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Comment by hakcermani | Hacker News Reader

Good start with compiling the list .. a couple more .. AirBnb, All airline apps. Maybe they have contracts with the big guys for some lump sum deal, or maybe they are just letting them go as they have to ... We developers already pay for the subscription, WWDC, a shiny iPhone / MBP every couple of years (to test and develop the new features :(, learn a language and sdks just for the Apple world - We Devs need Apple for sure, but hey they need us too (!) .. high time for a push back .. Apple makes tons on the devices, they need to stop robbing from us little guy developers. Apple do the right thing and drop this 30% altogether .. you will not miss it :)

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It is about 1/4 of net profit. They make 15 billion in revenue a year on the app store.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/apple-app-store-had-estimate...

I agree with everyone else here that Apple’s weird rules and the inconsistent way they’re enforced are both bad. But I don’t think the solution is as obvious as “drop the 30% cut”.

How should Apple go about making money from the App Store? Paid apps are dwindling off. They do charge a flat fee per developer, but it can’t be too large or they’ll lose all the indie developers, and there just aren’t enough developers overall to make that a viable business on its own. They could charge a flat fee to the developer per app download -- something really small, a few cents per download -- but then what about free apps?

What they want is to take a share of the profits from developers who are making money on their platform, while also supporting free apps free of charge. The 30% fee is their attempt to do that. The problem is that it’s easy to game the system and just run your payments outside their store. Hence all the silly rules to try to prevent that.

Maybe 30% is just too much. Would people complain as much if it were 10%, or 5%?

Or maybe they should just give up on App Store revenue and focus on hardware sales. But it would be a little weird for them not to have a direct incentive to improve the store experience for users.

Dead simple: apple could charge a low fee hosting ($99/yr) and a higher fee for promotion.

Or Apple could drop the charade and charge users for access to apps based on whatever pricing scheme they want.

Those are good ideas, yeah, but nothing is perfect.

The promotions one is interesting; I think it has the same pitfall as AdWords: if my app / web page is the best result for the user for a given search, why should I have to pay money to promote it? If Apple or Google is doing their job right, taking money for promotions is actively detrimental to users. Not that that stops AdWords, of course.

Charging the users would make sense. It’s a shame that we’ve all been trained to expect this stuff to be free.

I guess subscription-based stores are a decent approach? Like Apple Arcade. But that has downsides for users too -- you potentially end up paying multiple subscriptions (like most people do now for streaming TV) so it adds barriers to entry for new (possibly better) stores. Who wants to pay for yet another subscription service?

Apple has never had a problem with physical goods not paying the 30%. So WeWork, Tesla, AirBnb, airline tickets, etc would all be fine. The 30% cut was on digital goods as I recall. My last company sold things like gym memberships and bicycle rentals and Apple never had an issue with it. Although they did question us the first time we hit the App Store and the Mac App Store. Once we explained we weren’t selling digital goods we got approved.

AirBnb and airlines are companion apps for physical services and the rules for in-app purchases don't apply.

Getting 30% from the whales and scammers is worth too much and a bit of bad PR or the loss of good apps isn't going to change that. They need the big players like Netflix, but after that scummy, high margin, do nothing, trash apps are the best for profits.

Out of interest, what apps are you thinking of? Games with in-app purchases and thinly disguised gambling?

Yeah. A huge percentage of the stuff marketed to children and teens is pretty unethical IMO. The thing is, those are cheap to produce and have huge margins, so that's what everyone tries to make.

It's less risky to develop some skinner box slot machine because you aren't out much investment if it gets rejected. Plus, the digital goods are pulled from thin air, so anything you sell is pure profit.

Contrast that with a real app that provides a valuable service with backend costs and a subscription fee. There's a lot more investment to build an app like that, so getting rejected is a huge risk and, even at 15%, Apple's cut might be a big chunk of your margin.

Since Apple incentivizes low effort slot machines and detriments high quality apps, I feel like there's been an increasing portion of the app store is turning into what I consider garbage apps.

The subscription cut also creates the opposite scenario of what everyone is always parroting about iOS customers being profitable. They might spend more money, but they're definitely not more profitable (per customer) if you're paying 15% to a middleman.

They will when tesla is forced to cough up 30% of a feature when they allow an in-app autopilot or performance upgrade.

Basically every app that is used to sell goods or as an add on to a physical product doesn't have to pay Apple a cut. And it makes sense: the app is free and only the means to access a backend service or a something that was paid separately. I just don't get why it wouldn't apply to HEY: no idea of how it works, but I can imagine that for $99/year you get more than a shiny UI. That is only the means to access a backend service that is entirely independent from Apple's ecosystem (and in fact can be accessed through several channels).

[OP of the site]

I tried to limit the list to apps where you couldn't get to _any_ functionality without logging in. AirBnB lets you browse around etc. Airlines let you look at dates / availability.

I included Wells Fargo, however, because I thought it was wild that they're able to provide straight web links to Safari to sign up for banking services, whereas Hey has to pretend like accounts are bestowed via divine intervention.

If you don't know the difference between a bank and Hey, then there's probably nothing anyone can do to convince you that your position isn't tenable.

There is a difference, of course there is!

Why, then, did Apple decide to gerrymander its rules to extract rent from one industry and not the other?

Perhaps there's an ethical or philosophical argument why Apple feels entitled to one industry's revenue and not the other, but I haven't heard that argument.

Yea this is probably the best year to introduce unpopular, rent-seeking rules. You'll never be forced to see any of these people in person and the government has enough on its plate to even consider thinking about anti-trust issues.

I'm confused why they don't rip the bandaid off and just charge everyone at the same time though. Charging Tesla 30% probably isn't feasible but this seems like an ideal time to introduce fees for all companies that are currently allowed exemptions (Netflix, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Audible, Airlines etc). Yes they could put up a fight but at least some of them would cave.

Until the government gets involved, they are totally allowed to selectively and arbitrarily enforce the rules. Banning Hey but not Netflix just makes them look like hypocrites and makes them less money. Seems like the worst of both worlds.

You think Netflix would cave to apple on this? I don't think so. Netflix would just make it extremely public that Apple have blocked user access to the app on iOS. Apple is the one that will cave, not Netflix. I mean, come on, iPhones are popular but not even majority of the market.

> Charging Tesla 30% probably isn't feasible but this seems like an ideal time to introduce fees for all companies that are currently allowed exemptions (Netflix, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Audible, Airlines etc).

Since cars are physical goods, Tesla COULD freely sell the car in the app using Apple Pay, Credit Card, etc in the app if they wanted, just like Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce apps do. They wouldn't pay the 30%, just the credit card fee.

Similarly, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber and some Airlines accept ApplePay, Credit Card, etc, all without the 30%, because it's a physical service, not software or a digital product.

Netflix and Audible just don't sell their stuff on the app. It's not an exemption, it's something predicted in the App Store terms: don't link to the signup/sales page. The problem here is that Hey is claiming that they should be allowed to use that rule that Netflix and Audible use.

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