[spenvo]

Eh, I guess? It involves people essentially performing for each other in their own physical spaces. It's not a purely digital good like ads though.

On the other hand, you can buy a Facebook ad in its iOS Ads Manager app that only targets iOS devices, right?

All of this is to say Apple has arbitrarily picked winner and loser categories of digital app businesses. Meanwhile it sticks to the line that the store is an even playing field. I'd love it if it were!

[chipotle_coyote]

I think you just solved a conundrum I was having thinking about this very question -- a video class that you watch in an app is in a sense a purely in-app digital good, and Apple appears to have recently been getting super-aggressive about interpreting it that way. But "not a purely digital good" is a great delineation, and one that Apple should probably be making.

(I'm not arguing that Apple's 30% cut requirement for even purely digital goods is appropriate; I think Ben Thompson's recent suggestion of a difference between goods with marginal costs vs. zero-marginal costs goods would be a better starting point, if there were a way to express it simply. Of course, a better suggestion might just be for Apple to allow developers to integrate their own in-app purchase systems for goods and services that aren't explicitly tied to the Apple ecosystem and use non-Apple infrastructure for delivery -- not just video classes but Netflix subscriptions, Kindle books, and so on.)

[cortesoft]

Is it really arbitrary, though? The decisions all seem to have reasons, mainly "what is best for Apple's bottom line"

[Nasrudith]

Facebook has a native browser app. I think that is a pretty damn big economic difference as otherwise they wouldn't bother with a native app. That would be bad for the apple Brand to give Android an exclusive like that.

[bonoboTP]

And? It's not illegal for a company to calibrate its business model to improve the bottom line. On the contrary in many cases they are legally forced to. Obviously while respecting other laws.

[jasonlotito]

And they claimed otherwise.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

It's also not surprising that companies the size of Facebook, and others, have negotiated terms with Apple that smaller organisation will find difficult to match.

Perhaps what the smaller organisations and some developers need is to fund a lawyery folk to advocate / negotiate collectively on their behalf?

Edit: improved grammar by removing a typo and changing a word or two.

[vkou]

The lawyers aren't the reason those negotiations are successful.

Billions of users are the reason those negotiations are successful. Apple will be in a pickle if you can't get Facebook on an iPhone. Apple doesn't give two figs if someone can't get some shitty startup's app on an iPhone.

[RonanTheGrey]

The ugly truth Apple doesn't want aired out in the open is that if not for apps like Twitter and Facebook, its own platform (iOS) is suddenly alot less appealing.

This in addition to the question of, what is 30% of all revenue FB makes via ad purchases in its iOS app? I don't think this number is published but easy to think it is in the billions (what is annual FB ad revenue? $60 billion something like that? How much of that is ad agencies (or ad buyers) managing ads via the iOS app?)

If Apple were to attempt to tax that... they'd suddenly give Facebook a several-billion-dollar reason to push the market to create a third mobile device platform and have it overtake iOS.

[justinclift]

Well, if the FB app wasn't allowed on iOS any more, wouldn't FB do its level best to create a web experience (via iOS Safari) that's "good enough" instead?

[captn3m0]

Apple owns the mobile-web Safari experience and penalises PWAs for exactly this reason.

[RonanTheGrey]

It's not about not allowing the FB app, it'd be about forcing those purchases to incur the 30% fee; no way FB would give up that much money.