Creator Platforms and the App Store
But creators aren’t Apple’s traditional customers. They’re not app makers or game developers. They don’t actually have a piece of real estate in the App Store. They instead find their distribution through media platforms, including the likes of Patreon and Substack. It might feel weird for someone who publishes a podcast through Patreon, or a publication through Substack, to receive the same treatment from Apple as Netflix.
The emergence of the creator economy presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for Apple, and some delicate questions for Patreon and Substack. We want creators and subscribers to benefit from the power of Apple’s in-app purchases. In fact, at Substack we have been working with Apple to bring in-app purchases into our app, because we believe that anything that reduces the friction of a subscription is great for creators. We’re doing everything in our power to make the implementation of in-app purchases as creator-friendly as possible.
How much is the ease of in-app purchases worth to creators? It’s a salient question.
For something like Substack (or Patreon), you give them your payment information once on the Web and then subscribe to multiple creators, with them helping you manage the subscriptions. They can provide better tools to do this than Apple’s generic solution. For these types of apps, it’s obviously great to be able to add a new subscription within the app. But this is mostly because you’re already in the app, not because of Apple’s IAP per se. The benefit of IAP is that it’s the only way Apple allows them to process subscriptions. If they could just use stored payment information, like with the Amazon app, they wouldn’t be clamoring for IAP. If you consider how the Amazon shopping experience could be improved by switching it to using IAP (were that allowed) the idea is ridiculous.
How I got it wrong is that I checked, in the app, by looking at a publication to which I was already subscribed at the free tier, to upgrade to a paid account. That showed me a panel that read “You cannot manage your subscription in the app.” But that’s because I started the subscription on Substack’s website. For Substack subscriptions made on the web, you must continue to manage them on the web. This probably isn’t merely about avoiding Apple’s payment fees, but a practical requirement. I don’t think there’s any way, technically, that an individual subscription you started paying for on the web could be migrated on-the-fly to Apple’s payments, or vice-versa.
It sure seems like Apple’s restrictive guidelines and rigid payment system are hurting the user experience.
It seems obvious to me that creator-platform apps like Substack and Patreon ought to be in a new category of their own, the basic idea of which would be for Apple to take some sort of smaller cut of these transactions.
I think they should be a separate category but I also think they should have no fees. Amazon and Walmart and DoorDash and Uber and PayPal and eBay don’t pay fees to Apple for every transaction inside their commerce apps (and Amazon pays a much smaller fee for their digital purchases post Apple TV deal so that ATV could have Amazon content). If Patreon or Substack uses Apple as the payment processor, pay whatever those fees are. But not beyond that.
Personalized services should also be a separate category. It makes no sense to treat a therapy app with real humans responding one-on-one the same as an IAP loot box that has zero marginal cost.
The idea of special treatment for ‘creator platforms’ is interesting, but I think at that point anybody selling e-books or other 3rd party content - anything in the “Reader app” category, basically - ought to get the same deal; there’s nowhere obvious to draw the line.
Apple has a much better case for taking 30% of Amazon’s cut of a Kindle purchase than they do of taking 30% of the whole thing; the problem of course is that this can’t be audited in a scalable way.
Adding additional special categories for certain app genres is just putting lipstick on a pig. The whole monopolistic app store business model is fundamentally broken and is damaging the whole ecosystem.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-15): Jim Rea:
Does anyone understand how Patreon can work with Apple’s in-app purchase system? […] Did Apple add some new capability to in-app purchases to enable this? 🤔
Look at Substack. Each subscription for each creator gets its own SKU. Substack’s App Store listing exposes the most popular ones[…]
It feels like a particularly janky thing when you look at something like X, too, where each account’s subscription is its own SKU. I don’t know about now, but the App Store used to allow only some maximum number of SKUs (off the top of my head, maybe 10,000?).
My understanding is that there was a relatively low limit and that the SKUs had to be created manually. Now there seems to be an API, and I don’t know what the limit is.
A commenter reports that, on the Web, Substack has separate billing info for each subscription.
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
It sounds reasonable to do bill each creator separately as a separate business so that they can take advantage of the lower 15% fee tier, but these creators don’t have a direct relationship with apple… they have a relationship with a middleman, and that middleman has a relationship with apple.
I can imagine the complexity and overhead of tracking those individual creators though a middleman, and the App Store is not known for its nimbleness.
Perhaps apple should create its own Patreon competitor - and each creator is just like a podcaster or iBooks Author, and have a direct relationship with apple. (I have no idea how much ebook authors or podcasters take after apple fees, but I imagine it’s less than app developers since these folks don’t use the tech to build with)
> For something like Substack (or Patreon), you give them your payment information once on the Web and then subscribe to multiple creators, with them helping you manage the subscriptions. They can provide better tools to do this than Apple’s generic solution.
This is simply false. Just last night I discovered a credit card expired on one Substack subscription. Yep, one of them, because each is a separate sub with unique billing info. Ok, went to fix it… and utterly failed.
- Substack favoring “log in by getting an email and clicking a link” made it a huge PITA to just log in since I used Feedbin’s newsletter address
- Feedbin made things worse by changing their email address format from newsletters.feedbin.com to feedb.in
- Google’s captchas that are only training their bots tripped up the cc renewal flow after I finally managed to log in
Everything I did to try and *update a credit card number so I can willfully fork over cash to pay for something I want* ran face first into some growth hacking / fraud prevention bullshit.
I strongly ending my subscription entirely, a loss to both Substack and this particular creator. If it wasn’t a creator I respect and enjoy who was impacted, I’d have left the platform.
It’d sure be nice if I could manage these subscriptions through a single common UI. Like the one iOS can provide. I’d even pay more for the privilege!
Just open up for separate app stores. Allow sideloading 100%.
That is the only sane way forward. slicing the cake thinner and thinner "Here's the new Creator Platform category where your not allowed to sell games or subscriptions to games unless they are interactive novels with less than 5% of the visiual space taken up by illustrations and DO NOT include in game items that can be bough, but MAY be handed out as bonuses during the following list of approved holidays, as long as the creator resides in the country where the holiday is generally accpeted as a national holiday ..."
"but I imagine it’s less than app developers since these folks don’t use the tech to build with"
Stop believing Apple's lies. This never had anything to do with "using Apple's tech," or IP, or anything like that.
30% is what Apple charged for MP3s back in the old days, so I guess that makes sense.
So, actually, the 15% lower fees for small developers is actually a giveaway from Apple to spur small developers to come to its platform and grow into big 30%-paying ones. :)
@Old Unix Geek: yes, I know. I’ll pay to cover that expense, for the benefit to me of not having to share any information about myself with Substack, and have better control over subscriptions to boot.
Given that AltStore uses Patreon [1], with this "rule change", does this mean Apple will be able to extract 30% from any app installed via AltStore that uses Patreon?
Was reading the Patreon press release and they blame “Apple’s mandate” for the change, for example, the removal of per-creation billing.
Interesting and incorrect choice of language, much like “tax”.
Look, yeah yeah small creators and all that. Patreon was designed for the web and created a unique and custom business model and billing system.
When it chooses to come to the App Store (capital demands growth… see Epic), they build on someone else’s (well-known) foundation, including a 15-30% fee for media subscriptions (the Patreon app is a reader, rss, and podcast app from your subscribed creators now).
So it’s annoying to see Apple thrown under the bus for decisions they aren’t and shouldn't be responsible for. Patreon got away with a loophole for years and now it’s a “mandate” that’s causing them to change? That’s public relations BS.
And to be clear, the issue probably is that there aren’t enough SKUs (10k limit, as mentioned by Herr above) to support all the individual per-creation billings. That’s probably why they can’t just use an in-app purchase.
That 10k limit has been there for years. While Apple can and maybe should update that SKU limit, that’s definitely not a “mandate”. Language matters.
@Someone else I think calling this a “loophole” is revisionist history. Patreon has been in the App Store almost from the beginning of their service. The original IAP guidelines did not sound like they required IAP for situations like Patreon’s. Apple did not enforce them that way for Patreon or for other apps. Apple is certainly responsible for changing the rules. Apple contacted them and required them to do something (use IAP); that’s why it’s being called a mandate (“an official order or commission to do something” by their own dictionary).
@Someone else
Building on someone's else's foundation? For goodness sake, if Apple would get the fuck out of the way, there would be even more great apps for the platform. They literally micromanage app development (lot of private API's only Apple gets to use and no ability to make your own, forces use of their IDE, etc), dictates stupendously mind numbingly awful store terms which monopolizes distribution, and then people act like Apple is doing some favor for developers.
Here's a crazy thought, sell your optional tools for app development, offer an optional distribution platform, optional marketing platform, and optional cloud services platform and keep all the terrible policies in place for each and see how many developers bother to use these tools and services. Given the choice of alternatives from the very start, Apple wouldn't have any ability to compete. The Mac App Store is a wasteland because frankly the Apple ecosystem around it largely sucks, the iOS app store thrives only because Apple literally doesn't give any other options. Who is clamoring for for their primary computing device to be locked down the same way as a game console? What happened to the market? This didn't used to be a problem. Literally, what the hell happened? Who argues for this? I don't even understand…
