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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. It literally enables level playing field for smaller developers who can't simply incorporate in 175 countries and navigate through the rules, regulations of taxes.

The value that Apple provides for the smaller developers is immense, you don't actually see small developers complaining about Apple(with exception to those who were sherlocked maybe) but you see multi billion corporations pretending to be advocating for the little guy.

I'm very annoyed by all this, I'm afraid that they will win and solo developers will lose any chance to make it big without getting screwed by large publishers.

Can you please stop saving the small developers from Apple? Thank you.

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> you see multi billion corporations pretending to be advocating for the little guy.

And they are.

The little guys won't stand up to 30% of their gross taken but the big guys can and do. As a result after all the lawsuits have run their course Apple will be charging a much lower fee in the hopes of regaining their payment processing marketshare.

How do you decide that %30 breaks the business but %15 is fine? Can I see your math please?

This is not an argument made in good faith so I will ignore it.

Please don't ignore, I'm curious how I will not stand a chance at %30 but it's fine at %15.

I want to know if this is your gut feeling or do you know something concrete.

Thanks.

I just look at what other payment service providers charge, they are between 1 and 5% based on volume, risk, transaction size.

There is plenty of competition in the payment processing space.

When you take the card companies' cut into account the fees are even lower for the transaction processing.

How do you pay your taxes in UK, Turkey, Poland, USA, Japan, China, Australia and the rest of the 175 countries? How do you handle the regulatory requirements in each country and how do you navigate through the trade agreements?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, why are you even active in this thread?

I've been running an international business for a couple of decades and this has never been a problem at all.

I'm asking you to enlighten me. Currently I don't have to deal with any of these, Apple handles all that for me, I like that and that's why I'm active in this thread. I'm defending a service that I see value in but maybe you can shine a light and demonstrate that all these can be handled for cheaper and easier than using Apple's service that charges %15 to %30.

I'm asking legitimate question, I'm puzzled by your dismissive tone. How do you sell software and services in 175 countries for less work and commission than Apple's service?

Good for you that you are running international business for a couple a decade know, would you share some of that knowledge?

Thank you.

That it works for you is fine. You obviously have no incentive to look further than what works for you and you are fine with paying 30% for a service that is not competitive but that is convenient.

If you were a bit larger that equation would change. Your first step would then be to use a commercial payment services provider such as Stripe, Adyen or any of the others to process the transactions for you (rates: 1 to 5%), possibly falling back to Apple in case their coverage doesn't perfectly overlap. Then at an even higher level of transactions you could choose to do the payment processing yourself.

It's pretty simple, really. And as for taxes: that too is something that you can arrange in different ways, depending on where your main place of business is registered.

My dismissive tone is because it appears that you want me to do a bunch of homework for you while at the same time arguing that there is nothing to be concerned about in 10's of comments in this thread. You have already made up your mind and seem to use questions as a way to argue rather than that you are really interested in the answers. I predict that as a result of this response you are going to come up with another set of questions for me to answer or a new set of arguments that move the goalposts away from your previous claims.

But the essence of my response is: anti-competitive behavior can not be argued for by utility to some subset of the customers. The phone company provides a lot of value. But if they behave in an anti-competive way, for instance by price gouging customers on something that costs them peanuts such as roaming then they deserve to be smacked down, even if some people will argue that you could of course buy a different phone for every country as an alternative, and so those roaming charges are acceptable because they are cheaper. That misses the point entirely.

> If you were a bit larger that equation would change

Right.

Can you please stop saving smaller developers from Apple? Thanks!

PS: You maybe need some homework too. Essentially, Stripe etc. doesn't handle anything else that processing your payments(Maybe that changed or will change in the future). They have list of countries that they support and links to the governing bodies, you are on your own to figure out how to sell in these countries. There are some companies that handle stuff like that but you don't simply pay 99$/year and start using them, there are also publishers that will do it for you but they are much much more predatory and restrictive that Apple. So please, if you have something that you know say it, instead of passive aggressively attacking my character. If you are business genius you say you are, it would be much nicer of you to share some of that with those who know less instead of throwing generalised assumption and saying things like "go do your homework".

Nobody said that you can't do business with Apple in any way that you want.

Your arguments in this thread are based on some kind of extrapolation that is not warranted.

As for what Stripe and other PSPs do: I'm intimately familiar with that stuff. You are free to do your own marketing/sales/payment processing/whatever but you should not be forced to deal with any particular party, including Apple at some price that they set.

Note that if Apple would charge regular PSP fees we probably would not be having this discussion and you would be making more money.

I'm glad that you are intimately knowledgable but your original claim was that %30 is a bad deal and large corporations are in a mission to help small developers agains Apple.

Then when I press you to show some calculation, you admit that you actually need to be "a bit bigger than a small". Essentially, what you say that all you need is a dream and a few million dollars in the bank. Thanks, great advice.

You keep repeating that you know a lot and I am sure you do but your arguments fall short of actual information. You keep saying things that "you need to learn" which I tolerate and try to be respectful despite I really don't enjoy being patronised.

Besides, I want to note that the real issue for me is not the %30 or %15 or whatever cut Apple takes. The real issue is that Apple/Google/Amazon or any other company can cut you off if they want. At this point, I think these services must be regulated like utility, i.e. businesses that depend on these must be guaranteed to be treated equally and fairly. Apple is has done fine for the most part but IMHO what we need is rights, not all that BS about making Apple change their software to accommodate something.

30% is a bad deal because it was a one-sided affair.

Let's see your reaction when they crank it up to 50%, 70% or even more. Your arguments are going to be exactly the same, right?

> At this point, I think these services must be regulated like utility, i.e. businesses that depend on these must be guaranteed to be treated equally and fairly.

This is exactly the crux of this court case. Apple is abusing its position, it has turned itself into a utility and there is no way to opt out and switch to another utility.

There isn't going to be any reaction because they can't crank it up to 50 or 70 percent because developers would leave. Which means it's not a monopoly.

Developers wouldn't leave, the apple app store generates so much revenue that it would be much more profitable than android even if they lost half of it. What would happen is that governments all over the world would quickly rush to regulate Apples power away, that is what Apple is worried about and why they lowered it for small developers to 15% already, they aren't worried about competition here.

> Developers wouldn't leave, the apple app store generates so much revenue that it would be much more profitable than android even if they lost half of it.

You're countering your own point. The fact that there is so much money to be made on the app store, is why they have a right to charge 30%. They created the platform, and made it a great place to buy apps for users, and a lucrative place to sell apps for developers.

iPhone users are wealthier than Android users, that is the main reason the platform is more lucrative. Apple did a great job creating phones that users wants and charges a premium for them, which is great. What is not so great is that Apple then uses their dominance in the premium phone market to become the gatekeeper of a majority of phone app revenue, resulting in Apple taking a 30% cut of most app sales in the world. They don't have the most phones, no, but they have most of the phone app market.

And as phones are taking over phone apps are becoming an ever more important part of our lives. Apple can't just sit there and charge 30% of phone apps forever, that starves an upcoming market and holds back progress.

> That is the main reason the platform is more lucrative.

Citation needed

Suggesting that what Apple does is equivalent to a payment processor is ridiculous. I suggest looking at Epic v Apple and how that argument went down in court. It was embarrassing to witness.

Yes, agreed they are more like a mob running amok in a neighborhood but for the moment I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and looking at it purely as a transaction processor.

I wonder how all of those defending Apple in this thread would respond if they jacked up the prices to say 75%. And why stop there?

I was hoping for a serious conversation.

Do you think that a 99% tax/commission would be fine? If not, how do you decide that 99% breaks the business, but 30% is fine?

The answer of course is that different businesses have different margins. For some, even paying 99% commission to Apple would not break the business, as they have such great margins that even getting 1% of each sale would still leave them profitable. For others, even a 1% commission is too much, as they have such low margins even losing 1% of sales price makes them unprofitable.

For any set price, some business models are excluded from the App Store, for better or for worse.

And yet somehow indie devs have managed to sell software for macOS for decades before the invention of the Apple App Store. Only the larger software shops are atually running their own payment and licensing backends. Most use payment providers like Paddle or Fastspring. There are also other distribution channels like SetApp for expample.

One thing that Apple has made very easy for devs are In-App Payments. But I think you can argue if that is such a good thing for Apple's customers.

macOS app ecosystem isn't really thriving and the regulatory complexities arrived after the Internet matured.

Something being possible isn't the same as being good. Selling 1000 copies at %30 commission(it tends to be around %50 once you ad stuff like VAT) is much better than selling 10 copies at %1 commission.

I also think that from the users perspective it's much better to have one place where you manage all your payments/subscriptions/downloads etc. That can be solved through some kind of unified purchasing interface though.

I'm not saying that App Store distribution is useless. But I think vendors should have a choice. If Apple's system is so superior, they have little to worry about.

The problem is, small developers won't have access to all the options - especially the good options - that the big companies would have.

Currently, if you you manage to make a great app or game you have access to the exact same processes as the Epic or Microsoft.

> ... you have access to the exact same processes as the Epic or Microsoft.

No you don't. Netflix and Amazon got special deals (before the whole Epic saga) [1] [2]. From partial waivers of the Apple Tax, to Apple-run editorial promotions, to bundling!

"The emails could serve as evidence that for lucrative and powerful partners, Apple seems to be willing to make concessions."

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/5/22421734/apple-epic-netfli...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206400/apple-tax-amazon-...

You make no sense. No one is arguing Apple should stop offering this service to developers.

However, Apple shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the market for mobile apps (or "oligopolize" it together with Google, if you want to be extremely pedantic). There should be other options for these types of services.

If Apple offers the best case for your business: Great! Keep using Apple. If someone else's business doesn't need availability in 175 countries (say, they are a taxi app operating in one city), perhaps they should be able to choose some other payment processor who won't demand 30% of every in-app purchase for offering them the exact same service as Stripe.

The problem is that they aren't offering the same service. The payment processor is not maintaining the ecosystem or doing anything outside of the relatively narrow scope of accepting payments and maybe dealing with taxes.

Even if you think Apple's (and Google's, and Microsoft's, and so on) cut is too high, the idea that the entirety or even the bulk of the value that they offer is strictly in facilitating transactions is incorrect.

> The payment processor is not maintaining the ecosystem

There is good historical precedent to believe that this "service" is approximately 0 in value: the Windows desktop market (in its heyday). People were making money selling software to consumers on Windows without Microsoft doing anything to "maintain the ecosystem" other then developing their OS.

So, the approximate value of the service Apple offers to businesses except payment processing, taxes, etc, is 0, which is approximately how much Apple should be paid if someone is using Stripe instead of Apple for payment processing.

So why is Apple so scared by competition? Why denying other payment services at all?

> Apple so scared by competition

That's a loaded question.

I don't think they are scared, it's just easier for them to collect their cut when the payments flow through their systems. It also enables them to do really good customer service and this helps them sell more iDevices. Purchasing, refunds, cancellations are all handled by Apple and are accessible from a single place and that makes for a superb customer experience.

Let's not forget that companies are not charities. When they are charities, they register as such.

This 15% happened after all the outrage. Yes, all these mega corps don't care about the little guy but apple allowing third party options doesn't take away from their ability to continue to provide the services to developers who see value in apple's payment services.

Are you a developer? Can I see your apps? I'm curios about your business model where selling coins or unlocking premium features at %30 commission instead of %15 breaks your business to the point that incorporating in 175 countries is more desirable.

I develop. No, 30% doesn't break my business majorly because my business model is not around app sales but I agree with your point that for most 15 and 30 won't break the business. But you are presenting a false dichotomy. Why are we assuming if apple doesn't offer these services, a third party won't as well? And I am not proposing that apple stop offering its payment and other distribution services but rather that third parties be allowed to do the same.

There's nothing desirable in dealing with multiple 3rd parties to reach your customers instead of one that is essentially providing equal service at equal price to (almost)everyone.

And I am not advocating that any one takes away that from you, just for us to have a choice.

> providing ... service

The mafia also provides services. You don't just pay them and get nothing in return. Of course, there, as here, you really have no choice but to pay; and to pay ridiculously inflated rates.

> ... at equal price

Not true. Apple's price is zero. Sucks if you're competing with them, then. Maybe we should all be thankful Apple at-least let's you compete, even if with a handicap. Unlike the mafia.

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