[madeofpalk]

The App Store doesn't prevent any of this (though, the App Store won't distribute porn) - it just requires a 30% cut. What's OnlyFan's cut of all those transactions?

Youtube can imitate these features on it's website, where it can surely do a better job due to scale. Twitch does this - arguably OnlyFans is largely modelled on Twitch.

[spacebanana7]

> What's OnlyFan's cut of all those transactions?

Onlyfans takes 20%.

If Apple had a stripe connect like API which charged 30% then the business activities I mentioned would probably be viable, if painfully expensive.

To make social payments at present, a company would have take In App Purchases revenue into its own bank account then distribute those funds to creators. This usually requires some kind of money transfer licence depending on jurisdiction. There’d also be cost in performing KYC checks on all creators and covering another layer of currency conversion (again depending on jurisdiction).

That kind of setup is possible at the moment, but hard to sustain without adding at least another 10%+ to the fee.

And the operations side of managing chargebacks, payment timings and refunds through the IAP platform stacked on top of your own money transfer business would be very painful.

[madeofpalk]

Those businesses are already viable, without App Store, as evidenced by Twitch and OnlyFans.

App Store deserves plenty of criticism, Youtube's failure to produce a viable ecosystem for accepting tips for videos is not Apple's fault.

[spacebanana7]

Does Twitch allow tips inside its iOS app? Ignore the rest of comment if so.

I agree theses businesses are viable however their iOS App activities are severely limited, thus creating the missing app economy.

[madeofpalk]

Surprisingly enough, yes, Twitch does allow tips (Bits) inside its iOS app. They're 30% more expensive than on the web https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/watching-twitch-on-ios-devi.... Same with subs https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/subscriptions-on-mobile

[x0x0]

Google says OnlyFans takes 20%. However, if you look at a saas business, the general metric for a well-run business is a 50% cost ratio. That means paying 30% instead of 1-ish percent for payments is actually 60% of profits in a well-run saas business. I suspect stripping/sex work has a lower cost than engineers, marketing, CS, computers, etc.

Which goes a long way to explaining the dearth of professional tools in the app stores.

[wiseowise]

> just > 30%

30% is anything but just.

[detourdog]

I find that people making these arguments need a villain to blame to $x million. Apple's privacy protections is an easy target for why they haven't made any of the $320 billion Apple has distributed to developers since the App Store creation.