Comment by spacebanana7 3 days ago
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.
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.
Microsoft threatened to take 30% margin on all Steam transactions. That's why Valve embraced Linux and made the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
Valve already takes a 30% cut of all Steam transactions. It's just corporations fighting to steal each other's revenue streams.
Let me clarify. Microsoft did not approach Valve and say "give us 30% or else." Valve saw that Microsoft was moving in the same direction of Apple where their devices would be locked down and only run software from their store, felt threatened, and decided they couldn't remain tied to that ecosystem.
Microsoft don't really have an equivalent to iOS so let's compare oranges to oranges: macOS vs Windows.
On macOS, Apple don't take a 30% cut on Steam purchases. Steam take 30% however.
There's a big difference - when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something and they legally can charge.
I don't actually have an opinion on whether 30% or 15% is too much or not. It's factually wrong or illogical arguments that bother me: how can we fight anything when the arguments are just nonsensical.
Apple make plenty of user-hostile decisions, but people need to criticise them reasonably, otherwise they will be ignored by those that might have the influence to change things for the better.
> when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something
Is it?
We spent several decades of the PC world, MSDOS and Windows, with zero platform license fees or approvals. This was hugely beneficial for innovation, and this is why everyone hates the sudden rise of platform landlordism.
Remember when software was sold in a box with a paper manual in a store? Before App Store and steam, retailers and publishers of games and software also took their share of the revenue from the work software developers created. Their cut wasn’t small.
If the government stepped in to regulate the sales of software (to protect developers and consumers?) do you think: A) apps will cost less B) the government won’t want their cut
Yeah but there was a big difference: As a developer you could opt out of that distribution and go your own way. I knew people who sold floppies out of their garage. IBM or whoever made your hardware, and Microsoft or whoever made your OS, could not prevent your users from installing your software on their machine.
Gov't taking a cut from tha App store is already happening [1] and it's a legitimate concern unlike the concept of Apple taking cuts from people's salary (LOL).
[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/12/app-store-and-japanese-co...
So they aren't exempt from sales tax in Japan, and they're crying about it?
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’s reductio ad absurdum
It's not, it's just factually wrong.
If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee.
That's reductio ad absurdum.
Lol.
> If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee.
Apple could absolutely do this. They could say that professional medical use of macOS requires a commercial license, and the price of that commercial licence could be linked to revenue.
Doctors - or rather their hospital IT/procurement departments - would be held to the terms of service they agree to. Far more rigorously than ordinary consumers.
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.