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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think so. It's more akin to not posting a sign saying "our landlord charges us $5,000/month in rent" in a brick-and-mortar shop.

Do you think the landlord should be allowed to make them remove the sign?

If it's accurate, what's the harm in the public knowing about it? If it's a two square meters stand in a food court, the public might find the landlord to be insane. If it's a five thousand square meter super market, I'm sure the public will find that appropriate.

Keeping the Apple tax secret suggests that Apple believes the public wouldn't find them appropriate, either because "the public doesn't understand" (easy to fix by writing a blog post) or because they aren't appropriate (given Apple's profit margins, I lean towards this).

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I don't think that e.g. confidentiality clause in the rental agreement preventing the disclosure of the rent is unreasonable. It's not exactly the same thing, but I think it's fairly similar.

Also, I find the idea that a blog post is an easy fix for the public not understanding what the developers are paying for with Apple's 30% cut to be a huge simplification. At the very least a major ad campaign would probably be necessary, and even that's probably only gonna reach a subset of their users.

But there is no confidentiality clause in the App store agreements, is there? It's public knowledge that Apple applies a 30% tax, it's just not actively known by the general population.

Sure, a single blog post might not reach everybody. But at the same time, lots of people won't care, and everybody that searches for "Apple Tax 30%" on the web will find their blog post. Maybe they can get Bono to write a song about it! ;)

There is, but as far as I know, it doesn't cover this. Apple would probably argue that it's instead covered by the App Store Review Guidelines, but I'm not really inclined to agree. This is the kind of thing that probably should be explicit rather than a read-between-the-lines sort of thing. I wouldn't find such a rule (if it was explicit) to be an egregious overreach though.

I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302003 informative on the topic.

Yeah, but that's not so much about not disclosing the terms of service as it is about "don't advertise that your users can get it cheaper elsewhere". Apple takes 30% does sound a bit as if it was possible to pay less by not using the App, but according to the screenshots they'll charge Android users the same, i.e. the user pays $9.99 no matter what, but the person offering the item would get more money if not bought in the iOs App (because seemingly Facebook does not take a cut).

I don't think that Apple is arguing that e.g. Facebook wouldn't be allowed to say on their website how much commission they pay to Apple. Apple also says quite openly that and how much they take [1]: Developers earn 70% of sales from in-app purchases and Apple collects a 30% commission. That page actually looks like the blog post I mentioned: explaining to users why Apple's share is appropriate.

[1] https://www.apple.com/ios/app-store/principles-practices/

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