Japan forces Apple to slightly loosen restrictions on ‘reader’ apps
macworld.com
macworld.com
> It doesn’t sound like the new guidelines will allow the apps to even state that subscriptions or purchases are available on the web. Rather, the apps will be allowed to, “share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account,” according to Apple’s release. That account management might include purchasing or renewing subscriptions, but it sounds from Apple’s release as if the single link in the app may not be allowed to say “subscribe for just $9.99 a month” and instead must say something like “Account Management” or “set up your account.”
https://www.macworld.com/article/354963/japan-fair-trade-com...
If this is the case, the change simply does not go far enough. Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service, and how the money they pay gets distributed. Any less is anti-competitive.
Why? Do you know how the money is distributed when you buy groceries, when you buy a meal at a restaurant, when you buy your clothes, when you buy a book, etc? Does that get you riled up to not know? Why is it different?
When people sell items through big box stores, those stores buy the items at wholesale. What happens if Apple changes from the 30% structure to a 50% wholesale/retail?
Fitness apps compete with gyms, movie apps compete with theaters, learning apps might even compete with schools, etc.. an OS provides the capabilities to do all of these things. I'm sorry, but your analogies make zero sense to me. Apple should be regulated at least the same way Microsoft was, and the Open App Markets Act does this, and I'm glad to see it. I don't think small changes like this are really the way to fix what's wrong with iOS and Android, even though the latter is more open.
App devs should have an honest conversation with the devs of pre-app days. You had to have a release completed so that it could be sent to the facilities to make the dis[c|k]s. These had to be way more complete than today with the ability to 100% re-download the actual product that has had extra time to complete. There's also the cost involved in getting those physical objects made. Today's app devs have it so much easier, and yet want so much more.
It's irrelevant how easy or hard developers have it, the consumer can pick if they want to pay once or have a subscription for the feature set they want in apps.
The closed nature is the only argument that carries water with me as far as being anti-competitive. Every business has to pay to have their product distributed, and the 30% just never sounded unfair to me.
Honest question.
So, all of that to say I'm used to getting 50% of the retail price by selling to wholesellers, so being able to have a 70/30 split being offered by Apple would be 20% increase in my earnings.
Allow alternate app stores, and you'll likely see as much competition on mobile as there is when comparing Itch vs. Steam.
Why are we trying to hold Apple to standards that we know are bad, but just happen to exist in the real world anyway?
It seems completely reasonable to me that the provider of a good or service should be able to communicate freely and directly with their customer about something as core to the transaction as their options for paying for the service.
[0] And even retailer isn't quite right. What the App Store does is less akin to the wholesale-retail model and more like the agency sales model.
App Store is not unique, it is a platform copied from other vendors such as Nokia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovi_(Nokia).
Users pay for the phones.
There is no 'merit' left for Apple (or Google) to collect fees or to impose rules.
As a consequence there are incentives for the stores to decrease the amount of money they make in the normal way and they instead try to find strange ways to make money that the mall doesn't get a cut of.
For example if you buy shoes at the shoe store they will send you new colorful shoelaces every month if you mail them money.
But every now and then a store will come up with clever new way to make money that doesn't give the mall its cut and then the mall throws the store out and leases its space to a competitor. Or just announces method X of making money also needs to give us our share.
If you want the analogy to make sense, let's assume there's exactly two places that sell shoes and they have a stranglehold on the market, and they both mark shoes up the same amount and far more than they would if there was competition between them on price, and they refused to allow any reference to nike.com and how you can get shoes far cheaper there on or in any of the packaging.
That would be a very dysfunctional market, and I think the reason would clearly be the anticompetitive practices that prevented competitors and that resulted from them not competing on price.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
What would work is being forced to actually show things to users, directly in their face, at the time of purchase. As long as a user has to follow a link first, there’s still a pretty good chance they just won’t bother.
Just imagine how app store sales would change if the stores were required to tell users what is actually going on (as you would see at any cash register or online web site shopping checkout page, by the way):
Your New App — $6.99
Apple Store Fee — $2.20
Taxes — $0.80
-----------------------
Total — $9.99
What if, when playing games (which Apple makes, by far, the most money from), you saw the same breakdown, every time you did a consumable in-app purchase:
MyGame Gem Bag — $6.99
Apple Store Fee — $2.20
Taxes — $0.80
-----------------------
Total — $9.99
Until THIS is what purchasers actually see, any other “concessions” allowing “links” mean nothing.
Like, do you think that the practice of airlines advertising $49 flights if not for the $20 9/11 fee, and $40 oil and gas fee, and $20 airport improvement fee, and $30 per page, and... for a total of $327.84 round trip is actually beneficial to the consumer because it provides some kind of perceived transparency that we're supposed to be mad at some nebulous other if we're unhappy with prices?
https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
The breakdown is important because it lets consumers consider the impact of tax legislation passed by the government officials they vote for. If you don't care about the breakdown, you don't have to read it.
This kind of price transparency would be a consumer-friendly improvement to the app store checkout process. Not only because it lets users see where their money goes, but also because it lets users discern that they could be getting the same product or service elsewhere at a lower price (or be able to support the developer with a greater portion of their purchase amount). Forbidding this disclosure is consumer-hostile because it prevents users from understanding this.
A single link? How generous of Apple.
/s
If it applies for audio, video, newspapers, books etc, will it apply for Fortnite?
A highly interactive video game rendering natively on the device cannot be a "reader" app.
If this is accurate, this is an incremental move toward sanity. Still not enough, though; I’d like to run my own App Store, and I think my $2000 payment to buy my iPhone was more than enough of a fee to make this possible.
That can be countered by adding the 30% Apple Tax for those who opt to pay using "Apple Pay". If you have to pay "$x + 30%" on Apple Pay vs only "$x" through another payment system, the consumer will obviously think twice.
Someone should really build an alternative App Store, and complain to regulators that it's not allowed. Then we'd have a serious case.
The browser-ballot screen would not have been a thing if there were no alternatives to IE.
Being deeply ambivalent about this issue, you've just now most closely articulated my position. Thank you.
I have no idea what a reasonable App Store fee should be. But 30% seems excessive.
Further, I despise the entire payments racket. I'm paying MasterCard, Apple, Stripe, whomever to use my own money. Grrr.
That said:
I absolutely want to always use something like Apple Pay for everything. Touch ID, plus secure enclave, plus token exchange (vs plaintext), etc.
I don't care if others want to use something other than Apple Pay (and whatever the Android equivalent is). There should be options.
Further:
App Store needs a rethink.
Apple's recent move to charge less for low volume revenue is backwards. If apps were physical things, shouldn't the cost go down as volume goes up?
So I'd rather Apple focus on raising the asking price for apps. Especially for smaller indie devs (publishers). Or be more flexible. Or...?
- Japan Fair Trade Commission forces Apple to loosen restrictions on ‘reader’ apps - https://www.macworld.com/article/354963/japan-fair-trade-com...
- Apple to Let Media Apps Avoid 30% Fee After Global Scrutiny - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-02/apple-to-...
- Apple to Allow Media Apps to Link to Own Websites for Payment Options - https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-allow-spotify-other-me...
And it's not like the mainstream press are guaranteed to be accurate or objective. For example they did, in various people's opinion, a rather poor job reporting on similar news out of South Korea yesterday. A much better, more considered take on this was posted by Hoeg Law on their Virtual Legality podcast a few hours ago. Well worth a watch if you're interested in hearing legally informed views which might differ from the Hacker News mainstream community view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fruldokyfYc
Hoeg has been covering the Epic vs Apple trial in excruciating detail and has done an excellent job of communicating it alongside explanations of legal jargon and legal principles.
It says that Apple agreed that they improve clarity for review guideline and reject reason, and report improvement to JFTC.
Also it seems that "single" link isn't mentioned.
Further, "reader" app appears to be defined as "an app used solely for the viewing, etc. of digital content users purchase through websites, etc."
There's a lot of reasons why I think this, but for me the main reason is that the thing of value here—the creation of desirable content—occurred entirely outside of Apple's developer agreement and any of Apple's intellectual property associated with it. Plus it's a just a crappy looking thing for the largest company on Earth to do when directly competing with other "reader apps" in the streaming music and streaming television spaces.
They've allowed web to go untaxed. Kind of.
There are web standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently. Maybe a judge should tell them they're not allowed to have a browser if they're going to treat apps differently.
They've corralled 50% of Americans into their bubble, and they're telling businesses to get in the correct lane to access them.
"Deserve" is an entirely subjective question to which reasonable people can honestly disagree. To which reasonable people can express differences in degrees or in the margins.
The law (currently) says yes.
• If you write code that embeds or hooks directly into GPL libraries/APIs, then the FSF would insist that your creation inherits responsibilities under the GPL license and must be made available under a compatible license. In a sense, the open source community gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code for distribution on a PlayStation, Sony would insist that you comply with the license terms associated with their developer agreement. Sony gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code that relies on material supplied to you through the Apple developer agreement, if your app hooks directly into Apple iOS libraries/APIs, then Apple Inc says that distributing this software must be done in compliance with the license terms you agreed to under the Apple developer agreement.
2 is a semi reasonable comparison but "and x does it" isn't proof "and therefore y is right". It could be that both x and y are wrong and y was just challenged first due to prevalence or that y is subtly different than x.
Whereas in the case of iOS applications, developers are agreeing to the Apple developer agreement and then directly embedding and/or linking to Apple intellectual property when compiling their binaries.
--
As for the analogy I made to the GPL, this was only to demonstrate that the open source community also leverages the enforceability of license agreements to require developers who use GPL code in a certain way to comply with community expectations. It's the same legal principle, even though it's used to very different effect.
Developers who have signed Apple's developer agreement and utilised the libraries/APIs are being held to the terms laid out in that agreement.
A website is a website.
Whether you agree or disagree with how Apple has chosen to operate their iOS ecosystem—again, I believe that reasonable people can disagree—it's certainly not unlawful for Apple to distinguish between developers who rely on Apple's work (SwiftUI, Metal APIs, etc) and developers who publish web pages with open standards without any involvement by Apple.
Developer agreements and rules being unlawful or not doesn't seem to me to be a relevant framing here. One of the party can basically change the law if it goes against common sense or society's wellbeing.
I'm not saying this isn't a valid opinion to hold—I'm not necessarily opposed to nationalisation in other contexts—but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what your opinion entailed.
We are not talking about forcing them to GPL their OS or publish their API sources, or even allow uses of whatever they invented outside of their system.
Just "don't prohibit app devs from putting links to external web pages".
It's further mired by the fact that Apple went from less than 10% market share to over 50%.
As consumers, we can't repair our devices or run the software we want to on them.
As small businesses, we can't ship software the way we want to anymore. It has to be in the form of an app to reach the target audience. We're audited, policed, and taxed. This isn't for some niche hobby or market - this is the primary form of computing for most Americans. We have to waste effort to develop applications twice because reasons, and we're treated like dog shit all the while.
Both sides of the coin suck, and the 800 lb gorilla in the room isn't going away. It feels like we woke up in bizarro world, because this shouldn't have ever become the status quo.
This is nothing else but Apple imposing a tax. If Apple wants to pretend it is a nation state I think regulators of actual states should take notice and treat them like the peer competitor they intend to be.
Not even the Judge in Apple vs Epic agrees with this. For a very recent reminder of this, Virtual Legality today posted his observations[0] about the South Korea law and how the effect of it is being misreported in the media (and to be quite frank, by commenters in Hacker News). In here he reminds us about how people are improperly conflating the "right" and the "means" to collect a revenue share.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fruldokyfYc&t=683s (In particular, 11:24 — 14:57)
In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.
Unfortunately vast majority Apple supporters or Apple apologist seems to think Apple deserve everything because it is Apple's App Store.
Now signing up a remote teaching class which is basically a group video call ala Zoom doesn't require to pay 30% of that to Apple.
Edit: And I will just add, before 2016 that mandate to have signup link, most of these Services and Reader App were just fine. Apple argued it gives bad user experience because the App does not have any sign up link. That is BS. In reality no-one discover these Apps on App Store. The discovery process does not happen on App Store. It would have at least gave Apple a minuscule creditability if App Store Searching had actually worked. But it never did. People discover the services outside of App Store and download those Apps with links. ( And they know full well how all these worked and killed their Apps affiliation program in 2018 ) And as shown in court document Apple actually knew this and how the App Discovery process drive Apps related Ads which leads back to privacy etc etc. Basically there is whole new level of hypocrisy just to achieve their Services Revenue Goal by 2020.