You could make the argument that Patreon isn't much more than a banking app.
It just focuses on the receiver of the money than the sender.
I think Apple is slowly killing apps with this policy. Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else. This will likely be much stronger in countries where iPhones do not have the same market share as in the US.
Apple users seem to be fine with everything being much more expensive. Not only the 30% apple tax itself, developers know Apple users pay more and specify higher prices on Apple.
Google allows out–of–store installation (for now...) so it's much easier to argue there's competition. Apps installed through F–Droid don't have this tax.
And in the EU alternative app stores are allowed on iphone as well. In both cases, it’s a near negligible amount of people that use them. Your exceptions prove the rule, if anything.
This would not be true if all markets rose simultaneously. It’s why they all fight so hard to delay the inevitable. You don’t have to win, you just have to win for long enough to be established
> Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else.
Frankly, yes, please. I mean, I'm biased as my whole career is in web app development, but there are so many things these days that do not need a whole native app. They're just communicating with a server backend somewhere, using none of the unique native functionality of the phone (much of which is available in browser APIs these days anyway). I can block ads in a web app much more easily. It's much harder to do customer-hostile things like block screenshots in a web app.
Native apps definitely have a place, but I think they're very overused, mostly for reasons that benefit the business at the expense of the customer.
You still can't have a "share to" target that is a web app on iOS. And the data your can store in local storage on safari is a joke.
Of course, forget about background tasks and integrated notifications.
In fact, even on Android you miss features with web apps, like widgets for quick actions, mapping actions to buttons and so on.
And no matter how good you cache things, the mobile browser will unload the app, and you will always get this friction when you load the web app on the new render you don't have on regular apps.
No, I use them but loading and unloading the app in the tab still happens when the browser flushes the app from memory because the OS killed it or the browser eviction policy hits.
This loading is not nearly as seamless as a regular app starting back up.
For a regular app, you have the app loading, and the os cache helping with it. If you do your job half correctly, it loads as a block almost instantly.
For a web app you have the web browser loading, the the display of the white viewport in a flash, then the app loading in the browser (with zero os cache to help with so it's slower). It needs then to render. Then restoring the scroll (which is a mess with a browser) and the state as much as you can but you are limited with persistence size so most content must be reloaded which means the layout is moving around. Not to mention JS in a browser is not nearly as performant as a regular app, so as your app grows, it gets worse.
I disagree, native apps on iOS have important abilities that no web application can match. The inability to control cache long-term is alone a dealbreaker if trying to create an experience with minimal friction.
I think the parent may be referring to the fact that safari/webkit will evict all localstorage/indexeddb/caches etc after 7 days of not visiting a site. And apparently this now extends to PWAs making it a pretty big blog to building any infrequently accessed PWA that needs to persist user data locally.
Those same elevated controls are used to steal PII and sell to data brokers. Again, it's the companies that are trying to force apps on their users. If it were genuinely a much better UX, they wouldn't have to do that.
I don’t think you are correct, but I could be wrong. For example, can you replicate the functionality of TikTok - autoplay unmuted videos as the user scroll down to new videos? It’s the experience that the user expects.
I've probably deleted 15 apps from my phone in the past year as I steadily move over to the web for everything.
My chat agent, file transfer tool, Grubhub, Amazon, YouTube, news, weather are all deleted in favor of a set of armored browsers that suppress the trash and clean up the experience. Its been an amazing change, as those companies no longer get a free advertisement on the application grid of my phone, making my use of them much more intentional.
Sure, once the user interacts with the first video.
If third party native apps were installed and run without user interaction the same as cross-origin redirects, I would expect the same limitations with native apps.
I use FB via my web browser (Firefox on Android) and when I look at Shorts, it has this exact functionality. Web browsers on mobile can do this, clearly.
The Android Browser isn't as crippled as the iOS one. Watch a full screen video on Safari and tap a few times on different places on the screen and you will get a notification about "Typing is not allowed in Full-Screen" or some other nonsense
You couldn't make that argument because Patreon is also a platform to host content, not just send money. If it was something like a twitch donation app the argument would make more sense
The hosting aspect is only necessary because a) piracy and b) Google would eat their lunch if they were the gate keeper to content. Bit like how Ticketmaster takes all the money from artists because they get to say who sits in a seat.
Honestly I wouldn't be that shocked if Apple tried demanding a 30% royalty on bank deposits and bills paid using iPhone apps. They've decided the future of their company depends on being huge assholes about it.
I would be surprised by that because iPhone users would notice that. I think the App Store model relies on their fee being invisible to consumers, and the increased price you’re paying not being linked to them. AFAIK apps aren’t allowed to explain that they charge more if you subscribe on iPhone to users either, or why they do so.
True, hard for bank deposits where the user sees both ends of the transaction.
For bill payments though, they'd just insist on taking 30% of your electric bill payment and if the electric company's margins aren't high enough to absorb that then "Haha that sounds like a you problem" - Tim Cook, probably
While you're correct, it's worth noting that this only happened because the judge in the Epic lawsuit ordered an injunction forcing Apple to allow it.
Apple then "maliciously complied", allowing it while demanding a 27% fee on any web-based payments, which was found to be a violation of the injunction.
> For U.S. fans, there’s still a way to avoid Apple’s fee. When signing up in the iOS app, they can choose web checkout instead of Apple’s in-app purchase system. Apple’s rules require that any paid content shown in the iOS app is also available to purchase through Apple’s in-app system.
When you use Apple Pay, Apple collects ~0.15% (15 bps) from the issuing banks for credit.
$1B in transaction volume = $1.5M
In 2022 the total volume was estimated at $6T * .15% = $9B. Real number would be maybe half due to lower fees on debit, but it's hugely profitable for Apple, and carries zero risk.
I think this is a very strong and simple argument to use with regulators, politicians etc.
When I put my credit card into Apples ecosystem they take a 0.15% cut of the transaction and appear to be very happy with the results. When I put my application into the ecosystem they take 30%..
You can then break down why this is, but boy is that an interesting contrast.
Something interesting is that Apple and Google Pay charge a tiny commission (don't have the number at hand). Which banks didn't like, so at least on Android they created their own NFC payment stacks for a while. Only to then discover that maintaining such a stack cost them more per year than the commission.
My German Bank still maintains their own pay stack. It's also nice that I don't have to share my payment information or commission with another parasite
It just focuses on the receiver of the money than the sender.
I think Apple is slowly killing apps with this policy. Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else. This will likely be much stronger in countries where iPhones do not have the same market share as in the US.