Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place.
>does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
I agree that the high proportion t of take between the two firms says a lot about the state of the market. It also says a lot about the users, and what they care about.
I think people are shocked by these outcomes because they aren't used to thinking about transaction costs as meaningful. Transfer, trust, and triangulation are critical parts of an exchange, and their costs can be even greater than the good itself.
> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?
I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make.
But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite.
I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened.
That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.
This is kind of the crux of the matter to me. Apple, in this instance, is basically a credit card with a 30% transaction fee, and it's using its dominance in the mobile phone market to force everyone who uses their phone (via their app store policies) to use their credit cards instead of ones with 3% transaction fees, which is pretty classic behavior outlawed by antitrust legislation.
> Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?
In many markets, Apple does let a dev link users to external payments options.
But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. They require a dev to track purchases made on that external system and pay a (slightly reduced) fee. You agreed to be audited to make sure you are making the proper payments. You may have to pay Apple a cut in more scenarios since the payment system is no longer cleanly isolated.
In-app purchasing is not an expensive credit card processor. It is Apple’s simplest method of collecting their contractually obligated royalties.
So this link is not cheaper if you are following your contract. It is cheaper to buy on your site when those users aren’t coming from the app.
Note that it can still be worth a dev using an external payments options system for other reasons - it is just that a lot of them are dark patterns. Things like variable rates for different people for dating services, no-consent charging for gambling apps, gathering additional tracking information so you have additional ways to monetize the user, making unsubscribing from a service more difficult than Apple makes it, etc.
> But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store.
This is its own can of worms, but doesn't really change much about what I said above.
That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Sometimes I misjudge the intent of a comment.
Apple's restrictions on origination in places like the EU reinforce that Apple does not see these price increases as a tradeoff for quality that customers are willingly going along with, and does believe that if customers were able to be informed about alternative payment methods that already exist that are cheaper, they would take them. In instances where it can't hide alternatives from users, it imposes fees at the point where users are informed about those alternatives: fees that make it impossible for alternatives to be cheaper than Apple's own inflated cost.
Apple's origination fees are a lot less about compensation and a lot more about making sure that on iOS, a less expensive payment option will never be offered. This is not the action of a company that believe that it is adding value to the purchasing experience, it is the action of a company that believes that its purchasing systems would not be chosen by many customers if they were fairly stacked up against existing alternatives.
> That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app?
Apple wants you to use their payment processor because it is more convenient than auditing/p and potentially suing companies for breaking their contractual agreement around revenue sharing. They force transactions where they collect a royalty through in-app payments, and actually forbid other transactions from using it (like booking an Uber).
It is also a better end user experience.
But you aren’t paying 30% for a particular end user experience feature. You are paying what Apple put into the agreement as what they think they are owed from the value their ecosystem provides.
So Apple split their “payment processing” to 3% and their “using our tools, platform, store and infrastructure” to 27%. It’s certainly possible to undercut 3% for payment processing.
The real problem is 27% of revenue excludes entire categories of services, but that isn’t something regulators can easily force - they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.
If this was clearly true, Apple would not forbid apps from telling users that other payment methods exist. You don't have to hide alternatives from a user if what you're offering them is the obviously superior service.
It's fairly safe to say that Apple doesn't believe that their user experience is obviously superior. At least, not so obviously superior that customers are willing to pay a 30% surcharge for it. Apple isn't confident that if Patreon told users at the time of checkout, "heads up, this is going to cost you 30% more because you're using the app" that those users wouldn't jump-ship to the browser.
Apple phrases this as the price of iOS overall, that this is the most convenient, user-friendly way to collect a payment that provides value to every iOS user. But again, if they believed that, they wouldn't need to hide it from the user. Apple's policy is not that you can't collect payments through Safari and you have to use an app. Apple's policy is that you cannot tell users about surcharges on the iOS store or advertise lower prices through alternative payments.
This is not the policy of a company that believes it is acting everyone's best interests.
> they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.
I don't know what regulators can and can't force; that depends entirely on the countries and jurisdictions involved. But I do know that as users, we should view a 27% tax on every subscription paid to indie creators as evidence that something has gone wrong with this platform.
It is weird that Apple believes that their ecosystem provides more value per-transaction to indie creators than the actual platform that those creators are using. I know that creators don't agree with that assessment, they're telling users to stop using the app. And it is weird that Apple is not giving Patreon the choice to opt-out of the supposed value that their platform is providing by disabling transactions in the app. I don't know what line you personally use to decide when something becomes rent-seeking, but saying "the platform provides value" isn't enough of a justification; every single rent seeking behavior on the market from every company can be justified by saying "we control access to a valuable resource, we're providing value by providing access."
At a certain point, you have to look at some of this through a the lens of just human sensibility and say, is this what we actually want a phone platform to look like? Do we want a phone ecosystem where 30% of every dollar you donate to some starving creator goes to one of the richest companies on earth? Is that actually representative of the value Apple is adding via iOS, or is it a parasitic, rent-seeking behavior from a platform that uses its userbase as a bargaining chip to extract value from unrelated services on an ever-increasing level?
Of course Apple will tell you that everyone owes them 27% of their revenue regardless, that this is just the easy way to collect it. Literally any company in their position would say that, regardless of what they were doing or why. The question is whether anyone believes them. The question is whether we believe that it's an accident that they've priced their agreements in the UK to be so arduous that you are guaranteed to lose money by leaving their ecosystem. Is that actually unbundling, or is it punitive fees designed to shut down competitors.
Only regulators can decide, but normal people can guess.
> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
You can't really argue that it's a fair choice when Apple does everything in their power to make going outside their walls a worse experience.
Case in point, they hobble WebKit, but also forbid any alternative to WebKit. Are users choosing WebKit? Nope.
> Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place.
This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking.
Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.
I agree, under the assumption that users jailbreak their devices. In my mind Apple has zero obligation to enable it maximum leeway to obstruct it. The people don't want they locked down single function phone, they shouldn't buy one.
>under the assumption that users jailbreak their devices
if that didn't void warranty, I'd accept it as a reasonable workaround. But on top of that I'm pretty sure Apple acively fights with jailbreaking and jailbreakers in particular.
>In my mind Apple has zero obligation to enable it maximum leeway to obstruct it.
They might soon, given DMA. In my mind, Microsoft got dinged for antitrust decades ago and Apple has gone so beyond that line that I'm surprised Europe had to step in before the US. Even Mac OS isn't locked down this hard (helps that it started fundamentally as a BSD fork) so it just tells me this is exploiting its monopoly.
>The people don't want they locked down single function phone, they shouldn't buy one.
opposite argument works as well. An open world does not stop you from staying in the walled garden. If you really don't want to use anything other than the App store, that's fine. You just miss out on a few apps like you have for 16 years with Android stuff that Apple banned.
"Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own."
It should be able to be decided while owning it, not before. The point is that a phone that doesn't give the user the same level of control over the software that the manufacturer has simply should not exist. It should not be left to market forces.
Yeah I know that’s not what OP meant. The problem is OP is not fully thinking things through with principles.
All these “problems” with walled gardens are well known and consenting adults keep opting into it time and again.
I think it’s arrogant to look at a system you aren’t even participating in (can we assume op doesn’t have an iPhone) and say “no those people are doing it wrong”
I don't like this "you consent to the walled garden" approach for a very simple reason: you can do both. Jailbreaking has existed for over a decade but no one was complaining about the walled garden collapsing.
Opening up IOS doesn't mean you need to open up too. The garden isn't going anywher. Take it from an android user that has had choice and google play is still the dominant platform. It's just nice that when/if I need to I can download open source stuff, or games in foreign languages, or just sideload some random apps I tinker with without paying $100 for something I don't plan on releasing to the app store anyway.
These are all very niche uses and I don't understand how my existence inconvinences the garden.
>I think it’s arrogant to look at a system you aren’t even participating in (can we assume op doesn’t have an iPhone) and say “no those people are doing it wrong”
I do it with Russia and North Korea, so call me whatever you want. I'm not just going to dimiss it as "well its their culture" if their culture breaks fundamental principles I was raised on.
> I do it with Russia and North Korea, so call me whatever you want. I'm not just going to dimiss it as "well its their culture" if their culture breaks fundamental principles I was raised on.
Are you really equating the human rights atrocities of those nations with Apple business practices?
Here's the difference - Putin kills people who disagree with him. If you want to leave Russia, people with guns stop you (see East Berlin).
And you want to equate that with simply making a choice to not buy an iPhone and buy another phone instead?
And since we live in a democracy with laws where Apple's current arrangement can be voted to be made illegal, we can also decide to force Apple to open their device ecosystem (which may already be illegal).
Yeah we could. But just because we do, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing or the smart thing to do. Once upon a time alcohol was voted illegal and even now marijuana is federally illegal.
I personally think it’s a shame when the government takes something interesting and working and makes it illegal. Patreon could easily not be an app on iOS, but they really want that money, so now the government has to make laws on apple. Doesn’t make sense to me
No I don't, but I get the feeling that you missed an assumption in the middle which is that Apple/iOS is a monopoly.
It's clear to me Patreon is not forced into having an iOS app. They do so because they think they can make more money. But they could be web only.
All of these entities already have a presence on Android + desktop/web and can operate just fine on those. They just want to make more money from the iOS audience.
do we really call "give us your subscription money or get banned" an "interesting and working" system? That's pretty much peak antitrust fuel there. This is quite literally what Epic spent years in court fighing over.
This is literally so many businesses. Are you kidding me? Get a membership at a gym. Then stop paying the subscription. And see if they kick you out or not. Or stop paying your netflix bill. See if netflix bans you. Btw, stop paying your patreon, see if you still get the videos. Every subscription business is literally give us your subscription or get banned.
I don't care what Epic is fighting in court over. Why is that mega corp the good mega corp? Mcdonalds spent years in court fighting the responsibility to pay for some woman's burns.
>does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?
I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.
I agree that the high proportion t of take between the two firms says a lot about the state of the market. It also says a lot about the users, and what they care about.
I think people are shocked by these outcomes because they aren't used to thinking about transaction costs as meaningful. Transfer, trust, and triangulation are critical parts of an exchange, and their costs can be even greater than the good itself.