I might get downvoted on principle, but I genuinely wonder and don't understand: why is it NOT OK for Google and Apple to ask for a cut? They have spent years and millions (if not billions) in developing the infrastructure, public trust and user base that allows developers to reach millions of potential customers in the first place. They provide some valuable guarantees that apps should follow that benefit and protect the consumer. I understand that bypassing fees is a way how to temporarily "have green numbers" and show savings on the quarterly report, but this is like a sugar company trying to sell sugar on the streets outside of a supermarket chain, because they don't want to pay a fee to the supermarket chain. It's their app store, their user base - why can't they make their own rules which benefit the consumer in the first place and not the greedy provider?
Again, I am genuinely curious what ethical principle am I missing here.
Developers of apps like Fortnite and Tinder believe the fee is too high for the services it provides, and they're literally putting their money where their mouth is by bypassing the fees and forgoing the benefits of the store.
We'll be able to tell if they're right by looking at whether the 30% savings offset the increased costs and lower install rates. The fact that developers are able to realistically try this out is a sign that the market is working as intended.
This is why Google's model of allowing 3rd-party stores is (imo) a pretty direct improvement over Apple's -- it allows us to run these kinds of experiments. Why waste time having a philosophical argument about whether or not Google's cut is fair when we can just test the hypothesis directly?
The other idea I want to push against is that because Google built a platform, they're entitled to continue to make money on it. That's just not how capitalism works -- "value" here is what the market will pay you, it has nothing to do with whether you did something good in the past. Google may have put a lot of resources into creating an amazing platform, but if being listed on the store is not currently increasing profits for large apps like Tinder after fees, then the cut isn't fair.
Their past contributions to the app ecosystem don't matter.
Well, they already used the stores to gain critical mass - and once they've reached it, now taking advantage of that. Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing it out.
Sure -- while they were gaining critical mass they were happy to pay Google's fees. Now they're big enough that they feel they don't need to anymore.
This goes back to what I was saying about whether or not a business should be owed some kind of 'gratitude' over past actions. There's no rule in a capitalist system that says you owe someone continued patronage just because they used to provide you with a good service.
It's all about what value Google is providing right now -- the past benefits are irrelevant.
- It seems like collusion that both of them keep the cut at 30% for more than 10 years
- It doesn't cost them that much anymore. Their cut is absurdly high. For apple it was a profit of 21.7 Billion last year from other people's apps , in exchange for whatever minor changes they made to their app store. Does it really cost even 1 Billion to keep the app store running?
- They should be more transparent about their numbers. How much does an app developer make? Their opaqueness is self-serving (attracting developers to work for them in the dark, basically). Their PR machine (like the article i 'm linking) is too loud and i believe misleads developers regarding what to expect from app revenue.
- Freedom is a benefit for the consumer, apple has way too many restrictions on the kind of apps i can have on my iphone. Whether it benefits the consumer or not is highly debateable.
- The lock-in of developers is real, it's built with dirty tricks, and i pity those devs who are bound by it.
There’s only one app store for Apple device and Apple fought tooth nails to ban jailbreking and forbidding any other app store like system.
There’s only one extensive app store for android and Google forced it down the throat of any maker that wanted Google’s service libraries which tons of apps learned to rely on.
Platform owners have been playing dirty in a lot of aspects, I think it’s game for service owners to find workarounds or get out of paying a cut to Apple or Google.
In principle consoles are not different, and lawyers looking at Apple/Google stores are also wondering what impact would a ruling in this field have on consoles as well.
I think nobody goes after consoles for now because there is no big enough business case getting hurt, and they’re kind of grandfathered in people’s perception.
>why is it NOT OK for Google and Apple to ask for a cut?
I don't think majority of people complaining are actually about the cut, but how much of the cut. And 30% is what a lot of people disagree with.
The reality is somewhere along the line Apple got too focused on their 20% Net Margin, they put themselves into a price corner. Before the iPhone era Apple mostly do ~10% Net margin, and at best some one offs ~13% quarters. Not only has Apple earned 30x the revenue post iPhone's introduction, that have also doubled their margin.
But then Pricing is only one part of the equation, it is the value on offer that matters, which is fundamentally what people are complaining about the App Store as well as iPhone 's prices.
Well, IMHO it is a fair argument for Google. They allow third party app stores. F-Droid is a brilliant example.
For Apple, however, things aren't as nice and shiny. They force you to distribute and get apps through their store. They don't let you distribute your apps easily otherwise. You don't have a choice of sharing a piece of your app price with Apple or selling it through your website as a package, or through any other app store.
As a side note, there are tons of countries, including in Europe, which are not supported as merchant countries in Play Store - i.e. devs are only allowed to publish free apps.
These countries do not support merchant accounts:
Antigua and Barbuda
Angola
Aruba
Barbados
Benin
Bermuda
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
British Indian Ocean Territory
British Virgin Islands
Burkina Faso
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Cote d'Ivoire
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Falkland Islands
Faroe Islands
Gabon
Georgia
Gibraltar
Greenland
Liechtenstein
Mali
Monaco
Montenegro
Morocco
Mozambique
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
Rwanda
San Marino
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Tajikistan
Togo
Turkmenistan
Vatican City
Some of those are in Europe, but which in particular were you concerned about?
It’s the “Netherlands Antilles” not the Netherlands. Also, it split in 2010 [1]. The US played Curaçao, formerly of the Netherlands Antilles, in this year’s Gold Cup.
It would be no problem whatsoever if playstore/appstore were just two of many market places. As it is however, they both completely dominate their respective markets. On top of that, it is costly, both in terms of money and in terms of friction, for a customer to change between the two, so they really are quite separate markets. As a customer, you pretty much choose one of the two, then stick with it (or pay a hefty price to switch). As a developer, you either also choose one of the two, or both. Choosing neither really isn't an option.
In this situation of non-competition, some very crucial assumptions about the efficiency of free markets break down entirely. I think hardly anyone is debating that apple/google make some money for the infrastructure they provide. But the amount they take would be significantly lower if there was real competition. Which there really isn't. That's what's called "rent extraction" and basically just means you're extracting more money for something than would be needed to make you do it in the first place. Would google/apple still be motivated to provide the same service if their cut was halved? Probably. It would still make a killing. But their dominant position allows them to take more, so they do.
TL;DR:
At the base, your question (for me) really boils down to "why should there be any rules for corporation at all?"
To which I would answer: because if left completely to their own devices, that would be a bad system for nearly everyone, except the very few at the very top.
Is it a revolt against the app store fee, or against new privacy and security rules, which demand that they change their target SDK level to something modern which doesn't allow as much data collection?
They haven't left the Play Store and started providing a sideloaded APK. Instead they've stopped using the Play Store API for in-app purchases and have built a custom flow.
Apple does not require that subscription fees be paid through in app purchases.
You have always been able to collect subscription fees on your own website and distribute your app for free.
>TechCrunch learned this week that Netflix is testing a payment method that bypasses iTunes in 33 countries. Until Sept. 30, new or lapsed users in select European, Latin American and Asian markets will be unable to pay using iTunes. Instead -- like with Spotify -- they will be redirected to Netflix's website to enter payment details directly with the video streaming service. In May, Netflix made a similar move prohibiting new subscribers from paying via Google Play.
>> 2.3.2. If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.
Your app will be booted off the App Store if you try to redirect users from your app to an out-of-app purchase system
Netflix and Spotify do not actively redirect users to their own payment systems (in the U.S., at least). They do not provide any links, nor do they offer any instructions on how to sign up outside the app. They just say this:
Netflix: "You can't sign up for Netflix in the app. We know it's a hassle. Join and come back to start watching TV shows and movies."
Spotify: "You can't upgrade to Premium in the app. We know, it's not ideal."
The user is left completely on their own to figure out the subscription process. Netflix and Spotify are apparently big enough, and have enough consumer awareness of their services, that users will put in the effort to go sign up. For your app, this is almost certainly not the case.
This is not true; at least, you cannot redirect within the app. Spotify had its updates rejected when it had a flow that ended all IAPs, and redirected people to a web browser.
The kindle app offers no way to purchase for this reason.
Yet and still there are dozens of apps that force subscriptions outside of the store. Why can I never find a documented case of Apple banning apps that require subscriptions outside of the App Store?
I'm not sure you read the previous comments - Apple in fact forces you to use their in app payment system for subscription fees and pay them a cut, or be left with no in app payment system at all.
That’s not true. I have used plenty of apps that have subscriptions but don’t use in app subscriptions including Sling, DirecTVNow, Linux Academy and Spotify.
But the IAP rule for Apple only applies to purely digital goods. If Tinder also sends you a condom with your profile upgrade, they don’t have to pay Apple anything. (This is why Amazon’s main app lets you buy real-world goods)
The key thing is that you can set up a separate website for payments with iOS devices, but you can't embed or link to that website within your iOS app. I've seen apps rejected because their technical support website was linked from the app and the header of that website got you to the payment website after like 10 clicks.
I have worked for a major music streaming service for a long time and publishing the app on iOS has been a constant pain.
Sometimes the app was not updated for months because apple would not validate it.
Each time the source of contention was that you could subscribe without using apple solutions (paying them) and that the subscriptions covered all platforms.
> (I think even 2-3% fee is too much for doing basically nothing, but that is another discussion).
My guess is that the play store fee works more like a tax on a closed ecosystem than a price for a service. For example, when the government needs to pay for a more expansive healthcare bill, they may decide it makes more economic sense (or is more politically viable) to raise the additional funding through a tax that doesn't go back to most of the people who receive the benefits. So maybe they raise capital gains taxes, etc.
Likewise, while Google is an ads company, and running Android does benefit them some in that regard (e.g. ecosystem lockin), they're not running it as a charity. Android being given away for free, and many phones being subsidized, both benefit a lot of people, and because Google has more or less complete control of the market, they've decided the best way to pay for it is to tax the Play store, instead of charging those people for the benefit.
They important thing I'm trying to point out here is that they could do it differently - they could charge for Android, or require subscriptions to use more of their services, but they've decided the best way to monetize is through the store. In this case, the question of whether the fee is "reasonable" for what Google provides to app developers isn't quite as significant as it would be were Google simply providing a product on the free market.
But in this case I suspect you're both right, anyway, and this likely has more to do with data collection.
It's not a closed ecosystem anyway, I think. As far as I can tell, all the devices that officially have Google Play, also allow other applications to install APKs; now in a very fine-grained and straightforward way (as of Android 9).
Google certainly aren't doing nothing - 30% includes hosting, bandwidth, patching, some amount of marketing, payments, fraud. Whether it's worth 30% is a different discussion, but to say they provide no value is just sily.
Agree on everything except patching? What does Google patch on say a netflix app?
30% is ridiculous for Apple and Google. It's an arbitrary number that they could get away with when the Appstore came out nine years ago and everyone ran with it ever since.
I don't know what a fair amount is. But I doubt it's in the two digits.
Fair is probably less than credit card co’s for base payment functionality, i.e. < 2.5%, plus some for editorial, autoupdates, decent admin UI, review.
You're forgetting that these stores act as merchants of record. They are not just payment processors. They handle VAT internationally. They do all the billing and compliance for you.
You just have one large customer in one country instead of thousands/millions in many different jurisdictions each with its own tax and consumer protection laws. That's worth more than 2.5% but it's not worth 30%.
I would say fair is somewhere between 5% and 10%, considering they also provide some distribution infrastructure on top of payments, billing, taxes and compliance.
No the stores were run by the carriers. Sprint and Verizon had an App Store before the iPhone was introduced where they sold a third party J2ME apps. Those carriers took a 70% cut.
I suppose it might have been regional, but that was never the case here. You would just download the jars (or cabs) directly from the developer. The only cut would have been the ~2% credit card processing fee.
The source being the carriers shop and scummy online shops listed on newspapers getting paid via SMS codes, which one would need to pitch before they would even consider taking their royalties.
Well, the install base is way bigger for Android, and the general state of patching in 2019 is far more frequent than it was when older platforms were operating.
However they spend a considerable amount of money trying to stop those. It's fairly irrelevant to the preceding poster's point whether they succeed or not.
No, how much money or effort Google spends is irrelevant to the value they provide.
If Google came up with a magical technique to get rid of all malware on their app store that didn't cost them a dime, you could still argue that they're adding value to justify the 30% cut.
If Google spends a billion dollars to get rid of all the malware on their app store, and it doesn't work, and using the app store is not significantly less dangerous than sideloading apps, then they're not adding any value to justify the 30% cut.
Note that I don't think Google's efforts are completely fruitless. At the very least, they seem to help with taking down duplicate apps, and that's something. But whether or not moderation is valuable only depends on whether they succeed or not -- their effort is irrelevant.
It seems like an incumbent app should would likely want app stores to suffer from a lack of policing and degradation, whether they are paying 3%, 5%, or 30%. The less app stores are trusted for safety, the lower the friction there is to just use the established Netflix, Tinder, or Spotify app.
2019 - big Korean publisher is caught red handed engaging in click fraud in background. Apple never noticed this, it was detected by researchers analyzing their Android apps.
2% would likely not cover credit card transaction fees let alone their other costs. Even low transaction fees generally look like 2% + 10c. Making the situation even worse for 1$ apps. On top of that they need to pay for development, hosting, fraud detection etc.
The ecosystem may be better off with something like 20c + 20% transaction fees. But, a flat percentage needs to be surprisingly high just to breakeven.
Don't know why you're being downvoted: Google had immense bargaining power with Visa (and the others). It might be a stretch to say they aren't paying 2%, but it's unlikely they're paying 3-5% + $0.30 flat per transaction (typical fees for small merchants going through a merchant bank payment processor, PayPal, etc.)
I doubt they have any negotiating power. Negotiations are always based on leverage, and second-best option. They have none of those. What can they theaten? To not take Visa or Mastercard in the Play Store? That they'll only take checks my mail?
Interchange fees in Europe are capped to 1.15% online and 0.2% on payment terminals, and I'm sure Google, Amazon, and other big companies are able to negociate better fees
There are a lot of credit cards that offer cashback rates between 1-2%. I'm certain Visa is not eating that so Google (and other merchants) must be paying.
And don't forget foreign exchange fees, which add at least another 2% to purchases in foreign currencies. (One bank used to charge me a ridiculous fee of 8% just for currency conversion from USD to EUR)
Handling publication, payments, giving exposure and direct access via the play store, approving the apps, rejecting impersonations, the play store platform actually does a lot of stuff.
I agree that a 30% fee is a lot and probably way too much, but claiming that they do nothing is just ridiculous.
For example the support you contact to get your money back if the app doesn't work. I did that and support did return my money. It was a long time ago, maybe now that's automatic with refunds within 15 mins or what it is.
One example that is easy to explain is the runtime permission system.
IIRC this change was introduced in API 23 (marshmallow), now a while ago.
Before that Android version, permissions (such as accessing your contacts or your calendar, using the camera sensor, etc) where requested and given at installation time.
23 introduced runtime permission : now you don't get the permissions at install time but at runtime : while the app run it incrementally asks to access your contacts, camera, or whatever else it needs.
But there is an issue : how to handle all the existing apps ?
What happens is that apps declare which sdk version they are targetting when they are compiled. If that version is 23 or higher, they get the new behavior.
For apps targeting 22 or less though, the system fallbacks to the previous behavior.
This way apps don't suddenly break when you update your phone and apps already published on the play store don't have to handle this change right away.
Most apps, especially popular ones have been pretty quick to follow these new targets.
However, some apps (cough like snapchat cough) have seen a loophole there and have been keeping their target sdk very low so they don't have to follow new behaviors.
So a couple of years ago Google decided to address that : now if you want to publish a new app, you have to target an android version that is at most one year old. App updates have the same rule, although IIRC the period is a little bit longer.
So it is no longer possible to game a system that is only there to gracefully handle old apps.
I have mentioned runtime permission because it is one change that is easy to explain, but each Android version has several behavior/security changes like this one, so enforcing this rule is definitely for the best.
2nd paragraph:
> The online dating site launched a new default payment process that skips Google Play and forces users to enter their credit card details straight into Tinder’s app, according to new research by Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter.
I'm not against app store operators demanding a service fee - but I've always been baffled that everyone seems to be ok with the amount of power Apple and Google have over the app economy.
If you're a tech startups engaging with end-users, right now there seems almost no way around offering an iPhone and Android app to accompany your product or service. There are whole sub economies where the app is the product.
Yet app stores are basically private property where the companies running the stores can set (and change) arbitrary rules and regulations. If a rule change means your app is no longer viable and that app was your product, sucks to be you.
Shouldn't at least the free market crowd object against a whole economy being at the mercy of two companies?
I'm not against app store operators demanding a service fee... as long as they do a good job of blocking malware/spyware apps (Google doesn't, many GooglePlay-approved apps spy on you and send your data home), don't block innocent apps for sake of their own interest, let a consciously willing user bypass the store and, at last but not at least, don't demand a ridiculously high fee. A fee of 5% is ok, 10% is tolerable, 30% is absurd.
The fee would be alright if the ecosystem of app store apps was fair. When Google bans those kinds of apps from their store and Apple doesn't even support 3rd party app stores on their devices, it makes the argument of a monopoly a lot more forseeable.
> Shouldn't at least the free market crowd object against a whole economy
It's not the whole economy, unless google+apple conspire to regulate the market to prevent others from entering. Frankly, developers are free to leave the platform and we should be telling them to get out. We 've had enough of google+apple fanboys telling everyone that they must make an app for that. We don't have to, and it's like shooting yourself in the foot. Very few developers are successful and we 're better off working on open platforms. And also, most mobile ads traffic is fraudulent. Stop advertising your stuff on mobile.
> unless google+apple conspire to regulate the market to prevent others from entering
Not to pick on you specifically, but this view is way too wrong to be so common.
The information economy is fundamentally different from the industrial economy for (at least) two reasons:
- Extremely high capital intensity
- Positive reinforcement through network effects (same and cross-side)
As a result, market concentration in information and technology markets is extremely high compared with other industries. It's not a conspiracy, and it's not something anyone can change. It's just the nature of the product itself.
There are a few strategies to combat it (open source, adversarial interop, etc...) but "just build your own" isn't one of them. Because it's almost always impossible in practice.
Is it really high capital intensive? I make websites and i m not rich. Network levels are strong and global, but they do come and go every few years, its unlikely that facebook will be as long lived as disney or mcdonalds.
A mediocre engineer is worth on the order of a million bucks a year to one of these big companies... one engineer can create a reasonably large amount of 'capital' - that doesn't make it cheap.
Yeah, you could build that capital for yourself rather than for a big company, if you wanted to; that doesn't mean it wasn't expensive.
That, and I think that big successful projects take a lot more than just someone who can build a decent website. Take friendster... one of my favorite examples 'cause it was one of the real-world cases of a company dying due to insufficient resources being put into systems administration and scaling. They were in the right place, at the right time, with the right product to become what facebook is now; they got traction, but due to performance and reliability issues, they ended up leaving an opening for Facebook to come in and eat their lunch.
And even getting to the point where facebook was is really hard.
I mean, it happens; Craigslist is a famous example, but usually you need more than one engineer worth of capital to build one of these things, and you need more than just engineers.
I dunno. every time I step out into other industries, I'm shocked at how little even skilled people are paid. I dunno much about animation, but I'm pretty sure you could setup, say, a small publishing house and support it for a few years on a million bucks. I'm certain you could start up a restaurant on that kind of scratch, and if you were the business type, you could turn that into a chain. I mean, sure, you'd need more for promotion/advertising, but that's just as true of the tech industry.
I mean, sure, a business starting with a million bucks is unlikely to become a multi-billion dollar business, but... I think it's a reasonable amount to start a reasonable business... and I think that's how McDonalds, at least, got it's start.
> Is it really high capital intensive? I make websites and i m not rich.
If you work in the industry and aren't familiar with concept yet, it's something that you would greatly benefit by reading up on. Capital intensity is about the RATIO of capital costs to operating costs. Compare the cost of developing a website with the cost of operating it. In general, the former are much higher than the latter--though there are some exceptions.
Actually, the total (absolute, not the ratio) cost is related to a third factor I didn't even list--constant or increasing returns to scale. This means that products can be VERY expensive to develop before an extra dollar of investment won't result in more than one additional dollar of profit. No surprise that there's a synergistic relationship here with capital intensity (very low per-unit costs). This isn't going to be super-applicable if you're building websites for small companies, but if you consider how much it would cost to develop a commercial operating system that was on par with what's currently out there (Android/iOS/Linux/MacOS/Windows/etc...) it would many millions on the low end to billions if you couldn't rely on open source.
i m not in the industry but i couldn;t find a definition such as the one you re mentioning
> Capital-intensive industries use a large portion of capital to buy expensive machines, compared to their labor costs. The term came about in the mid- to late-nineteenth century as factories such as steel or iron sprung up around the newly industrialized world.
i dont know, computers are dirt cheap, and IT is famous for being particularly easy to enter into as a sector. I don't think i m the exception
There's more to "capital" than a physical machine.
Compare the cost of creating software (often many millions) to the per unit cost of copies of that software (zero).
Compare the cost of developing a new processor architecture and setting up the manufacturing plant (billions and billions) compared with the per-unit cost.
Compare the cost of building out a physical network infrastructure to cover a city (many millions) compared with the cost of connecting a single user to the box down the street.
Compare the cost to create all of Facebook's hardware and software infrastructure to the marginal cost of adding one more user to the platform.
There are several Android stores and sideloading apps is trivial. Lots of apps choose to go around the store. Fortnite doesn't use the Play Store, for example. It's possible.
I have to admit that with Android itself there's at least an option. Even though Google tries to get developers into using the Play Services instead of the built-in android api (see their location api as an example), you're still able to run your own software. You can easily get other apks or use Amazon appstore.
With Apple, you have no proper way running an app without Apple. So it'll intriguing to see such act within a platform that is truly locked.
The article says nothing about Tinder making this release on App Store, just Play Store.
If Tinder requested this update be sent to Apple users than the review process would reject the update. The Play Store doesn't put a person in the app update loop.
Fundementally this is the benefit of Linux. Google provides a nice fortune 500 solution to everything, but you could layer up and delete most of Google's packages.
It has nothing to do with Linux. Google voluntarily provides a simple UI toggle to disable Play Store restrictions on any Android device when they could easily not have one. Tinder wouldn't even try this if the only way to sideload their app was to "layer up" and deal with rooting or flashing or anything that requires technical knowledge of Linux.
You're still at the mercy of Apple giving you a valid (and revokable) app development certificate. Apps installed with a development certificate expire after a certain number of days. There's also a limit to the number of devices you can use with a development certificate.
There are enterprise distribution certificates that don't have these restrictions, but using them to distribute apps outside of the company will end up getting it revoked. (Like what happened with Facebook)
> As for the distribution, you can distribute your App open-source and let your users compile and install it themselves.
Because non-technical users will surely do that.
> The reality is this: You cannot mass distribute proprietary App's that Apple has not approved.
I feel this is the only point relevant to this post.
Yes, you can invite your developer friends to try out the app you wrote yourself. But if you actually want to make money from it, you need Apple's approval.
There's an entire ecosystem that surrounds sideloading apps that are not in the app store. They're not all developers or technically inclined people, it's a very easy thing to do and can be done on any OS. Developers can distribute an IPA that isn't valid for your device, and you use an extremely simple GUI tool (Cydia Impactor) to resign, repackage, and install all in a few steps. You don't need to be a technical user to do this. You just sign in with your Apple ID in the app (or any Apple ID, it just needs to be in the program as a free or paid account).
A step in the right direction for software as a whole.
The AOL/compuserve internet that we all thought we won against is here again. The walled garden is our reality.
This new trend could be the start of crumbling of the second wave of walled gardens. Open platforms allow for freedom (as in speech) and innovation that isn't so easily snuffed out by incumbents - a good thing for consumers.
Tinder and others averting the rent-seeking behavior of google signals that companies have realistic options in the fight against their sharecropping lords.
This movement could also help win the fight for opening up the iOS platform in the coming legal battles - the fact you can do this on android and not iOS might be significant.
The net is consolidating and so the wheel will turn again. Long live the decentralized, open net!
How is this supporting open platform? Tinder is still closed platform and available on playstore, Can I use premium without paying Tinder tax? No. Now you need to send in your credit card info to Tinder instead of better privacy protection from Playstore.
If Tinder collects the payment, you're paying Tinder.
If Google or Apple collect the payment, you're paying Google or Apple, they take a cut, then a portion goes to Tinder.
Guess which one results in Tinder raising their prices?
You could argue that the app stores aren't a charity and don't operate for free - that they need money to exist. I'd argue that the app store model itself doesn't need to exist and that it's a form of greedy rent-seeking and power thirst. Besides, neither Apple nor Google are hurting from their phone monopoly.
If AppStore model isn’t needed why is Tinder available on AppStore. They could have gone side load model. But didn’t. This just shows why AppStore is relevant.
"Side loading" is a second class citizen reserved for criminals and nerds.
A true first class distribution model would allow you to install directly from the web without messing with settings. Perhaps even running as WASM seamlessly out of the box, never once switching contexts into a storefront.
If we'd done it this way from the beginning we'd have true cross-platform apps written in WASM with full native experiences. Microsoft still might have their phone, too. But things didn't evolve that way, sadly... Apple and Google wanted their control and walled gardens.
Of course, to reach true parity now we'd have to remove the app store to let web distribution catch up in the minds of consumers. But that will never happen unless we can lobby for antitrust breakups of these titans.
Arguably, if you connect a PS4 to that TV you are paying the Sony tax on every game you purchase, which would be a closer analogy. Sony selling the TV is identical to Google selling a Nexus phone, whereas when Sony sells a Playstation they are also selling a platform.
Edit: just reread grandparent, the tinder tax doesn't make sense and your example was valid. Apparently I haven't had enough coffee to read properly yet.
I would rather see the users turning away from app stores and into the web. The mobile app companies are just going to revolt, apple will cut them some slack, and they ll go back to sleeping with the devil
Yep, people compare app stores with the wild west of old windows applications and ask how could we possibly go back.
The biggest improvement on the smartphones in this regard is not the app stores themself, it's the very tight sandboxing of apps that is the real enabler of the ecosystem. With such a good sandbox we could be installing apps from anywhere on the web as we did on windows before but at the same time not risk our whole system in the process as we did before.
And in the end it’s the user who will suffer the most from it. Giving my payment details to google was acceptable but if it actually continues in that direction soon you have to feed every third grade company with it.
What the hell does "third grade company" even mean? Tinder probably respects your privacy more than Google.
Unless you're referring to worries about giving out your payment information to "random sites"? If so, that's dumb because it's 2019 and there are tons of dedicated secure payment processors out there. Very few companies would even be willing to process payments themselves.
Any effort to take power away from Google's iron grip on the internet is good unless you're a Google employee or shareholder.
I'm not so sure about that. I bet Tinder would love to share your data with the other IAC properties. (IAC owns Match, Tinder, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and others...)
As a user I would much rather give my actual payment information to a few companies, like Google but ideally this would be my financial institution, who will proxy payments to various 3rd parties on my behalf.
The only thing that the actual vendor should see is a purchase from "a Discover customer."
Hell, for most online transactions I would like to proxy the whole thing. If I could give money to someone to buy things on my bealf and put their name, address, and shipping info instead of mine and then ship it to me I absolutely would every single time.
Have you bought anything online in the past two decades? Because pretty much every online store uses a third party who processes the payment information on their behalf. Your CC info never goes to the seller. Examples are PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Dwolla, etc.
> soon you have to feed every third grade company with it
Many payments on the web are done by handing over payment card details and trusting the merchant to bill the correct amount.
The alternative is to use a middle-man like PayPal.
It's absurd that the banks and credit card companies haven't come up with a better solution than handing over your card details and taking it on trust, but here we are, and online sales are doing fine.
Right but if a company has a buy with Google/Amazon/PayPal/Apple button you better believe I'm taking that option immediately over giving yet another random company that I trust less than a 2am gyro cart unfettered access to my credit card details.
The real kicker being that you aren't just trusting their honesty, you're trusting their long-term data security.
It's a regular occurrence for companies of all sizes to fail to protect customers' payment card information. For some reason, no-one talks about how preposterous is it that we still handle many online payments through total trust.
Little comfort knowing your card details will eventually expire, especially considering that they no longer really do [0]
As you say, far better to go the PayPal route, despite their considerable problems [1]
Privacy concerns me but security & convenience concern me more, especially for credit card data which I’m already giving to a giant entity that resells it.
There's also a potential upside of dealing with individual apps if they run up fraudulent charges: you're not putting your Google account in jeopardy because of a charge back.
Granted, Google probably is quite supportive of users vs app vendors, but the risk of losing their Google account is gigantic for many users, and there's no useful way to appeal (unless you happen to be in luck, your complaint goes viral and somebody from Google manually intervenes).
Darn, so much for getting Tinder on F-Droid :( I was hoping they were going to start distributing APKs directly but nope, just seems they're directly processing payments for in app purchases, rather than using the Play Store
On a side note, I launched Tinder recently to poke around and I see they're now offering read receipts as a feature. Purchasing "Tinder Gold" to see who has "liked" you, I can understand. Getting read receipts though? Ehh, it feels a bit far.
Don't get me wrong though, it's fully what I would expect from any VC funded entity. You've gotta keep showing growth until the end
Hahaha I'm sorry, I know this doesn't "stimulate intellectual curiosity" per the rules, but I couldn't let that sentence go given the colloquial meaning of the word "poke".
I like read receipts because they help me not feel like I'm talking into the abyss. It moves the needle a tiny, tiny bit closer to more face-to-face characteristics.
People seem to prefer it at large. If you turn off read receipts on WhatsApp, then it disables them for you too. Yet I'm not sure I've seen anyone disable it.
I absolutely hate them. I hate not being able to read a text and respond to it on my own time. It doesn't do anything for face-to-face characteristics whatsoever but it does put pressure on me to respond. If it's that urgent, call me, or just make plans with me to get coffee or something.
KakaoTalk [0] does this and I end up just having way more notifications because I don't want to leave someone "on read" until I get around to responding. Actually, many, if not most people "read" incoming texts via the preview from notification centers so they can read it without feeling like they have to respond right then.
I hate how it conditioned me over time to check repeatedly to see if someone had read my text or not. You could argue that they might've just wanted to respond later, but that's not the "culture" of how kakaotalk is used generally. I have some friends that take anywhere from ~3 days to 2 weeks to respond but they don't open the text until then. I vastly prefer imessage or other apps now simply because I can toggle off read receipts.
[0]: kakaotalk is the messaging app of Korea. I don't think I've ever had someone send me an actual text or phone call outside of KakaoTalk. Line (Japan) is similar and also has read receipts unfortunately.
Software inside the official F-Droid repository has to be open source. You can however simply add additional repositories to the F-Droid client which everyone can host following its own rules.
Uber (when it first came out) you could just take a photo of your card and then tap in the security code yourself. It seemed to work decently well back in 2014.
It is nice how easy it is with Apple to cancel subscriptions. None of this NYT style, you need to call this number and go thru a couple hoops to do something that should be easy as a button click.
Which is silly because it's better for the consumer to deal with individual companies rather than go through one provider for everything. Amex already protects me from fraudulent online purchases. If I get ripped off Apple by buying one of the apps they sell, charging back risks putting my entire account with them at risk.
The last thing that I want to do is to deal with Amex to cancel a service under the "fraud" pretense. For once, it would require me to get a new card with a new number. It will also require me to talk to Amex. And it may also require me to fill out paperwork and fax said paperwork ( granted, it was CapitalOne and not amex but it is still the same point).
Here's what I want to do to cancel something: Click on play store. Click on subscriptions. Find the one I don't want. Click on "Cancel", click on "yes, cancel"
I'm going to bet you aren't tinder demographics ( which is basically 18-30). These people grew up on the internet and they grew up on easy payments. It is paypal/venmo/applepay/google pay. Credit cards ( not revolvers, but credit cards as a method of accessing a revolver ) is a relic of previous century.
> The last thing that I want to do is to deal with Amex to cancel a service under the "fraud" pretense.
So, rather than get your money back from a fraud, you'd just let them have the money and you'd just cancel the subscription?
Or are you talking about lying and committing fraud yourself by claiming "fraud" when there was actually none and you just wanted to cancel a subscription?
Which one is it? I just want to understand which one you are talking about here. It can only be one or the other in the context of your comment.
It's a subscription, right? So I subscribed, they had no way of "charging me" and they have no way of continuing to charge me. When I no longer want for them to charge me I click on "Cancel" and they can't continue to bill me because they have no credit card information.
If it charged me for a month extra that i don't know, i get a notification and get it refunded via Google play store the same day.
That's the current workflow. Single location. All Google Play based subscriptions. No need to deal with a card replacement.
Same reason I use Paypal where possible. There's a list of organizations that are allowed to charge me without my interaction (like recurring payments) and I can cancel them whenever I want from Paypal UI instead of figuring out a random business' arbitrary, hostile cancelation flow.
The best possible outcome of this is that Apple and Google lower their fees. I'd rather we not move to a system where every app and app developer is responsible for managing payments directly.
Netflix, Tinder, and other huge apps are safe from being removed. Neither Apple nor Google wants to be missing massive "features" that the other ecosystem has.
Netflix and the other monster apps might have a lot of influence and bargaining power with Apple and Google, but at the end of the day, Netflix needs Apple far more than Apple needs Netflix.
I hope they are punished for this. Moves like this only hurt indie/smaller developers who don't have the resources to setup their own external subscriptions. If apps can make back even 25% of the cut, that gives them a significant advantage in UA that is hard to beat.
The 30% cut is fine. It's well worth it for everything App Store/Google Play gives you as a dev.
I've found the Apple/Google in-app subscription APIs way more annoying to work with than Stripe/Braintree. Plus, if you sell on web and mobile, you now have to deal with three different systems instead of just one.
Big players with power need to revolt against this stuff otherwise little players will never get the freedom to do it. Google happily will punish little players for doing it.
What does that mean, setting up external subscriptions? You mean like monthly transactions? Don’t most CC processors these days offer pretty much free starting plans since they’re making money from the transaction fees? The competition is too fierce, someone is making a low financial barrier of entry.
I understand where this article and app developers are coming from. There is a big difference in what Google and Apple do in this ecosystem, however.
Apple basically says that any digital goods purchased through an iOS app needs to pay Apple's 30% fee. This includes things like subscriptions and in-app purchases. I really noticed this with Audible, you can search the store but are not able to buy anything in their app on iOS.
My issue with apple is not that this fee exists, but that it is truly anti-competitive. Apple does not allow users to install apps outside of the app store. They also are holding back things like PWAs from being viable alternatives for very similar reasons (I'm looking at you Web Push notifications!).
Google's ecosystem on the other hand is more open. You can install APKs from anywhere and there are even third-party app stores like F-Droid. I honestly don't know if the play store has the same rules as Apple does, but even if they did i'd be ok with that because users and companies do have other options if they don't want to use Google Play.
The argument for me is do you want to be on the App store for the exposure/convenience of disribution or do you do it because there is no other alternative. The former is a marketplace with an audience and the ladder is a monopoly.
Side Note: Google has been the champion of PWAs which main use case is to be able to bypass an app store and install an app directly from a website. This gives Google less control over the app ecosystem but has the potential to be beneficial to users.
If I'm not mistaken, Google still has power over the PWA spec, so they can just add something to give themselves total control again. (Just like they've done with AOSP and the Play Store + GSF)
This is GREAT. It's been long overdue that these stores should not be monopolies imposed on device owners. Besides these things can stand perfectly fine on their own if users have choice. There are plenty of people that will still want to purchase from various app stores, but it shouldn't be required.
Simple question: Why doesn't Google prevent this? Eg. "To publish an app on the Play Store you must provide a clear way for the user to pay or subscribe in the app"
My understanding is that if you're small enough they won't let you do it. That's what makes it significant for big companies to sideload their own store or refuse to follow the policy.
Does Tinder really have that kind of leverage? Google could kick them out of the Play Store, and requiring users to side-load their app would cause them to lose far more than 30% of their user base...
That is nowhere near the level of gatekeeping that the duopoly of Google&Apple have. The web is full of opportunity, that we owe to TBL's decision to make it free. The dangerous gatekeepers of the web are Google and FB , but there is still plenty of opportunity left.
That Apple was/is even tolerated by app developers to forcefully use their payment options, is surprising. Devs should've simply refused payment via Apple channels, and forced consumers to their site, as they're doing now.
By tolerating a tyrannical middleman for short term gains, you justify their unreasonable claims of value addition
They don't have a choice, generally speaking. Apple makes it harder to get around the fee. If they're successful on Android, it's possible they'd try to swing their weight around on iOS... but I suspect Apple doesn't care how big you are.
You don't have to - you can sign IPAs with a developer certificate, but the app will only work for 7 days on a free account (1 year for a 'real' developper account). Having to resign every week is obviously a dealbreaker.
Read the article, friend. Tinder is still on the play store, but removed it's Google Play payment features so you have you now enter your credit card number to pay.
Admittedly it's poorly titled, but come on. Read the article.
You have no evidence of that (and I totally disagree) and you just continued to drag her into this years later.
Just because someone has found employment is not much of a signal of how they are doing.
I think you should edit your post and at least remove her name so it’s not indexed. It’s not nice. I would flag it for the mods but don’t see a way to do that.
I don't think it should count as internet stalking to google search the PR rep for a big company or organization. It's another matter to go around following her on every social media platform or publish her address on the internet, which isn't happening here.
For example if we were discussing a seed round or venture funding round for a startup and someone brought up that the founder of the startup was that one guy who got away with beating his girlfriend (twice) due to a mixture of lawyer trickery, evidence concealment and police errors, would that be internet stalking?
Right, because multiple assaults are somehow comparable to an insensitive tweet.
It's been six years. People who have committed DUIs are shown more mercy than this. How does it benefit us in any way that we might continue this charade?
We have more of a culture of forgiving someone who served time in jail for a crime they admit they committed than forgiving someone who made a bad tweet six years ago.
It would be exploiting mob mentality to damage someone who wasn't proven guilty of doing anything wrong, so yes, I would consider it internet stalking. Innocent until proven guilty exists for a reason, otherwise the behavior of a single crazy person could ruin your life forever.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is an important standard for justice (you can't jail someone without sufficient proof) but it's not something that applies to everyday life.
For example, if a child care provider is accused of abusing children, but the court does not convict them because of lack of evidence, I'm still free to stop sending my kids there.
I just want to be sure I understand: are you saying that it is right and just to lose our capacity to start our own companies because of false allegations?
Again, I am genuinely curious what ethical principle am I missing here.