External Purchasing From the Kindle App

I remember emailing with Apple PR in 2011 when they made the change to force the removal of IAP in the app and a move that essentially shut down Sony’s entire ebook store. Glad we can at least go directly to the web, even if it is a regression from what it was until 2011 or so.

Leaving a second comment because it just occurred to me that for 14 years, Apple has made the process of buying ebooks on other platforms a more friction-filled experience than it should be — and than it was in 2008 — and to what end? Apple still was found to have violated antitrust laws regarding price fixing and forced to pay a $450 million settlement (I got $140 or something from the settlement, so thanks Apple for that I guess) and despite forcing competitors to have a lesser experience in their apps, it isn’t as if Apple Books ever achieved significant market share.

I won’t buy anything in Apple Books — the DRM hasn’t been cracked (probably due to lack of demand) and I like the freedom to read my ebooks on eink devices as well as my phone and iPad — but even without that, the Apple Books experience (page turning animations aside) was never good enough for me to not overcome the hassle of having to go to the special website Amazon built for the iPad or on iOS.

So they did all of this and I wonder what it really got them. Because last I checked, Amazon was the runaway leader for ebooks and I’m sure Kobo ranks behind them and Apple is probably a distant third.

@Christina It’s the same with the other anti-steering stuff. Apple got Netflix to make the user experience worse by not being able to sign up in the app, yet that wasn’t enough of a stick to get them to use IAP. It seems like everyone lost: more difficult for customers, lower conversion rate for Netflix, zero IAP revenue for Apple. Maybe it marginally helped Apple TV+ vs. Netflix?

I’m kind of resigned to some court allowing Apple to charge some fees, but I’d love to see them keep losing completely and forever lose their ability to tax all digital goods that happened to be purchased while using one of their devices.

If developers wouldn’t get smacked with some kind of anti-trust action for it, I wish all of the third party developers ganged together to blackout all their apps for a week or month and demonstrate to Apple just who needs who in this relationship.

Apple is the ten thousand pound gorilla, no doubt, but can you seriously tell me that people would still buy iPhones if they could not use Google Maps, Mail, Calendar, YouTube, Netflix, etc on it? I highly doubt it.

Apple should be able to charge fees for hosting apps, their developer tools, and payment processing and pretty much nothing else, in my opinion. And if they are going to charge fees for app hosting, they should be prohibited from forcing people to use their store front.

Agree with all the above.

How did people just accept the idea that Apple deserves a cut of every transaction on their platform in perpetuity, or suffer a purposely worse experience?

Now that the precedent has been set, I seriously hope it stands. It's now been very well documented that there's no actual justification for it. I don't see how it could be overturned now.

They've already started making the changes, are they really going to undo it? Would Apple really be that obstinate and openly hostile to absolutely everyone to take it away now that it's been done?

@ gildarts

The dev tools are what Apple is charging for. The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

Netflix, Amazon, et all can absolutely be on the iPhone and avoid that fee - just like in 2007 - that is, as a website in Safari. They can even “add to Home Screen” their web app’s icon just like 2007.

It’s interesting how we want to get paid for our work, but don’t want Apple to get paid for theirs.

@Someone else

If Apple isn’t getting paid by the cost of their devices, which are totally out of line compared to the actual price of the hardware, I don’t know what they are doing.

A less flippant answer is that I don’t mind them getting paid, I just want them to be subjected to actual competition and market forces. As the court ruled, Apple has been using their market power to extract above market rates for their IP. It is impossible to separate out the value of the developer tools from the hosting, intellectual property, marketing, and everything else that Apple says the fee is for because it is impossible, outside of Europe, to disentangle the various aspects.

We can guess that the market rate is going to settle at 15% or less for everything since that was the bone Apple tossed out to try to get people off their backs.

Look, I have defended Apple generally over the years previously, but I don’t know how anyone could have read the court documents and Apple’s internal communication and come away with the impression that they even believe 30% is a fair market value for their IP and other services. They have been extracting it for one reason only, because they could.

Another thought

> (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

I frankly don’t care how much all that costs because Apple forces everyone to use it. If they wanted to reduce the costs, stop forcing everyone to use those services, problem solved.

You can’t force people to use something and then cry about how much it costs you.

> (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

It's funny that there's a long line of companies that would happily relieve Apple of the"burden" of all of that.

There's nothing to it but an artificial barrier that Apple put up.

"I won’t buy anything in Apple Books — the DRM hasn’t been cracked"

I probably still wouldn't give my money to Apple, but the simple solution is to buy a book in the place that benefits the author the most, and then just get it from Anna.

"The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP"

No. This argument makes zero sense. Apple is not providing this IP out of the goodness of its heart; it's doing it because its devices would be worthless otherwise. I give Apple money to buy its devices. I want stuff like Netflix on my devices; otherwise, I won't buy them.

So, providing the infrastructure for these things to run is the absolute minimum Apple needs to do to make its devices worth anything. In fact, Apple should give Netflix money, not the other way around.

@Someone else
"The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, one-click purchasing)."

Apple should audition for the part of the Thenardiers in the musical Les Misérables.

The dev tools and App Store reviews and distribution are what you get for a $100(?) annual developer subscription. Next question?

"It’s interesting how we want to get paid for our work, but don’t want Apple to get paid for theirs."

Apple gets paid — it took in $95.4 billion in its FY25 second quarter. Some of that surely is thanks to price-gouging on storage and memory on the Mac, but most of that is thanks to having the most popular mobile phone brand, which is the most popular mobile phone brand because every major developer writes software for it. The notion that developers aren't doing their part to get Apple paid is complete propaganda on behalf of executives who want to bleed its developer community completely dry to please Wall Street, and it's crazy how many people just nakedly repeat it without actually thinking about why Apple is such a valuable company today.

I used to think that Apple should be more than capable of competing on fair terms.

After the Apple Vision Pro, Apple Intelligence, touch bar, butterfly keyboard, port less PRO MacBook, that creative collaboration app I can't even remember the name of, tone deaf depiction of the creative industry and Apple users in ads, well ... not so sure anymore.

The Epic store will be like a glass of ice water in a desert.

Okay, everyone, so what’s the fair market compensation model (that actually makes sense) that you imagine Apple should use, and how is it fair in our current economic system and legal regime?

Like real-life business-fair, not ‘fair because the vibe is right for me personally’ or ‘fair because free-as-in-beer’ or ‘fair because of some imaginary thing that doesn’t exist yet will happen’ or ‘fair because I wave my hands and make Apple do something against their best interest but lack a legal framework that forces them to do so”, or “I change IP and copyright law so that…”

Is 15% too much? Is 30% too much? What’s the right number? 0%? Why? List the obvious knock-on effects of that (iPhone price goes up $500?).

Perhaps we go to old-school dev licenses — free for hobbyists and you have to use BASIC, IDE+SDK costs money and progressive fees for bigger sellers? (isn’t that what exists now?)

I love complaining as much as the next guy, but what’s your actual proposal? (again, that makes sense to Apple and the other players (i.e. users, society, capitalism, etc.).

A contract is and should only be made between parties when there’s a mutual benefit. Seems like a lot of you feel you’re not getting enough benefit. So what’s the next logical conclusion? Stop doing/buying Apple stuff? switch to Android/Linux/Windows? Build your own rig and OS? Regulate because powerful business is too powerful (so what’s the regulation, and what’s the obvious (legal) thing Apple does in reaction?)

For example, I predict that Apple will seal the current (possible?) loophole that may allow devs to make un-commissioned purchases via links in their apps… how? Either through legal means, or if that doesn’t work, they’ll change the annual dev contract so that you need to track and report those sales and cut Apple a check, or they’ll just change the contract in some other way to recapture that leakage.

I list a change, and the obvious after-effects.

So, what’s your new proposed business/societal model?

@Someone else I have not seen a good argument for why the mobile situation should be any different from the way it is on Mac/PC/Web. I think it’s quite obvious that, were Apple somehow not allowed to charge any commission, they would still find it advantageous for them to offer third-party APIs and an App Store. iPhone with no apps would be dead in the water. iPhone with price up $500 would not be in a good place, so they wouldn’t do that. The reason they are currently able to charge 30% is because that’s the number they picked and they’re in a monopoly-like situation, not because that’s the number that popped out of an economic or fairness model.

"A contract is and should only be made between parties when there’s a mutual benefit."

Apple providing developers with free access to APIs and SDKs, along with everything they need, and only charging them *only* for payment processing costs, would be mutually beneficial and "fair" by your definition.

That's it—zero additional cost. Not 30%, not 15%, but 0%.

That's fair, by your own definition of fairness, because it would be mutually beneficial.

Small developers can sell apps and earn a reasonable income, Apple can sell iPhones that offer a vast number of high-quality apps (and they compensate for this with the cost of running the store, which is fair), and consumers can access devices that provide the kinds of apps they want. Everybody wins.

If Apple were forced to do that, do you think it would stop providing development resources for its platforms and shut down the App Store? Do you think Apple only "allows" apps on iOS because developers are forced to pay for the resources required to build these apps, and pay for the ability to sell them? No! Apple benefits tremendously from all of this, *and* they also steal money from their developers because they have built a system that gives them monopolistic power, to the detriment of everybody else, including Apple's customers.

I don't see any possible solution mattering so long as Apple is a publicly traded company that has to make even more money than they did the previous year, and it needs to be as much of a growth in profit as they possible can make it. They are legally obligated to do that for their shareholders, which means they will eventually leverage every bit of power they have and turn to every dirty trick they can to keep making even more money. Inevitably this leads to selling out every last bit of goodwill their customers and developers have, until everything sucks and the company collapses. We're already on our way there.

"it needs to be as much of a growth in profit as they possible can make it. They are legally obligated to do that for their shareholders"

People often say this to excuse corporate behavior, but it's not true. Executives have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the company's shareholders; however, this does not mean they are legally required to maximize short-term profits at the expense of all other considerations. I would argue that maximizing short-term profits at the expense of all else goes *against* their fiduciary duty.

Apple's leadership can absolutely be a good steward of the company. They're failing to do so because they are, with all due respect, fucking useless shitheads, to put it mildly, not because they are legally required to fail.

Tim Apple and his friends suck because they suck, not because they are powerless not to suck.

@Plume Yes, this is a complete myth that executives are supposed to maximize short-term profits. Apple does lots of things that are focused on the long term or building the brand, and the people promoting the myth have no problem with that. The executives have great latitude to do whatever they want (subject to the Board) because how are you going to prove in court that they weren’t maximizing long-term value?

They may not be precisely legally obligated to make the most profit in the short term, but because they are required to create growth, in reality we see that happening with every traded company eventually.

The problem is that growth is unsustainable in the long term. Eventually there will come a point where there aren't any new markets to expand into (or at least none that make sense), there aren't new major innovations, and a company basically reaches equilibrium. This *ought* to be a fine state of affairs, where they're still making a good profit and providing a valuable product that by and large isn't changing very much, but that situation is untenable if growth has to be sustained.

Inevitably there will be nothing more to do to generate growth other than cannibalizing what made the company good and profitable in the first place. We're already seeing that with Apple. I've yet to hear any compelling argument that such a thing can be avoided under the constraint of needing to maintain growth.

Part of the reason this is so annoying too is that often company's have a great product, and they and their users would be well served by just keeping it the way it is, making minor changes and refinements as it makes sense. But instead they need to keep changing it up, shoehorning in new things, changing the look and layout of everything to demonstrate that they're not stagnant, and then ending up with something that's a sloppy mess compared to the past. Of course Apple is a prime example of this, but we see it *everywhere*, not just in the tech industry.

This is so awesome. It took years and years from a court to make it happen, but finally the user experience on iOS isn't not terrible. It could be better, but at least it's not as bad as it was.

Apple is idiotic for continuing to fight this battle. They could've had their cake and eaten it too. But no, they were like little children stomping their feet that little Bobby wouldn't play with them.

Tim should resign for making Apple customers suffer for nearly 15 years.

@Michael Tsai,
> I have not seen a good argument for why the mobile situation should be any different from the way it is on Mac/PC/Web.

Does there really need to be a good reason? Legally-speaking, market-speaking, etc. — their current model is profitable and it’s very similar to any number of video game consoles which typically charge 30%.

Why don’t we think of the iPhone as a (closed) console? I think we should because that’s basically the business model. (Actually, I think it’s more than that — video game consoles aren’t about SDKs and IDEs or developers. They’d don’t seem to compete for them anywhere that I see. They’re about distribution, marketing, and an engaged audience, and for Nintendo, doing some cool stuff. I think Apple did/does way more for devs than Sony/XBox/Nintendo.)

I think we’re colored from coming from the PC world… but this wasn’t meant to be a PC. It was coming from the iPod direction — but self-contained, like a video game console. (no ripping and loading it with music)

So I’d say judging it by PC metrics is the wrong way to look at it. Video games is a better lens.

And TBH, unlike a video game console, I actually find the iPhone to be very full-featured, and did from the original closed version (as did plenty of other folks!)

I personally don’t need many third-party apps on my phone for it to be useful. Notes, Messages, Maps, and Safari. Those are the killer apps for me, and I imagine a lot of folks are the same. (I’d rather play my games on some other 30% console :) )

@Plume,
> Apple providing developers with free access to APIs and SDKs, along with everything they need, and only charging them *only* for payment processing costs, would be mutually beneficial and "fair" by your definition.
>
> That's it—zero additional cost. Not 30%, not 15%, but 0%.
>
> That's fair, by your own definition of fairness, because it would be mutually beneficial.

Huh?? Why would Apple or anyone do that? A business giving away their IP for free when they could get 30% instead?

Their ‘mutual benefit’ part of the equation seems to be missing from your proposed solution.

Apple’s not a charity or a public benefit corporation, and thinking Apple would do something against their obvious interests and past behavior is really magical thinking (recall Jobs when charged like a dollar for a firmware update).

If you were Apple, you’d take that deal? I certainly wouldn’t and don’t think anyone else would, either. But perhaps you can come up with another proposal.

@Bri,
> I don't see any possible solution mattering so long as Apple is a publicly traded company that has to make even more money than they did the previous year, and it needs to be as much of a growth in profit as they possible can make it.

They could let profits level out and focus on growth less, I suppose (fix those bugs! and services actually could help pay for that) — they’d have to explain that to the shareholders, though, but if anyone could possibly pull it off, Apple might.

Patagonia has turned into a public benefit corporation and their brand is now something like ‘we’ll take the hit for nature (and charge you for our luxurious goods)’. Could Apple ever do that? Maybe by focusing on dividends and less on stock price growth?

But yeah, ‘line goes up and to the right forever’ just isn’t sustainable for the world.

Also, I think I read somewhere that the ‘legal requirement to maximize profits’ is actually not true.

I’m actually quite appreciative of Apple’s hard lines on things like privacy, etc. rather than the easy buck.

The flip side of this is that we really lean into the reality that Apple is maturing and walking slower, rather than sprinting around like a kid with the accompanying excitement.

Will Apple ever have another earth-changing revolutionary product? Who knows — the iPhone is their 4th revolution — that’s a good… no, great, run… but they’re now missing the head revolutionary.

One argument I’d say about maturing companies is that they also have the power to squash or co-opt new upstarts… the other revolutionaries that aim to take the space the iPhone/smartphone has now.

But back to business models or changes — since I brought up consoles:

I think console rev share / fees are pretty stable. Steam/Epic battling for the desktop video game store space is about the closest.. what’s interesting there is that yes, Steam takes 30% (and Epic takes less but gamers just don’t like them for various reasons, despite them spending millions in game giveaways (driving the value of games down in the process, as people have a ceiling on game-playing time))… Steam takes 30%, but that goes down to 25% after $10M in sales, then 20% after $50M in sales — so it’s a regressive fee system (smaller sellers pay more) vs Apple’s progressive fee structure (smaller sellers pay less).

The other consoles take about 30%, also… don’t know if they have progressive or regressive fee structures… may be individually negotiated for big publishers, too, but that’s all top secret.

- So what if Apple did something similar? Charge less for big sellers. Would that make us happy? (It wouldn’t help me, but I’m not selling billions a year)

- What if we as a nation put in some price caps? (I imagine companies would try to recoup that lost revenue / spare bucks that players now have… perhaps with premium subscriptions for things like chat or discounts on pizza and whatnot)

- What if we regulate/limit smartphone time-used by law (like China with their limit on video game playing hours)? If that were actually possible, then that’d be interesting… probably benefit for society, maybe not great for big or small devs? Or maybe a wash.

- What if America did EU-style market influence-style regulation? That’d be surprising considering our country’s liberal democracy and common law foundation but who knows? “Right to repair” is finally getting some legs.

There are a lot of things that are legal and possible but I’d argue that many of them are on the margins or would require a real grass-roots campaign targeting consumers. All this 15% 30% outbound links stuff is super-inside baseball that normal people don’t really care about, and I’d argue, that small devs really only care about in a mostly ideological way.

The big devs are the ones who want to free-ride the most, but our legal system doesn’t allow that (or rather, we’ll see soon enough).

> Why would Apple or anyone do that?

I'm unsure if you're trolling, as I've already answered that question.

>Their ‘mutual benefit’ part of the equation seems to be missing from your proposed solution.

No, it's not. Here it is again, quoted word-for-word:

"Small developers can sell apps and earn a reasonable income, Apple can sell iPhones that offer a vast number of high-quality apps (and they compensate for this with the cost of running the store, which is fair), and consumers can access devices that provide the kinds of apps they want. Everybody wins."

For everyone's sake, please refrain from making the same comment every time and ignoring all the answers that point out why you are completely wrong. You're not changing anyone's mind, you're just making yourself look like a corporate shill for a multi-billion international corporation that gives zero shits about you.

@Someone else Apple has repeatedly said that iOS is their vision for the future of computing. They see it as general purpose, a computer replacement, not a console. The current model uses monopoly power to employ DRM-enforced control and toll collecting. Aside from being bad for customers, this also makes the user interface worse by encouraging companies to try to get around the tolls and incentivizing exciting new developments to happen off-platform, out of Apple’s control. This is ultimately not to Apple’s benefit, either.

@Plume,

> "Small developers can sell apps and earn a reasonable income, Apple can sell iPhones that offer a vast number of high-quality apps (and they compensate for this with the cost of running the store, which is fair), and consumers can access devices that provide the kinds of apps they want. Everybody wins."

Wow, sure. Yeah, so what are the details?

Why would Apple change to do this? Would they give up the 30% licensing fee thing? Would they increase iPhone prices? Or they’d be happy to be uncompensated for the value they’re delivering.

Everybody wins. A real concept of a plan, I guess.

@Michael Tsai,

Notwithstanding that Apple typically says “this is the future and everything else is junk” until they themselves do the thing that was junk but with a twist and that’s the new Apple future.

The future of computing certainly could be a console. Well, actually, isn’t it already? How many people really need more than a smartphone now?

It’s already the computer is for teenagers and college students as they were born after the iPhone came out… the smartphone is their computer (and over 50% a of new US phones are iPhones! Crazy). Many of the new generations don’t know how to use file systems, a mouse, (make a phone call). For many, it’s their sole computing device and they seem pretty happy or content with it as-is now.

And cloud-based AI will probably make the smartphone even less necessary… I think there are computing revolutions to come (both for good and bad)… one of the bad sides for us old-schoolers is that computing is literally an appliance now. A pocket-sized toaster. And doesn’t need many more skills than that to use it effectively for things people want to do.

That’s something Apple will have to deal with for sure. But even on that front, they seem to be doing okay with the smartphone as a terminal for AI (and future things that will still probably have a screen, be portable, have a camera, etc.)

So anyway, I’m not sure I’d agree that Apple is making the user interface worse.

It’s certainly making some things worse — the new iPhone Photos App is pretty awful — but the store and IAP is definitely not one of them, IMO.

It was a nice, compact, self-contained whole, with one-click purchasing, licensing, and fee-collection (just like a video game console… better, actually). Too bad some of it seems to be illegal (now — the CA anti-steering thing)… that’s what makes the user experience worse.

>Why would Apple change to do this?

Because they're forced to by the government, which is what you're arguing against. Do you not see that you're running in a circle?

I point out how this change makes everybody win. You answer "but why would Apple do this?"

I point out that laws make Apple change. You answer "that makes the user experience worse."

I disagree and point out that the change makes everybody win. You answer "but why would Apple do this?"

and so on.

>A real concept of a plan, I guess.

You asked me a specific question, and I answered it specifically. If you're unhappy with my answer, ask a better question next time.

>The future of computing certainly could be a console. Well, actually, isn’t it already? How many people really need more than a smartphone now?

Smartphones are not consoles.

@Someone else Just because it’s not itemized in the way that you want doesn’t mean the value is uncompensated. If you shop at a store that has “free shipping” the drivers and trucks are not working for free. Note that Apple did not reduce the prices of Mac hardware when it started collecting a toll on Mac software sold through the App Store. And Apple has something like 35 million developers paying annual fees. That’s billions in compensation right there.

@Michael Tsai,

Apple definitely uses ‘vibe’ pricing — 30% is a nice round number, after all. Mac prices have also been quite stable over the decades. Hardware has been improving, though, so buyers get more for their money.

Why isn’t that considered a price drop? The 30% -> 15% for small developers sounds like a price drop to me, too (though that was probably lawsuit + price matching with Android)

Another way to look at the Mac (or iPhone) is to ask: could they have charged more for it from consumers if they didn’t charge developers instead? Consumers (only) pay for the profit margin.

Maybe? Or do what Apple did with the iPhone. Go the Nintendo route, not the Android or Atari 2600 route. Heck, even Android isn’t as open as the 2600 was (and the 2600 had a problem with money-grab games once anyone could make a cartridge).

Just a thought excercise: As a company gets more popular and has more market power, it could more easily raise prices… demand goes up, a MBA would say: raise prices/fees, right? Maximize those profits. But has Apple? Why not? Competition? Too hard to find another round number?

I think that more devices sold means more network effect so iMessage users are happy, more money and audience for developers, more money for Apple, too. Win win win? Or Win lose win?

Oh, back to your point re: the Mac App Store —

I think the Mac App Store is kind of an afterthought for big productivity apps — good for bundles for things bought from iOS. Users who use Macs and PCs are really different from smartphone-first users.

Actually I think the MAS is quite nice for little apps or extensions that do one thing. And I think that it’s actually good for developers — as I see a lot of little apps for sale there.

I know that if was me, creating a website, SEO, hooking up a payment system, managing licenses, unlock codes, refunds etc… that’s worth 15% for me.

There are plenty of tiny MAS apps that don’t have websites (and I’ve bought some of them) — they tweet about it and boom, they got customers. And it’s really easy for the customers, too.

I often have a hard time deciding whether to buy the MAS version or the direct one to give the dev more money — simply because it’s so easy to share what I bought with my family via Family Sharing. The problem is that I’d actually consider paying a little bit more for that convenience both for billing and for future installation and use. This is for like $5-10 Mac apps, though.

@Someone else The small business program is a price drop for developers but a rounding error for Apple, so great PR for them. iPhone prices have gone up.