[candiddevmike]

What recourse do you have if the app store review process finds "issues" with your app that are "obviously unrelated" to your payment setup but seemingly can't be resolved after multiple review iterations?

It seems like the app store review process is designed to be opaque enough to ensure Apple gets their way in their sandbox, regardless of judicial ruling. In my experience, the review process is wildly inconsistent.

[raw_anon_1111]

I know Netflix, Amazon’s Kindle app and DuoLingo have outside links.

Apple and Amazon made a deal years ago where you can buy digital videos within Amazon Prime Video using your Amazon account.

But let’s be real, the only apps making money directly from in app purchases are pay to win games. It came out in Apple vs Epic that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games.

The other companies making money are mostly selling subscriptions to SaaS apps/services that you can use one subscription anywhere and have always been paying outside of the App Store.

[troupo]

> that you can use one subscription anywhere and have always been paying outside of the App Store.

Why can't those services show a link in their app to their page without Apple claiming it's owed 27% of the sale?

[raw_anon_1111]

In the US you can because of the judgement against Apple. When you link outside of the store, Apple gets nothing.

Even in the store, Apple charges 15% if your revenue is below $1 million and charges 15% for renewals after the first year.

[troupo]

> In the US you can because of the judgement against Apple.

Indeed. It took a court battle, and holding Apple in contempt of court, and perjury by one of Apple's executives before Apple was forced to do it (did it comply?).

Why not everywhere?

> Even in the store, Apple charges 15% if your revenue is below $1 million and charges 15% for renewals after the first year.

No, Apple was going to charge 27% on sales happening outside of the App Store, if linked in the app.

Also, you keep trying to diminish/dismiss this as if was no big deal.

Also, the latest court order was a victory for Apple, not for devs. Apple, again, can charge commission in external links, restrict language in those links etc.

[raw_anon_1111]

Apple can not charge for external links In the US.

I am saying that if the indie devs didn’t have go pay Apple a dime, it wouldn’t matter. You still aren’t going to stand out and monetize compared to companies selling loot boxes and coins that make up 90% of App Store revenue. You will still have the same discovery problem, people’s unwillingness to pay money for apps on the App Store aside from games and the same race to the bottom.

Just like no matter what, the indie band playing at the local bar is not going to make money off of Spotify and all of the money is going to go to Taylor Swift and Drake.

[troupo]

> Apple can not charge for external links In the US.

1. Yes. Yes it can.

2. This was literally my first question you keep dancing around: "Why can't those services show a link in their app to their page without Apple claiming it's owed 27% of the sale?"

> You still aren’t going to stand out and monetize

What does this have to do with my question? Literally nothing.

But we've been at this twice already, and I am not inclined to go for a third round.

Adieu.

[AnthonyMouse]

> But let’s be real, the only apps making money directly from in app purchases are pay to win games. It came out in Apple vs Epic that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games.

But is that the chicken or the egg? Is it that surprising that when such an oppressively large margin is being extracted, the primary survivors are the things that are themselves scams? Normal businesses typically don't have 30% margins to begin with, much less have that much to spare for a extractive middleman.

[raw_anon_1111]

No it’s the same for every marketplace. Profits accrue to a few. Look at YouTube, books, artist on Spotify etc.

Software has near 0 marginal costs unless you are dependent on a third party server side AI models (instead of on device models) or other API vendors. 15% (if you are making less than 1 million) is not the reason you aren’t making money on the App Store. That sane person wouldn’t be making money on the web no more than the indie artist isn’t making money on Spotify compared to Drake or Taylor Swift.

If Apple reduced in app commissions to 0, the same developers would still fail. Well known publishers have tried the pay $10 once for a premium game on iOS and users wouldn’t pay for it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> No it’s the same for every marketplace. Profits accrue to a few. Look at YouTube, books, artist on Spotify etc.

Many of those are things where the value of a single user is very low and then you need a significant audience just to earn an ordinary salary.

> Software has near 0 marginal costs

But it has significant development costs, and the fact that you're required to use Apple's store makes them even higher, because their restrictions are incompatible with free software licenses, which locks you out of even using LGPL code on iOS, much less anything else.

Apple's hardware has those fancy chips in it, right? Suppose you want to create a front end for Blender and run it on iOS. Your front end doesn't have to use the same license as Blender itself if it's a separate program, so you could charge for it. But Blender is GPL so you can't run it on iOS at all. Then you'd have to write Blender yourself, by which point you're talking something that would need a million a year in revenue, and a 30% deadweight loss could very well make the difference between viable and not.

It's also incredibly disheartening, because you do the work and take the risk and then if you actually succeed you know someone else is going to cut out a huge chunk of the revenue, which discourages people from making the attempt.

> Well known publishers have tried the pay $10 once for a premium game on iOS and users wouldn’t pay for it.

Which is kind of weird when they're empirically willing to do it on other platforms, right?

But that's what happens when you establish a reputation for being capricious while taking a large cut. Who wants to make a significant investment into a platform when the platform is eroding their profits and there is a non-trivial chance they could be arbitrarily cut off at any time with no recourse? At which point the users come to expect apps to be scummy and become disinclined to pay for them up front.

[raw_anon_1111]

And you are still blaming the 15% cut. How does that have anything to do with discoversbility and people’s unwillingness to pay money for mobile apps? Apple’s “capriciously” has nothing to do with it.

We have an existence proof. In the US, any developer has been able to link out to their own payment scheme for awhile now without paying Apple a dime. That hasn’t solved a single problem for indie developers. It’s not the 15% cut - the same that every other marketplace has

[AnthonyMouse]

> How does that have anything to do with discoversbility and people’s unwillingness to pay money for mobile apps?

It's rooted in the same source. Their rent-seeking creates a distribution monopoly to those customers, which they try to keep a strangle hold on because otherwise people would use alternatives to avoid the large cut, but then once they exist those same tentacles squeeze people in other ways too. Moreover, the effect is cumulative, so those costs layer on top of the revenue loss and exacerbate each other.

> In the US, any developer has been able to link out to their own payment scheme for awhile now without paying Apple a dime.

This is something that was forced on them by the law and then they do everything possible to make it an inconvenience. For example, where is the Paypal or Stripe app that already has the user's payment info and allows other apps to use that for in-app purchases without entering it or signing in again?

> the same that every other marketplace has

Epic Games Store is 0% up to a million dollars and 12% after instead of 15% and 30%, isn't it?