouble free, they would support it.
Imagine what a great time apps would have if Apple let them charge you an amount whenever they wanted, without user authorisation?
It's a simple matter of user communication: you make it clear from the start that the billing will be unpredictable, and potentially provide a ceiling for monthly bills to let the user stop if it goes out of hand.
I follow per creation billing creators and it's fine. Amazon also offers an option to auto buy new volumes of a series.
The customer not knowing in advance how much they'll be billed isn't common, but it's not complex in itself.
I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god finally we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn thing". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in making a Patreon-like that does offer it and recapitulating the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform, what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay their tithe or leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games's suits".
Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth Problems and says "sign me right the fuck up, convincing a bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a great way to spend a few years of my life", hey, I'll gladly give you input on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or something.
If you think that last paragraph sounds like fun I be delighted to accept a lucrative position on the advisory board for this enterprise. :)
Like the best one they've had, bundling every charge for the month into a single transaction so that $1 payments aren't wasting a huge percent.
Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think about it they must think very little of their customers treating them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple' should be remembered.
Even if the end users are aware and accept it, that doesn’t make Apple right.
We as a society accept a lot of things - from the security theatre at airports (last week, I saw photos of passengers taken, for domestic flights) to Amazon workers peeing in bottles. As long as we get our crap the same day, we’re good with some unfortunate souls peeing in bottles. If it bothered us, we’d stop shopping at Amazon, for example.
All this to say, we’ve been trained very well to tolerate and even accept a lot of bad behavior if it helps with our laziness. Doesn’t mean it is right though
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/apples-...
https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/do-you-have-to-pay-the...
Yes, there is far more discussion in tech/nerd spaces, but it's also being talked about in non-tech areas too.
That is who the average iphone user is.
So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
In related news, I just got my keyboard settlement check!
For crying out loud; you just got your settlement for a hardware flaw Apple doesn't admit exists 8 years after they shipped the flawed product. Mankind cannot sustain this pattern of business refusing to back-down from demonstrably harmful practices that their customers can identify and isolate. The Butterfly keyboard is a microcosm of how Apple ships deliberately flawed products in an attempt to market a solution they are exclusively qualified to sell. And despite all this, people still rush to Apple's aid like it's wrong to call them out for being so greedily obstinate. The reality distortion field is still in full effect.
I don’t think any corporation goes into product design hoping to give out free repair service and settle class action lawsuit claims.
Remember that when Apple finally introduced the 2019 MacBook Pro that reverted the keyboard design, it was only 3 years after the original 15” MacBook Pro butterfly model came out. It’s not like they were sitting on their hands for an extremely long time ignoring their customers as you accuse. They completely reverted the design in about 3 years and seemingly forced their lead designer into retirement.
As far as admitting the problem exists publicly, offering proactive refunds, etc, find me a public corporation that will do that and I’ll give you a pot of gold. And recall that the service bulletin and offer to provide free repairs is an acknowledgment of the problem.
1. iPhones (starting with iPhone 6) being constructed to have fragile and DRM-encumbered components (display, battery, camera)
2. Macbook topcases with unibody constructions that can only be replaced as a single $600 finished assembly
3. Macbook bottom chassis for using glue instead of tapped screws to prevent safe disassembly and repair
4. Airpods being entirely impossible to service in any way (and conveniently removing the 3.5mm jack for alternatives)
5. Vision Pro being designed to stop functioning if non-essential features like the eye-tracking or the glass panel up front are broken.
Why is this a conspiracy? Because we can easily prove Apple knows about the pressure they're creating for customers. At first it was AppleCare that capitalized on these insecurities, giving the rich a solution that doesn't even repair their Apple products in the first place. Before being criticized for it, Apple themselves did not even want to repair Apple products. They'd rather trash your old one and give you a new one. Then the criticism came in, and instead of designing their products better Apple creates a new first-party repair program with worse DRM problems. Worse yet, they're still forcing you to buy entire component assemblies to fix a single broken part. Did your display's power IC break? That's a $2 Texas Instruments component you'll be paying $150 to get replaced. Don't forget your $49 repair kit rental. $200 to fix a $2 part.
You might say this is all very smart, on Apple's behalf. Too much so; with the DRM scheme they've created it's impossible for you to do cheaper repairs even if you wanted to. You have to buy first-party components, and even donor-boards won't work as sources of cheap spare parts. So Apple went out of their way to stop third-parties from being capable of performing profitable repairs. They've prevented users and repair shops from buying the components they need and using software they have blocked you from even attempting to fix things yourself. Sound like John Deere yet?
You know why Apple takes 3 years to sheepishly fix a mistake they don't admit exists? Because they make money off it. People stuck on old models are forced to get one with a usable keyboard. Hell, before they started (2 years after shipping btw) the free repair program as a response to lawsuits, they were charging users for new keyboards. It's a racket; you would have to be actually blind to look at Apple's history of behavior and assume it is not arranged for profit over any other single value.
BTW, this is not my opinion but instead a re-hash of the criticisms that Apple-certified repair stores have levied against Apple. People have been complaining about this since 2016 and if you step outside HN you may notice that people care about Right to Repair.
Still shocking such a bad an sonically ugly keyboard launched though.
I vaguely remember the courts being unimpressed with that requirement, and Apple maliciously complying with the judgment by allowing something hilariously minimal and uninformative, like “one tiny in-app link to your main website but you can’t say the word ‘cheaper,’” something along those lines.
(Edited to add: yes, sounds like that came post-Epic, and involved an even more Dantean set of caveats than I’d remembered. Among other things, not only can there be no more than one link, but that one link can only ever appear in one place in the app, it can’t “discourage” in-app payment, and its one appearance can’t be during the payment flow:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/16/apples-app-store-... )
However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
I can't see that lasting very long.
No, I very obviously saw it on TV and got it from Apple because that's the only way to install native apps on iOS.
In more open ecosystems like the web browser, you can literally install extensions that tell you where you can buy something for cheaper. I'm sure Amazon, Walmart, and friends would love for that to be impossible.
The virtual space only "belongs" to Apple because they've deliberately walled it off.
One analogy: By offering only Fairplay DRM on iPhone, they get a cut that might otherwise have gone to Google (widevine), Microsoft (playready) or some other third party.
Not necessarily. They may have heard about it on the internet and then looked in the app store for it.
If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the outside of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart, there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking Apple Ipad from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its direct services once you start using the product.
People bring up this comparison all the time and it's very simply not true. You can advertise direct services inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the store page, Apple is saying that you can't advertise alternative platforms in the app itself.
There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on whether a physical product you buy from them can have an advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the box or software that comes with it.
If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart. After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right? Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases? That's how Apple sees the world.
Several things:
A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.
B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).
C) Is your implication that if Walmart did open up a music streaming service that suddenly it would be improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices purchased from Walmart? Because that's a wild thing to suggest.
D) Just re-stating B more directly: Apple advertises direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store - a direct competitor to Walmart's tech hardware sales - for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging for devices that are bought from Walmart.
Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not be able to link to this page within an iOS app.
There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.
> Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.
I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an Apple store.
> Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).
Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But amazingly, somehow less egregious than what Apple is doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive does a company have to be in order to be worse than Walmart? That's almost an accomplishment.
In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
[0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
*The US will let corporations do whatever they want while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges.
There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct.
We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved.
People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is.
But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position.
Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
Not if your competitor, android, controls 70% of the market.
That's what I meant about being insulting. In court, when we're making these kinds of claims, we shouldn't talk about what could be, we must talk about what is.
And "Android" is a bunch of companies, not one.
It’s important to not just consider the quantitative impact of the monopolist (percent of market share) but also the qualitative components (is it vertically integrated? is it hurting consumers?).
I’m not sure whether or not Apple is a monopolist, but I certainly think there are some arguments.
Apple has over 50% of smartphone marketshare in the U.S. and over 60% of mobile app revenue.
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts. You can buy a Brother printer and not have to buy paper or toner from them, why should I have to buy my apps from Apple? And to be clear, that is precisely how Apple thinks of the relationship between the user and the app. Apple owns that relationship. They mediate. They manage. They facilitate. No one else. Users don't buy apps. Users pay Apple. Apple pays the app developers.
Epic tried to make this argument in court and failed, mostly because tying is generally not illegal if the consumer is aware of the tie when purchasing and has the option to purchase an alternative product without such a tie.
In other words it would be absolutely legal for Brother to sell a printer that only uses Brother-branded paper and toner, because if you don't like those restrictions you can simply go and purchase a non-Brother printer instead.
I was an iPhone guy. Switching to Android was honestly trivial.
Apples biggest crime IMO is doing everything possible to hide the 30% tax from common knowledge, not that they charge it.
Market share is irrelevant, though. As we can see in this article, the ability to force an unrelated business to transform its business model to fit your needs is monopoly power.
Cite please? IIRC, the present day antitrust precedents were set in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri....
Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android.
But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist.
As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does.
[0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use.
[1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation.
[2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.
[3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
27% Worldwide
And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android device makers.
In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly when your closest competitor is at 24%.
And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone.
80 fucking 7 %
To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).
Yes, but "only when it harms both allocative efficiency and raises the prices of goods above competitive levels or diminishes their quality."[1]
[1] https://law.stanford.edu/press/congress-hears-challenges-to-...
There's no reason Patreon must use Apple's store. They could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site. iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content, and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if the services Apple is offering do have value, and people are just arguing about the bill.
The thing is, while iOS is only 27% of the global phone market, that percentage increases when you look at high-value customers. That is, the people with disposable income to spend on fancier phones[0], the people who pay for apps, and the people who would, most critically, donate to an artist's recurring crowdfunding campaign. This isn't even something I made up, it's specifically one of the allegations in the DOJ's lawsuit against Apple.
Now, you are a counterparty to this $3tn megacorporation[1] who owns all your customers. Said corporation is altering the deal: you either bill through our royalty-bearing[2] payment processor or we kick you off the platform. You have two options:
- Upend large sections of your business model to comply with Apple guidelines, including killing an unusually quirky billing model some fraction of your creators make use of, or,
- Leave the platform where all your creators' customers are, hope said creators can get people to follow along through Apple's convenient and extremely discoverable six-step process[3] to install a PWA, and enjoy degraded access to push notifications[4], having to fight Google SEO spam for discoverability, and the ongoing business risk of Apple having complete and total editorial control over how your webapp works on iOS[5].
I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
[0] To be clear, high-end Android phones cost more than iPhones now, but iPhone is still a status symbol.
[1] Incidentally, this is about half the current budget of the US government.
[2] Apple's argument in the Epic lawsuit was that the 30% is a copyright royalty for the use of iOS, which doesn't quite make sense but the judge bought it.
[3] Navigate to the website, press the Share button, scroll down to "Add to Home Screen", fill out the form to name your new home screen icon, tap "Add", relog into the PWA again
[4] Yes, I know iOS added push notification support. I'll believe it when the Google Fi PWA actually notifies me about text messages on my iPad.
[5] Yes, this risk is higher for webapps. Apple can't modify submitted apps after-the-fact (just refuse to host them), but they can modify webpages behind your back by changing Safari. To quote Cory Doctorow: "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." If users can block ads, Apple can block whatever else they want, too.
This is just hand-waving away my point, though: they can absolutely be on iOS through the browser and nobody has to pay Apple a dime. The fact that they've done the math and decided they must be a distributed iOS app in the Apple App Store means it offers undeniable value. Whether or not it 'screws over creators' is incidental to Patreon, their business model is extracting revenue from creators. Of course they're going to chafe at competition and make sure creators blame Apple for the business expense Patron is passing on to them.
Not sure how this myth keeps getting perpetuated. The antitrust laws that are relevant to the lawsuits against Apple (specifically Epic's and the DOJ's) absolutely care about market share for the purposes of proving monopolization or attempted monopolization under the Sherman Act.
(Yes, technically it is true that some antitrust violations can occur with low levels of market share, such as price fixing, but those are not really relevant to the lawsuits against Apple.)
I would argue that whatever good Steve Jobs did by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he could have done more by also taking good medical advice and treating his cancer.
Also, this guy is not an oncologist, advocates for a vegan diet that is extremely high in carbs (and fiber, granted), and is thus not exactly a disinterested party presenting good scientific research.
An operation or anything else may not have saved Steve Jobs. But doing nothing and hoping it goes away definitely didn't.
Take mammograms for example. Some European countries have stopped using them all together because even the US admits it raises the likelihood of getting breast cancer. But the US medical system will tell you it's worth increasing your chances of breast cancer from mammograms, because they help you catch breast cancer you may have gotten in other ways earlier, thus making it more treatable.
Not a bet I would take personally. But women are rarely told that. Every women I've told that to is shocked.
The point here, though, is that even if mammography were ineffective at identifying cancer or had large false positive rates - which no reputable medical body has suggested is the case - medical and surgical intervention would be the proper treatment, because they work and are effective for those forms of cancer.
There is also simply no evidence that Western medicine is causing more cancer. I would believe that there are diets that can decrease the likelihood of it, but there is also not evidence nor any known mechanism by which a diet can cure cancer once it exists.
Wait, no.
Hmm:
> The McDougall Program is a transformative and life-saving 12-day online medical program designed by Dr. McDougall. For over 35 years, this program has been helping individuals reverse chronic illness and take charge of their health.
"chronic illness", very specific! And in only 12 days! Wow.
Okay, it doesn't get any better when you get specific:
Osteoporosis (no, you can't reverse that, though with diet AND medication, you can slow it). Arthritis, same. Cancer? Ooh, that's a bold claim, "this diet will reverse cancer". Multiple sclerosis, same.
And all from the same diet!
If it walks like a duck... it says quack quack.
It did reduce his high blood pressure and he was able to go off the medication he was on.
He told me to look into it but I am not on any medication and am older than my friend; he dropped the issue when I pointed out that both of my parents had lived years longer than Dr. McDougall.
You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.
Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
I don't see that at all. A very small government that is willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far. It's just that the will is not there.
I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this, both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what happened to the company afterwards. He was more right than they were.
> guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine
Hilariously irrelevant.
> both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple
I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate, when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting around the rate while small developers had to pay it. Nobody, in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60% fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
This is the difference I'm getting at: "We want a cut but our users shouldn't have to pay more" vs "We want a cut and our users can pay for it"
Which is why it's specifically the approach of Tim Cook's Apple to it's customers.
Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription.
Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
Apple’s policy is one account and other family sharing or child accounts.
Second, what I've described is a problem that a lot of people have because seemingly no one at Apple understands that if you move between countries for work and need to have access to banking (or any other apps that are specific to that country) in those countries, the only way is to have different IOS account per country.
And it's even somewhat supported in ios, if she needs to redownload an app that was deleted due to lack of space, ios prompts her for that specific account's password (not the one I'm currently logged in). So it's somewhat shoddily supported. Nowhere near as good as android, where you can be logged in to multiple accounts and just click on a a menu and chose which account to use.
"Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other thanuse in-app purchase, except as set forth ...",
And that includes sending promotional emails if said emails were gathered via app.
See also: people who copy and paste images into Word documents before attaching them to emails. Same mental model disconnect.
And yes, see also people who print emails so they can scan them XD
I wish Patreon had more apps. It's a pain to watch videos on my TV. I have to mirror my iPad and keep tapping the screen to keep it from locking and ending the session.
But they're being forced to use a payment platform that they don't want to use and have to alter/drop one of their best features to do it.
Feels like getting a dry cleaning bill from the guy who stabbed you.
Apple should have a carve out for small donations/creator support just like physical goods.
The only use cases I can think of for an app are 1) Socializing with other supporters who support the same artist, and 2) Searching other creators on Patreon and discovering similar artists you could support.
But Patreon's social features were (still are?) terrible, which is why all the creators took their social communities to Discord instead. And ever since the beginning, Patreon has opposed adding search. So their app, to me, is totally worthless. I'm astonished they're still in business.
I subscribe to a bunch of Patreons, and most of them are videos (which I can view on a website) or they're downloadable assets I use my PC for accessing anyways, wouldn't make sense on mobile no matter app or website.
Hell, Jobs originally wanted there to be no iPhone SDK, and for everyone to create webapps. Man, that would have been a better world. Initially it would have sucked, but the mobile web platform would have improved so much faster, and APIs for doing native-y things would have been complete and useful 15 years ago.
Perhaps, if only the segment of the population forced to use a browser that didn't support PWAs for over a decade. I can see why they would forget about websites over a long enough period of time.
I’m not sure why Patreon couldn’t replace the “subscribe” button with a “wishlist” button within the iOS app. They could add a link that opens your wishlist in the browser too. It turns what should be 1 click into 3, but it seems far more sensible than accepting the 30% fee.
And if it is true that they're not allowed to disable payments, I would also love to know what's special about Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify (other than their size) that would allow them to "get away" with the same behavior.
Patreon works fine in a web browser.
The challenge (as always) is accessibility and discoverability. The functionality is all there.
And that's the challenge that actually matters, and is more or less insurmountable on iOS.
I'm not making a judgement on right or wrong, but I see many people just thinking about infrastructure and not realizing Apple sees iOS user base as one that would not exist without them. And, they want to get paid for access.
This is what happens on consoles today. Apple views the iPhone as a closed and complete ecosystem where licensees are allowed to write apps - like a console. The hardware, OS, and App Store are viewed as a single entity and not distinct.
Not saying I agree, but it's important to understand Apple's argument. Given the ruling from the Epic case I think Apple will win the majority of any action taken against the AppStore (not a monopoly, business terms are irrelevant). IMO where Apple is vulnerable is interop like with messaging. I can only guess Apple's lawyers think the same, hence Apple's fairly recent push into RCS.
Except no, actually, it isn't. Neither Xbox nor PlayStation attempt to collect a 30% royalty from any of the streaming apps nor block them from steering.
Consoles have a significantly more harmonious relationship with the developers, whereas Apple's is drastically more abusive. This is not an insignificant difference, both morally and legally.
Patreon does.
I'm inclined to think the "write off the iOS app entirely" option was one of the very very first things they pondered, and the odds are that it's pretty clear that was going to be a very, very expensive option.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
They're not literally forced, they have a choice: A) abide by the rules of the platform or B) leave the platform.
I agree that it's shitty by Apple, but if you start playing the game (being on the AppStore), don't be surprised when you have to continue playing the game by adjusting how you do things.
This forcing apps to use your payment platform through extortion is anti-competitive. Full stop.
But, IIRC, Apple makes it nearly impossible to offer off-app payments without breaking their TOS, including linking to them (don't quote me on that).
Can you cite the US law for it?
I think it's specifically Apple that doesn't want it because it would give more visibility to Apple's abusive behavior.
>remember, Apple’s fees are only in the iOS app. Your prices on the web and the Android app will remain completely unaffected.
If this means Apple will take 30% of funds I send to Patreon, then time to dump Apple Pay.
Yet another reason I avoid Apple, seems they are in a race with Microsoft to be the biggest abusers to their users.
But Apple prefers to insinuate that you either pay them 30% or get scammed, and there is absolutely no option in between.
They absolutely do, just through Apple, "Disputes".
Apple will refund the user the full purchase price (that's fun, $10 app, you get $7 after the Apple cut, and on refund, you have to refund $10, so you're actually out money).
And too many disputes will get your developer privileges restricted or revoked.
IIRC, the judge in the EPIC case even said there was no issue with 30%.
They could. And the third parties would absolutely ignore it or make it a front door to their own subscription management, which could mean anything from something as simple as the current iOS subscription management (highly unlikely) or a link that opens a browser page that tells you to call a given phone number to cancel your subscription that is always "experiencing high call volumes" and "thanks you for your patience" after half-an-hour on the phone.
A service that is effectively un-cancelable really is the dream product: the person doesn't want it, so they don't actively use it (meaning you have no expense in providing it), but also don't want the hassle of putting up with your "are you sure?" tactics to cancel. Businesses make hundreds of millions of dollars annually on hard-to-cancel subscriptions in the US.
Edit: Econ 101 - the more inelastic the demand, the more the tax burden falls on consumers. One would assume that demand for Patreon is relatively elastic, at least when compared to things like food, housing, transportation, etc. Thus most of this tax burden will actually fall on the producers (i.e. Patreon and the creators), which explains why they're not willing to just take the 30% cut and will instead charge more for Apple users.
I'd prefer to see them cut the rate from 30%, because it doesn't give anyone that much value, but it does create some for the users of the App Store.
I understand that some things are hard to cancel and some companies are malicious about this. Back in the pre-app days, this came up with "free samples" and gym memberships. The general solution back then was to either (a) not get scammed or (b) use a unique credit card that you could easily cancel. With the advent of things like Privacy cards, you can pretty easily do this without an App Store intermediate.
That said, they could keep the benefit for users and the fee for Apple Pay, but then not require that apps exclusively use Apple Pay. They could even require that all apps call an API to issue some scary warning that the subscription will not be manageable in your Apple Pay dashboard, make sure you trust this app developer, are you sure you want to continue? etc etc
Plus there are plenty of other billing services that can do this. I already mentioned Privacy cards. If you sign up for PayPal recurring payments, they also have an authorizations dashboard that you can easily use to revoke payment permissions. Neither of these companies needs to charge a 30% fee to offer that. Both charge somewhere around the "standard" CC fee of 3%.
There's real value for me, the family IT guy, not having to worry about my parents, who are in their mid-60s and not tech-savvy, getting told by their "friend" through email to download malicious software to their iOS devices. Right now, you just can't do that. If something wants to execute code on an iOS device, it has to do so through somewhat-sanitized means. It's not 100% foolproof, but getting malicious executables onto an iPhone without someone knowing about it is currently beyond the capability of most threat actors.
Is it as open or cheap as us tech people would like? No. But if I want that, I go buy an Android device.
Do your parents a favor, talk to them about digital security if you're actually worried about them. Your other choice is to let reductive paranoia consume you until you're only comfortable when their web browser and contacts list is locked in a straitjacket.
It can absolutely be both, which is why this isn't such a cut and dry issue.
This is why I love capitalism!
You don't even have to have a smartphone at all and if you decide to have one, you don't HAVE to have an Apple device.
There are countless other brands to pick.
If you truly hate the 30% thing, then don't buy an iPhone.
The beauty of capitalism is that you can choose the color of your car as long as it's black.
1. If Apple plays a key part in getting those donations, then the 30% is not a problem: the content creator is not getting 70c on the dollar; the content creator is getting 70c instead of 0c. Apple gets people to donate that wouldn't otherwise have done it. There's a ton of money flowing through the Apple ecosystem purely because Apple made it a premium experience.
2. If Apple does not play a key part in getting those donations, then the 30% is still not a problem: the content creators / app makers / Patreon can simply switch to some other platform and get the same results.
The beauty of capitalism is that we used to have horses and shoes only, then black cars became an option, and now you can buy any color you like. I guess some people think they appear to be clever, thoughtful, and fair-minded finding an issue with every step forward.
I'm pretty sure it's at best wildly misleading to argue that the reason cars were invented is "capitalism".
You can jeer when the FTC throws your favorite corporation a yellow-card, but what else are you going to do? Europe's not going to stop, Apple hasn't payed taxes to half their jurisdictions in God knows how long. Japan doesn't care since Apple schemes ways to avoid their hardware duty. Your broader point can be whatever you make it, but the world doesn't owe you shit if you deliberately organize a criminal racket.
The entire point of this article is that Apple is abusing their market power to force other companies to do things that affect people who are not even Apple customers.
But regardless, your argument is laughably wrong. We don't have "countless other brands". We have iOS and Android. They are not fungible. There are pros and cons to both platforms, and sometimes it's impossible to reconcile a showstopper negative on one platform with a different showstopper negative on the other. Or to reconcile a must-have feature on only one platform, even though that platform also has a showstopper negative.
Yes, it's nice that there are many Android manufacturers, but they are still largely very similar products, with the "differentiation" being annoying most of the time, not a benefit. The idea that we have "choice" is hilarious.
Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a smartphone at all" as an alternative, my respect for their opinion drops to zero.
So even as a non-Apple user, you benefited from Apple's system. The same is true for Patreon, and for the content creators.
As for your complaints about the dearth of ecosystems, I guess the rest of the world can only apologize to you for not pouring even more hundreds of billions of dollars into developing an ecosystem that fits your requirements * just so *. (By the way, I was talking about phone brands, nice work shifting the goalposts)
> Anyway, any time someone suggests "don't have a smartphone at all" as an alternative, my respect for their opinion drops to zero.
Well, I am devastated. But "no smartphone" is indeed one of the options, as is "Apple smartphone", "Samsung smartphone", "flip-phone", and many others. Can't find one that is perfect in every way? Welcome to the real world.
Others can choose to use virtual credit cards that come for free (or cheap) from their bank or privacy.com for that purpose.
cf. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-sends-pr...
But they literally have more cash than anyone in the world... why bother with this?!
no clue why patreon doesn’t count though
There is no real line, just imaginary ones apple draws arbitrarily.
So the negative point value, currently -1, tells me that I am asking a rhetorical question and I should have said that I'm asking a rhetorical question.
Back on topic:
I am an expert on in-app purchases circa 2020 and do know that there's no working around it unless you have a deal with Apple. Used to be my job.
Paypal or any other financial transaction entity Is all the same to Apple, the user is sending their money while using an apple hosted app, and apple wants to make sure that users don't get fleeced! So Apple taxes those transactions ostensibly to provide oversight Services.
So the only way for patreon to get around this is to not mention in their app that you can also sign up on you know patreon.com To give money, and to allow users who have signed up and sent money on patreon.com to use the iOS app.
2. Now you're at PayPal's tender mercies, which... well, you do you, but I wouldn't advise it.
In fact, how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template? There are other payment providers.
they probably exist already (minus payment processing). Network effects take hold as usual, though. Patrons are more willing than average to jump, but I can see hesitation signing up and adding payment for a new/unknown website
and honestly all payment providers suck in some unique way. Though most of the fault lies in Visa/Mastercard. That's a monopoly we need to tackle one day.
I think there are several reasons users gravitate to apps, but the biggest pain point apps mitigate is the login UX. I'd wager that you use a password manager, most people do not and cannot be convinced to do so. With an app, one can create an account and log in once, then stay logged in and never think about the password again until they get a new device, at which time the password can be reset via email and then immediately forgotten.
Practical suggestion:
Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
Well there is a choice, but it is questionable if suing will or will not result in any change. Even if they win in court it will be several years and millions of dollars in legal fees, and it isn't clear they will win.
I guess I assume Patreon would mention if it didn't.
Not that losing per-creation billing is good, but Patreon has been threatening it for a while, and there are ways it could in theory be simulated. But this makes it effectively impossible for creators to go on vacations, take a sabbatical, whatever... without continuing to charge patrons. It's a really commonly used mechanism from what I've seen, this would be a loss of a really important flexible tool for creators.
I'm not distrusting you, I just feel like I'd like to see some confirmation from Patreon before I start making accusations about it. Maybe they have some deal or know something about a future unreleased API that I don't know?
But losing the ability to pause a Patreon page would be a very, very big deal. Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from. That's something that people should be talking about if it's the case.
"I will want to withhold money the moment you go on a break" is not "patronage".
But that should obviously be a choice that is available to creators, for a variety of reasons. They might be treating Patreon more like a subscription service than a donation platform. They might have personal psychological hang-ups (read about why per-creation pricing is so popular with some creators). I would criticize Patreon if it forced creators into that decision. Forcing them out of that decision is also worth critiquing.
It ought to be a creator's choice when they do and don't charge their patrons. It is not Patreon or Apple's job to decide with that level of detail what the relationship between a creator and their fans should look like. And creators who voluntarily decide (for whatever reason) to temporarily pause charging fans are not doing anything wrong.
I didn't say it does, but someone apparently thinks they should. That someone doesn't get the idea behind patreon
> It ought to be a creator's choice
There's plenty choice. Sell your stuff, there are plenty platforms for that. Sell physical media. Stream. Patronage is a specific thing.
To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators. This is a feature that creators heavily use, by their own choice, because it helps them psychologically or because they prefer this style of interaction with fans, or for whatever reason because they don't have to justify their decisions to anyone, least of all commenters on HN.
> Patronage is a specific thing.
Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform. Patreon hosts a wide variety of creators who approach audience interaction in a variety of ways. This has always been the case.
It's wild to me that you're going to jump on here gatekeeping creators off of Patreon, and to act like it's somehow improper for me to suggest that the significant portion of the creator-base on Patreon that uses the platform in a way that makes them happy... should be allowed to keep using it that way.
People have this weird habit of taking creators who are making in many cases at or below minimum wage doing things that they love and subjecting them to purity tests about whether or not they're living up to some platonic ideal of what some random person on the internet personally believes fan-creator relationships should look like.
Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
> doesn't get the idea behind patreon
The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them. Your aesthetic attraction to the idea of a donation platform is not really relevant to that goal. You're not sticking up for creators if you gatekeep how they interact with fans. And your ideal of how patronage is defined has never been the exclusive model for how Patreon as a platform has worked -- nor is it consistent with the model that Apple is forcing creators into.
I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.
This would be an anti-feature for me because if it's implemented then there is pressure to pause payments when I don't create for whatever period of time I estimate is "too long" for some average patron. What a freaking can of worms. Turns creators into service providers.
> Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for
Tiers is basically "choose how much change you can spare to support me". Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
> both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform
Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees. If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche. You'll make more money too
> Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
This is not providing a service in return for money. I create, my choice. You want to support me, your choice. Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have then it's too much money for you, choose a smaller amount. Or don't pay at all. You don't have a responsibility to pay. See also Github sponsorships.
> The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them
By definition not. There is no generic "creator". People are different. "Comfortable" is different for different people. Patreon is focused on one specific model. They sorta try to do more ("pay per post") but that's feature creep and worse than using a dedicated platform. As patron I hate "pay per post" bc I have to do some math to even tell how much I'm paying you. Just obscurity for no good reason. As creator, see above.
Great. Not to be blunt here, but if you're not on Patreon then who the heck cares what your opinion is on this? I feel like it's kind of reasonable to care more about the opinions of the creators using the platform than the creators not on the platform.
As far as I can tell, this "anti-feature" has existed for the entirety of Patreon. Features like pay-per-post are not new, they're not Patreon expanding or losing its way. Quite the opposite, Patreon has tried multiple times to get rid of some of these features, and they were stopped because of creator backlash. Learn the culture of the place you're criticizing.
And maybe this just isn't the platform for you? But it's a wild thing to go to a platform that has always worked in a certain way -- a platform that you are not using as a creator -- and to say, "oh, this is an anti-feature." Who are you to decide that?
> Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
Great. That is a thing that creators are allowed to do. It is not representative of the entire platform, and it's kind of gross to dismiss the concerns of creators who don't work that way.
> Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees.
What in the heck does it mean to "cheat" on fees? Patreon works great as a subscription platform, and people have used it that way for years, and both creators and fans benefit from it. This isn't a sport, it's not a bad thing for creators to be able to support themselves. I am genuinely thrown off by the idea that someone would look at a creator building things that an audience loves and say, "but they didn't do it fair."
> Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have
Very literally nobody has said that you do. What I've said is that other creators do not have a responsibility to ask you how they should create or how they should engage with their fans.
They don't have that responsibility. You can go off and create however you'd like. You can even use Patreon and not pause your service. Patreon has zero requirements to send regular updates. I follow and support creators who put out one update every year. I kick a few dollars a month to a creator who has not posted an update in nearly two years. Do what you want, but stop getting mad at other creators because they're using a platform in a way that has always been officially supported and allowed by the platform.
> If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche.
Or -- and this is going to be difficult to hear -- creators can do what they want because they don't answer to you. It is wild to me that you are trying to dictate who is allowed to use Patreon as a creator... as someone who is not even on Patreon. Since when do you get to decide who does and doesn't belong inside of a community that you are not even a part of?
> Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
I don't care what you call it, I don't think quibbling over semantic definitions matters more than people's livelihoods.
> By definition not. [...] Patreon is focused on one specific model.
I mean, no, objectively not, given that Patreon supported exclusive tiers and rewards from the very beginning. I'm sorry if you thought it was focused on something different, but creators on the platform have literally never universally treated it as a donation model. Your idea of what you'd like Patreon to be has nothing to do with what it has always been. Of course, Patreon can be treated as a pure donation platform, and many creators do. And of course, some creators who do treat it as a donation platform still choose to make use of paused payments or pay-per-post, and have written en-length about how that's better for their personal ...
Then, chill. No one is telling anyone what to do. But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature. Like standing it's original idea and not wanting to compete with a bazillion alternatives like Twitch/Bandcamp/Etsy in each niche. Like not turning creativity into a service business. Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
Patreon's original idea included the features you're calling antifeatures.
You are imagining a fictional version of a platform that has never existed and getting mad that the real platform has lost its way from the fictional platform that only lived in your head.
The original idea that you're upset about Patreon abandoning existed only in your head. It has always been a platform for both pure donations and for transactional subscriptions. It was never the idea to serve one of those communities exclusively. That is a thing you have imagined.
> No one is telling anyone what to do.
> if you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche
Sure.
> But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature.
Patreon offers the feature. This is a conversation about whether Apple might remove a feature that Patreon chooses to offer.
I don't know how to make that clearer? Again, the platform you are imagining does not exist; there is no version of Patreon that was positioned against creator services or the ability to pause transactions or per-creation payments. Yes, Patreon could choose not to offer these services.
But they did choose to offer them.
And only one person here showed up and got really mad about the fact that Patreon used the word "patron" in relation to a service they have as far as I can tell, always offered.
> Like not turning creativity into a service business.
> Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
I don't know if you get to tell people to chill at the same time you're calling anyone who uses Patreon in a way you don't like a hustler, accusing them of ruining creativity, and questioning their ability to know what they do and don't want?
And again, only one person here is mad that Patreon is... doing what they have always done, under the direction of a community that wants them to do it, despite what people who are not part of that community want. Only one person showed up in an unrelated comment thread and said, "stop calling it patronage if a creator chooses not to take someone's money for a month."
I mean, yes, it is irritating and frustrating to hear someone who's not using Patreon as a creator badmouth a significant portion of the community that is doing stuff that people love, and to belittle them and tell them that they don't know what they want or they're hustlers and shouldn't be on the platform. If it means something to you that it's irritating to hear that, congrats! That is irritating and annoying to hear. I'm not sure what that proves, but yes, good job. Belittling creators will make people mad at you, you have cracked the code.
I wouldn't assume this until confirmed. The way I read these news is the typical Apple scenario, where if you subscribe from the app, there's an added 30% subscription fee and a loss of all control from the subscription by Patreon, all control and all limitations handed over to Apple, all subscription cancellations, all billing complaints, everything.
But you can still have a parallel system without the fee on the web, the cannot be advertised or guided to it from the app (at least this used to be the case), but it's also as usual completely handled by the developer.
Patreon is probably removing the on-purchase pay model even on the web because it's inherently incompatible with the basic Apple model and would cause a major disconnect in what the user can expect.
But I don't think the scenario with paused subscriptions is quite the same. Patreon would simply allow them to be paused, while if subscribed with Apple, the button on the web could simply be disabled or gone, or heck, the entire subscription page on Patreon gone, with just info text "This subscription is managed from your device". I mean, many devs do it like that at least.
I think there are rules about telling people not to use IOS method.
Not sure if that would extend to content displayed in the app too from creators?
Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the website. Send them updates when people post new content.
I've never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS. I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I'd want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my email, and if they're long enough I click a link and read the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.
You're not the average user, and if the average user gets a billing email and hasn't bothered to read their content email, visit the site or open the app, they are more likely to end their subscription.
What does the Patreon app do that a PWA can't?
I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill my password but same page as a PWA it won't.
I also did some testing with macroquad [1] and I was finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just didn't work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there's no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.
---
PWAs just can't do the same things that native apps can. This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle man between them and their customers?
[1]: https://macroquad.rs/
Each update of an app is reviewed, while a website can change completely at any moment (or have different versions served for different people). This is why for instance web extensions are heavily reviewed and audited.
This means they are pretty fundamentally different models.
The prompt for location is different for example because Apple enforces you are using the location information you gather for a specified reason, and has the aforementioned business penalties for misuse, and has tied all that to a real world identity. The browser can’t know if the page asking for location data is for mapping, for marketing tracking, or so that someone can drive to your home. The two features are going to look and behave distinctly.
There's another erm... "creator oriented" Patreon-like service that works entirely through the web. Specifically to avoid Apple and Google's cut. And they seem wildly successful, although perhaps the type of content may influence user's decisions.
They don’t want to just be a payment middleman for creators, they want to be “sticky” like Facebook.
So they might add things like chat, media playback (with DRM), creators being able to post with notifications. Maybe you can sign up for additional private streams or even 1-on-1 sessions (like a gamer offering tutorials).
But by having an app to consume digital services, Apple says you have to provide a way to pay for services in the app (because that’s apple’s revenue model, a portion of software sales and resulting digital goods and services off of the App Store)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/apple-lets-devs-....
After that you can maintain your account via the web.
> However, the rulings established that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.
> Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure.
You can sideload, but the duopoly exists and they're shaking 99.9% of users down for every dime they can get out of them.
Remember when Samsung made fun of Apple for removing the headphone jack?
What you say may be true today, but tomorrow is unknown territory as far as these sorts of agreements go.
I bet I would also be able to purchase ebooks on the Amazon Kindle app installed from the Amazon Appstore on my Google Pixel phone.
How long until YouTube (Google) demand "their" cut of your Patreon income? What will you do then?
No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.
I agree, but I also wonder why Patreon needs an iOS app.
It's 2024, you don't need an app for everything. See OnlyFans, they're doing fine even without being able to access the proprietary stores.
Personally, I agree. I want better/first class mobile websites over an app. I don't want apps for most things. That said, I didn't grow up in a mobile first/mobile only era.
I don’t think age is the driver. For most people, for the last decade, all software in their phone has come from the App Store. Everybody is trained to check there first. Even if you think to google it first, you’re just going to get App Store link in the top results. Company’s own site might be at the top and you’ll instinctively look for the ‘get on App Store’ badge when you click through.
Some small number of android power users are the only people that really know that downloading an app from not the App Store is possible.
> See OnlyFans
i bet they would do even better as a native app.
also let's remember that apple goes out of their way to not support PWA in an effort to maintain control https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/apple-confirms-its-breakin...
This should be beyond illegal right? Other apps do this without issues.
Outside these categories (eg a email account as a service, group classes) you are expected to always have in app purchasing.
There have been interesting ways people have explored getting around this, but obviously Apple thinks they should be paid what they are contractually obligated.
Having control of distribution means it is easy on Apple’s side to solve disagreements. You only see it brought to lawsuit by the other side (e.g. Epic’s lost case in the US)
Patreon from its very model does not. A very sad exploitation of the little guy, even if this is one of the biggest little guys.
This is truly egregious. "At risk"? This is sheer blackmail.
"Nice store you have here. It'd be a shame if anything... bad were to happen to it. A 30% cut for our legitimate businessmen's club should assure you peace of mind... "
unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments
It sucks big time.
What would this mean, exactly?
You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
What's the missing revenue model here?
There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things:
1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read
2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E.
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Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1.
Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them.
With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.)
Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX.
The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever.
The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.
When did it become possible to download additional executable bundles on iOS?
Re: multi-edition shared apps — I'm not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.)
ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?
That would be a choice, not a requirement. It's literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with it. It would be trivial to have "V1 full app unlock" feature be the same as "V2 full app unlock" feature.
This was before the change to allow Delta on the App Store, too.
[0] https://ish.app/blog/app-store-removal
When you run an App Store that involves human review the big problem you have is apps that mask their behavior during review and then end up breaking the rules later. My understanding is that the "don't download code" policy is intended to prevent this, at least in spirit. I think, at least at the highest level of the company, the intent is to keep to somewhere near this at least for submissions made in good faith and not prone to opening them up to a slippery slope. There are distinctions here, though, and policy enforcement is also complicated.
My (and iSH's) position is that "code" should be interpreted very broadly, including native code (which the platform blocks from loading anyways) but also things like embedded webviews updated server-side or those "code-push"/"run JavaScript in an interpreter in your app" things. And going even beyond that, I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
From this perspective you will note that code isn't even really the interesting part here, it's the behavior changing that matters. So this leads naturally what we have described as "scripting apps", which download code but do not change their behavior. Their entire point is to download code. Like, App Store is an app store, regardless of whether you download TikTok or Google Maps from it. iSH is a a Linux environment. Nothing you will do in the app will change that. And notably we have zero ability to change that ourselves, short of submitting a new app. It's not like we can just add Windows emulation as a downloadable JavaScript package without going through review. From our discussions with leadership, I think they agree with us on it, but are not willing to commit to it publicly, because then people will take creative bad-faith interpretations of it to argue what a feature of the app versus something a user does in the app is, or something like that. Or they just want to hold all the cards and reserve the right to take this away. Either way I strongly disagree with them doing this, but for now iSH remains on the store.
You will note that the changes we make (see our blog post about repositories: https://ish.app/blog/default-repository-update) continue to support that position. Again, I cannot say for sure whether this is the interpretation Apple uses, or if they even have a consistent position. It's just an attempt on our side to show good faith. As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment (it says code therefore your app for coding is bad). But again, this is just our experience; we have no idea if Phill will hit his head tomorrow and decide to pull iSH tomorrow because he thinks Linux is the child of the devil.
> I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
After Epic added direct purchase gated behind a feature flag to Fortnite, I'm genuinely surprised Apple didn't start requiring full control over and documentation of all downloadable configuration files as part of App Review.
A sadly universal experience. Especially when the not-so-secret is that that frontline is often contracted or outsourced. They do not understand (by design) the subtleties of submission of creative content. They are simply cheap help to do the bare minimum to remove liability, and if a few false negatives happen during that time, oh well. thousands of other apps in the sea.
So like everything else, if you havev the money, clout, or simply sheer persistence (which shouldn't be necessary) then you can force yourself to someone who can actually help. But few will get there, even with persistance.
The first version you sell to a user at full price and offer a discount for upgrading (something like 40% off). It lets the customer pick when they feel the value prop is worth the cost and lets you offer a loyalty incentive to the user.
Right now the choice is "keep paying for it to keep working" or "fully price for every upgrade".
Since then, people have backed off.
If you're going to this much work to help users workaround Apple nonsense, you really care about helping them save money, and the support + refund costs of people accidentally buying the bundle with the old version they don't need is > just building out your own server-side system, versus a combinatorial explosion of bundles in the App Store that creates a confusing minefield for users.
It does not look like a problem for them.
Do you have an example of a company that saturated the market with free upgrades and went down because of it?
Panic even had an upgrade for MAS users when they released their new version of the now defunct Coda outside the MAS (for sandboxing reasons).
1. Download seemingly cool app on iOS (free with potential payments)
2. Go through a 30min quizz
3. Required to subscribe for $150/year to start using the app
It’s not free, it’s false advertising
Most of these apps use dark UX patterns to trick new users into scammy free trials which convert to $100+/yr subscriptions after 1-3 days. These apps also make it difficult to close out of the subscription window, or make it seem like you have to subscribe when you don't.
It's entirely contradictory to everything Apple once stood for in justifying their gatekeeper App Store experience.
Apple could easily ban these types of scammy UX patterns, but they won't because it benefits them. That's my point.
I’m fairly certain this is because it’s the only way of offering a trial that Apple allows?
But maybe that was by design as they decided to call their music shop by the same name as their ipod management software. That is the essence of Apple's UX. Shiny destruction of your property. It remains so.
The UX everyone wanted was copying files onto and off the device presented as storage on any computer it was plugged in to.
Porn is allowed: https://apnews.com/article/x-twitter-musk-porn-adult-content...
And interest in porn is growing: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/twitter-crypto-pornograph...
Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.
This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.
>Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage
It won't alter this course, but given recent news I sure hope Biden can do one last kick to this stupid model. The biggest reason subscriptions do this is because so many forget to unsubscribe. An issue as old as fiat currency. discouraging recurring subscriptions could be the US's version of GDPR in terms of how utterly devastating it will be to companies.
Only site where I simply toggle desktop. And now FF mobile can even install RES so that helps mitigate the otherwise clunky navigation (though, I have been unable to enable cloud backup. I can restore local copies though).
You can if you choose to request the desktop site, but then you get an obnoxious bar going across the middle of the page blocking some of the tab.
If you fold and finally download the app, you're greeted with a 10+ page unskippable questionnaire that after you're done ends with a paid subscription call to action. If you then force close the app, and open a tab link from the browser into the app, you are finally allowed to view a tab.
There was an Australian low-cost airline (Bonza) that only allowed bookings via their app. It went under very quickly (I wonder why...).
That's why every day, there are flights from both airlines that are "cancelled" and everyone moved to the next flight. Qantas got so outrageous that they were selling tickets for "flights" that they knew were never going to fly.
Australia's airport and airline "markets" are monopolies (airports) combined with oligarchies (Qantas/Virgin).
Like most consumer industries in Australia, there is a natural oligarchy or regulated market size, thing supermarkets (Coles/Woolworths + Aldi/IGA), banks (the "big 4"), Fuel, Hotels/Pubs, etc.
the sad reality is that mobile pretty much "solved" an issue corporations struggle with on web to this day. A closed down (i.e. no adblock), centralized (i.e. you can pay to game the platform to highlight your product), scalable system that can be easily and conveniently monetized. They don't like it, but those corps would 99/100 times take that 30% toll from Apple/Google to gatekeep the adblockers if it means they get more consistent ways to serve ads and subscriptions. That's why being open didn't change most company's decision to serve on Google Play vs an alternative store, nor on the web.
Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few Wordpress plugins.
At the same time, people do care about spending an extra $5 on top of $50 they already spend on patronage, so new creators in the same field find it harder to amass a sustainable number of patrons.
Pay-per-creation mode was available then. It might have even been the only mode. I can't recall for sure. It's certainly the one I chose, if there was an option, and I haven't changed that for ten and a half years. Looking at archive.org's earliest capture of the site (June 2013), it says this:
Pledges are only charged at the beginning of each new month based on whether the artist created any content that the artist specifically labels as supported content after your pledge. Artists can, of course, post new content that doesn't count as supported content.
You'll get notified each time the Content Creator posts new content that the artist specifically labels as supported content, but you won't get charged each time. Artists can also, of course, make posts on their activity feed and even upload new content that isn't labeled as supported content. Charges are aggregated and done once at the beginning of each new month, and you can edit/cancel your patronage at any time. Additionally, you can set a max limit for how much you'll be charged, so you never need to worry about paying for too much content!
This sure makes it sound like the original model was pay-per-post. There's nothing in there about a monthly subscription. "Support me through a monthly recurring tip" existed back then via Paypal's tip jars and some creators were getting by on it but it was a much harder sell before Patreon came along.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20130608123152/http://www.patreo...)
Then Apple comes along, and uses its market position as a hardware and OS vendor, to make a nonstandard software download thing that could've been a Web site.
In parallel, Apple also made open-standards Web apps unattractive on their hardware in various ways. (Often through foot-dragging when other vendors were trying to make Web apps a smooth experience, but sometimes also going out of their way to make Web work worse.) (See also: making kids look like losers to their peers in chat, if they don't have iPhones.)
Apple then imposes predatory rates and terms on other businesses who are pretty much forced to use the Apple proprietary app store, due not to the merits of the app store so much as Apple's dominance of hardware and conflict of interest when implementing open standards.
I assume many consumers don't understand the situation, and how much of an overbearing abuser of its market position Apple can be. Or they have some idea, but pragmatically have to accept it. Also, this affords Apple a lot of money for really first-rate PR.
What I don't understand is why regulators haven't smacked the snot out of the Apple app store, with finality. For example: Apple may only charge a few-percent administration and payment processing fee, and that's it; and they have to permit other app stores with first-class access to the system, as a compromise given the proprietary lock-in mess they've made. (Making them support other open standards better, even to the exclusion of prorietary ones, is more complicated.)
Here is an awesome graph (scroll down 1 page) charting out the 3 options -- 1 web, and 2 overtly expensive for iOS.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/27991664769677...
Wow. I don't know if that's selective memory, or revisionist history, but you've got a huge dose of the stuff.
No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).
Open core, Royal Road / Patreon pipeline, Linux itself…
I imagine that part of it is that Apple's stock backstops a lot of activity in the financial markets. No one wants to kill the golden goose to protect "a bunch of Millennial and Zoomer phone addicts"; you have to remember, we're the cows everyone else is happy to milk dry for their own needs.
The EU had a tenuous relation with Apple from the start. Apple spent the past 20-odd years manipulating Irish subsidiaries to avoid paying a dime in taxes on any of their European operations. Despite being called out on it and partially settling the back-taxes in some jurisdictions, they still owe billions to multiple EU members they haven't payed back. There's no history of love, between Apple and Europe. They conspire against Apple because Apple conspires against them.
Then Apple had to kick the hornets nest and piss off the Dutch regulators with the Tinder case. Apple forfeit quickly but it set the stage for everyone else joining in on the fines. This was the perfect catalyst for the DMA and the DSA, which would be copied in other countries like Japan (which coincidentally also has tax feuds with Apple).
Good luck to the shareholders They won't take kindly to the news that the Apple of their eye is a big fruit-shaped bubble.
A big part of it is restrictive and onerous standards on cellular firmware that act as a compliance moat for Apple and Google (and seem designed to enable surveillance more than anything), but if we fail to get open-source alternatives via commonsense regulatory reform the antitrust guns need to come out. When smartphones are often the only authentication mechanism accepted by major payment providers, workplaces, and other contexts that most people can't opt out of, a (fairly cozy, collaborating as often as they compete) duopoly on viable operating systems is unacceptable
We also need to save the world wide web. Most of these 'apps' have no need to exist.
1. Some iOS users don't realize there even is a web browser, and only look for apps. If there's not an app, they give up.
2. The patreon app has features like playing music and video (patreon rewards), notifications (new posts and messages and such), etc.... and while those features would work for a webpage on android, they either don't work on iOS, or are more difficult to implement, buggy, and feel "non-native" for the user.
Notice how the other two replies assumed "web page" didn't mean "using safari on iOS". If hacker news commenters have trouble with the concept of "using a webpage, not an app, on iOS", what hope does the general populace have?
What would your opinion be if they did?
If that's not abuse of market power, I'm not sure what is, then.
Apple's cut is 30%.
If Patreon went to 0%, creators will still be getting 22% less.
What would, according to you, be a good reduction on Patreon's side?
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon […] disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
Absolutely astounding that removing transactions from the platform could result in being removed.
Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have the ability to install apps using alternative app marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App Store.
Mobivention (b2b specialized) https://app-marketplace.eu/
AltStore https://altstore.io/#Downloads
Sometime in the future, Epic Games Store, MacPaw’s Setapp
I don't know a ton about Patreon, but what if creators have exclusive content available via the app and use that to encourage fans to subscribe outside of iOS? What if creators start an education campaign on YouTube telling their fans to avoid subscriptions on iOS?
I wonder if Apple is playing with fire on this one. If the creator and influencer markets turn on them, I think it could have a non-trivial impact on Apple's brand, especially with younger generations. Many modern creators are also smart business people and they're not going to see much value in Apple taking 30% of their revenue when Patreon is already providing all the services they need for about 15% at the top end IIRC.
Right now I think the biggest change that could help the average consumer would be for legislators to allow, or maybe even require, app owners to split platform fees into separate line items. For example, something like:
They had to remove payments completely so that it's a "free standalone app".