{"id":33512,"date":"2021-09-01T15:39:55","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T19:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=33512"},"modified":"2021-09-10T16:34:31","modified_gmt":"2021-09-10T20:34:31","slug":"south-korea-app-store-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/01\/south-korea-app-store-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"South Korea App Store Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sami Fathi<\/a> (Hacker<\/a> News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

South Korea today passed a bill that bans Apple and Google from requiring developers to use their own respective in-app purchasing systems, allowing developers to charge users using third-party payment methods, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> reports<\/a>.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

The bill is an amendment to the existing Telecommunications Business Act. It aims to ban Apple and Google from unfairly exploiting their market position to “force a provider of mobile content, etc., to use a specific payment method.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

David Heinemeier Hansson<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

But as much as South Korea is an important market, particularly for Google, it’s not the fifty million people there that truly scare either of these companies. It’s the crack in the dam. The one that’ll soon flood their scarecrow arguments on app-store payment mandates around the world.<\/p>

South Korea just made it a lot easier for every other country in the world to pass their own laws outlawing anti-competitive app store payment mandates. These countries will be able to point to South Korea to show that allowing developers to use Stripe, Square, Braintree, PayPal, or whatever to charge their customers won’t bring about app armageddon. Reality is going to refute the fear that Apple and Google have been working so hard to stoke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Lot of the discussion around this, especially from Apple’s side, makes it sound like a potential in-app payment wild west. What that ignores is that there are payment processors that customers do<\/em> trust — Amazon, Stripe, PayPal, et al<\/p>

Those services are just as easy, if not easier, as Apple’s to cancel\/refund\/unsub with. And prices will be lower, as a result, if offered side by side. There is nothing stopping Apple enforcing — by policy — that all apps using IAP must adhere to the system IAP family controls<\/p>

How does Apple’s in-app purchase stay as a preferred option for consumers given the choice? By competing<\/em>. Lower rates & better terms for developers. If Apple’s IAP really were the best option out there, developers wouldn’t be looking elsewhere to try and sustain their business<\/p>

If Apple cared about consumers more than the paltry sum it makes from developer revenue, it would drop App Store & In App Purchase commissions to as low as realistically possible, so that everybody would want to use the system. Match other processors — you can afford to<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I see a clear difference between purchasing an app or game from the App Store and making an in-app purchase within an app or game after having installed it. My understanding of the new South Korean law is that it only pertains to in-app purchases, so the distinction, I believe, is more than just semantics.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I am confident that the overwhelming majority of typical users are more comfortable installing apps and making in-app purchases on their iOS and Android devices than on their Mac and Windows PCs not despite<\/em> Apple and Google’s console-like control over iOS and Android, but because of<\/em> it. And if these measures come to pass and iOS and Android devices are forced by law to become pocket PCs, I think there’s a high chance it’ll prove unpopular with the mass market. The masses are not clamoring for the app stores to be opened up. These arguments over app stores are entirely inside baseball for the technical and business classes.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The part of Apple’s statement about “Ask to Buy” and parental controls, though, I think is sophistry. It’s certainly true that the “Ask to Buy” feature currently<\/em> wouldn’t work with third-party in-app payment processing, but that’s because nothing in iOS is built to support outside payment processing for in-app purchases. If required to support third-party payment processing, Apple could and should create APIs to support them through the existing “Ask to Buy” process, and the App Store guidelines could and should be expanded to require supporting all parental control APIs regardless of how payments are processed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n