Certainly not defending Apple's behavior in this instance, but isn't the success of the larger product ecosystem a direct driver of their App Store profitability? To strictly evaluate the App Store finances in isolation seems to be the sort of accusation you've levied against Apple in the opposite direction..

I like Apple less and less these days for various reasons, but I haven't purchased an app on the App Store in more than a decade. It's strictly a vehicle for local utilities when, for whatever reason, a browser will not suffice. Nearly all purchasing is done on the 'open' web.

I'd say that in the case of Patreon, any fee for Apple is unjustified. Apple can justify their fee on app purchases/subscriptions in the app store, but Patreon is not an app subscription, the money goes mostly from the patrons to the people they support. Ok, Patreon takes a cut to cover their operating costs, and also make a profit (not sure how profitable they are currently), but I really can't see how Apple, who don't have anything to do with this process except for listing the Patreon app on the app store, can justify taking a cut.

They could opt out - by sticking to web platforms.

Apple cannot charge for that. However, apple does attempt to gimp the web platforms on mobile to "subtly" push for apps.

Don't forget they also directly compete with Patreon with podcast subscriptions. You can support a podcast through Apple podcasts or Patreon, but only one of those has a 30% chunk taken out.

While inconvenient and likely to reduce patrons, the article does describe how they can opt out: use the web to do any payment activity.

Yeah, because they built it. If people were using Linux everywhere, the situation would be different.

That's pretty much the conclusion the EU came to and why they introduced the notion of gatekeepers in the DMA.

It doesn't matter if you are not technically in a dominant position if your special role in a large ecosystem basically allows you to act like one in your own purview.

You could say this kind of move invites more scrutiny but the regulators are already there watching every Apple's move with a microscope and their patience with Apple attempts at thwarting compliance is apparently wearing thin at least in the EU if you look at preliminary findings.

> downloading and using packages & executables from the internet

Oh boy, now my mom can get the full experience of having malware on her phone too!

It does make sense to highlight, because this kind of statistic is a very strong indicator that the market is not competitive. This is not a normal kind of profit margin and basically everyone except for Apple would benefit from them lowering the margins.

In normal markets there are competitors who force each other to keep reasonable profit margins and to improve their product as opposed to milking other people's hard work at the expense of the consumer.

High profit margins are a sign of market failure.

Makes me think of the concept of involution in Chinese business and how they understand all of this very differently, and how difficult it is to compete because of that.

it sounds like it does make sense because if they are making $Z profits then they are still making profits and are not non-profit.

there could also be cases where cutting back to $Z profits might be preferable in case not doing so were to prompt legislation causing someone to be forcibly cut to $Z-1 or even $0 profits from a particular profit source.

Which it has been my observation that when someone is saying "X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits" it often coincides with saying therefore company X should be legislated on this particular profit source.

Note: $X didn't make much rhetorical sense.

“Growth is what makes a cell a cell.”

Until it turns into cancer because of unrestrained growth.

Like it or not capitalism is a part of an ecosystem. We’ve been “educated” to believe that unrestrained growth in profits is what makes capitalism work, and yet day after day there are fresh examples of how our experience as consumers has gotten worse under capitalism because of the idea that profits should forever be growing.

When parts of a market become dominated by one or few companies operating in a limited choice environment, consumers can't just opt to not use both Apple and Play store. You need to choose one in practice.

At this point the regulators should investigate what the barriers are to new entrants and if it's too costly and nobody has managed to cut in the last few years, establishing some rules is probably a good thing. This happens as industries mature and become critical, it happened in transportation (most bus, train companies), energy, water supply, trash, etc, depending on the country and market conditions.

"Why wait until tomorrow to get one golden egg when I can kill the goose today and get all the golden eggs?"

I think it's a little known fact that societies don't exist for the benefit of companies. It's actually the other way around.

It makes sense that regulators can step in without destroying a company.

Off topic, but is there anything specific that you hate about Android? I find it acceptable. I'm trying to cut down my phone usage so maybe I'm more tolerant.

I keep hoping and wishing for a daily drivable linux phone that's compatible with all the us networks to come along. I'll keep hoping and wishing. Someday I hope we will get there!

The problem is that Apple owns the platform and half of the mobile ecosystem. You can't just launch a competitive marketplace which could compete alongside Apple's app store, nor can you launch an alternative operating system. You have to launch a whole new smartphone stack complete with operating system, app distribution and app ecosystem.

Indeed, that's why the former blocks the latter: not to lose margins to those opportunities

There is no ideological argument for voluntary action here. The entire goal is to force regulators to step in. The debate over 'good vs. bad companies' is just online noise and rhetorical trik, no one on either side of the political spectrum wants these systems to be fixed voluntarily with corporate altruism.

and that exactly what monopoly allows you to do.

We don't need "more" government, we need the government to do its job. We need the regulators who have been legally appointed to oversee these areas to actually respond to these behaviors. Regulatory capture is the issue, but the solution isn't less government. It's getting corporate money and lobbying out of the government (Citizens United is to blame for most of our woes), increase the enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and get antitrust back on the table.

I want big corporations to be scared. I want them to fear for their own survival, and to tread lightly lest the sword of damocles fall upon them.

Visa/Mastercard take like 1 or 2%. That's why they cannot compare to Apple...

Large transactions are riskier, let’s give them 45%. After all, I’d really hate to see their margins suffer.

Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.

If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.

I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.

That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.

Presumably if you buy an AI subscription through an iOS app you also have to pay 30% Apple tax. Nice work for them.

Oh but you do get policing...

Feels more like a sales tax (VAT) though, which is the same for everyone.

On the other side Apple gets money, so they can make *whole* world better, not just your country.

Think about how many lives were improved just by M* CPUs or Siri

/s

Guess it is no different than Docker Desktop charging based on your revenue. The idea being charging based on some second order.

It's kind of interesting that while the structure is largely the same, the underlying behaviour/intent has morphed from a disruptor-model into being toxic rent-seeking behaviour.

and the 30% they take from the things you sell via apple devices, once your work is done.

Apple's 30% tax was introduced under Steve Jobs and there were no small business exemptions back then. Jobs died in 2011. It's time to stop extrapolating what Jobs would be doing 15 years later in 2026 if he were still around. Could be the same, could be better, could be worse.

Jobs was a greedy bastard like all the other CEOs. The difference is that he also had mostly good taste as far as products go.

Tim Cook is usually good at politics, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Nobody other some CNBC guests really gets too upset when they take 30% from tinder, music or mobile gaming companies. And those types of apps run by unpopular large companies make up the majority of App Store revenue.

However, newspapers and content creators are popular in a way that carries political weight. It'd be wise for Apple exempt these categories and write off the few hundred million in forgone revenue as a political expense.

For example allowing the NYT or Joe Rogan to have nice paid apps with no fees would be a much more effective use of money than the same amount in political donations.

This is not an accident. This is exactly why Apple (and Google also) have made the PWA experience bad for years. They must force users to believe their app store is the only source of programs.

To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.

Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.

Why do they need to install a PWA?

We do mobile friendly Web UIs, that is enough.

Their customes, employees, go to the respective company website, get a responsive UI for their device, done, the services require to be online anyway.

There may be a time where we have to push back, though, and this may be it. "There is no app" may sound terrifying now, but once we've educated users, it will only get less scary, until we might actually claim back some ownership of our own stuff from the likes of Apple.

This may just be more of a design and communications challenge for you, than your users. I have seen several design templates that use various forms of visuals to assist the user through the “add to Home Screen” process, which is just three steps; Share—-> More —-> Add to Home Screen. It Is arguably even a faster process than going through the App Store, even if users may be more familiar with it.

You could accompany it with some copy explaining how it keeps the service efficient and affordable, i.e., possible stating if you were to offer an app you would have to increase the price by 75% to pay Apple their fee and for the extra costs.

I suspect other arguments for PWAs would not really matter, like that you have no need to track them or use other abilities an app affords, etc. Most people only care about very few things engineers actually care, let alone know about.

I’ve always been an advocate of PWAs whenever it makes sense and will even design and architect to that objective. But even when I would deal with clients, I think the real “up hill battle” is that apps allow for higher fees and charges because they’re more work and come with greater expenses for for-profit apps, so there has been very little incentive to spread general user awareness about the “add to Home Screen”/PWA.

It’s a bit of a paradox, but I guess that seems to be an under-appreciated driver in something like “advanced consumer capitalist economies”, where the “rational actor” simply does not exist anymore.

BTW, you don't need the app store for that. You can use Firebase App Distribution which doesn't require you to go through the review process.

Basically you just ask their email address and add it to a list in Firebase. Upload your ipa to firebase and the user will receive an email with a link to download

What kind of users are these? Power-users or normal users (Android etc.) or dum..Apple users?

Because in my circle, power-users and beyond. Everybody is angry with apps needed for everything, you want buy bread in store, "do you have our app?" It's a meme here. And in our local subreddit, 600k users. Sentiment is the same.

We also tried to bypass stores apps with generating new accounts and distributing QR/cards for free to everyone. It was kinda popular.

And problems are more real with each day, eg.: scammers have their work way easier, since dumb users can take a huge loan directly from banking app in their phone.

Also small EU country, btw.

>95% of users ask 'do you have an mobile app?' in first 5 minutes of onboarding

Did you ask them why?

I don't think that applies to Patreon which, as far as I know, doesn't have any ads in the first place?

The app might make it easier for them to enforce DRM-like behaviors to prevent people from pirating creators content, but I strongly suspect people aren't doing that on iOS regardless.

Yep, it's the driving force why I rarely install apps. If the mobile site doesn't work well, it's a good filter that I shouldn't use it. (Doom scrolling trap).

For those that are not aware, on Android you can install Firefox and Ublock-Origin. Life saver!

Most of them still source their ads from a known domain so you can easily block them using DNS.

Patreon isn't something you need to be checking all the time, though, unless you patronise a LOT of people. It can pretty much be a "setup and forget" kinda deal.

It's highly unlikely for someone to use the internet in 2020s but be unaware that Patreon is a thing.

Funnily enough I stopped using the Patreon app for podcasts with the big rewrite a while back where it became almost unusable and switched to Overcast instead.

Sure, if your app has something worthwhile to do offline.

PWA also work offline.

a) does it actually work offline (seems unlikely for a payment app, although I guess it could batch stuff)?

b) if so, does it work any better than a web app can offline?

The Nineties would like a word.

You know some of us remember Mac System [7|8|9] and how MSFT pretty much ruled everything (Apple had low %).

We kept working on the platform and developing tools and things changed. Of course Apple is a lot more powerful than MSFT back then and the general population is their target.

It's not just about making apps. Anything you do for this company is going to backfire at some point and hurt us.

This even includes developing open source tools for MacOS.

And even if it doesn't backfire it is largely a wasted effort.

Yes. It's improved now, but the mobile web was bad for a long time. The early days of Android experienced a "web-first" ecosystem by force, as lazy businesses just threw a webview around their site, and it was awful

I might be in the minority but I have a really hard time using iOS and their apps in general (I use Android).

I struggle (and mostly curse) to figure out what swipe gesture to use to get simple stuff to just work. Not super sure all the 60fps animations and wizz-bang behaviours are being used the way you think they are.

#include<"old-man-yells-at-clould-meme">

Good thing GenAI is about to destroy capitalism, finally!

Even the stupid many headed hydra can't survive when an 8 year-old kid has a super intelligence capable of autonomously manufacturing a bio weapon.

$1500 represents the money you've already given them to purchase the hardware. You already overpay for that - fine - then they demand a 30% cut from $5 you're giving to a struggling independent creator. It's pure greed coming from one of the richest companies in the world.

Analogy =\= Precise Maths

woosh

Apple was also compensated by Patreon in the form of the developer fee.

This is the triple-dip attempt.

I agree that 30% is high but the arguments I see online are generally in favor of a cut to 0%, not a reduction. If you get into the weeds of what the cut should be then it gets messy, who gets to decide? How do you determine what is actually fair for all parties?

I would argue Patreon is far more parasitic than Apple in this case, they're shaving off 10% for a pretty simple service.

In practice I’ve seen apps just game the system by (1) using IAP using the normal flow, and (2) giving user a button unrelated to purchasing that would open a new WebView, which just happens to contain a purchase button.

This was a result of the Apple vs Epic case, external payment processors avoiding the fee were enabled in the US in May 2025.

Spotify does link to their website to sign up in the US...

Not allowed. They ban your app immediately if you inform people they are robbing them!

I could be wrong but seem to remember this being explicitly disallowed by Apples terms

Many banks require you to two-factor authenticate with an app on your phone.

Some countries still charge for SMS. That's why WhatsApp is so popular in many places of the world.

Honestly… if we implemented $0.01 charge on every message, post and etc. the world would become an amazing place.

Is Patreon not popular?

Have they? Netflix, Spotify, Kindle, ...

Is it still true that Apple bans you from telling users, in app, they can pay through alternative platforms?

I think you may have fundamentally misunderstood what a technocracy is: it has nothing to do with tech companies whatsoever. From literally the article that you have linked:

> The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.

Technocracy is probably not the right word for what you mean. Oligarchy is probably a better one. This will probably evolve into idiocracy if you have seen the similarly named documentary .

At the end of the day Apple is doing their damnedest to force the requirement to support other app stores. They want their cake, and they want to eat it too. Unfortunately they are going to make an epic fuckton of money before they get told to stop.

There is so much stuff that needs to get fixed in congress over this issue is even a blip on the radar.

Bravo!

Why would you want to give the government such power? That always amazes me... when there is an issue, people jump on "let's vote for government to regulate this", but then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.