Reminder: Apple gets up to 30% of subscriptions set up in any iPhone app! It's a huge tax on the European economy. 💡 Tip: Cancel and resubscribe on the app's website.
Reminder: Apple gets up to 30% of subscriptions set up in any iPhone app! It's a huge tax on the European economy. 💡 Tip: Cancel and resubscribe on the app's website.
Not sure how many people subscribe to anything on Lemmy, but let's give it a try
30%. That's robbery, it should be illegal.
It would be fine IF iOS allowed other app stores to compete with their own. This is why it's fine when steam does it, because the game developers can always go to GOG or Epic or itch if they want
Steam has the biggest reach and has a Most Favored Nation policy. If you offer your product cheaper anywhere else, you'll be exiled from Steam.
It's required. And they'll charge whatever the fuck they want and you'll pay it. Otherwise, you're never selling your game outside of your family.
But 30% is standard.
It has always been highway robbery. Yes, even Steam. Look at how desperate Microsoft was to copy it on their platform that was successful because it's more open (than Apple).
Class action lawsuit against Steam's 30%.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.1.0_1.pdf
Wrong, Apple does not provide any additional features besides taking a cut. Sure, maybe they provide the payment process, but that's it. The moment you subscribe, you might as well forget Apple exists.
Steam, on the other hand, allows: cloud saves, family sharing, media library, big picture, controller support, Linux support, achievements, community, friends, groups, store with tag search, advanced review features, inventory, couch coop over internet, and fuckton of stuff.
I'd say 30% is pretty generous, given Steam's reach. Also you are not forced to use Steam, you can you GOG, Epic (eww), Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, etc., while with Apple you can't.
The EU introduce the Digital Markets Act that is supposed to force Malus and Gogle to open up their ecosystem. Gogle is fairly open but for some reason another app store hasn't made it big. Malus is just locked down as hell but now has AltStore in the EU.
Malus does however not abide completely by the DMA. Someone mentioned "notarisation" to me recently: they still have to approve apps on alternative stores, which the EU isn't happy about. No one knows how long it'll take for the EU to force Malus to play by the rules and get rid of notarisation though. Maybe with how the US is acting, it could speed that up, but my bet is on 2026.
Samsung has their own app store which I presume does reasonably well in their ecosystem, and Amazon maintains their own app store for Kindle. F-Droid is also reasonably popular with the open source and privacy focused crowd.
It pays for the development of system apis, update infrastructure, software deployment infrastructure, software development sdks and toolkits, among a bunch of other very expensive to maintain infrastructure. There's the argument to be made to force them to allow competition, but I don't think you can call it robbery from an informed 10000 foot view because everything they provide is extremely expensive and extensively technical to host/construct on your own.
Which doesn't justify a cut of a 30%. I'm not saying they shouldn't charge anything, but this is at usurious levels.