Apple’s requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

It’s important to recognize any time that we’re talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that charges fair prices – because fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.

BUT… since fairness gets so often brought into conversations about Apple’s fees, often with the implicit suggestion that Apple “deserves” to be compensated for all of the work they’re putting into hosting and curating apps and for (in heavy quotes) “creating” a market that they supposedly also don’t have duopoly control over: does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?

Like, if we’re going to talk about what’s egregious and what’s not egregious, charging higher fees per-transaction than the platforms you are hosting seems like it might be a good indicator that things have gotten out of control.

Well, there is a simple way to test this… just get rid of the Patreon iOS app and just use a web version. Why does patreon need its own app? Why can’t it just be web based?

I wish fewer companies had apps. I don’t need an app for everything. I don’t need every hotel I stay at to have their own app, I don’t need an app to order food at a restaurant.

So why do companies make them? Because people spend more money when they can just use the in app purchase functionality. It is CLEARLY worth the 30% to most companies, because they keep pumping out single use apps that would be better as a mobile web page.

So, platform developers have to take iOS support very seriously or miss a lot of profit.

It’s not like Patreon would be unusable on iOS without an app.

When they are asked to search for a website, they open the app store and search there. If there is no result, they give up.

Forms are pretty darn important to 99.9% of web apps, this felt like active sabotage.

Also a lot of companies make apps so they can get more tracking info. That value doesn’t come from the Apple Store.

It’s things like games that really get an advantage from being native and in the store. And that’s largely a red queen’s race, they need to stay on top and they’ll pay out the nose to be the easiest install. Paying lots of money in a zero-sum situation doesn’t mean they’re getting much value in a more zoomed-out sense.

Not everything needs to be an app.

I strongly disagree with that. The store is not the reason apps are good for lots of things. You can assign a lot of value to phone and OS, but Apple does not try to take a cut based on making the phone and OS because it would be hard to defend. The store pales in comparison.

If the CEOs could sign a petition that had a sure chance of antitrust action against Apple’s fees, every single one of them would be itching to sign.

Wondering about that, too – I always use the website on my ipad since a browser allows me to enlarge the font size when reading novels on Patreon (a feature that the app does not offer).

You may not like it but programmer reading news in HN is not common in global scale

plus mobile apps is just value added, same reason you have dekstop app vs webapp

because apple gimps their web browser capabilities & performance to incentivize developers to enter the walled garden

I can understand that developers would like to use certain feature, or that they’d make the job easier, but they are not required. Patreon isn’t cutting edge web development, you could make it work on an IE8 if you cared enough. There it absolutely no features currently lacking in Safari that would prevent Patreon in moving to website only.

Apple Pay is a percentage paid by the bank, not the merchant.

In-app purchase is for an app being used to buy digital goods and services consumed in-app. The agreement for publishing apps says that you will give Apple a cut, and upfront purchase price and in-app purchases are how they collect it.

You can’t use in-app purchases to say order dinner to be delivered.

Assuming the average user accesses Pateron by clicking a link, there’s really no reason for a dedicated Patreon app to exist. Apple Pay works just fine on websites, without demanding the App Store fee.

AppStore is horrendously bad for discoverabilty. It’s overrun with scammy ads, fake reviews and fake apps.

And it should be noted most Patreon users find their way there via YouTube, which itself automatically opens links to Safari, where Patreon can be subscribed to easily.

Apple & Google Pay is my guess. Which I don’t use, just because it’s rent seeking and leads to this.

I use the websites. Don’t want to install bloody apps which request every permission available. My browser has most of those set to denied. Don’t even ask for permission, outright deny.

What makes a normal CC better?

I’ll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let’s abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers?

Looking at it that way, sure. It seems obvious. If a local distributor picks up a local product, and then a national distributor buys from the local distributor, it’s pretty obvious that the national distributor brings more value.

Looping back to the specifics, if Apple was the primary means that people discover Patreon and the creators on it, sure, it would make sense. But for Patreon specifically that’s not the case (I think). The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.

That isn’t obvious at all. In both cases the distributor’s margin will reflect how much competition they have. If there is only one distributor, their margin will be large. If there are a thousand, competition will force their margins down. Whether they’re local or national.

Moreover, in this context Patreon is the national distributor who needs to distribute content to everyone whether they have iOS, Android, web or something else, and each of the platforms is a local subcontractor for a subset of the customers. Which leads to exactly the problem. The notion that Google and Apple are in competition with one another in this context is false, because to distribute to Android customers you need Google and to distribute to iOS customers you need Apple. You can’t switch from one to the other because Google can’t distribute to iOS customers. They’re each a different market serving different customers, and then they collect a monopoly rent.

What the usual trope that analogizes this to Walmart or Target is missing is that “Walmart customers” are also customers of Target or Amazon, but the large majority of iOS customers are not also customers of Google Play or any other app store.

It is still competition even in this context, it just happens on a slightly slower cadence. The Apple customers, by and large, are paying good money to avoid Google’s app store because they believe Apple is a better steward on net.

Every time I buy a phone I have to ask if Apple’s bad software decisions outweigh the costs of signing up with Google. So far the answer has been one sided in Apple’s favour. Consideration of things like this with Patreon come up at phone purchase time.

You’re looking at a different market. The customer in this context is Patreon and the product is app distribution. Patreon needs a way to distribute their app to all of their customers. Many of their customers have iOS, so Patreon needs app distribution to customers with iOS, and there is only one supplier of that.

Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do.
Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for. Maybe some very low double digit percentage of these people will try to load a pwa from patreon.com

I just searched the App Store for Patreon:

The top hit was an ad for Ashley Madison. Seriously.

The second hit was the Patreon app.

The third hit was ChatGPT for some reason.

But if the Patreon app was not in the App Store, no doubt there would be a bunch of scammers trying to pose as the official Patreon app.

I’m not at all aware of where the boundary is between “that’s fine” and “that’s abuse of market dominance to fund uneconomical expansion”.

Does anywhere have a specific “national defence” tax and another “police fund” tax etc. for each expense, rather than “income tax” and “sales tax” for each source?

There doesn’t seem to be anything snowflake special the Patreon iOS app needs to do that a web app cannot handle.

People get confused very easily when small digital subscriptions are charged through third parties on behalf of sellers whose name is often different from the app or service.

I’m not sure a shop app fixes that though. Better communication and better choice of names seems far more important.

In the sense that (bigger company) can make more money and reach more people than (smaller company), yes. But if all they are doing is sitting there and using that bigger presence, you can see how that roads ends in antitrust.

>The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.

two big issues.

1. No one wins. Users lose the convinience of an app, Apple loses money from a potential large customer, Patreon loses views from being visible on the app store. It’s just bad buzz all around for no good reason.

2. The underselling point that Apple has actively sabatoged web apps and PWA’s which is part of why the DMA is coming down hard on them. We’re well past a monopolistic power using its power to stifle competition.

Let’s not pretend this trillion dollar company that already forces devs to use IOS hardware to develop (and took down their server OS’s to boot), and charges a yearly membership to dev is scaping for cash here.

I don’t follow this at all. If a big record label strikes an international distribution deal with a small label, the big label brings more value to the artist than the small label does. Is that necessarily antitrust?

> Let’s not pretend this trillion dollar company that already forces devs to use IOS hardware to develop (and took down their server OS’s to boot), and charges a yearly membership to dev is scaping for cash here.

I think you replied to the wrong post? I certainly didn’t assert that out of pretense or otherwise. Though it’s hard for me to fault “forcing” devs to own the hardware they are developing for. Phone software and iOS software have enough quality issues without letting developers ship stuff that has never been tested on real HW.

it ultimately comes down to what they are doing with that money in my eyes. Are they actually distributing as a presence inernationally, helping you gather talent, helping you to navigate the industry outside your area, introducing contacts and deals to you, and overall being pivotal to your small label? Sure, they get a bigger cut. They are actively growing you as a company.

Or are they saying “yeah I’ll put you on our Spotify”, pay you 10% of ad revenue, claiming exclusivity on your portfolio, and calling it a day? No, there’s no value there that couldn’t be done yourself. But you’re paying for the “platform” they have. That is very much using their presence to exploit you. The key isn’t necessarily “are they a monopoly” here, it’s “are they abusing their position as a monopoly”.

>Though it’s hard for me to fault “forcing” devs to own the hardware they are developing for.

It’s a tech specific sitution, but the main point wasn’t the target platform, but development platforms. I can setup a Linux server rack with android emulators and use my Windows device to develop and deploy to said rack. I am forced to use mac as a development platform and they disconinued Mac’s server OS. So I can’t even scale up a test suite for IOS, I need to buy multiple iPhones or beefy desktop Macs to run a few emulators each.

>iOS software have enough quality issues without letting developers ship stuff that has never been tested on real HW.

great use of my subscription fee to maintain crappy emulators. They don’t even have platform excuses like Android does.

Again, what am I really paying for here?

Unfortunately this is in the nature of suppliers and retailers.

Supermarkets make more profit on a litre of milk than farmers. Way way way more. Because they know farmers in practice have to sell _all_ their milk, not just some of it.

And what Apple really has, and knows it, is the only supermarket on the main road out of iBorough. And there are no corner shops.

It’s profitable for supermarkets.

(They definitely do manipulate milk prices to get consumers to shop with them rather than competitors, and sometimes they artificially lower the prices. But they don’t ever do this at their own expense. They do it by forcing farmers to supply below the true cost of production. Because dairy farmers can’t just sell some of their milk. Essentially as soon as a dairy farmer can’t get a buyer for the totality of their product they are out of business. It’s remarkably precarious. So most are pressured into selling below cost for long periods of time.)

Supermarkets might be using it to get customers deeper into the store but milk is also heavy, awkward, refrigerated, and shorter shelf life, which means they are always going to put it closest to the back of the store.

Breaking up (and privatising) the UK national rail network didn’t work so well; a few years after it happened, the party who did it lost power, and had apparently forgotten they had even done this to the trains as they were running ads saying “you paid the taxes so where are the trains”.

Apple’s iPhone can clearly be split into “hardware” and “software” because Android QED; but that’s not sufficient because the Play Store gets much the same criticism.

Likewise the App Store can obviously be split off, the technical issues are demonstrated by what already exists. But, the Samsung store isn’t stopping the criticism of the Play Store, so alt stores are also not enough here for iOS either.

I was expecting anti-trust issues before it reached “just” one trillion dollars of market cap, let alone three, so who knows.

This way, the different stores could compete – by charging lower fees or offering more services. Like the android store does a bare-bones check of the app and so it only charges 10%. Apple checks every app throughly, so it charges 15%. Some open source store might have 0% fee, have no app checks, no payment processing, and it is 100% on the user not to download infested software.

To be brash, maybe consumers need to learn how to protect themselves or move to dumb hardware that is impractical to hack. I don’t understand this trend of blaming corporations for not being the de facto gatekeeper of security. They should help minimize spam/malware, but if you’re going out of your way to disable those securities (likened to turning off Windows Defender after 2 warnings), your insecurities are self-inflicted.

Many “opponents” aren’t asking to change the default experience. They simply want the reigns to take those risks and tinker. Most people can barely even find the theme settings on Android; I won’t believe a signifigant portion will get through idiot-proof safeguards just because “well they have a chance to now!”

Most people can’t use systems well enough to take charge of their protection. Ideally they wouldn’t need to use systems beyond their competence any more than I should have to synthesise my own ibuprofen from scratch (I wouldn’t know where to begin), but software ate the world so they can’t opt-out either.

Old survey now, but I doubt the results would be significantly different today: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/a-quarter-of-adults-c…

> I don’t understand this trend of blaming corporations for not being the de facto gatekeeper of security

Governments, the alternative place to seek security, can’t do it. The attacks are global in origin, cross border government cooperation isn’t at that level, while all Apple local corporations worldwide are all aligned with the one in California.

This trend was preceded with “install antivirus”, which had some overlap with “don’t connect to the internet” back when that was practically possible.

> They should help minimize spam/malware, but if you’re going out of your way to disable those securities (likened to turning off Windows Defender after 2 warnings), your insecurities are self-inflicted.

Those warnings are themselves seen as Apple trying to prevent people switching to other stores.

> I won’t believe a signifigant portion will get through idiot-proof safeguards just because “well they have a chance to now!”

What counts as “significant”?

For example, 1% of a nation having their bank accounts drained would be a huge issue — I think that’s about 15 times what ransomware currently costs per year.

I’ve yet to encounter a system so well designed that it’s at the 99% level of “idiot-proot”, the closest they get is by being the exact opposite: too hard to use so the idiots hurt themselves some other way first.

A weather app needs my location and network access. It doesn’t need to sell ongoing location tracking information associated with my device identifier and IP addresses to marketing companies.

fortunately, GDPR covers that already. Or CPPA if you reside in California.

But that’s not quite what by Malicious. Malice implies intent for bad desires. A company selling your weather tracking data with dubious consent is simply greedy. It very likely wouldn’t be in your top 10 list of perpetrators if your phone was hacked, wiped, or stolen.

I can see it now: needing to have 15 different stores with subscriptions to get apps who all have different deals with different apps for exclusivity.

No thanks.

the stores are just that. These aren’t PC launchers that monitor every game for achievements or act as communication hubs.

The store pops up (and not even the whole store, just some financial popup or webpage) when I need to pay and is otherwise just some icon in a drawer idling. I don’t see managing subscriptions anymore annoying than managing 15 subscriptions from different websites. And if that’s annoying there are apps and sites to manage that. Just like any other utility bill you have).

Alternatively: don’t download any other stores. Again, these aren’t games: how many times do you need to search something up and don’t find at least 10 different apps that solves the problem?

App stores encourages shitty practices over healthy ecosystems, the model for computers has resulted in much better products with less consumer hostile practices.

Apple isn’t an expert on games, they shouldn’t decide what games to suggest and what games should be allowed on the phone, a dedicated game store would be a huge upgrade.

Edit: And no, phone games aren’t consumer hostile because they are on phones, they are consumer hostile since the appstore encourages the games to be consumer hostile. You don’t see many in-app purchases or ads in steam games since steam doesn’t encourage those, while the appstore encourages it.

So you see phone games be shit because the appstore, do you really like phone games as they are or would you prefer them to be like steam? I don’t think anyone prefers the phone game in-app purchase toxicity we have now.

We are already seeing it on PC where epic is buying titles. Microsoft it’s trying to make my exact nightmare scenario a reality each passing day.

Just cause you lack imagination of corporate bullshit harming consumers in an unending chain doesn’t mean everyone is unable to see it.

An indie creator I follow recently implored fans to buy their next game on Steam and not other platforms… because in order to be profitable they absolutely needed to get their game to be ranked on Steam above a certain review threshold, and reviews of the game would only count towards their ranking if matched with specifically a Steam purchase. And once again, I get this weird feeling. I’m struck that at the point where a creator is begging users to reinforce the most dominant PC gaming platform because if those users buy the game somewhere else that has better creator terms and fees, the platform will (in effect) punish their store listing, something might be going wrong with the market.

Sometimes Apple advocates will point at similarly bad situations in other markets and say, “what, are you going to regulate that too?”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

I do think Steam is engaged in anti-competitive behavior, but that doesn’t mean they’re the full equivalent of the app store. And we can see on the PC market the large number of indie games that very literally would not exist if PCs were locked into only using Steam.

My point here is more that Steam is not really a good argument for justifying a pricing model. But it’s a good clarification that in many ways Steam has “only” mostly locked down the PC gaming market, where Apple has gone further and locked down the actual software that can be loaded onto the phone.

I understand you as a creator prefer steam but I wouldn’t obey that, sorry. Also, reinforcing their market position is not in my best interest as a consumer.

Steam effectively punishes creators for not steering users towards their monopoly, and they have a ton of tools for user lock-in: Steam Input, Steam Workshop, etc… They may not be as egregious as Apple, but they are often pretty egregious in their own right.

In a normal market, having a diverse set of users across multiple platforms would be a good thing as a creator, it would give you security and give each platform less power over you. Steam uses their review system to punish smaller creators who have a diverse userbase, and it uses their response to cement its market dominance even more and to give itself more power over those creators and their players. I would argue this is bad for the market.

My bigger point here is that Apple advocates will sometimes point to Steam and say “they charge high fees too, what’s the problem?” There’s are multiple reasons that Steam is able to charge higher fees than most of its PC competitors and remain the dominant platform for PC games, some of them due to the way that it methodically weaponizes incentives for both players and creators against alternatives. Comparing Apple to Steam does not make me like Apple more.

Steam offers the far superior platform, in every possible aspect. Every thing you’ve said is them OFFERING (not FORCING) better solutions to things.

For example, in what universe do you think it’s sane to think a store front should accept random reviews from random people? Having bought the game is the one of the best metrics to tell if a review is even approaching sincerity.

Not having random reviews in the steam reviews is a feature.

And in the context of Android or iOS, the PC gaming market is SUPER DUPER EXTRA diverse. I own games in like 5 different stores, but always prefer Steam or GOG where possible.

Offering better services and getting more user because of it is not malicious or anti-competitive or monopolistic. It’s the best possible outcome (assuming you like capitalism).

Main difference is steam is pretty clever about how they do this. They will pull out very fast if customers start to complain, maybe reworking it later on (paid mods -> steam workshop). Meanwhile, devs on the wrong end of the stick can get some of the worst customer service out there behind the curtain. The only way to get steam to respond is to be lucky enough to cause enough customer ire (e.g. Stein’s Gate prequel not being approved for Steam. Despite having an ESRB rating… until customers complained).

That’s how you get stuff like the Wolfire lawsuit but people chastising Wolfire instead of Valve.

Most other companies don’t even pretend to care and just eat the PR hit. That cynicism will build up over the years, so there’s much less sympathy for Apple.

Even more surprising, Gog’s DRM’d version multiplayer may require … STEAM! … to run.

This is galling.

(For the game that most annoyed me, Baldur’s Gate 3, this may have changed once Larian introduced their own cloud sync. I haven’t tried again, the first experience was that tedious.)

Not what I’m suggesting. In fact, you’re making my case beautifully.

I’m agreeing that the PC being “open” isn’t what makes the difference.

People are barking up the wrong tree. Your argument is much as the one I made elsewhere in this thread for why there’s Amazon when there’s Alibaba, and Amazon can charge not percentages more, but many times the price, for same products.

Tangentially, “imploring” people reminds me: I encourage Mac and iPhone toting friends to try SetApp. It’s like Apple Arcade but for utilities. It’s not from Apple, and people are confused it works for iOS. Once they try it, they set it and forget it. I don’t know if it’s working for the app owners there, but the value/reward seems much more balanced than the world where every widget wants $119.88 to 239.88 a year (12 x $19.99).

Less tangentially, there are ways to exploit users and ways to add value. The second is harder.

> I’m agreeing that the PC being “open” isn’t what makes the difference.

This is a good point, but I do think the “open” part is possibly a pre-condition to making a difference. But that’s kind of squabbling over details, I completely agree that iOS being open to sideloading would not be enough to change the dynamics.

And we know this because… well, Android exists. Android is a really good example of how sideloading is great and something that I love, but also not sufficient on its own to curb anti-competitive behavior.

It’s like pointing to the existence of people who willingly buy a BMW as a justification for forcing everyone to buy a BMW whether they want it or not.

products aren’t markets. Steam is a market and many games only launch on Steam. That’s a sign of a monopoly, be it deserved or not.

Still, I’d rather have some aspects investigated because monopolies are historally dangerous.

At least, that’s the way I’ve seen people speak of monopolies exclusively.

If people are willingly paying this because the promotion is worth it, that’s not necessarily a monopoly. And you can tell if they’re willingly paying it because they have the option to distribute to the same customers by other viable means, without paying the fee but also without getting the promotion. And then as we can see, some people pay and other people don’t.

You could make the different argument that they have a monopoly on games promotion by itself. I don’t know if you’d win that one or not, but regardless it’s distinct from what Apple is doing.

>but the fee for the promotion

I don’t think ‘putting product on shelf’ is ‘promotion’. IF that’s your only reason and begging the question leads to “becasuse we have 90% of the userbaase”, that’s a monopoly. Steam is lauded by their audience for only using their local history to recommend games (i.e. they have a realtively simple tagging system they rely on to serve games), so I wouldn’t say this is anymore promotion that Google Search is promting “best game 2024” when I search “best game 2024” (in some utopia where the first 3 results were SEO slop).

>If people are willingly paying this because the promotion is worth it, that’s not necessarily a monopoly.

I really hope people day understand the difference between “monopoly” and “monopolization”, because this seems to always come up in this topic.

“Monopoly” is a very mechanical, neutral term, legally speaking.

>The term “monopoly” is often used to describe instances where there is a single seller of a good in a market…However, despite the general animosity towards monopolies, not all monopolies are illegal. Examples of permissible monopolies include… Monopolies created purely by one seller having a superior product, business acumen, or having good fortune (ex. online search engines, social media sites)

So yes, you can in fact say Steam is a monopoly (in an objective, legal sense), but also argue it not being illegal because “seller has a superiod prouct/business”. Monopoly is not a scary word by itself.

In terms of its 90% marketshare and indusry warping effects, it’d be very hard to argue that Steam isn’t a monopoly. It’d be easier to argue Google/Apple in mobile aren’t monopolies; At least they have each other to shield from their duopoly. Steam has no contender in the US.

“Monopolization” is a scary word.

>In United States antitrust law, monopolization is illegal monopoly behavior. The main categories of prohibited behavior include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing.

One leads to the other, so I don’t blame people for conflating one or another, but it’s an important distinction if we’re going to start trying to talk about what is/isn’t a monopoly, or monopolizing behavior.

—-

So, does steam engage in monopolization? Yes, but in much more subtle ways than what Apple/Google are doing. They are very smart about it because they care a lot about consumer feedback, and consumer feedback drives a lot of discussion on social media. But that’s a discussion for another inevitable day.

You buy Adobe from Adobe, “Get” Adobe from Apple, and log in with an email.

Also, a minority of consumers by headcount choose Apple. A majority of wallet share is spent by those who do choose it. That’s behind most of the sour grapes.

These conversations often seem to miss that Apple’s requirement is that consumer purchasing be presented as the singular option in-app, not that you have to pay Apple a cut for purchases outside the App.

Even Amazon Video supports in-app purchasing of a Prime account restricted to Prime Video access. They just know next to nobody is going to use it vs an actual Prime account.

This is the sort of thing where Apple is playing politics, disallowing the same behavior for others while carving an exception for the ones with enough influence.

Ask yourself why Adobe can do this but not Patreon.

> Also, a minority of consumers by headcount choose Apple. A majority of wallet share is spent by those who do choose it. That’s behind most of the sour grapes.

This argument makes no sense. People don’t want to be paying 30% to Google Play either. Maybe this is why they complain about Apple more than Google, but the nature of the complaint is the same regardless of how the user base is distributed.

Yes, and no? It’s funny because steam works the opposite way. They charge 30% but reduce the cut if the publishers makes over $X million a year (I think it’s 25, but I can be wrong). Apple charges 15% if you’re under 1m/year or 30% otherwise.

but yes, Steam was another early adopter of digital commerce and is leveraging its (slightly illogical, IMO) network effects.

Patroon is chosen by content creators not customers as such its goal is creating value for content creators not customers. As a customer it’s providing negative value with their policies to immediately cancel service the instant someone unsubscribes rather than letting the month play out etc. Thus why their website can be so unbelievably terrible for customers and yet they stay in business.
So for customers Apple/Google/whatever may provide literally infinite more value not because it’s significant but because they are on their side.

You have fewer subscriptions options for creators (1st-of-month billing and per-release billing is going away, despite the fact that creators regularly use them to simplify the experience for subscribers). You’re going to pay more (I promise you, creators on Patreon are not rich enough to swallow a 30% transaction fee on iOS subscriptions). You’re going to use the same app that you were using before. And this will change nothing about when Patreon cuts off service when you unsubscribe (incidentally, I’m pretty sure this is a creator decision and creators can choose to extend benefits to the end of the month).

What is Apple doing that is making any of this better for you?

Maybe you sort-of marginally have an easier time unsubscribing? But it’s not hard to unsubscribe from a Patreon tier, and it’s difficult to argue that Apple is providing infinite value by organizing your subscriptions into a list.

What are you actually paying this fee to Apple for? They’re “on your side” except in the sense where them being on your side creates any tangible or significant change in your experience using Patreon. Seriously, what about the iOS experience using Patreon is better (or even different) than the experience elsewhere?

Not infinite value, just any value versus 0 value. IE: infinitely times 0 is less than 0.0000001%. So the same relationship is true if you’re using Firefox to access Patron.

Apple charging fees is definitely a reason to drop Apple, but you personally can’t force creators to drop Patron which is why they can be so toxic.

I’m not a fan of Patreon by any means, but it seems pretty silly to me to argue that Patreon offers literally zero value to consumers. Patreon’s interface is still better than using Paypal to subscribe to a creator. Patreon still offers me as a user a modicum of privacy, I don’t have to give my billing address to every creator that I support.

You don’t have to like the platform, but zero value? Do you really believe that?

> but you personally can’t force creators to drop Patron which is why they can be so toxic.

I also want to push back on this a little bit. I know creators on Patreon, and most of them don’t like the platform. You know why they use Patreon? Because it’s the only place anybody goes to subscribe to content. If you set up a Ko-Fi account as a creator, you will receive a fraction of the subscriber-base that you’ll receive on Patreon.

I’m not saying this to say that Patreon is somehow justified in its abusive behavior, but it’s kinda silly to argue that the only reason Patreon is popular is because creators prefer it. Subscriber preferences play a huge role in this, and the fact is that most subscribers refuse to use alternatives.

If creators felt confident that they could move to platforms like Ko-Fi, Gumroad, Subscribestar, Librepay, etc without permanently losing all of their subscribers, they would. They’d leave in a heartbeat. Fewer fees, better websites, less VC-weirdness: creators don’t really like Patreon. And many of would be able to move if it was worth their while; Patreon doesn’t (as far as I know) have any restrictions on joining parallel donation platforms. But every time I’ve seen a creator do that, the majority of their revenue continues to come through Patreon. Subscribers refuse to leave the platform even when other options are being advertised to them.

There is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that some creators end up only using Patreon because it’s the only platform that brings in enough revenue to make it worth their while, which in turn means it’s the only place to subscribe to them — and yes, that can help reinforce network effects as well. But the biggest thing keeping creators on Patreon is consumers themselves.

If you want creators to leave Patreon, you do actually have at least a small amount of agency over that: find the creators you follow that are on multiple subscription platforms, and subscribe to them on those alternative platforms. By and large, most consumers are not willing to do that.

Value is the net worth of something. I judge it as negative because IMO if it didn’t exist we’d be better off which isn’t to say it has zero positives just that the negatives outweigh the positives.

Your free to disagree, but I think it’s a reasonable argument.

I do want to re-state that if the majority of Patreon users (not creators but users, subscribers) agreed with you, Patreon already wouldn’t exist. There is no conspiracy among creators to keep the platform afloat, they are constantly criticizing it. There are alternatives. Many of the alternatives have their own problems; the actual competitive coverage in this space is very low. But the biggest problem that all of them have is that they have a fraction of the userbase that Patreon has.

I’m not accusing anyone of anything, as far as I know you already use alternate services and you already support creators directly through other means. This is not an accusation against you, it is a general encouragement to everyone who dislikes Patreon, to please very literally put their money where their mouth is and go subscribe to creators on other platforms.

is this recent? I definitely remember my service playing out the month when I cancel subs. Because for most subscriptions period I cancel the moment I subscribe.

I think the caveat here is that you are charged on the first, no matter when you sub. Be it on the 2nd or the 28th. But generally I can still access that month’s rewards, so it’s still not as bad as it could be.

Edit: seriously, even the casinos and bars will eventually tell you you’re done.

That being said, I’ve just checked and Patreon does not appear to block or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe from a creator. It’s two clicks, you hit “cancel membership” and then the confirm button.

I’m open to claims that Apple’s system might still be marginally more convenient (you do have to go to the actual creator page in order to unsubscribe, which is a little inconvenient, I guess).

But is it so much more convenient that most users would literally pay 30% extra on every one of their subscriptions in order to use it? And even if it is, isn’t that something that users should be able to choose as an educated decision instead of it being Apple policy for Patreon to not be allowed to tell users in the app that other payment methods exist?

I agree with you that the reality of markets is quite different to the “common sense” model. Unfortunately I rarely find either in the press or just talking to people myself, that anyone gets beyond this kind of price=cost(1+a little incentive) thinking.

For people who would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon’s website? Sure, why not? That sounds like a niche market that Patreon would be completely unable to participate in without Apple’s help.

Apple seems to be very invested in forcing Patreon to either not be in the app store at all (and given the limitations of web apps, this is a significant penalty), or offer exclusively Apple payments in the app. Then Apple goes a step further with rules blocking Patreon showing links to other purchase methods in the app. These are not the actions of a company that believes that its users can be trusted not to make a purchase elsewhere.

If these users would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon’s website, Apple wouldn’t be scared of a link to the website payment options inside of the app. But they are scared of that, because they know that many of their users would choose to pay less online if they were informed about the choice or if Patreon decided not to offer payment options in the app.

I think the fact that Apple is (according to Patreon) not offering a choice of whether or not to accept payments in the app pokes a lot of holes in the idea that iOS users would never use a website to subscribe.

Does it? It seems like they are enforcing their developer agreement as written, and likely have been advised they need to enforce it uniformly due to regulatory scrutiny. I believe Google hit this in India where it was ruled they could not start collecting their royalty after several years of non-enforcement across certain categories as it amounted to a bait-and-switch.

Is this a niche market that would never have been available to Patreon that Apple is helping Patreon access, or is this Apple needing to en-mass protect its users from themselves as a result of them being too.. I don’t know, weak willed(?) not to pay for Patreon using another method?

It’s not both.

The first part is undoubtedly true, but competition doesn’t exist here either. That Apple is getting away with their anti-competitive practices is a full-blown scandal.

they are both rent seeking middle-men who abuse network effect, its just one has more power than another.

In one sense, I agree with it. Patreon is a rent-seeking middleman who abuses network effects. 100%.

But the creators on Patreon who’s income are going to be most affected by this don’t care about which side of the debate is more likeable to you, and I’m kind of sick of pretending that policies that affect a huge swath of people (often people with limited options, virtually no power, and few backup resources) can be treated like popularity contests.

The video essayists, programmers, artists, authors, and indies doing weird, wonderful work supported through Patreon get their revenue squeezed even tighter, being forced to either bleed revenue or subscribers due to new fees, being forced to abandon revenue models and subscription models that Apple doesn’t like.. and, I mean, honestly, “I hate both companies” just is not a valid or acceptable response to that situation.

The solution to rent-seeking middlemen is not to make more of them.

Internet payments/subscription platforms are in desperate need of more competition, even partial competition.

I thought for a while that Youtube was experimenting with paid subscribers? But it’s possible that I misunderstood or that Google just got bored and abandoned it.

Ultimately, Patreon isn’t fundamentally doing something that even a non-tech user can’t whip up for their own website. May need to resort to a payment processor (another middleman) to get donations going, but it’s possible. I can take my ball home.

Current factors on IOS make it impossible to do the same on IOS, even post DMA they want to rent-seek outside of the App Store. I think that’s what makes IOS worse in my eyes.

I think ethics is not applicable here. Corps are for profit enterprises, and seek every chance to bring gain to shareholders.

Regulators goal is to support competitive market and healthy business environment, they totally can go after monopolists who abuse network effect and/or put limit on rent amount (say 5-15% from transaction) to support value creators.

Sure, but the act of charging money for a service isn’t inherently unethical. I just want to know where and what lines you draw.

>Regulators goal is to support competitive market and healthy business environment, they totally can go after monopolists who abuse network effect and/or put limit on rent amount (say 5-15% from transaction) to support value creators.

They could, but I’m not optimistic. I think many regulators are out of touch and don’t realize how much upkeep digital commerce is saying. They see 30%, assossiate it to the days of brick and mortar which charged much more than that and say “well that’s reasonable, Apple needs the money”. All while ignoring the different landscape of how much people need to survive these days and how utterly hand over fist the middleman make.

There’s just not a lot of empathy these days, and if all these Apple/Google lawsuits as is hasn’t changed much, we need that empathy to make change.

It’s Apple on IOS for not even being able to get a proper web app off the ground.

For android, there’s probably no primary blame here. But there is financial incentive to produce an app over a mobile website when given a choice.

The thing is: Patreon is a service that’s meant to be paid by a small fee included in the donations. There should be no need for them to gather data on their users as well.

The problem with “fairness” is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests.

This is one of the key problems a free market economy solves. Price discovery is the intersection of what somebody’s willing to sell something for, and what somebody else is willing to pay for it. Both of these parties will have a completely different idea of what’s fair. That’s why fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism, and I don’t think any free market economist has ever advocated for it.

I’m a mild advocate of the Apple ecosystem in that I really like the fact it all works together pretty flawlessly for me, with many security headaches taken off my plate. (I’m always reminded of this when every ten years or so I think about trying to save money with a Windows laptop and come running back). But I think the parent comment’s suggestion that this isn’t about fairness as such, but whether that kind of arrangement is egregiously wrong hits home, and it does make me feel that this is the kind of weird economics that can only come from an unhealthy duopoly of iOS and Android.

What to do about it? I’m not sure the parent or I have any particularly good answers…

I will say, I do have opinions about what to do 😉 But parent comment is right that I’m not trying to advocate for those opinions above, someone might completely disagree with me about how to respond to the situation, and that’s fine.

I’m more just pointing to the situation and saying, “this seems really weird, right? This is not the outcome that any of us would expect or want. Maybe you disagree with me about how to solve this, but this does seem like something we should try to solve.”

With respect, this sounds a little bit like you’re agreeing with me?

Another way of phrasing “fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism” might be to say that fairness as a concept “doesn’t exist” in the market, only competition: ie, what people are willing to pay to acquire a service from the available options they have before them, ideally within an environment where low barrier-of-entry to the market allows prices to fall if a service can be legitimately offered cheaper elsewhere, and where regulation sets the (occasional) market cap on how exploitative businesses are able to be. Fairness as a concept is not applicable to market prices: they don’t get set because they are “fair”, they get set because businesses calculate the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for products before going to a competitor (assuming there is a competitor to go to).

BUT, if people on HN insist on bringing fairness into discussions about anti-competitive behavior (which very often happens in discussions about the app-store), I think that Apple’s fees in this case, and the impacts they will have on small-market creators, are unlikely to line up with most people’s personal evaluation of “fair”.

A sibling comment phrased this in a really good way, I think this is a situation where regardless of how you feel about fairness, you can look at the market outcome and think, “wait a second, something is not right here.”

so basically, you don’t care about moral fairness and are fine letting monopolies rule markets and societies. The extreme side of “equal opportunity”.

I won’t make a moral argument here, but merely a logistical one: country governments have a lot of incentive to not let this happen. For the sake of technological progress, for the sake of ensuring the non-upper class economy (aka, taxable income that won’t play Matrix with them in terms of evasion) is healthy enough, and for the sake of minimizing risks of a hostile takeover (be it from the monopoly or foreign powers).

So a truly “free market” only works in a vacuum with benevolant dictators and a united world government. That may take a while.

>The “average person” does not exist

hence why we have multiple fields dedicated to approximating such a person. Because averages are still valuable for many things. From government policy, to targeted marketing, to identifying societal biases.

No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they’re putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon.

If you want to argue that they’re not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let’s talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting “bullied” by that discussion.

The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there’s a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it’s Apple.

“You can’t reasonably expect Apple to-” Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.

How much do all the contributors of these projects get paid?

https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

And all the stuff not listed there too, like OpenSSH, curl, all those little things that pretty much _every_ OS uses?

And the predecessors? BSD, Mach, FreeBSD…

Apple is imposing a tax on revenue that is higher than the revenue that Patreon pulls in from each transaction fee.

There is no equivalent situation in a realtor market. In no world would a realtor sell your house for $500k and then tell you that they deserve a higher cut of the revenue than you do.

Apple users bring in the money for Patreon.

I own an iPhone. I am not Apple, and Apple does not own me. Why should Apple be able to charge money for “access” to me, as if I were a prostitute and Apple my pimp? I’m simply using a computer, which I paid for.

really solid point. they shouldn’t be able to.

I had the same feeling but I couldn’t put it to words that well. But you hit the nail on the head. Thanks for this!

> “you” does not even come into the equation

Second sentence:

> Patreon is accessing their customer base ( You )

Of course I come into the equation. Apple does not and cannot subscribe me to a Patreon without my initiative and consent.

However, your argument isn’t what you think it is. It’s extremely common for companies to sell/gatekeep (Or “pimp” as you put it) access to “their” user base. Think credit cards (Amex can charge merchants more as because their users tend to spend more) or even club memberships like Costco (They’re certainly not letting telcos sign up users for free.)

You can be both an Amex and a Visa card Customer.

You can also be an iPhone and Android Customer at the same time as well. As well as a web user.

Amex charges higher fees, and offer specific services to their customer base.

Yes, which supports my point.

> You can also be an iPhone and Android Customer at the same time as well.

Who does this? Barely anyone. Most people can’t afford to buy two smartphones, and even if you could afford two, why in the world would you use two of them simultaneously? That sounds extremely inconvenient, for no apparent benefit. Practically speaking, a smartphone is an exclusive relationship; you pick one at a time.

Yours is such a bizarre hypothetical.

In any case, the crucial difference is that a smartphone is a product of independent value that you can buy, whereas a credit card is not. The piece of plastic is just a container for your credit card number, a means of accessing the service, a line of credit.

This is missing the broader point, which is that companies absolutely do gatekeep access to “their” customers all the time in several industries in and outside of tech. Customer acquisition costs a lot of money, and one of the ways businesses recoup their costs or boost profits is by monetizing them by selling access.

The problem with Apple doing it is that they’re abusing their market power.

I think it’s even more base than that. Valve does it and users are happy (I have hot takes on this, but that’s a later, inevitable discussion for another post). Because they continually re-invest in Steam to add more features, niceties, and convenience. Customers feel respected. Costco does it because ultimately customers who buy in bulk get deals that pays the membership back, as well as a very cheap food court.

What’s the last “rewarding feature” Apple’s really done to the app store that made customers feel respected? Not something like the Play Pass where “you spend 500 dollars and we’ll give you a 5 dollar coupon!”.

I’m genuinely asking as an android user and I can’t even think of an answer on the Play Store. I had to look it up and family sharing seems to be the most recent option from 2021/2022-ish.

You’re still in need of examples, because I’ve already explained how credit card companies don’t gatekeep access to me.

> Customer acquisition costs a lot of money, and one of the ways businesses recoup their costs or boost profits is by monetizing them by selling access.

iPhones also cost a lot of money. Apple sold almost $40 billion worth of iPhones just last quarter. I’m quite certain that Apple is recouping its costs via hardware sales.

Costco makes the vast majority of its profit from membership sales, and not from the items they’re selling. They absolutely gatekeep access to “their” customers, and regularly play hardball with their suppliers to keep prices low, even major ones like CocaCola. Suppliers that don’t meet their terms don’t make it to their warehouses. Same as Apple.

The difference is their market power.

In the context of iPhone, it means that the owner of an iPhone is not able to install software on their own iPhone without Apple’s permission. It’s a restriction on the owner’s freedom.

Neither credit cards nor Costco memberships are analogous, because in the first place, there’s no ownership involved, as I already explained. With a Costco membership, you certainly don’t own part of Costco. You’re simply buying temporary access to the store. In the second place, there’s no restriction of customer freedom. A Costco member is free to walk across the street and buy Coca-Cola at any other store. Coke is Coke: it’s the exact same formula in every can or bottle. It may be more expensive elsewhere, of course, and that’s the point of the Costco membership. But there is absolutely nothing in the world restricting Coke and customers of Coke from coming together.

I have no objection to Apple having an App Store and setting terms for its App Store. It does this on the Mac too. My objection is that unlike on the Mac, the iOS App Store is the sole source of software, and iPhone owners are not free to shop elsewhere, again unlike Mac owners. The iPhone gatekeeps its owners in a way that the Mac does not.

It’s not really about market power, because iPhone owners have never been free to install software from outside the App Store, not even way back in 2008 when iPhone sales were vastly smaller. And that’s always been wrong.

If you want another example of customer gatekeeping, I’ll give you one: John Deere tractors using DRM to prevent tractor owners or third-parties from repairing the tractor. That’s wrong too.

Specifically, it means no access to Costco customers inside Costco. But again, Costco customers are not forced to shop in Costco. They can shop anywhere they please, including but not limited to Costco.

That’s the essential difference. iPhone customers are forced to shop for apps inside the App Store. They have no access to alternative stores, unlike Costco customers. Costco cannot prevent their customers from shopping for the same goods in other stores.

> If you want a 1:1 example, then just look at gaming consoles, their whole business model depends on the same one giving Apple antitrust issues. Same gatekeeper restrictions.

Agreed.

> It’s not that the business model is, or even should be, illegal per se

I think it should be. In my opinion, it’s one and the same with the right to repair. Once I pay for my computer and walk out the door, it ought to be mine to do with as I please.

I don’t want to get into a debate about what “is” legal or illegal in the United States. As I see it, the law is whatever a majority of the Supreme Court decides it is on any given day, precedents and principles be damned. And antitrust enforcement has been practically nonexistent since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist a couple decades ago. I don’t expect Apple to have much trouble here in the near future. Of course Europe is another matter.

A “cut” in this case means such a high percentage of the transaction that if Patreon didn’t pass the extra cost on to consumers/creators, they would make negative dollars on each iOS subscription. That really genuinely does not strike you as odd at all?

It doesn’t strike you as weird or maybe like a possibly negative market effect that Patreon as a platform should be more profitable for Apple than it is for Patreon? I think most people would say that’s a signal that something might be going wrong.

I’m not surprised.

The dirty little secret people won’t talk about is that monetizing anything is so much easier on iOS because Apple users have, in some combination, more disposable income to offer, and are more willing to spend money.

This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career, almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on Apple is easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for good software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for the software they want.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, many of them socioeconomic in nature that mark out the differences between your average iPhone user and your average Android user, and I don’t want to get into that quagmire and be called elitist: all I’m saying is, when Patreon says the vast majority of patrons are buying from iOS powered devices, between iOS being easier to monetize and the general populace being on their phones far more than their computers; yeah that makes complete fucking sense to me. I believe him.

That fact is neither dirty nor secret. I know you were using a figure of speech, but still. Everyone knows it.

>This has been the elephant in the room for my entire career, almost 11 years working in apps. Monetizing on Apple is easier. Getting Apple users to put down money for good software is easier, and Apple users will pay more for the software they want.

That’s also pretty obvious, and likely because Apple users, whether mobile or computer, tend to spend more per capita on hardware than Windows or Linux users, simply because Apple hardware is more expensive.

It was already true on desktop, before laptop, and before mobile, on Apple devices.

I’m not sure it’s a quagmire: iOS devices are more expensive compared with the competition. I don’t think this is up for debate.

Given that, a null hypothesis might be that since their owners are happy to pay more for their device that they have more disposible income?

It’s become an increasingly common argument in discussions about Apple to phrase their value as one of “distribution”, or sometimes less subtly as “access.” But no one would ever credibly argue that the actual physical distribution costs, hosting, and bandwidth of the Patreon app is more valuable than the entire platform itself. That would be absurd. Instead, what people actually argue is that access to Apple users is the value that Apple quote-unquote “creates”(0).

I think a lot of people look at this and see it for what it is: rent seeking. But it’s a marvel of the modern tech landscape that we’ve trained so many people to not only accept that they are the product for the platforms they use, but taught them to be proud of being a product. We’ve gotten people to come around to the idea that companies have done such a good job turning them into a product that the companies now somehow deserve some kind of special reward for doing so.

Excessive use of customers as bargaining chips inevitably creates bad incentives for companies, which become increasingly defensive of their “assets” and increasingly more and more hostile to consumer choice and freedom to move from ecosystem to ecosystem. These negative effects play out again and again in multiple industries both inside and outside of tech, to the detriment of both consumers and the overall markets. But when tech companies come up (whether we’re talking about Apple, or Steam, or Nintendo, or whatever) — for some weird reason people suddenly become very defensive about the rights of companies to treat them like cattle.

TLDR, no, access to iPhone users is not Apple providing value to app developers. It’s just rent seeking.

—-

(0): As if iPhone users would somehow stop using smartphones now if the iPhone went away.

It also kept the price of kerosene low for the consumer.

If it was broke up it would also hurt the economy overall. They also argued it wasn’t really a monopoly and they have other competition lol.

Tech companies are such a brilliant monopoly they get the consumer to mindlessly puppet Rockefeller’s exact points for them.

Does Apple’s refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?

I’m reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook’s arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make.

But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook’s line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite.

I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn’t consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened.

That doesn’t sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.

In many markets, Apple does let a dev link users to external payments options.

But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. They require a dev to track purchases made on that external system and pay a (slightly reduced) fee. You agreed to be audited to make sure you are making the proper payments. You may have to pay Apple a cut in more scenarios since the payment system is no longer cleanly isolated.

In-app purchasing is not an expensive credit card processor. It is Apple’s simplest method of collecting their contractually obligated royalties.

So this link is not cheaper if you are following your contract. It is cheaper to buy on your site when those users aren’t coming from the app.

Note that it can still be worth a dev using an external payments options system for other reasons – it is just that a lot of them are dark patterns. Things like variable rates for different people for dating services, no-consent charging for gambling apps, gathering additional tracking information so you have additional ways to monetize the user, making unsubscribing from a service more difficult than Apple makes it, etc.

This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking.

Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.

if that didn’t void warranty, I’d accept it as a reasonable workaround. But on top of that I’m pretty sure Apple acively fights with jailbreaking and jailbreakers in particular.

>In my mind Apple has zero obligation to enable it maximum leeway to obstruct it.

They might soon, given DMA. In my mind, Microsoft got dinged for antitrust decades ago and Apple has gone so beyond that line that I’m surprised Europe had to step in before the US. Even Mac OS isn’t locked down this hard (helps that it started fundamentally as a BSD fork) so it just tells me this is exploiting its monopoly.

>The people don’t want they locked down single function phone, they shouldn’t buy one.

opposite argument works as well. An open world does not stop you from staying in the walled garden. If you really don’t want to use anything other than the App store, that’s fine. You just miss out on a few apps like you have for 16 years with Android stuff that Apple banned.

“Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.“

It should be able to be decided while owning it, not before. The point is that a phone that doesn’t give the user the same level of control over the software that the manufacturer has simply should not exist. It should not be left to market forces.

All these “problems” with walled gardens are well known and consenting adults keep opting into it time and again.

I think it’s arrogant to look at a system you aren’t even participating in (can we assume op doesn’t have an iPhone) and say “no those people are doing it wrong”

Opening up IOS doesn’t mean you need to open up too. The garden isn’t going anywher. Take it from an android user that has had choice and google play is still the dominant platform. It’s just nice that when/if I need to I can download open source stuff, or games in foreign languages, or just sideload some random apps I tinker with without paying $100 for something I don’t plan on releasing to the app store anyway.

These are all very niche uses and I don’t understand how my existence inconvinences the garden.

>I think it’s arrogant to look at a system you aren’t even participating in (can we assume op doesn’t have an iPhone) and say “no those people are doing it wrong”

I do it with Russia and North Korea, so call me whatever you want. I’m not just going to dimiss it as “well its their culture” if their culture breaks fundamental principles I was raised on.

I personally think it’s a shame when the government takes something interesting and working and makes it illegal. Patreon could easily not be an app on iOS, but they really want that money, so now the government has to make laws on apple. Doesn’t make sense to me

You can’t really argue that it’s a fair choice when Apple does everything in their power to make going outside their walls a worse experience.

Case in point, they hobble WebKit, but also forbid any alternative to WebKit. Are users choosing WebKit? Nope.

It sucks big time.

1. Download seemingly cool app on iOS (free with potential payments)

2. Go through a 30min quizz

3. Required to subscribe for $150/year to start using the app

It’s not free, it’s false advertising

But maybe that was by design as they decided to call their music shop by the same name as their ipod management software. That is the essence of Apple’s UX. Shiny destruction of your property. It remains so.

The UX everyone wanted was copying files onto and off the device presented as storage on any computer it was plugged in to.

Most of these apps use dark UX patterns to trick new users into scammy free trials which convert to $100+/yr subscriptions after 1-3 days. These apps also make it difficult to close out of the subscription window, or make it seem like you have to subscribe when you don’t.

It’s entirely contradictory to everything Apple once stood for in justifying their gatekeeper App Store experience.

Apple could easily ban these types of scammy UX patterns, but they won’t because it benefits them. That’s my point.

I’m fairly certain this is because it’s the only way of offering a trial that Apple allows?

What would this mean, exactly?

You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.

And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.

And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.

If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.

What’s the missing revenue model here?

The first version you sell to a user at full price and offer a discount for upgrading (something like 40% off). It lets the customer pick when they feel the value prop is worth the cost and lets you offer a loyalty incentive to the user.

Right now the choice is “keep paying for it to keep working” or “fully price for every upgrade”.

Panic even had an upgrade for MAS users when they released their new version of the now defunct Coda outside the MAS (for sandboxing reasons).

It does not look like a problem for them.

Do you have an example of a company that saturated the market with free upgrades and went down because of it?

Since then, people have backed off.

If you’re going to this much work to help users workaround Apple nonsense, you really care about helping them save money, and the support + refund costs of people accidentally buying the bundle with the old version they don’t need is > just building out your own server-side system, versus a combinatorial explosion of bundles in the App Store that creates a confusing minefield for users.

There’s nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things:

1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple’s own SSO for it and it’ll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read

2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app’s pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you’re buying the old version, you’re buying features A+B+C; and then when you’re buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you’ve bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E.

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Note that there’s an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don’t release V2 as a separate app from V1.

Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an “edition” (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 “engines” as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them.

With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of “seamlessly upgrading” the app to V2; or the app would start up with an “edition launcher” UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.)

Here, you could charge for the V2 “upgrade” ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition’s UX.

The expectation here is that all the user’s existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever.

The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they’ve already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.

That would be a choice, not a requirement. It’s literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with it. It would be trivial to have “V1 full app unlock” feature be the same as “V2 full app unlock” feature.

When you run an App Store that involves human review the big problem you have is apps that mask their behavior during review and then end up breaking the rules later. My understanding is that the “don’t download code” policy is intended to prevent this, at least in spirit. I think, at least at the highest level of the company, the intent is to keep to somewhere near this at least for submissions made in good faith and not prone to opening them up to a slippery slope. There are distinctions here, though, and policy enforcement is also complicated.

My (and iSH’s) position is that “code” should be interpreted very broadly, including native code (which the platform blocks from loading anyways) but also things like embedded webviews updated server-side or those “code-push”/”run JavaScript in an interpreter in your app” things. And going even beyond that, I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.

From this perspective you will note that code isn’t even really the interesting part here, it’s the behavior changing that matters. So this leads naturally what we have described as “scripting apps”, which download code but do not change their behavior. Their entire point is to download code. Like, App Store is an app store, regardless of whether you download TikTok or Google Maps from it. iSH is a a Linux environment. Nothing you will do in the app will change that. And notably we have zero ability to change that ourselves, short of submitting a new app. It’s not like we can just add Windows emulation as a downloadable JavaScript package without going through review. From our discussions with leadership, I think they agree with us on it, but are not willing to commit to it publicly, because then people will take creative bad-faith interpretations of it to argue what a feature of the app versus something a user does in the app is, or something like that. Or they just want to hold all the cards and reserve the right to take this away. Either way I strongly disagree with them doing this, but for now iSH remains on the store.

You will note that the changes we make (see our blog post about repositories: https://ish.app/blog/default-repository-update) continue to support that position. Again, I cannot say for sure whether this is the interpretation Apple uses, or if they even have a consistent position. It’s just an attempt on our side to show good faith. As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you’d see in a Hacker News comment (it says code therefore your app for coding is bad). But again, this is just our experience; we have no idea if Phill will hit his head tomorrow and decide to pull iSH tomorrow because he thinks Linux is the child of the devil.

A sadly universal experience. Especially when the not-so-secret is that that frontline is often contracted or outsourced. They do not understand (by design) the subtleties of submission of creative content. They are simply cheap help to do the bare minimum to remove liability, and if a few false negatives happen during that time, oh well. thousands of other apps in the sea.

So like everything else, if you havev the money, clout, or simply sheer persistence (which shouldn’t be necessary) then you can force yourself to someone who can actually help. But few will get there, even with persistance.

> I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.

After Epic added direct purchase gated behind a feature flag to Fortnite, I’m genuinely surprised Apple didn’t start requiring full control over and documentation of all downloadable configuration files as part of App Review.

Re: multi-edition shared apps — I’m not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it’s just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.)

ETA: looking more into this, I’m finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?

Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don’t have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.

This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.

>Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don’t have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage

It won’t alter this course, but given recent news I sure hope Biden can do one last kick to this stupid model. The biggest reason subscriptions do this is because so many forget to unsubscribe. An issue as old as fiat currency. discouraging recurring subscriptions could be the US’s version of GDPR in terms of how utterly devastating it will be to companies.

Patreon’s been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I’ve been using it, so I’m sure they’re pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don’t think I’ve seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don’t want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few WordPress plugins.

You can if you choose to request the desktop site, but then you get an obnoxious bar going across the middle of the page blocking some of the tab.

If you fold and finally download the app, you’re greeted with a 10+ page unskippable questionnaire that after you’re done ends with a paid subscription call to action. If you then force close the app, and open a tab link from the browser into the app, you are finally allowed to view a tab.

There was an Australian low-cost airline (Bonza) that only allowed bookings via their app. It went under very quickly (I wonder why…).

Only site where I simply toggle desktop. And now FF mobile can even install RES so that helps mitigate the otherwise clunky navigation (though, I have been unable to enable cloud backup. I can restore local copies though).

the sad reality is that mobile pretty much “solved” an issue corporations struggle with on web to this day. A closed down (i.e. no adblock), centralized (i.e. you can pay to game the platform to highlight your product), scalable system that can be easily and conveniently monetized. They don’t like it, but those corps would 99/100 times take that 30% toll from Apple/Google to gatekeep the adblockers if it means they get more consistent ways to serve ads and subscriptions. That’s why being open didn’t change most company’s decision to serve on Google Play vs an alternative store, nor on the web.

Not that losing per-creation billing is good, but Patreon has been threatening it for a while, and there are ways it could in theory be simulated. But this makes it effectively impossible for creators to go on vacations, take a sabbatical, whatever… without continuing to charge patrons. It’s a really commonly used mechanism from what I’ve seen, this would be a loss of a really important flexible tool for creators.

I’m not distrusting you, I just feel like I’d like to see some confirmation from Patreon before I start making accusations about it. Maybe they have some deal or know something about a future unreleased API that I don’t know?

But losing the ability to pause a Patreon page would be a very, very big deal. Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from. That’s something that people should be talking about if it’s the case.

“I will want to withhold money the moment you go on a break” is not “patronage”.

Practical suggestion:

Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?

Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.

Well there is a choice, but it is questionable if suing will or will not result in any change. Even if they win in court it will be several years and millions of dollars in legal fees, and it isn’t clear they will win.

> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.

In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.

Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.

This is truly egregious. “At risk”? This is sheer blackmail.

“Nice store you have here. It’d be a shame if anything… bad were to happen to it. A 30% cut for our legitimate businessmen’s club should assure you peace of mind… “

I agree, but I also wonder why Patreon needs an iOS app.

It’s 2024, you don’t need an app for everything. See OnlyFans, they’re doing fine even without being able to access the proprietary stores.

Personally, I agree. I want better/first class mobile websites over an app. I don’t want apps for most things. That said, I didn’t grow up in a mobile first/mobile only era.

I don’t think age is the driver. For most people, for the last decade, all software in their phone has come from the App Store. Everybody is trained to check there first. Even if you think to google it first, you’re just going to get App Store link in the top results. Company’s own site might be at the top and you’ll instinctively look for the ‘get on App Store’ badge when you click through.

Some small number of android power users are the only people that really know that downloading an app from not the App Store is possible.

Patreon from its very model does not. A very sad exploitation of the little guy, even if this is one of the biggest little guys.

Outside these categories (eg a email account as a service, group classes) you are expected to always have in app purchasing.

There have been interesting ways people have explored getting around this, but obviously Apple thinks they should be paid what they are contractually obligated.

Having control of distribution means it is easy on Apple’s side to solve disagreements. You only see it brought to lawsuit by the other side (e.g. Epic’s lost case in the US)

unfortunately i don’t think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments

> However, the rulings established that Apple’s so-called “anti-steering” rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.

> Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure.

Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the website. Send them updates when people post new content.

I’ve never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS. I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I’d want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my email, and if they’re long enough I click a link and read the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.

They don’t want to just be a payment middleman for creators, they want to be “sticky” like Facebook.

So they might add things like chat, media playback (with DRM), creators being able to post with notifications. Maybe you can sign up for additional private streams or even 1-on-1 sessions (like a gamer offering tutorials).

But by having an app to consume digital services, Apple says you have to provide a way to pay for services in the app (because that’s apple’s revenue model, a portion of software sales and resulting digital goods and services off of the App Store)

You’re not the average user, and if the average user gets a billing email and hasn’t bothered to read their content email, visit the site or open the app, they are more likely to end their subscription.

There’s another erm… “creator oriented” Patreon-like service that works entirely through the web. Specifically to avoid Apple and Google’s cut. And they seem wildly successful, although perhaps the type of content may influence user’s decisions.

I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill my password but same page as a PWA it won’t.

I also did some testing with macroquad (1) and I was finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just didn’t work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there’s no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.

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PWAs just can’t do the same things that native apps can. This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle man between them and their customers?

(1): https://macroquad.rs/

Each update of an app is reviewed, while a website can change completely at any moment (or have different versions served for different people). This is why for instance web extensions are heavily reviewed and audited.

This means they are pretty fundamentally different models.

The prompt for location is different for example because Apple enforces you are using the location information you gather for a specified reason, and has the aforementioned business penalties for misuse, and has tied all that to a real world identity. The browser can’t know if the page asking for location data is for mapping, for marketing tracking, or so that someone can drive to your home. The two features are going to look and behave distinctly.

You can sideload, but the duopoly exists and they’re shaking 99.9% of users down for every dime they can get out of them.

What you say may be true today, but tomorrow is unknown territory as far as these sorts of agreements go.

I bet I would also be able to purchase ebooks on the Amazon Kindle app installed from the Amazon Appstore on my Google Pixel phone.

In fact, how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template? There are other payment providers.

they probably exist already (minus payment processing). Network effects take hold as usual, though. Patrons are more willing than average to jump, but I can see hesitation signing up and adding payment for a new/unknown website

and honestly all payment providers suck in some unique way. Though most of the fault lies in Visa/Mastercard. That’s a monopoly we need to tackle one day.

So the negative point value, currently -1, tells me that I am asking a rhetorical question and I should have said that I’m asking a rhetorical question.

Back on topic:

I am an expert on in-app purchases circa 2020 and do know that there’s no working around it unless you have a deal with Apple. Used to be my job.

Paypal or any other financial transaction entity Is all the same to Apple, the user is sending their money while using an apple hosted app, and apple wants to make sure that users don’t get fleeced! So Apple taxes those transactions ostensibly to provide oversight Services.

So the only way for patreon to get around this is to not mention in their app that you can also sign up on you know patreon.com To give money, and to allow users who have signed up and sent money on patreon.com to use the iOS app.

There is no real line, just imaginary ones apple draws arbitrarily.

I think there are several reasons users gravitate to apps, but the biggest pain point apps mitigate is the login UX. I’d wager that you use a password manager, most people do not and cannot be convinced to do so. With an app, one can create an account and log in once, then stay logged in and never think about the password again until they get a new device, at which time the password can be reset via email and then immediately forgotten.

How long until YouTube (Google) demand “their” cut of your Patreon income? What will you do then?

No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.