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Comment by tomasreimers | Hacker News Reader

Your argument applies equally well to payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.) and, as a society, we seem to be okay with them just taking ~2% of Revenue despite their underlying costs (largely) being a flat fee.

I'm not saying it's okay, simply that there's precedent fairly ingrained in our economy.

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But that's not a 1:1 comparison because you are not forced to use them, you're free to go to another one, or not take them and use checks or cash or bitcoin or whatever you want.

If Apple was not making it mandatory to go through them, it would be another story from my point of view.

Note that payment processor fees are massively regulated in the EU as well, with very low limits. So by that precedent the EU coming and saying "30% is way too much" wouldn't be out of nowhere.

You‘re not forced to use them?

So you have to pay your Spotify subscription by cash or checks. How many people will still subscribe to Spotify? I haven‘t ever seen a check in my live besides in TV.

In some sense you are „forced“ to use them. And in some sense it is ok, as long as one party does not has to much power.

FYI: Apple disallow you to redirect your users to subscribe outside of their app without their fee. You cannot tell your users "go to our website to subscribe by check for 30% less", that gets you banned. So yes, you are forced to use them.

> 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.

Also, I don't know how common it is in the US but in the EU and here in France we have "prélèvement" (~bank direct debit ?)

Eg I (virtually, on my computer) sign an agreement for company X to take amount Y from my bank account every Z amount of time for a given service. It takes less than a minute to setup and sign directly on the provider website (no need to contact or connect to my bank). I can cancel it at any time through the provider or at my bank. Since a couple of years they are valid in the entire EU accross countries "prélèvement SEPA" (Single Euro Payments Area). They're entirely free, for the customer AND the one billing them (there are bank fees depending on your bank, but no interchange fee, eg I use them to charge many of my customer and it costs me a flat fee of 25e/month for the web access).

That's how I pay my amazon prime, my amazon purchases, my electricity bill, my mobile phone bill, ... So a certain swedish music company could bill me in france that way for virtually no fee.

I paid for Spotify directly with a credit card on their website and then logged into my existing account inside the app. So, by definition, I wasn't forced to subscribe through Apple.

It's true that you're not allowed to advertise that you can do this inside the app itself, but that's not the same as saying you're not allowed to do it at all.

Spotify even ran an email campaign to tell users that they can save money paying outside the App Store.

> have to pay your Spotify subscription by cash or checks.

Not a good example - Spotify takes PayPal, which can be topped up from a bank account transfer, trivially done with the bank app or site.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/payment-methods/ (just learned there's also "pay by mobile" which adds it to your phone bill ...)

Paypal also support the SEPA bank direct debit I mentionned above as a source of funds, meaning you don't even have to initiate a bank transfer they do it for you and it's instant. Bank account -> paypal -> spotify, in one or two clicks and no waiting time.

You’re “not forced to use them” in exactly the same way you’re not forced to use Apple.

There's a fairly big difference between a duopoly, which, for the record, major government services rely on (if you want the COVID tracking app its either iOS or Android, if you want an app that your senator will use, you probably have to make it for iOS, etc.), and services that you can actually wholesale replace in your product like a payment processor. Not to mention certain school courses that are taught with iOS, etc. Apple has worked very hard to position themselves as one of the only players in the space, and they've succeeded! There is certainly an argument that the duopoly situation is fine, but it is in absolutely no way the "exact same" as with Apple and the AppStore.

Consoles are also effectively a duopoly, and yet Microsoft has argued that they should be allowed to keep third-party app stores off the Xbox while also signing on to the lawsuit to try and force Apple to open up their own.

I feel like you stopped reading my comment as soon as you hit the word "duopoly". Look at the specific reasons I gave why phone AppStores are different: they are increasingly necessary for everyday life. COVID-tracking, political interaction, school courses, paying for parking, etc. etc. The day XBox becomes one of the few ways to do these things, and not primarily a means to play video games, then it would be appropriate for the calculus to change there too. You can bring up Keurig coffee cups too, but the implications just aren't the same.

at the end of the day there is always an alternative to ios though: the other OS that controls 87% of the market.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272307/market-share-fore...

ios isn't a monopoly, there is always the other option. The option that has six times the marketshare.

again, this is literally about shutting down any possibility of a company ever offering a "walled garden" model. It's not that apple is dominant in the market - they're not. You have many many alternatives to using their devices, they're about an eighth of the market. But even that eighth cannot be allowed to exist, that business model has to be shut down permanently.

That will be a crucial point of the ruling to come yes, as the full version is "You're not forced to use them to sell on the market", and it depends on what you define as "the market".

If you consider selling apps to ios devices to be its own market, then yes you are forced to use Apple. If you don't consider that to be its own market but only a part of the actual "phones and tablets apps" market then no you are not forced to use Apple.

I believe because of the size of their userbase that apps for ios devices are a market on their own, therefore "you are forced to use Apple" applies. Here the EU seems to agree.

EU alredy regulated interchange fees for cards to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/lt/IP_15_...

Yep, its great because I never feel bad about paying for tiny things by card. I remember how before this regulation the card companies were extracting so much profit (with a minimum fee) that it was often expensive for a convenience store to accept cards. Some had lower bounds of what you could pay by card, to keep the fees at a manageable level. Now it's not a problem, contactless payments are everywhere and for everything due to slim fees. The only downside is that credit card rewards are modest compared to the US

Wouldn’t it be nice if banks charged a fixed fee for a loan no matter the size? Visa/MasterCard/etc are not comparable here because they are financing transactions which do have percentage based mechanisms such as % of fraud or % charged back.

The cost to the issuer is proportional to the size of the purchase in the case of credit default or fraud. So a fixed fee does not make sense for loans. This isn't the case for the App Store.

BTW, Visa/MasterCard don't manage risk afaik -- the card issuing banks do that. Visa just connects the pos terminal etc to the right bank.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I'm responding to someone who said that we as a society have accepted % of revenue based charging BECAUSE Visa et al. have models like that. I'm pointing it out that they have % of revenue models because their costs are directly tied to revenue. I'm not even going to get into cash back and points and international transactions which are one-to-one relationships with how much is being charged, but do you really think the banks pay for the privilege of being part of Visa? No, Visa has costs at least somewhat proportional to the volume going through that bank.

Banks and loan are not a good comparison since you ll most likely understand a million euros loan will be harder to produce for the bank than a 1000 one. Taking a percent is fine.

Tbh it would be fine if Apple charged per bandwidth usage. But taking 50 or 500 euros in wont change how much it cost them to deliver the app.

That was entirely my point. I was responding to a comment that says we have precedent in accepting % revenue models because Visa has one. I'm pointing out to them that in finance, percentage of dollar amount is normal and orthogonal to the App Store model.

I'd argue that their cost scales to the price paid because credit card processors are taking on the liability for those transactions.

Additionally, a 2% fee is nearly inconsequential. If Mastercard and Visa demanded 30%, there would be literal riots.

And yet interchange rates in Europe are capped at around 0.2%. 2% is still a lot of money.

It does stack up, but if the cost was too high, many businesses wouldn't work with the credit processors. Amex is an example of this. There's payment options that avoid this retailers could incentivize.

And Apple and Google charge 15 times that because there's no way around them.

In the USA. The EU forced them to take a smaller cut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union)

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