The app store percentage problem

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Hey, Simon :slight_smile: I’m curious how/if you’ve decided to “solve” for the app store percentage problem. I know a lot (a lot a lot) of creators whose Patreon incomes have been decimated this month due to the mobile subscriber fees being fully enforced.

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If this is for a “mirlo player” app then the answer is:

It’s why we don’t plan on doing sales through an app–it’ll purely for playing music you have already bought. Or do you think they’ll start enforcing “if you bought it elsewhere” kind of stuff?

I think that’s what bandcamp does, but I feel like I’ve also seen some stuff that some artists can sell things through their app, and I wonder if that’s something artists toggle with the sense of like “i’d rather have the sale and lose the 30% than not have the sale at all”.

If however this is in relation to the soundcloud clone app (I think that’s the case but maybe the thread got split?) then maybe this is all about building a mobile first webapp, it’s just accepting that 30% of your 10/mo goes to Apple :sad_but_relieved_face:

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Ah, sorry for the slightly ambiguous question!

I was asking in response to this

I appreciate your patience with my questions. I’m sure you’re two or five steps ahead of my thinking here. I’m interested to know if you all feel it’s crucial to be in the app store for discovery? Or is it more that you think a mobile-first experience is key, and the app store is a necessary evil therefore?

Thanks, Simon :slightly_smiling_face:

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Question out of my ignorance. What is “the app store percentage problem”, and does it affect only Apple’s store or is it a generic app store problem?

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I’m interested to know if you all feel it’s crucial to be in the app store for discovery? Or is it more that you think a mobile-first experience is key, and the app store is a necessary evil therefore?

To be honest I don’t have strong opinions on “app store”. In my experience mobile apps offer a better experience than websites, but that’s not always true. It probably has more to do with the designed-for mentality of the builder, whereas a mobile site is usually an after thought (I know it is for me). I pretty much exclusively listen to music on the bandcamp app for example.

I do suspect that most normal consumers need a thing to be an app for it to feel legitimate. I suspect that part of this is trust actually, and how untrustworthy the general internet is. But that’s just a hunch, not based on anything.

Question out of my ignorance. What is “the app store percentage problem”, and does it affect only Apple’s store or is it a generic app store problem?

AFAIK Google Play has the same issues

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Thanks, Simon :slight_smile: I appreciate you engaging with all my questions.

As The Indie Beat expands its features, I think about these things. And I’m also intensely interested in how this question influences how we think generally as a community when it comes to trying to bring more people to the fediverse. I see it as a part of the larger debate (see Elena Rossini’s latest) about whether or not it makes sense to be on the big platforms even if we’re fighting them. (I’m not advocating either position to anyone, at the moment.)

I look at what happened at Patreon, and it’s acted as a learning experience for a ton of creators. I think “the app stores (mostly Apple) are evil” is an idea that’s taking hold with non-techie creatives. (Yet, they feel they can’t leave Patreon.)

With TIBR I plan to avoid the app stores at all costs, especially if I do anything involving payments. But that’s not at all a criticism of anyone who chooses to be in the app store.

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I suspect that this intuition is intentionally engineered, at least in part.

Progressive Web Apps are a thing; however, mobile platform vendors have some obvious incentives to hobble those in favor of native apps that go through the app store (so as to capture a percentage of all payments) and some less obvious ones, too (such as capturing developer mindshare by having developers wrap their head around certain frameworks and toolkits – a deeper layer of walled garden).

Users do have “polish” as heuristic for trustworthiness, so as long as the OS makes it impossible to make PWAs feel as smooth, Web vs. Native will remain a factor – even though it’s just yet another SFP…

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I have so many scars from trying to make a PWA work smoothly :upside_down_face:

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The things I’ve seen gets glazed look

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Well! If Apple doesn’t bribe the justice department to launch a trumped up investigation into Epic to intimidate them into dropping it, this might just stick.

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According to an e-mail from Apple:

The App Review Guidelines have been updated for compliance with a United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps. These changes affect apps distributed on the United States storefront of the App Store, and are as follows:
3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.
3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.
3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

Really, really want you to know it’s on the United States storefront only, which is basically saying “you have to have two app builds.”

Also, just had some more clarity, if you make under <a large quantity of money> it’s only 15%. And I can imagine that for most people building out a complicated payment system that works differently in different countries is probably more hassle than the 15% cut that Apple takes.

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Oh, I thought Apple were already required to do the same in the EU (other countries too maybe?)…

Re the percentage, my focus for our purposes is on platforms that allow artists to sell something, not independent app developers. I don’t think the app store (if fees are possibly going to come back), is worth it for small platforms.

If I run a small platform (like Bandwagon), no matter how I price or structure my product, the artist’s going to eat the app store transaction fee. Add the ~3.5% payment processing bank fee and any fee that my platform is charging. That’s pretty hard to take unless the platform is doing a lot to increase my revenue. It gets even harder to take if it’s not a big name platform that I feel might help me get found and that my fans will be comfortable giving a credit card # to.

The artists I know and listen to are getting hurt badly by the new fees at Patreon. But they’re also locked in. They’d leave if they weren’t frightened of losing half their patrons in the process. They’re between a real rock and a hard place.

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