[alex_t]

I am trying to understand why is this business model from apple not acceptable, from my point of view the way apple makes money on the apple store is with the 30% fees on transations. In exchange they give out tools, libraries and services for free. Do i get that wrong?

with that in mind isnt the request of Epic something like: "We want access to all your platform and tools for free?"

[simion314]

If I have an ebook store and want to give iOS users a nice experience when buying books Apple will make the books more expensive with 30% and on top of that if I want to give my users information that they have the option to buy cheaper from my website I can't , Apple is preventing their users to get informed/educated on how to get cheaper stuff because this information costs Apple money.

Btw you can have apps that do not use any of Apple SDKs (for example engines will use the OS core and neither of the fancy GUI toolkits and languages)

[alex_t]

> If I have an ebook store and want to give iOS users a nice experience when buying books Apple will make the books more expensive with 30% and on top of that if I want to give my users information that they have the option to buy cheaper from my website I can't , Apple is preventing their users to get informed/educated on how to get cheaper stuff because this information costs Apple money.

Well i go back to my argument of isnt that like saying: "i like to use your ebook platform to sell my stuff, but i dont want to pay for it"

the fact that you switched from software to ebook does not change the fact that you want to choose to be able to sell without giving a commission to apple for the store they did set up

[simion314]

Sure, if is not the excuse that the wall garden if for the user safety or for the user privacy and in fact it makes things more expensive for the user and it prevents user getting informed then we change to the excuse that is Apple hardware and Apple can fuck their customers as long as is legal and PR is good enough,

You are defending Apple not allowing developers to present their customers a simple text information, at least for now your banking apps are not taxed by Apple.

[panpanna]

How about the $99/yr app store fee they already pay?

[danudey]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Epic's $99 doesn't cover the cost of Apple actually hosting and distributing Fortnite and its updates to users.

[panpanna]

Well, Apple TOS forbids them using their own servers for updates (which btw Facebook ignores and gets away with)..

But what would be a fair price? Given how cheap bandwidth and storage is would $50,000 suffice? Surely that's closer to apples real costs than 30% of hundreds of million dollars they want now?

[scarface74]

Can I put a book in your hypothetical ebook store without giving you a cut?

[simion314]

If I made such a store I would use the web hosting model, you have a super cheap plan and if you want more feature you pay extra, I would care about your sales similar on how web hosting do not care about what you sell from your website.

Why is web hosting so cheap and you have so many options? Because of competition, allow competition with at least 5 stores and you will see different prices and features.

[alex_t]

Let's say running an ebook service, that cost cost you some money, a portion of your profit will go into building this shop, that will also be used by another party, because you have millions of users and a good trusted brand. in order to sell on that market you sell a some subcription based like a web hosting.

Party B, after using your premuim service, decide he will use your service just as a frontstore, sending your customer to his own website to complete purchase.

in your opinion that is a fair situation?

[simion314]

Yes, my web hosting is not jealous if I pay them 100$/year and I do sales of 1 million. If say my site generates too much traffic then I will have to upgrade the CPU,HDD etc. They make money when I am successful and use their resources. I can always change the web hosting and still reach my existing customers where with Apple I can't reach my existing customers if Apple kicks me out(see Epic)

[alex_t]

I dont think that is a fair comparison, you took away all the issues with branding, your customer dont really care if you are hosting a website yourself or aws or anything else, probably most of them wont even know what that means.

If you want to start to sell ebooks (or anything really) you get an advantage by placing it in a well known store, you can prove me wrong but i think that is a fair statement.

So it is really hard for me to accept as fair a situation where you could build a store, build the brand reputation, host other people product and not get a compensation.

[scarface74]

You’re not talking about web building. You’re talking about an online store.

If I get kicked off of Epic’s platform. Where do I go?

[panpanna]

> Do i get that wrong?

Yes.

> We want access to all your platform and tools for free?

Well, they do pay the $99 annual fee + cost of a Mac required for submitting to the store :)

More seriously, you are wrong because Epic/Spotify/etc don't mind giving apple money when they use their payment infrastructure _but_ want to be able to also use their own infrastructure and sell things 30% cheaper.

And yes, for companies with multiple sale points (fortnite is also on PC and consoles ?), apple TOS forbids Epic selling things cheaper elsewhere which means in-game item prices are artificially increased by up to 30% on _all platforms_.

[danudey]

> which means in-game item prices are artificially increased by up to 30% on _all platforms_.

Or means that Epic takes a 30% hit on revenue on the App Store and Google Play Store in exchange for the services provided.

Do you honestly believe that this is about Epic trying to lower prices for their users? It's not, it's about Epic getting all of the pie instead of just 70% of the pie. If Apple had caved before this stunt then prices would have stayed the same, but Epic would be taking it all themselves rather than having to pay Apple the 30% cut.

[panpanna]

I am fine with epic getting a bigger piece of the pie, after all they are doing the work and apple is just taxing them. We are talking about 30% of hundreds of millions of dollars. The yearly developer fee Epic pays Apple should cover apples costs more than enough.

Apple and google already allow certain companies (uber, netflix,... ) to pay much less which by itself is anti-competitive.

[mvanbaak]

You are missing the fact that epic is not a payment provider. So if they dont pay apple the 30%, they will have to pay stripe or adyen or any other psp. Most of those ask 0.25$ + 2% per transaction. For a fortnite skin of 0,99 or even whole apps that cost 0,99 that 30% is lower than the costs of other psp’s. And apple provides a lot more than just payments for that 30%. They handle disputes and refunds etc. and the handle all the money exchanges with sales is other countries etc

[7786655]

You're trying to argue that Apple IAP is a good deal for Epic, but Epic has clearly decided that it isn't.

[alex_t]

but how is this different from, for example, me selling stuff on amazon? i want to access the amazon customer pool, so i pay amazon a fee to do it?

what would be apple alternatives that would not imply giving away services for free? i still have an hard time understanding this part: i understand that 30% cut i a lot i am not defending the 30% tax.

[izacus]

Amazon itself is in hot waters for antitrust, so perhaps you shouldn't use them as an example.

Still, there's a giant difference - Amazon's "customer pool" isn't forced to buy only on Amazon and Amazon doesn't force YOU to ONLY sell the same item to that "customer pool" (I like how you use a term that makes people seem like inanimate objects.) via Amazon.

This is a massive difference. All the benefits of free market (as opposed to command economy) are derived from customers being able to freely choose another vendor and product to purchase. Monopolized integrated services are just a corporate version of command economy where a single actor dictates pricing and eliminates competition leading to severe lack of innovation and worse products for everyone.

[panpanna]

The $99/yr fee is supposed to cover apples costs for the store. Google asks for $25 and they have 6 times more devices to serve...

At this point the 30% is basically free money they get on someone elses hard work. And there is no consistency, some companies pay much less.

This is even more wrong in case of Spotify which is a direct competitor to apple music. Apple basically makes their competition 30% more expensive hence less competitive. (And you can by no means claim Spotify is big because of app store so the fee is fair, they exited before the first iPhone)