External Payments From the HEY App
Well, we risked everything, but also secured a four-year truce, and now near-total victory is at hand: HEY is finally for sale on the iPhone in the US!
Credit for this amazing turn of events goes to Epic Games founders Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein, who did what no small developer like us could ever dream of doing: they spent over $100 million to sue Apple in court. And while the first round yielded very little progress, Apple’s (possibly criminal) contempt of court is what ultimately delivered the resolution. Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet).
This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a way to distribute our iPhone apps and keep the customer relationship by billing directly. The 30% toll gets all the attention, and it is ludicrously egregious, but to us, it’s just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don’t tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer.
This is a win for users, and Apple won’t lose a cent from commissions from any of these apps.
Previously:
- Critical Warning for External Purchases in App Store
- App Review Guidelines Updated for Epic Anti-Steering
- HEY Calendar Rejected From the App Store
- HEY Approved With Trial
- It Doesn’t Work
- Have You Contributed Any Revenue?
- HEY Rejected From the App Store
- Basecamp App Rejected for Including Help Link
Update (2025-05-30): David Heinemeier Hansson:
Apple is back to their intolerable bullshit with the App Store. Despite approving our initial HEY update with web billing immediately, they’ve now sat on a bug-fix update for over a week. Are they gearing up for another shakedown or is this just the regular malice lottery?
[…]
Would you look at that! Not a peep for a fucking week. Then a few tweets and through it went. I mean, it’s nice that Apple have turned on notifications for my tweets, but this is no way to live. Few devs have a bullhorn like this.
My problem with Tim [Sweeney] and David is not that they don’t have a point. They absolutely do, Apple exploits a dominate market position to be able to get what they get.
My problem is that they are not real stakeholders in the App Store and apps as a way of life. Tim has plenty of other income sources, David runs a productivity SaaS. The App Store to them is mostly an extractive add-on.
So when they start white-knighting for us, it comes from a place of never having really benefited from the App Store, not being dependent on it. Having no real stakes in it. We’ve all been dealing with these problems for a decade plus, and yet working around them to create amazing software. These guys show up, get a rejection and have a meltdown. I’ve dealt with more rejections than I can remember: you can get mad or you fix it and move on.
Or, hear me out, they’re speaking out for us since they aren’t risking losing their whole businesses. We can’t do that or Apple will boot us out.
They saw a problem and took action. Just because those of us who built our livelihoods in the App Store and learned to route around the problem, I’d rather not have the problem to begin with.
As long as we can’t install software without Apple approval AND signing, there is no freedom.
13 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
💩posting from random commenters incoming! Who wants to do research before signing up for services rather than fill a deplorable, greedy corporation’s pockets. Get ready for “only Apple cares for user safety and privacy” BS, etc.
You nailed it: who wants to do research before signing up?!? How on earth is this a good use of my time? The strawperson of whether or not Apple "cares" is irrelevant and silly, all of my subs are three taps away, and cancelation is two more from that. I will _always_ be refunded. I have to talk with nobody, email nobody. I have as close to zero worry about information leakage as I can have.
All this clambering for "choice" is for and about devs, not consumers. We (consumers) have it good, and this won't make it better.
@random Apple will always cancel your subscription. They are not reliable at refunding, even when there’s a good reason.
DHH is a pretty horrible person.
Seeing someone horrible be happy about something makes me question the thing they’re so happy about.
He's not horrible so much as gullible.
He believes what Jordan Peterson and Musk say. He applauded JD Vance crap about there being no freedom of expression in Europe, and he's full on MAGA, which is ironic considering he had to move to Denmark to escape climate change induced wildfires.
But he says a lot of good things to, and he makes a lot of good things as well.
Personally I think his worst offence is misunderstanding taoism completely.
But he's absolutely right about external payments.
@Kristoffer ah I see so he's like nearly everyone else in tech. Smart but believes the crazy things their chosen political party says.
I consider myself a true centrist, so most people seem far-right or far-left to me already. And the few centrists in tech just don't talk about anything because saying anything about either side is just asking for trouble from the extremists in both camps.
And also his political leanings have nothing to do with this subject. Anyone willing to blindly dismiss someone’s views based on their political leanings is just as an idiot as the ones blindly follow their political side/party.
Especially since his MAGA leanings more closely align with apples insistence on putting tariffs on other peoples work.
Apparently, he really needed to defend Andrew Tate repeatedly. Strange look. Can DHH and Apple both lose somehow? DHH thinks JD Vance is super smart talking about the lack of free speech in Germany, while his administration is trying to deport protesters and defend anything that disagrees with their point of view? This tracks.
@ gildarts
Seeing an ass like DHH or Elon Musk or some MAGA creep liking something is a data point — for me and for you.
You can put your own data point on the graph next to theirs, but see where that cloud of points leads.
