{"id":44496,"date":"2024-08-14T14:00:39","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T18:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=44496"},"modified":"2024-08-15T13:35:06","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T17:35:06","slug":"creator-platforms-and-the-app-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/14\/creator-platforms-and-the-app-store\/","title":{"rendered":"Creator Platforms and the App Store"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hamish McKenzie<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But creators aren’t Apple’s traditional customers<\/a>. 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. <\/p>

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.<\/p>

How much is the ease of in-app purchases worth to creators? It’s a salient question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em>. But this is mostly because you’re already in the app, not because of Apple’s IAP<\/em> per se. The benefit of IAP is that it’s the only way Apple allows<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

It sure seems like Apple’s restrictive guidelines and rigid payment system are hurting the user experience.<\/p>\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Christina Warren<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Personalized services should also be a separate category. It makes no sense to treat a therapy app<\/a> with real humans responding one-on-one the same as an IAP loot box that has zero marginal cost.<\/p>\n\n\n

Michael Love<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>

Apple has a much better case for taking 30% of Amazon’s cut<\/em> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Jimmy Callin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n