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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it's hidden and that Apple causes problems for companies that expose how big the fee is makes it extremely consumer unfriendly.

Do most users care or regularly discuss it? Probably not. Would they be happier paying 30% less for their apps though? Quite likely.

Apple is also explicitly reviewing the payment providers involved in this. There's no reason to choose between "only apple" or "users will install malware". There is a huge middle ground here.

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Europe used regulation to cram down interchange fees [1]. The US could (and should) do the same, again, with regulation. Users shouldn't have to care (just as they shouldn't have to understand the intricacies of core financial infra in their country), and Big Tech shouldn't be able to use monopoly power to take such a large cut.

And lets not mince words: Apple in this case (and Google in theirs with their mobile ecosystem) is acting as a payment processor, and that function should be regulated as such. If that margin, once regulated down, is insufficient to operate an app store (hah), charge a flat fee per app to be listed and made available to customers. Shopify costs $30-300/month (depending on plan), which sounds like reasonable cost segmentation to adopt for providing a mobile storefront/app in their app store.

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

(I'm aware this post is Netherlands specific; I'm speaking in broad strokes)

> is insufficient to operate an app store (hah), charge a flat fee per app to be listed and made available to customers

No one - no one - wants that. Free apps suddenly won't be free when they have to pay to be on the App Store. Its so easy to create an app and share it, and that is a good thing. The end result of apps costing money (even though free apps have nearly a 0 marginal cost to distribute) is that you'll end up with less apps and/or more ads and data tracking (also proposed to be regulated away) and/or a subscription service that bundles free apps to cover the cost.

>Its so easy to create an app and share it, and that is a good thing.

It's how you end up with 2 million apps in the store but you still can't find what you need.

Developers already pay to be on the App Store each year, and developers pay to be on the Play Store.

Thats not meant to cover the cost of distribution of the app nor the associated per use costs. Thats paying for access to developer services.

> Would they be happier paying 30% less for their apps though? Quite likely.

Indeed, but that’s almost certainly not going to be the consequential result of whatever happens to the App Store.

The businesses might make 30% more, in their best case.

Worst case, Apple is ordered to split up in a way that means development of iOS has to be funded independently of device sales, and also that there App Store is no longer allowed to be the unique store for iOS sales, in which case developers might find that each of the frameworks they rely on from ARKit to WidgetKit now has a licence fee, or end users of iOS may find they have to pay for upgrades instead of getting them free.

It’s possible that the economic rent Apple currently extracts from the App Store will end up somewhere more economically useful, but not guaranteed for the same reasons mergers can reduce waste — replication is necessarily redundant, even though it’s also necessary for the exact competition that would naturally minimise economic rent extraction.

(That said, I don’t think any of this is why basically all governments are going after Big Tech right now. I think that’s happening because Big Tech is scaring a lot of governments by being too big, and in the case of everyone outside the USA, too beholden to Washington — as I’ve said before on the site, it is ridiculous that I, a British national living in Berlin, have to report to the US federal government the use of encryption in the apps I write, while working for German businesses who sell the apps to other German business).

> Indeed, but that’s almost certainly not going to be the consequential result of whatever happens to the App Store.

It is 100% gonna be 27% instead of 3%. So a potential saving for the consumer of 3%. No thank you!

When apple cut the commission from 30% to 15% for small devs, most app developers didn't lower their prices. The savings went to developers. I think it will be similar here

Or if the result is a proliferation of alternative payment processors because a ruling makes that possible, we'll see a proliferation of payment processors that charge 30% by some combination of means. It seems to be a value that the market will bare.

The market it bears it because there's no competition. With increased efficiencies that competition brings, it's entirely possible that the market will find a lower price more bearable, once people are actually able to choose.

If you look at the payment providers outside of the app stores, the people like 2Checkout or the various Digital River companies they all seem to be in the 4% to 6% range.

27%.. The 3% is for payment processing, which now has to be paid somewhere else (actually in the Netherlands you can pay by direct debit, which is a fixed fee of only a few cents).

We don't show ATM transaction fees either.

We don't show creditcard fees either.

In the Netherlands, companies are required to advertise all-in prices (VAT etc. etc.)

Also, the whole lawsuit was not against the 30% appletax. It was about "freedom of payment provider". Ofcourse the real reason is the 30% commission, but that doesn't hold up in court.

ATMs do show transaction fees.

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