
Apple doesn't let you disclose their 30% IAP fee to your customers - tomasreimers
https://twitter.com/getify/status/1299569045348454401
======
pier25
If it was closer to 5%, or even a fixed fee (eg: $1 per app sold), I would
accept the narrative that it's a fee.

30% of your business is not a fee, it's more like a partnership. Apple is, in
practice, a business partner to each and every iOS developer. Except that they
have total and absolute control of the business. If they shut you down on the
App Store, you're done. Your iOS app is worthless on any other platform.

I shit you not, I've personally had apps rejected by the review board because
they didn't like the screenshots. Those were screenshots of the app itself.

~~~
kemayo
Interestingly (sort of), 5%-or-$1 wouldn't work out well for Apple. This is
because credit card processing fees are generally structured as a flat fee
plus a percentage of the transaction.

Something like 5 cents + 1.3% would be a _great_ deal on payment processing,
generally. Apple is a behemoth, so let's assume they're getting a good deal.

For a $1 purchase that'd be ~$0.07 to the transaction processor... which is
more than the flat percentage already. Then Apple has some amount of costs
involved (bandwidth, maintenance of systems, general overhead, etc) even if
they started running the App Store at cost as they originally claimed they'd
do.

There's definitely room to lower the cut Apple takes... it's just that
somewhere in the 10-20% range is still a reasonable fee to cover their costs.

It's also worth considering how gift cards affect what Apple can charge. Apple
sells gift cards through retailers, who are getting a cut of those sales. That
cut comes directly out of Apple's portion of the sale, so they have to account
for some percentage of transactions having that effective cost, which is
probably higher than the aforementioned payment-processing cost. (There are
some markets where gift cards are incredibly common. Kids get given them a
lot. They're super common in Japan and other countries for everyone.)

(The flat $1 fee wouldn't fall apart on processing costs until you reached
really expensive in-app purchases... but it'd massively change the economics
of the App Store, where $1 apps / in-app purchases are pretty common. I have
no idea if that's a good idea or not.)

~~~
cnst
Wait a moment, how do you get from 5 cents + 1.3% to the 10-20% range all of a
sudden?!

Electricity and processing power aren't that expensive.

They'd probably do just fine if they'd lower the fee to 10%, and stop
enforcing that you don't have third-party payments.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
10% seems reasonable. I don't think people would scream about 20%, even.
(Well, if Apple had made that change a few years ago, they wouldn't; now that
they're in an ever-expanding PR disaster of their own making, people might be
less amenable to that.) And they could probably have also staved off a fair
amount of complaints about in-app purchases with just a different structure.

Off the top of my head:

\- Non-free apps sold on the app store take a 20% cut, up to a max of a $5
fee. (This would be a bit of encouragement for developers to price
productivity apps higher than $25; the "race to the bottom" in app pricing has
been a deterrent for some classes of apps, in my understanding.)

\- In-app purchases and subscriptions take a 15% cut, with a drop to 10% for
subscriptions in their second year and beyond.

\- Links to external web payment forms are allowed (with no Apple cut or
penalty) in apps that are clients for cross-platform services, e.g., Netflix,
Kindle, and so on.

There'd be a lot of details and nuance to work out with respect to those last
two, but it doesn't seem like it'd be an impossible hurdle to figure out where
to draw those lines.

~~~
danilocesar
10% is not reasonable, 1% is not reasonable. The problem is not how much Apple
charges, that's up to them. The problem is Apple's heavy hand saying what a
user can see, what they can install, and what the developer can say to their
users. This is the problem. If they decide to charge zero, it won't fix
anything.

And don't get me wrong, I think Apple is a great company. But they are sitting
in a monopoly today. Maybe some folks here are too young to remember but
companies like microsoft got punished in the past for having too much control
over people' choices and, in my opinion, it was way softer comparing to what
Apple is doing today.

~~~
sebastien_b
> The problem is Apple's heavy hand saying what a user can see, what they can
> install, and what the developer can say to their users.

I remember Steve Jobs saying (about not allowing adult-themed apps) that iOS
was "freedom from porn!"[1], which to me sounded more like "freedom from
choice!"

1 (yeah, ok, like Safari does't do pornsites?)

------
sebastien_b
Funny how most replies in that thread don’t actually address the initial
question: why is there a policy of prohibiting disclosure of how the money the
user pays gets distributed?

Most “answers” immediately diverge into monopoly discussions, or questions-as-
answers of why 30% ‘seems so high’ (even though neither was initially brought
up).

~~~
sebastien_b
And besides this, most people seem content to compare it with the physical
world with (IMO invalid) comparisons of malls, etc.

There's another thing: Apple already charges developers a fee every year.
_And_ they also sell ads on the App Store (which you basically have to buy
otherwise you're a 'needle in a haystack'). _AND_ they sell ads to your
competitors, which use your (sometimes trademarked) keywords in their ads,
which means you need to buy even more ads to counteract those.

Apple wins, and wins.

~~~
modeless
And they make every developer buy a Mac because they prohibit running macOS in
VMs and in general don't allow building iOS apps without the use of Mac
hardware. That's probably a bigger expense than the app store fees for most,
and artificially inflates macOS market share in the important developer
market.

~~~
nagyf
If you write an app that you can sell on the app store to 860 people for $5
you already got the money to buy a Macbook Pro 16”.

I don’t think the Macbook restriction is such a big problem. However, if you
sell it to 1 million people and Apple takes the 30% cut, that’s a loss of
$1.5M for you...

(Maybe I miss something, I never wrote iOS apps, I’m just doing the math)

~~~
mkl
You need to buy the Mac before writing the app. You _might_ make enough to
repay that investment, but it's out of pocket to start with. For many people
that is a big problem.

~~~
threeseed
This really is a ridiculous point to make.

You need a Mac because important components like the XCode Simulator require
OSX libraries in order to function. It's no different to me needed a Windows
machine in order to build Office plugins.

~~~
modeless
I regularly cross compile for Windows from Linux, and I don't need to buy any
hardware from Microsoft.

~~~
efreak
Microsoft has little to do with the hardware you run their software on

------
hoistbypetard
Sure they do. They just prohibit you from putting that in your app's UI. If
you were selling your software in a box at Walmart, they may well refuse to
display it on the shelf if you included a message stating that Walmart had
just gotten 30% of the software's and that the publisher had just gotten 20%
of the software's price. Similarly, many publishers would likely refuse to
publish such a message.

I don't think the question of why Apple doesn't allow such messaging is all
that interesting.

I do think it's interesting that:

1\. Apple is more likely to notice such a message buried within app UI,
because they review apps. Walmart would probably only catch it if it appeared
on the packaging.

2\. We're more likely to hear about it , since we're more likely to know
someone who has published an app on the Apple store than we are to know
someone who has published an app through a traditional channel then marketed
it on retail shelves.

------
ClumsyPilot
I am gradually coming to the conclusion that active censorship of information
should be illegal, on any platform, public or private.

These companies control most of the modern society's information intake, you
can't keep justifying everything they do with 'it's private, they do what they
want'. The potential for abuse is just too great.

~~~
dudus
Certainly you don't believe that. What about child porn? Well you could say
that's illegal so then it would be ok to censor it. But what about anti-
vaxxers, QAnon or other blatant misinformation or lies? What if it's proven
that the misinformation, is posted by foreign agents trying to stir
controversy and hate in the country?

You clearly need to draw the line somewhere. But it's impossible to draw it to
comply with the expectations of everyone. It's just an impossible task.

~~~
azangru
I strongly feel that it should be up to the consumer of information to decide
whether to treat it as true or false. Otherwise, what's stopping you from
banning all religious texts? Spiritual texts? Ads for homeopathic pills? And
so on, and so forth.

If people are manipulable enough to fall for "foreign agents" stirring up
controversy and hate — well, they'll just need to learn and get smarter.

~~~
Talanes
What's stopping anyone from banning all of that right now?

------
ksk
The fundamental question is of "rights". Do we apply 17th century morality and
economic models for digital markets? Modern problems need modern solutions. We
need to re-define where these "rights" of digital businesses come from.

Comcast invest millions and therefore has a "right" to control internet
access, block websites, etc? Comcast "allows" a business to reach millions of
customers.

Apple invested millions and therefore has a "right" to block third party
payment processors? Apple "allows" a business to reach millions of customers.

Microsoft invested millions in their platform and there has a "right" to block
Chrome/Firefox? Microsoft "allows" a business to reach millions of customers.

etc, etc.

Taking 30% of sales of a digital-only product is not morally acceptable to me.

------
kgin
And yet people would rather battle Apple than make a web app and push open
technologies further.

~~~
ThatPlayer
Because Apple cripples their browser on iOS, so you cannot make a web app.
Basic app features like push notification are not implemented on iOS Safari.

~~~
baddox
You’re free to send emails or text messages from the backend of your web app.
This is hardly a great example of “Apple crippling their web browser.”
Personally I don’t want your advertisements pushed to me. Even the
notifications permissions prompt on desktop Chrome is ridiculously spammy
since it’s on basically every commercial website these days. Safari on iOS is
a great web browser that provides a great web browsing experience in my
opinion.

~~~
ric2b
So if I make a chat or video conferencing webapp you want to get an e-mail
every time someone replies to you or invites you to a call?

~~~
kgin
I would love to take this energy for fighting apple on the 30% fee and use it
encourage them to adopt web notifications and other web apis.

------
pornel
Apple to Facebook: if users were informed about your tracking, they wouldn't
like it.

Facebook to Apple: if users were informed about your fee structure, they
wouldn't like it.

Both companies have a cash cow that works better when users are unaware of it.

------
floflo79
How is this different from any other store that offers access to a wide
audience? Connecting devs to hundreds of millions of people, taking care of
warehousing, logistics and sale/payments handling? Do those retailers tell you
who gets what further down the supply chain? No. You see the price of the
product and nothing even remotely reminds you of how much the retailer payed
the manufacturer, and how much the manufacturer payed their designer.

Imagine you make a toaster. You want that toaster on the shelves at a
retailer. How much do you think the retailer gets? And the transporting
company? I think 30% is low in comparison. But but but this is digital. Yeah,
so where do you you have access to Apple’s client base? How much do you pay
for the running and maintaining of the App Store infrastructure?

How many apps do you think are hosted that don’t make any money? For neither
dev nor Apple? All those are costs. For Apple. Admitted they make a lot of
money, but they do so because they’re successful. If you want to be successful
on their platform, you play by their rules. And those are clear: you pay 30%.

------
hkai
Well, it's easy: just develop your own mobile phone and operating system, make
it popular, and then you don't have to pay the 30%.

Anti-free speech advocates use this argument when they say it's okay that
Facebook, Twitter and Visa ban you - they are private companies and you can
just create your own social media and payment systems. It's that easy!

------
naveen99
Atleast apple’s surplus is not only taken by its employees, and a reasonable
chunk passes to shareholders. So people paying the fee can just buy apple
shares and get back some of the fee.

------
sithlord
Guess Apple could let developers disclose the 30% iap fee, but only if they
disclose the margins they make off of each user/transaction/etc.

------
ecf
Which is smart of them.

I’d guarantee that every company with a financial interest in the App Store
would start putting up banners about the fee in an effort to stoke the Epic x
Apple tensions in their favor.

Let the court decide the case without the mob influence of millions of
uninformed users.

~~~
theonemind
As a counter argument, this does not fall outside of the business or
legitimate concern of the people in a representative democracy. The court
should judge according to the law, but if the people do not like the outcome
of the law, they might want a different law, and in the end, we will have the
proceedings in the public record. If the people have no business in this, we
should also make sure the same millions of uninformed users can't get access
to record of the court proceedings as well, lest they think to form opinions
even afterwards, as it did not concern them while it went on.

