- May 22, 2021
- 2 min read
Unless you've been living under a rock, everyone in tech is aware of and constantly talking about Apple's App Store 30% commission requirement for all in-app purchases, including requiring all purchasing in your app to through the in-app purchasing system for them to get their 30% cut.
Epic Games has taken them to court over it, which I think is in bad faith personally. Epic Games wants to put an app store of their own on Apple AND Google devices so they can be a middleman and take a cut of other peoples pie too.
But that doesn't mean I side 100% with Apple in this situation. Yes I do believe their requirements are too strict, heavy handed and greedy. 30% is the "standard" across the board, but they are the ones who set that standard, all other app stores barely existed before Apple.
Most companies have expressed how it's harming them and I empathize with them, for example Twitter just announced their new Spaces Ticket system and a majority of the cost of a ticket is going directly to Apple. But some have started to show gratitude towards Apple, such as CEO of Snap, Inc, Evan Spiegel, says they are happy to pay Apple 30% as without Apple they wouldn't exist.
I think there's a middle ground we can have here, Apple should lower the rate a bit, 30% is a bit high, but they can also not be so anti-competitive and offer app makers the ability to use their own payment methods along side of in-app purchasing API's, then charge the fee for using those API's.
Some people would find that a good tradeoff as using your own payment methods would require extra work for the infrastructure to make it happen when some apps just exist solely on the app store and not on the web at all.
And by using their own payment methods and systems I don't mean Stripe coming in and offering Swift API's for making payments directly in your app, but allow you to call out to your own API's to charge people, whether you use Stripe, Braintree or your own processing behind THOSE API's.