This is kind of the crux of the matter to me. Apple, in this instance, is basically a credit card with a 30% transaction fee, and it's using its dominance in the mobile phone market to force everyone who uses their phone (via their app store policies) to use their credit cards instead of ones with 3% transaction fees, which is pretty classic behavior outlawed by antitrust legislation.

> Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?

In many markets, Apple does let a dev link users to external payments options.

But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store. They require a dev to track purchases made on that external system and pay a (slightly reduced) fee. You agreed to be audited to make sure you are making the proper payments. You may have to pay Apple a cut in more scenarios since the payment system is no longer cleanly isolated.

In-app purchasing is not an expensive credit card processor. It is Apple’s simplest method of collecting their contractually obligated royalties.

So this link is not cheaper if you are following your contract. It is cheaper to buy on your site when those users aren’t coming from the app.

Note that it can still be worth a dev using an external payments options system for other reasons - it is just that a lot of them are dark patterns. Things like variable rates for different people for dating services, no-consent charging for gambling apps, gathering additional tracking information so you have additional ways to monetize the user, making unsubscribing from a service more difficult than Apple makes it, etc.

> But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store.

This is its own can of worms, but doesn't really change much about what I said above.

That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Sometimes I misjudge the intent of a comment.

Apple's restrictions on origination in places like the EU reinforce that Apple does not see these price increases as a tradeoff for quality that customers are willingly going along with, and does believe that if customers were able to be informed about alternative payment methods that already exist that are cheaper, they would take them. In instances where it can't hide alternatives from users, it imposes fees at the point where users are informed about those alternatives: fees that make it impossible for alternatives to be cheaper than Apple's own inflated cost.

Apple's origination fees are a lot less about compensation and a lot more about making sure that on iOS, a less expensive payment option will never be offered. This is not the action of a company that believe that it is adding value to the purchasing experience, it is the action of a company that believes that its purchasing systems would not be chosen by many customers if they were fairly stacked up against existing alternatives.

> That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app?

Apple wants you to use their payment processor because it is more convenient than auditing/p and potentially suing companies for breaking their contractual agreement around revenue sharing. They force transactions where they collect a royalty through in-app payments, and actually forbid other transactions from using it (like booking an Uber).

It is also a better end user experience.

But you aren’t paying 30% for a particular end user experience feature. You are paying what Apple put into the agreement as what they think they are owed from the value their ecosystem provides.

So Apple split their “payment processing” to 3% and their “using our tools, platform, store and infrastructure” to 27%. It’s certainly possible to undercut 3% for payment processing.

The real problem is 27% of revenue excludes entire categories of services, but that isn’t something regulators can easily force - they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.

> It is also a better end user experience.

If this was clearly true, Apple would not forbid apps from telling users that other payment methods exist. You don't have to hide alternatives from a user if what you're offering them is the obviously superior service.

It's fairly safe to say that Apple doesn't believe that their user experience is obviously superior. At least, not so obviously superior that customers are willing to pay a 30% surcharge for it. Apple isn't confident that if Patreon told users at the time of checkout, "heads up, this is going to cost you 30% more because you're using the app" that those users wouldn't jump-ship to the browser.

Apple phrases this as the price of iOS overall, that this is the most convenient, user-friendly way to collect a payment that provides value to every iOS user. But again, if they believed that, they wouldn't need to hide it from the user. Apple's policy is not that you can't collect payments through Safari and you have to use an app. Apple's policy is that you cannot tell users about surcharges on the iOS store or advertise lower prices through alternative payments.

This is not the policy of a company that believes it is acting everyone's best interests.

> they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.

I don't know what regulators can and can't force; that depends entirely on the countries and jurisdictions involved. But I do know that as users, we should view a 27% tax on every subscription paid to indie creators as evidence that something has gone wrong with this platform.

It is weird that Apple believes that their ecosystem provides more value per-transaction to indie creators than the actual platform that those creators are using. I know that creators don't agree with that assessment, they're telling users to stop using the app. And it is weird that Apple is not giving Patreon the choice to opt-out of the supposed value that their platform is providing by disabling transactions in the app. I don't know what line you personally use to decide when something becomes rent-seeking, but saying "the platform provides value" isn't enough of a justification; every single rent seeking behavior on the market from every company can be justified by saying "we control access to a valuable resource, we're providing value by providing access."

At a certain point, you have to look at some of this through a the lens of just human sensibility and say, is this what we actually want a phone platform to look like? Do we want a phone ecosystem where 30% of every dollar you donate to some starving creator goes to one of the richest companies on earth? Is that actually representative of the value Apple is adding via iOS, or is it a parasitic, rent-seeking behavior from a platform that uses its userbase as a bargaining chip to extract value from unrelated services on an ever-increasing level?

Of course Apple will tell you that everyone owes them 27% of their revenue regardless, that this is just the easy way to collect it. Literally any company in their position would say that, regardless of what they were doing or why. The question is whether anyone believes them. The question is whether we believe that it's an accident that they've priced their agreements in the UK to be so arduous that you are guaranteed to lose money by leaving their ecosystem. Is that actually unbundling, or is it punitive fees designed to shut down competitors.

Only regulators can decide, but normal people can guess.