Facebook says Apple blocked it from informing about App Store 30% fee
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The Streisand effect of sorts.
* wanted a 30% cut on all Kindle book sales (sold via iOS)
* had negotiated with most major book publishers that any book distributer (aka Amazon, Apple, B&N, etc) must sell their books at exactly a 30% markup.
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Also, we had built a native store experience for the Kindle app before launching it.
Yet, after submitting to Apple (and not hearing anything back for weeks), Apple announced their intent to roll out in-app purchasing many months later
They also immediately blocked our submission and forced us to take out all references to the native store or even linking to the web store.
Though, Apple did eventually get taken to court for the book publisher pricing agreements:
1) Delisted you if you didn't support their payment option. 2) Blocked any content that tried to criticize it. 3) Forced you to support their login as an option, and also didn't place it as the first option on the list.
Then why are we okay with someone trying to do this for the mobile internet?
Apple treats apps like they own the phone. My own mental model is it's my phone, and apps are an extension of the mobile internet.
Not specifying the line item is just plain sketchy.
Also FB: We're a multi-billion dollar company but we can't cover the 30% ourselves because fuck Apple.
Also also FB: Apple warned users that Facebook tracks them which hurts advertisers because users think tracking is awful. Fuck Apple.
Was FB trying to warn small businesses? I read the article as FB trying to warning users making a purchase, not small businesses organizing an event.
> Also FB: We're a multi-billion dollar company but we can't cover the 30% ourselves because fuck Apple.
You think it's reasonable for FB to lose $.30 on every dollar that passes through? That's not a sustainable model.
I'm sick of it all. Large corporations have way too much power in our world.
I’m not trying to judge right or wrong, but hoping to point out a store taking that cut is the standard not the exception.
If you want there to be something illegal about the lack of choice itself you have to think very long and hard about how you want to correct it with legislation, which would not be an easy thing to do right.
Going a little further and what if MasterCard and Visa requested a 30% cut to apple. They should also ban Apple from CC acquiring if they make this public.
Marketplaces (as a startup type) typically charge between 5-10% and survive off that.
30% is outrageous.
How can anyone be okay with this blatant abuse of power? How does it matter if the event is online or offline. If it's happening on a Zoom call or in a coffee shop. Apple isn't just harming big companies like Fortnite, it's harming individual creators. If this isn't case for anti-trust, I don't know what is.
Facebook can still communicate anything they want to customers through the channels <they> pay for. Facebook is also free to pursue any kind of financial arrangement they want with customers via channels which they can maintain and pay for.
But now through Apple's way, folks can have a one-stop shop to manage any runaway subscriptions, which is an unprecedented consumer benefit. Now folks don't need to maintain 10 different financial relationships... merely because they have 10 apps.
Before consumers only had one choice. Now they have two — Microsoft's way, or Apple's way. I'm still struggling to see how this hurts <consumers>, as opposed to the overarching story that Apple takes Very Good care of their customers. Without Apple in the middle, the Microsoft and Adobe's of the world each already have enough power to force customers to do things their way.
Also, I’m sure FB is only piling on because of the privacy changes to iOS which harm FB’s core advertising business. FB would charge 30% in a heart beat.
Again, I would do away with the 30% fee, but please find me someone other than Facebook to feel sorry for.
And even if they don't make an exception, it's ridiculous that they wont even let developers be transparent about where the money goes.
That shit costs money, whether it costs 30% I don't know, but given that seems to be in the order of the charges of every other store (what % of sale price do companies get on retail sales?).
The problem here is a bunch of companies have decided that they want special rules for themselves that don't include paying for services that they benefit from.
Any iOS device apple sells has 5 years of ongoing costs - software support, service upkeep, etc.
Google's store doesn't have the update and software maintenance costs, and the actual hardware sellers have demonstrate no interest in taking them on, so it's clearly not free. In fact google charges 30% on everything as well, but also makes money from all of the surveillance they have on the platform (after all, spying is how google makes its money).
Put very simply. Apple makes a profit from a sale of hardware when the user buys a new device. That's it. They continue to support that hardware for 5 years.
Google makes profit from every android device as long as that device is being used. If you buy a second hand android device then that device continues to generate revenue for google.
Despite this google charges the same commission/rent as apple.
Exactly. That shit costs money. And by that I mean iPhone. People pay $1000 dollars for that. It’s not a freemium game where transactions on the platform support the product. It’s one of the most expensive phones on the market, and long term update support is part of why their prices are so high.
All the reporting I've ever said that it isn't apple's flagship phones that are most popular, it's the lower priced ones which are in the $300 range.
The difference here being, I can install any app, from anywhere onto my Android device, without modifying it any way past changing one setting. In fact there are several non-Google app stores you can install, which charge either significantly less or nothing at all to the developer.
There simply is no analogue for iPhone or iPad without jailbreaking, something that ultimately creates more headaches than it solves. For all intents and purposes, Apple holds a monopoly on marketing and distribution with regards to iOS apps, something no other device or software manufacturer is currently doing.
"Get"? Apple forces all iOS apps to use that infrastructure. Google has a much better case because the Play Store is optional, but Apple dug their own grave here.
Which means that stripe is making 30c + maybe some tiny additional amount per transaction.
Their hardware PoS devices cost money and/or rent, so they make a profit there.
The distribution cost for their app is covered by amazon.
Which means that their remaining per transaction cost is the cost of the payment details which is presumably in the order of 1kb, which I'm fairly sure is in the fraction of cents realm.
> On Friday, the social media giant claimed that Apple rejected the inclusion of a warning that the latter company would take 30% of sales in a paid-online events feature Facebook is rolling out in an update of its app.
Do you really think Apple provided 30% of the value of the event -- created and hosted by someone else, organized by Facebook?
There's a point at which Apple is not responsible for creating the entire economy, even if parts of it incidentally touch OSX. Like, this is functionally no different than the web browser OSX is providing -- but Apple has decided that because it touches the App store, they deserve a ton of flesh.
Apple's updates included things like intentionally slowing down old phones without notifying users of what was going on, instead of encouraging a cheap battery replacement.
Should have kept this in the boardroom.