Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
(macrumors.com)1103 points by pier25 4 days ago
1103 points by pier25 4 days ago
But what about my banking app! I think it’s only fair Apple take 30% on every transaction I make. After all they put in a huge amount of work validating and making sure my banking app is safe and functional.
Edit: Maybe I am greedy now, but it would be nice if large transactions like say buying a house only would cost me a 15% transaction fee to Apple.
Visa/MasterCard take like 0.3% the rest of the interchange fee goes to the issuing and acquiring banks.
They must be looking at the revenue Claude Code is making on Mac and thinking “Why aren’t we getting 30% of that?”
Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.
If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.
I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.
That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
Claude code reached $1B in six months in early Dec and given what I am seeing on ground, I wouldn't be surprised if just in last 2 months after that their revenue grew by double.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
> I don't think they'd be that stupid.
We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
If Claude Code was in the Mac App Store, they would have signed an agreement to do so (offer an in-app purchase option and Apple gets a 30% cut of subscriptions for the first year, 15% after that).
They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.
It does work like that.
For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)
So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).
Look at how many different APIs you get as a developer on iOS.
On the other side Apple gets money, so they can make *whole* world better, not just your country.
Think about how many lives were improved just by M* CPUs or Siri
/s
You joke, but legally they could. If game engines can charge a licence fee as a % of revenue from games developed on those engines, then legally there's not much to stop apple doing the same. Of course consumers and enterprises wouldn't tolerate it, but the barrier is commercial rather than legal.
I've long believes that the requirement to use in-app purchasing was to make such revenue sharing easier to audit - if you can only use Apple's payment system to do certain things (or else your app isn't approved), then Apple doesn't have to worry about things like audits.
Since various countries have regulated the ability to do third party payments from apps, Apple has since added API to launch said payments, to help generate statistics on use so that they can then demand third party auditing that the commissions are still being properly paid.
In the US there was a court decision that they couldn't meter or charge commission, which may very well be walked back and will lead to lots of fun future articles.
Guess it is no different than Docker Desktop charging based on your revenue. The idea being charging based on some second order.
What is absurd is finding yourself paying 30% on every digital item purchased on a smartphone app. It would never even occur to us that Microsoft takes a 30% margin on Steam, yet that is what happens on webtoon apps.
Can't they add a rent clause to the ToS of MacOS, claiming that any commercial use (work for money) requires commercial licence?
Can Bic add a ToS to using their biros, so 15% of contract value goes to them if it's signed with their pen?
It would likely get voided as unconscionable if they just unilaterally demanded it, but it might hold up in specific circumstances (if the user is well-aware of the salary demand when they accepted the contract, and the user gets some proportionate value out of giving Apple a percentage of salary).
This is based on the controversial Unreal licensing, which is percent of revenue: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license
It’s reductio ad absurdum to make a point. But you could argue that income from Patreon forms part/all of a creator’s salary.
I don’t agree that this is an Apple hating thread. Its commentary on a pretty despicable action that Apple is taking.
It made sense in the early days, phone operators were charging up to 90% for the infrastucture to send an SMS, and get a download link to a J2ME/Windows CE/Pocket PC/Symbian/Palm/Blackberry download link to install the app.
So everyone raced to the iOS app store, it was only 30%, what a great deal!
The problem is that two decades later it is no longer that great deal in mobile duopoly world.
It's kind of interesting that while the structure is largely the same, the underlying behaviour/intent has morphed from a disruptor-model into being toxic rent-seeking behaviour.
and the 30% they take from the things you sell via apple devices, once your work is done.
All the regulators in the world have their sights set on them and they know it. The light is half on already and the music is slowing. This party is soon to be over. It's a last ditch attempt at milking all they can.
Stuff like this is ironic but I do think it's escape hatches like this that will make these tech companies, if they ever go down, go down kicking and screaming. Any platform holder that ever finds themselves in a bad place financially will 100% pull all the levers like this.
The wealthiest company in the world really needs that last little bit from those Patreon creators who have it way too easy in their lives. It's not as if the people that take that meager bit of cash are going to invest it in Apple stock so they're going to have to pay up.
The Mafia can learn a thing or two from Cook.
Sometimes I think the 30% was supposed to be 3% originally, and no one noticed the decimal was in the wrong place when they shipped it, and then people paid it anyway, so they kept it.
30% is just so unreasonable that it would be totally understandable if someone would believe this.
In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.
No one was buying boxed software in 2008. The second we had broadband, call it 2002-ish, everyone was downloading everything. For many of us that began in the 90s before we had broadband. Overnight downloads over 56K phone modems was already overtaking boxed purchases. More people downloaded Netscape in 1995 than bought it boxed.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but Netscape is probably a bad example here. People who wanted Netscape would have been much more likely to know how to download and wanted to download it. Compared to, say, video editing software, which would have much less correlation with web users back in 1995 when not everyone was a web user.
It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers. Marketing was done online, and the benefit of investing in retail had stopped outweighing the consequences. Online updates quickly became the norm, and service features supplanted point-of-sale business model (much like Apple's double-dip into microtransaction profits).
Apple chose 30% because they knew they weren't a retailer. You can hunt for a cheaper Diablo II copy online or at Wal-Mart, but not on iPhone.
> It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.
Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.
And what you quoted is my opinion as a consumer. Blizzard got it working in 1996, Valve figured it out in 2003 - the industry was moving on.
EA was an outlier, and by the time they capitulated and started Origin it was so bad that people regret signing up for the service. GoG didn't have this issue, Valve didn't have that issue, EA did.
Steam, the Kindle Store and iTunes all had similar sales cuts since before the app store launched in 2008.
It’s egregious now but at the time it wasn’t crazy because software developers often made way less than that when going through traditional publishing routes. Plus everyone was just happy to be making money off the new platform.
How does one even come about creating a thought like this?
2035: Apple takes 30% of my Patreon, Google matched it through their "Competitive Parity Agreement," and the EU fined them both €2 billion which they paid in 45 minutes of revenue then raised fees to 32% to cover legal costs.
The real innovation was convincing us this was inevitable.
You naively assumed that they would actualy disbourse 2 G€ in payments for those fines.
Reality disagrees: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/12/13/data-regulato...
You can be the patron of a creator and Apple in the same time! Jokes aside, this is awful...I like/use Apple products but this unacceptable, I hope everyone dodges this and pays through the website
Another outstanding decision vetted by Tim Cook.
In all seriousness, finance people see everything through the lens of margins and money primarily. Since any company's function is to deliver value to its shareholders, if allowed, bean counters will scorch the earth for it.
Ultimately, this is at odds on how Jobs approached things, i.e., money was not the end all be all.
Apple's 30% tax was introduced under Steve Jobs and there were no small business exemptions back then. Jobs died in 2011. It's time to stop extrapolating what Jobs would be doing 15 years later in 2026 if he were still around. Could be the same, could be better, could be worse.
It isn't 'You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain', it's 'You either die a hero or live long enough for people to realize you are a villain'. While it's ultimately meaningless to speculate on what the dead would do if they were living, Steve Jobs in life did have plenty of belief and made plenty of decisions that are perfectly inline with what we are seeing in 2026 and there is no particular reason to believe he would not just be up there with the worst of them.
Jobs was a greedy bastard like all the other CEOs. The difference is that he also had mostly good taste as far as products go.
At that time 30% was not something you would consider high in contrast to the situation before the advent of app stores.
Tim Cook is usually good at politics, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Nobody other some CNBC guests really gets too upset when they take 30% from tinder, music or mobile gaming companies. And those types of apps run by unpopular large companies make up the majority of App Store revenue.
However, newspapers and content creators are popular in a way that carries political weight. It'd be wise for Apple exempt these categories and write off the few hundred million in forgone revenue as a political expense.
For example allowing the NYT or Joe Rogan to have nice paid apps with no fees would be a much more effective use of money than the same amount in political donations.
Apple doesn't do partner exceptions (one of the complaints Epic had about working with them is that Apple wouldn't negotiate lower rates with companies, unlike the game consoles.)
They do have carve outs in the agreement, such as the 'reader' exception. Newspapers I believe also fall under the 'reader' exception.
I have suspected for a while that the 15%-after-the-first-year subscription rate drop was a carve out targeted specifically at trying to retain Netflix IAP. However, Netflix was able to operate without IAP because of the "reader" exception.
Just stop publishing the app, not every little thing needs an app. What the use for the app anyway? Notifications and apple pay?
I'm running a small service, sub 150 users, no online signup kind of business, B2B. Small EU country. 95% of users ask 'do you have an mobile app?' in first 5 minutes of onboarding. Telling them how to install a PWA (and what it is and so forth) is an uphill battle. Unfortunately App Stores rule the non technical crowd.
For Apple, sure. But Google has been leading efforts to make the PWA experience good. In origin trial right now is the ability for websites to install PWAs: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/....
This would make it much easier to find and install web apps than the current method.
To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.
Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.
It's not users who are pushing this. It started off with just superfluous but optional apps of websites. Now every year I find there is something I used to be able to do, which I now must own a smartphone to do. And it's not just getting discounts at coffee chains, it's increasingly stuff like accessing healthcare plan benefits, or verifying my identity for banking
A few sites throw up a blocking screen to download the app, which disappears once you spoof a desktop UA. But the big problem is businesses now having no web interface at all
Very good point, though I believe it's both market push and consumer expectation.
Because we have such limited control over our devices, they effectively provide the security of a jail locking down what users can do. That is appealing from a healthcare or banking perspective because it obfuscates the client-server API and gives exact control over the UI. As a bonus, the coffee chain gets to glean lots of details from your phone that would be unavailable in a browser.
As individuals we can do little more that push back: don't let yourself be trapped by coffee chains (go to a different one) and bother your bank's service line about having to use their app. The rest is up to government intervention, I fear.
>To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.
That is an education problem. What do school computer courses teach these days? Do schools even have computer literacy classes anymore? Do they still teach students about the internet?
The OS is what protects the user. Have you ever seen the prompts asking the user if they want to share their location?
This made me realize, Firefox needs to create a launcher that just creates PWAs out of bookmarks (or vice versa). That way, people get the "app feel" without needing to download every single app.
Why do they need to install a PWA?
We do mobile friendly Web UIs, that is enough.
Their customes, employees, go to the respective company website, get a responsive UI for their device, done, the services require to be online anyway.
It’s about convenience in most cases; an “app” to tap on, not a URL to remember and enter or a bookmark to save, name, file, and locate.
Just like apps in general, PWAs are mostly a mobile heavy modality. Bookmarks and the browser is largely still fine on laptop/desktop, but even there you see the app design language start prevailing with things like bookmarks and “recent sites” being presented like app icons.
There may be a time where we have to push back, though, and this may be it. "There is no app" may sound terrifying now, but once we've educated users, it will only get less scary, until we might actually claim back some ownership of our own stuff from the likes of Apple.
This may just be more of a design and communications challenge for you, than your users. I have seen several design templates that use various forms of visuals to assist the user through the “add to Home Screen” process, which is just three steps; Share—-> More —-> Add to Home Screen. It Is arguably even a faster process than going through the App Store, even if users may be more familiar with it.
You could accompany it with some copy explaining how it keeps the service efficient and affordable, i.e., possible stating if you were to offer an app you would have to increase the price by 75% to pay Apple their fee and for the extra costs.
I suspect other arguments for PWAs would not really matter, like that you have no need to track them or use other abilities an app affords, etc. Most people only care about very few things engineers actually care, let alone know about.
I’ve always been an advocate of PWAs whenever it makes sense and will even design and architect to that objective. But even when I would deal with clients, I think the real “up hill battle” is that apps allow for higher fees and charges because they’re more work and come with greater expenses for for-profit apps, so there has been very little incentive to spread general user awareness about the “add to Home Screen”/PWA.
It’s a bit of a paradox, but I guess that seems to be an under-appreciated driver in something like “advanced consumer capitalist economies”, where the “rational actor” simply does not exist anymore.
What kind of users are these? Power-users or normal users (Android etc.) or dum..Apple users?
Because in my circle, power-users and beyond. Everybody is angry with apps needed for everything, you want buy bread in store, "do you have our app?" It's a meme here. And in our local subreddit, 600k users. Sentiment is the same.
We also tried to bypass stores apps with generating new accounts and distributing QR/cards for free to everyone. It was kinda popular.
And problems are more real with each day, eg.: scammers have their work way easier, since dumb users can take a huge loan directly from banking app in their phone.
Also small EU country, btw.
Not sure I understand. So people don't use websites anymore?
Specifically, do people not use websites that have rich/complex data driven functionality anymore?
If they do, I'm wondering what determines whether an application is seen as needing a mobile app vs being ok as a regular web app.
BTW, you don't need the app store for that. You can use Firebase App Distribution which doesn't require you to go through the review process.
Basically you just ask their email address and add it to a list in Firebase. Upload your ipa to firebase and the user will receive an email with a link to download
Ehh. OnlyFans is a multi-billion dollar mobile business that has no app.
Clients and customers will not stand for this. I don’t agree but I’ve seen it enough times now it doesn’t surprise me. They want an app, doesn’t matter if you have an identical web-based version that does the exact same thing, they want an app.
I write cross platform apps using Vue/Quasar (previous Angular/Ionic, and before that Titanium), I have put up a web-based version of their app (as a fallback and as an early MVP) and it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone to even play with it. Then you put an app up on TestFlight and suddenly they are using it.
And that’s just trying to get the to use the web while I’m still setting up crap for a “native” app. The idea of not having an app is a non-starter.
Again, I don’t agree with them, I’m just telling you what it’s like out there if you are developing software for other people. An app brings “prestige”, they want be able to say “we have an app”. And no, saving a webpage to the home screen is not a viable alternative (trust me, I’ve tried). Clients and customers reject that and there are extra limitations with that approach (or there were last time I tried, around using the camera feed, things that work fine in mobile Safari).
I don't think that applies to Patreon which, as far as I know, doesn't have any ads in the first place?
The app might make it easier for them to enforce DRM-like behaviors to prevent people from pirating creators content, but I strongly suspect people aren't doing that on iOS regardless.
We really need to build more awareness for PWAs (Progressive web apps). Users (and developers) need to be educated on
- how to install them
- what advantages (and disadvantages) they have. In particular regarding censorship and privacy!
Apple and Google need to be pressured to make PWAs
- easier to install
- more capable
- less buggy (Mobile Safari in particular).
If your app's needs can be met with a PWA, you owe it to your users to offer one!
Here are a few PWA showcase links:
https://pwa-showcase.com/#/all-cards
And a lazy AI-generated list of things that PWAs can do today on top of the things a normal web page can do:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/make-a-list-of-all-things-p...
I work on a website that doesn't have any mobile-specific features, new users ask me all the time why we don't have an app.
My sister and my parents basically ~only read newspapers from their apps, despite it being static text with some images.
I don't know how, but Google and Apple are really good at nudging people to use apps instead of websites.
I use the Patreon app. It's great. I get to see stuff from my favorite creatives weeks (sometimes months) early, and ad-free. Since many of them are youtubers and I don't pay google to show me less ads, this is a huge value prop. And, the Patreon app can cast videos to my TV, so it's really a complete experience.
My TV doesn't support Airplay, and I have an Android.
Apps are more sticky. Users forget about websites more easily
Patreon isn't something you need to be checking all the time, though, unless you patronise a LOT of people. It can pretty much be a "setup and forget" kinda deal.
I think they could get pretty far with a PWA, but there are legitimate arguments to go native. For use cases like podcasts, where users can download them ahead of time, it seems like Safari limits storage to 1GB [0]. Plus playing background audio might not be as good an experience.
Its the convenience. 1 or 2 button clicks from the home screen to open "the app".
Sure you could do it in a browser, but half the time the credentials dont cache, or you have to waste 4 clicks and 20 seconds finding a bookmark.
They want convenience. For better or worse.
Because apps are the lowest-friction path to users. If you publish a tool that targets an audience of more than a very specific niche of people, you'll get people asking for an app literally every day. My inbox used to be full of them.
a) does it actually work offline (seems unlikely for a payment app, although I guess it could batch stuff)?
b) if so, does it work any better than a web app can offline?
yeah for entertainment content you just cant get away with it sadly
It's not so much that I love giving 30% to Apple, and more that there is no way to move your business elsewhere because Apple monopolizes mobile app distribution.
And the other half of the mobile app market is monopolized by Google who copies the pricing model while delivering even worse (if any) service to developers.
It's either getting out of mobile apps or paying up.
This is not going to change without drastic steps by regulators, which both Apple and Google fight tooth and nail.
You know some of us remember Mac System [7|8|9] and how MSFT pretty much ruled everything (Apple had low %).
We kept working on the platform and developing tools and things changed. Of course Apple is a lot more powerful than MSFT back then and the general population is their target.
When iPhone came out the sentiment was clearly opposite. The “sweet solution” was ridiculed and workarounds found. When web caught up, it was plagued with self inflicted performance issues. And eventually Apple decided to not invest in good PWA support.
I was an app advocate for a long time, now I made a PWA and it’s maybe 90% there. But you still get behaviors that you can not fix.
IMO the worst however is products that have a fully functional website, but refuse to let you use it (e.g.: Instagram)
Yes. It's improved now, but the mobile web was bad for a long time. The early days of Android experienced a "web-first" ecosystem by force, as lazy businesses just threw a webview around their site, and it was awful
Web is much better when the data should be public. Apps are much better when any kind of data privacy is required.
The trouble is, market forces always try and push things the other way.
The Reddit App for example is totally unnecessary. It's just public web content and should be a website.
SaaS on the other hand shouldn't really be a thing at all. I have no idea why anyone thinks it's a good idea for their private data and app state to be on a cloud somewhere they don't control.
Note that this does not preclude the use of cloud services that users can control e.g. by specifiying trusted endpoints. I'm trying to build the idea of "data locality first" software. I.e. you know where your data are and where they aren't.
> Why did we let mobile go down the one-app-per-website path?
Because the web is still barely usable for anything more complex than showing a few lines of static text and an image?
Because for almost as long as (modern) mobile apps exist the web was even less usable?
Because even now you can whip up a fast complex mobile app with 60fps animations and native behaviours probably in minutes? While on the web you're lucky if you can figure out which state/animation/routing library du jour isn't broken beyond all hope?
I might be in the minority but I have a really hard time using iOS and their apps in general (I use Android).
I struggle (and mostly curse) to figure out what swipe gesture to use to get simple stuff to just work. Not super sure all the 60fps animations and wizz-bang behaviours are being used the way you think they are.
#include<"old-man-yells-at-clould-meme">
I strongly prefer apps. The thing that goes wrong here is: Duopoly bad. Competition good.
Since app distribution is not a fair market anymore, it needs to be regulated. Either the fees have to go down close to cost or alternative app stores should be allowed. And not the malicious compliance version of it (as Apple is trying in the EU).
I actually love Apple for pushing this matter this hard and sticking to its guns. This will bring in more regulatory scrutiny not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well. That will force Apple to give up (maybe in a decade or so) this practice of arbitrary rules and squeezing the last penny from others.
Thanks a lot, Eddy Cue, for all that you do to bring Apple down to its knees!
So in about a trillion or two dollars of revenue’s time, then.
Just do what we all do to dodge this, have the Account management and purchasing abilities sit inside an embedded browser window that opens up from a button push in the app. Yes it adds a little barrier but with Apple Pay it is a very small barrier and the juice is worth the squeeze.
Don’t they forbid this? Spotify couldn’t even link to their website in the US lol
This was a result of the Apple vs Epic case, external payment processors avoiding the fee were enabled in the US in May 2025.
Or add a 45% apple tax afyer they click buy. E.g. costs $100, price comes up as.$100 with added apple tax as line item. total $145.
Click here to avoid apple tax takes you to web page if allowed.
I could be wrong but seem to remember this being explicitly disallowed by Apples terms
I don't get it. Apple is the top 3 most valuable companies in the WORLD. THE WORLD. They act like a greedy friend that would ask you to pay back $1.54 for a meal of $1500, because you ordered a side of fries which they did not eat.
Aren't they making the majority of their money from selling hardware and iCloud subscriptions? Why they go on and milk developers, who make apps FOR THEIR ECOSYSTEM?!
Good thing GenAI is about to destroy capitalism, finally!
Even the stupid many headed hydra can't survive when an 8 year-old kid has a super intelligence capable of autonomously manufacturing a bio weapon.
You get it though. They ARE the top 3 most valuable company in the world. How do you think they got there? Greed all the way down.
$1500 represents the money you've already given them to purchase the hardware. You already overpay for that - fine - then they demand a 30% cut from $5 you're giving to a struggling independent creator. It's pure greed coming from one of the richest companies in the world.
What don't you get?
They are greedy because Apple fans would by a turd in a box if it had an Apple logo.
If I was in charge of Apple I would do the same thing. In fact, I would likely increase the Apple cut to 40%. People would pay, they like their slick toys.
The developers will continue to make apps for their ecosystem regardless.
After the $1k monitor stand I don't doubt Apple can get away with selling ANYTHING.
Interestingly, Patreon doesn't give creators an option of "Just don't accept donations for us from Apple users" instead, which is what my old project (SQLite Browser / DB Browser for SQLite) would have gone with if available. :(
I've instead handed the reins to others, so I don't have skin in this game any more. ;)
I think this is relevant, Cory Doctorow's recent speech to Canadian government and texh leaders: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ott...
He talks about Apple's app store
How long until they make the argument that they're entitled to 30% of your salary because you use Apple hardware to do your work?