- cross-posted to:
- boycottus@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- boycottus@lemmy.ca
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59469059
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Evil corp wants even more. Ho-hum. Sigh. Anyway…
It’s wild that Steam is getting a class action lawsuit for charging 30% right now, and Apple doing shit like this at the same percentage and legally is getting a free pass.
I’ll throw a hat in the ring here. It’s because Steam has a grip on the gaming market that others want instead of them. That’s it, they want that money instead of Valve. Apple is getting a pass on this because it’s just fucking over the common guy which businesses couldn’t care less about.
But Valve doesn’t have a monopoly on PC games. You can sell your own game, or sell through GOG. On iPhone, Apple has the monopoly and they abuse it.
I was trying to avoid the monopoly complaint because it’s bogus for the reason you said. The truth, Valve has a massive market share and people are very used to Steam, tied to it in many cases. Other publishers tried to set out on their own with their own store fronts and most of those have utterly failed. Even Epic still sells their games on Steam. It’s a powerful market with a lot of brand loyalty that those companies really do want themselves.
Fair.
Other than the “not actually a monopoly” argument, I think it’s important that Steam has that marketshare because they add value. They have a stranglehold on the market similar to the way BarCodes do. You don’t have to register your product with the bar code authority, but it will sure make your product more accessible to more people.
And that’s before cloud saves, achievements, patching infrastructure, community forums, game recording/streaming, and other stuff built into the Steam client/API.
Whether that’s worth a blanket 30% is absolutely a conversation worth having. Maybe it should be a sliding / bracketed scale depending on revenue or units sold or something. But like you said, the big lawsuits are coming from competitors, not smaller developers.
I’d welcome actual, legitimate competition to Steam. That means it has to be as good if not BETTER than Steam in some ways. Epic, Apple, EA, Ubisoft, etc, sure as hell did not deliver. If anything it caused market segmentation and segregation.
True, but nobody is bound by it. There are other ways to sell on PC, there are no other ways to sell on iPhone. And games bought elsewhere will work just fine on a PC that has Steam installed. Anyone can leave at any time, or buy from anywhere. The only way to do that on iPhone is to switch your entire phone with Android. Apple’s position on the iPhone is far more controlling and monopolistic than Steam’s on PC.
The Steam tax might be too steep as well, but these are not identical situations. It’s far easier to avoid Steam if you don’t want it. I prefer to buy from GOG, and only buy from Steam when it’s cheaper or not available on GOG.
Right, but Valve is actually providing the service and infrastructure. Apple is not.
They are, I’m not arguing against Valve or for Apple. I’m explaining that business people want moar money and don’t like it when someone else makes it when they could.
Huh? It’s the businesses that will suffer from that 30% tax. It’s like suddenly seeing your Netflix subscription being more expensive and that triggers this “do I even need it anymore?” evaluation
If it costs 13€ to support a 10€ Patreon pledge, then how do you expect the company to cover for that? Paying the creator less? Still, that will spawn competition, which again hurts the business
Just nitpicking, but if the usual price is 10€ and you want to offload the 30% tax to the consumers, pretty sure the maths should be 10/(0.7) ≈ 14.29€
Tim Cook needs more money to forge golden offerings for his good pal Donald trump.
To make this clear: Patreon is a platform mainly used by creators, artists, musicians to get a reliable income directly from their fans. Apple is trying to steal 30% of the income of our favorite artists.
I really think this move blows and I wish they would reverse this decision and make an exception.
However Tim Cook didn’t wake up one day and wonder how he could fuck creators. Apple takes a 30% cut of all app transactions. This is how they benefit from the enormous and highly successful app platform and ecosystem they created. It’s not pure evil to say “hey use this platform all you want but you must share some of what you make there with us.”
It does suck that they won’t let creators off the hook though. This is like taxing rips.
The platform is enormous and highly successful solely because it is a monopoly in the Apple ecosystem
I guarantee you if other app stores were allowed on Apple devices, they would take significant market share with a far smaller cut of revenue
Yeah, hopefully Patron doesn’t roll over and just removes the option to do it in iPhone. Taking away functionality will make Apple look bad, which they deserve.
They already caved.
On Wednesday, Patreon said Apple has renewed its requirement that all Patreon creators must move to subscription billing. The deadline to do so is November 1, 2026.
It’s silly that they don’t just operate from the browser. It’s how I use Patreon on my (admittedly not iPhone) Phone.
They should have just pulled Patreon from the app store.
It’s not like it’s such an impediment to ask users to use their browser.
In an ideal world we would not have monopolies controlling app stores, but I think Patreon is really stupid for not just abandoning the app store.
Good thing none of us have iPhones here, right, guys? Right?
Been locked in this ecosystem for a while guys. I’m not proud of it.
It’s better than the alternatives, unfortunately. I really want to dump Apple; the products are waning in quality and the company is spending a lot of time genuflecting for king tangerine. But it just works.
“Just install grapheneOS” my brother in Christ, I have no time or interest in fucking up with the primary communication device I rely on to reach family, friends, and work. I don’t have time for the hobbies I want to do let alone adding work-adjacent activities under the cloak of a hobby.
The ecosystem is really seamless, especially with a MacBook and Apple watch in the mix.
Though I don’t think there is any winning in the smartphone space. There is a duopoly and even if you personally use graphineOS you still are benefitting and helping the Google ecosystem by using Android apps.
Sadly I don’t think we can “vote with our wallets” on smartphones. We need legal legislation that forces both Apple and Google to be consumer friendly.
Just buy a Fairphone from Murena with /e/OS preinstalled. You don’t have to do anything yourself. It mainly works like a phone without any issues, all the features I need work on it and I didn’t have to install it manually and supported the devs
Nothing would prevent you from communicating with a Graphene OS phone. It’s a smartphone OS, not compiling Arch here…
But use whatever excuse you can find to stay in the Apple ecosystem, that’s fine.
It totally could and probably would. I am a phone OS tinkerer myself, but the above poster is right that it is a lot of hobbyist type tinkering and you can brick your device and fuck it up so you can’t communicate with your friends and family.
I agree with the main sentiment that these alternative OSs for phones and computers are a lot better in a lot of ways, but we are unwise to act like getting your computer or phone that way is that easy. Trying to get an alternative OS working well on a device can very easily consume an entire waking day or more, and bricking is not impossible, especially with phones.
Perhaps the parent commenter has apps they need to run for work? I know Microsoft Authenticator isn’t supported on Graphene, which is admittedly bullshit but it’s a requirement if you work in the government or high security industry like utilities. If that’s the case they should be given a work phone, but companies don’t do that most of the time in my experience.
Or perhaps they’ve had a bad experience with an older version. I know that Ubuntu Mobile couldn’t even make calls on a lot of devices for a while. I recently had an experience where DTMF signaling didn’t work, which meant I couldn’t navigate phone trees to do things like get prescriptions filled.
Point being, there are lots of real reasons folks are stuck in their predicament.
The temptation to be snarky is strong, but we risk hurting imperfect allies instead of fighting our real enemies.
Installing graphene was not like flashing a ROM ten years ago. You just follow the simple steps on the web installer.
When for xiaomi…jpg
I’d love to jump ship.
Never too late to switch to GrapheneOS.
I can’t unlock my bootloader so i’m fucked.
I am in it for not too long, I wanted a Framework notebook but they didn’t sell in my country so I couldn’t purchase it through my business so I went with macbook and iphone next to because, why not.
I generally don’t care much about things like in the op news tbh, as if I have a subscription for something I use it directly from the website
And stuff like the seemless integration when switching from my phone to my MacBook with my airpods is fucking great.
but I am not a normal techie, I am waaay overindexed on user experience over a lot of things, for example I pay for spotify because the Ux is great for me, I refuse to pay for streaming devices because my own plex/jellyfin server is a much better UX.
I am also refusing to buy cars without physical buttons.
But I like my blue iMessages!
Definetly not, wayyyy to closed.
Honestly I wouldn’t touch Apple products with a bargepole. I dislike closed ecosystems
You’d rather be spied on constantly by the largest panopticon ever created, because they allow sideloading.
Honestly this is voting for Trump over Kamala; we need a viable alternative. Why have they taken personal computing from us?
No, I’d rather use my device like I want to use my device instead of how I’m told to use it. I don’t need to sideload on this device but glad I can if and when I want to. I prefer having a computer with me rather than a purposely stunted device kept that way to sell other devices in the ecosystem.
You say it’s purposely stunted, I say it has guardrails that saves me hours and hours of family IT support time un-fucking my elderly parents phones. This was something I’d have to do every single time I was home when we had android phones.
I would dump Apple in a heartbeat if something better existed. They’re not good but they’re the best for my personal scenario of the current options.
You really shouldn’t be so downvoted for sharing your experience. While not ideal it’s valid and understandable.
It happens if you express any positive sentiment towards Apple. I don’t give a shit, downvotes matter not.
I don’t need my phone to be a completely open computer, I have a computer and a server for that. I need a communications appliance, and since I’m the family IT guy, I need the lowest bullshit device my boomer parents can operate. My parents are not going to run some high privacy custom ROM because I’m not going to troubleshoot their problems. I realize that those ROMs are objectively better if you’re only considering the phone, but I basically have to manage a fleet of devices, and it’s easier troubleshooting if I’m also using the same. I don’t love Apple, it’s just easier.
You can deGoogle Android if you want, hopefully better alternatives, that don’t suck, like Linux Phone™ 🙏 arrive before too long.
Except all the posts I see about degoogling start with purchasing Google hardware.
other options besides graphene exist, like lineage OS that work on a ton of different phones. and sure graphene requires google hardware but nobody says you have to buy the hardware from google direct. buying used is different than buying from google
It’s also an option many people would be fine with. I’m okay with Google having my money. Paying companies for products is perfectly fine. I just don’t want them to have my data and invade my privacy
So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?
If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.
Were being spied on regardless, better to choose the option that allows one to do the most with it. If I could throw together my own phone and run a Linux variant on then I fucken would, but as it phone hardware is ass and Linux mobile doesn’t exist for my phone.
You can’t logic people out of an emotional decision. The hatred of Apple runs deep.
The obviousness of this is how Android users troll Apple discussions but Apple users don’t troll Android discussions.
They have insanely strong opinions on what other’s choices that it borderline religious.
The terminally online Apple cultists bully other people all the time. I mean you’re literally doing it right now while also blatantly lying about it.
Android has orders of magnitude more users than apple and the vast majority couldn’t care less what phone someone uses.
Its not closed
The door is just very very tiny
I always end up with MacBooks after startups and love to have something I can just pick up and use whereas my PC is my command center. Most of my shit is web or local web services so just need a Mozilla terminal. Also, I can’t fathom buying one out of pocket. I’ve also never had an iPhone, it doesn’t make sense to my brain.
So…if you’re just using web stuff, you could probably save a heap by using a Chromebook. That’s what my wife’s personal laptop is and is perfect for web stuff (and has the option of Android apps too, like Mozilla). It’s not her only computer though.
Why the hell did you get so downvoted??? Yeah, that’s not a bad point in any way but recall my use case - never bought anything per se, just ended up with 😁
Perhaps a Chromebook is not much better in terms of freedom than an Apple product? I heard they’re often e-waste in schools.
How greedy is Apple? Talk about insatiable greed!
Fuck patron. Fuck you Tim Apple. Fuck you both
he did give trump a shitty gold trophy to trump.
What’s wrong with Patreon? They advertise a 10% fee. It may be a little more complicated than that but 10% seems pretty reasonable considering the services they offer.
They are an American tech company.
From what I remember, they did try to heavily raise fees and worsen the experience on their platform “my next trillion users … life changing blah blah … my ARPU”, but then backed off when they got public pushback. They will do it again when they think they can get away with it.
Better to use something like liberapay.
That’s what I use to donate to Piefed development and I’ve been meaning try and pitch this platform to Patreon list.
Fair enough
How is 10% reasonable. They just transfer money from A to B while showing people some static html text about the options. They basically do nothing.
static HTML text, and all of the posts, and images, and audio that they host. not saying that deserves 10% but saying that they do nothing other than payment processing is disingenuous
I wouldn’t say these services are nothing. Are they worth 10%? Eh.
A 90/10 split for content creators who otherwise wouldn’t know how to build and operate their own platform doesn’t sound like a terrible deal. It’s not amazing but if there were better options, Patreon may not be so popular.
Edit: I want to clarify. Patreon is a for profit company who has apparently tried raising prices already and back tracked. Eventually, Patreon will try and squeeze out more profit from the creators and the user base will be big enough that Patreon will have the leverage to do so; we’ve all seen it before. I’m not saying Patreon is a good company, I’m not saying they won’t be dicks in the future, I’m not saying the system as it is, is good. I’m only saying 10% isn’t a bad deal when so many other options are worse (ex. Apple taking 30%)
It’s always getting fleeced with you guys and being fine with slightly less fleecing, when that is just a way to entice and reach a point where they can monopolize the market and fleece like the big dogs.
And then a new company with slightly less fleecing appears, with board members from previous company.
Rinse and repeat.
I understand your view and sympathize deeply but there is a lot wrong in the world today and if I have to divert energy somewhere to try and change something, Patreon’s 10/90 split is at the bottom of the list for me at the moment. Regular working class people aren’t getting that good of a deal at the jobs they work at. I’m not even talking 90/10, just getting their .01% of the profits in a 1000 person org for their contribution would probably be life changing.
You are right but our frames of reference are different.
Patreon stopped being benevolent years ago when they changed their pricing model to exploit small donors more.
Send money directly using Monero. Avoid as much ‘overhead’ as possible.
I’d love to but it’s a chicken and egg thing. Regular people don’t understand bitcoin let alone monero. On top of that, you still have fees for converting from a currency to monero and again from monero to a currency, so there’s still a middle man :/
Why does Apple feel they deserve a 30% cut? In cases like this, Apple aren’t providing any value at all.
Because apple is a “premium” product, so you have to pay a “premium” fee for normal stuff so it feels like you’re using “premium” services
But you’re getting literally the same Patreon content.
gotta get the money to bribe trump somehow
Just pass on the cost of the corruption to the consumer, as usual. It’s the Corruption Tax.
This sums the problem up fairly nicely I think. I do wonder with Apple being a gatekeeper by EUs own definition and unfair sales terms supposed to be history with the Digital Markets Act in place this can’t go through, right!!! at least not in the EU… assuming they do their job.
This is THE way that Apple gets any revenue from the enormous and highly successful app platform and ecosystem they created. They say “go nuts, make money on our platform, but share some with us in exchange for our maintaining that platform.” This is reasonable. Apple is providing a service to Patreon, and access to their tremendous user base. That ain’t nothing.
I agree that subjecting creator donations to the 30% is about the shittiest use case for this and I wish they would make an exception. But your post about how Apple is doing absolutely nothing here is garbage.
Apple is doing nothing in this particular case, not in general. There’s cases where the 30% is more justified.
Oh is there some case where Apple is creati by the content inside the app??? Do tell.
I meant more if people wouldn’t have found your app without Apple’s App Store. In that case, they’re essentially handling marketing for you.
They were sued by Epic Games for the same shit and Epic won on one count which allows them to put links to alternative payment methods and go around Apple.
So couldn’t patreon just argue in court that this precedent was already set with epic?
I’m not a lawyer but I think they could.
That is how case law works, yes.
I’m just wondering then why Apple would even push this if a president was already set with Epic. What a bunch of greedy corporate bastards.
Expecting Patreon to not want to bother fighting them over it, and they are correct in that assumption.
On Wednesday, Patreon said Apple has renewed its requirement that all Patreon creators must move to subscription billing. The deadline to do so is November 1, 2026.
Edit, adding my source: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/patreon-creators-have-to-switch-to-subscription-billing-by-november-thanks-to-apple-203759852.html
Deserving is irrelevant under Capitalism. It’s only whether they can get away with it or not?
And fixing this problem is going to require a similar attitude from the people tired of this.
We need to rep our interests as ruthlessly and as sophisticatedly as our enemies.
It’s just platform-milking, just like Meetup.com’s latest antics; there isn’t deep analysis needed to everything, haha. “Capitalism” is totally a legitimate answer despite being just one word.
You got a link to what meetup has been up to?
I, too, am interested in hearing about these supposed shenanigans.
I dunno, I left a couple years ago after they stopped providing .ics, started spamming our members that we were paying for, and then refused to provide us with the emails of our members.
No, but I used to be more active until I saw that they started to increasingly prevent you from talking to other participants, and even seeing who other people are (can’t even tell gender or anything) unless you paid for their higher tier. I literally saw it get added out of the blue after years of no such restrictions, and they’ve only dug deeper and deeper. I couldn’t even connect with someone with whom I met just because I didn’t attempt to get their number immediately on the spot.
Thank you. I havent used meetup in 10 or so years. Cant remember paid features then. People also had a profile, with a picture, so as you could see interests and groups they were part of, there was also a message board for the group and messaging members wasnt an issue. Sad to see what its become.
Yeah, we can no longer msg other participants without paying. I guess they’ve picked up on it having dating potential since it has a “Single” designation so it may get added to Match’s ever-growing portfolio down the years, haha.
Meetup is now owned by Bending Spoons, who have also enshittified wetransfer, Evernote, eventbrite, AOL, vimeo. They buy decent products that never exploded to ipo status, fire everyone and milk the rest for whatever they can charge.
Why does one company need to own meetup and eventbrite?
Is that not a monopoly? How does it not violate any anti-trust laws?
Edit to add: how long before we see a fediverse events app?
There is one, Mobilizon
Ironic that they named themselves on a plot about breaking out of a cycle of control, classic Palantir or Anduril vibes too of like “haha movies good where stonks”
They provide the payment system. They also mandate it.
If you subscribe on the website you don’t have to pay the extra. It’s only for subscriptions initiated via the app
An app you can only get via the Apple store, mandated by Apple?
You can make the subscription through the website on the phone just as well and not pay the cut to apple.
Yeah. But why would you use the app? I personally didn’t know there even was an app.
Maybe it offers something better than on whatever web browser Apple mandates, or maybe no reason but user preference.
There’s no way that the Patreon app isn’t more than a dolled up web view. If people make stupid decisions I guess the fallout is on them.
Sadly the fallout is usually on everyone - eventually companies will copy a shady practice as it’s been shown they can get away with it until no other option exists. It falls on the technologically literate to call out when others are being mistreated or they can suffer too.
I have the Android app, but I can download podcast episodes on WiFi to save on mobile data. That’s as good a reason as any to use the app.
You could also use any other podcast app.
Most likely the app exists just because people don’t know how to type patreon.com into the browser anymore
Full functionality is available on the web AFAIK. And if you subscribe on the web, there’s no Apple cut, but you can still use the app to see said content.
It’s an inconvenience, but a super easy one to get past and not exclusive to Patreon so a trick any Apple users should know anyway if they enjoy paying subscriptions for things (Netflix, Spotify, whatever)
I too assume the Patreon App doesn’t do anything that cannot be done on their web page. I can imagine there good dev reasons but also bad incentives to make it an app.
I am biased against Apple as I like being the on in control of my hardware/software… but is it a stretch to say Apple influence their users to use apps instead of webpages (so they can rentseek a cut)?
Your opinion of Apple is generally valid, but as an Apple user for the last few years, I’ve never actually seen Apple push me to install an app. It’s always the website itself saying “it’s even better in the app!” or something.
Lack of competition. No other app store is allowed to operate on Apple devices. They have a monopoly, which is the only reason they can charge as much as they do
Sure, Apple are providing a payments platform, but why do they deserve 10x what Stripe charges?
I don’t believe that 30% cut includes payment processing. That’s an additional fee
Sad to think about how little creators actually get at the end of the day. Example of a $100 donation/subscription:
-
Apple takes 30%
-
Card companies take ~4%
-
Patreon takes 10%
-
Taxes take another big chunk
After all that a the creator would have, what, $40?
-
Why does Apple feel they deserve a 30% cut?
Because they can. Time and time again, useful idiots have proven their dipshittery by sucking off the people taking them for a ride.
A main tenant of business decisions is to fuck over your customers as hard as they’re willing to be fucked. Since nobody has any standards these days, corporations make a killing.
It’s not about what they deserve, it’s about what they want.
Apple also gets money from developers who use their platform already. That should be it.
Apple will already bully small developers off their platform while giving bigger companies first-class treatment.
I suspect this has more to do with closing a loophole than going after Patreon and only Patreon.
People don’t have to subscribe through the app. and Patreon don’t have to offer that functionality in the App. Apple don’t have Patreon locked in to their platform.
That’s how the system works. You don’t expect Walmart to not get a commission when you sell something at their store.
30% is reasonable. DEAL WITH IT.
Don’t like it? Make your own phone and platform.
Opening up the comments on macrumors never disappoints me :)
Apple is reselling services, just like Walmart wholesales products, clearly
See? Apple users are as dumb as a sack of diapers and deserve to be taken advantage of accordingly.
its also not how it works… at all. walmart would buy wholesale from a supplier not directly from the seller
Apple is being terrible here, but Walmart now has an amazon-like storefront where third parties can list their own products basically entirely apart from Walmart but using their site. Not sure what the percent cut Walmart takes is, but Walmart might never actually buy from a company selling on their site.
I’m surprised this wasn’t already the case, how did patreon get an exception in the first place? I don’t know anything about how apple billing with patreon works but the way this sounds is that patreon’s “Legacy Billing” somehow allows creators to get around the 30% fee that is normally standard to anything on apple, and the means to enable/disable this feature is entirely in the hands of individual creators rather than patreon or apple, weird.
Yes! Exploit the morons as much as they’re willing to be exploited!
None of them have the brains/balls to fight back.
I didn’t even know there was a Patreon app. I signed up through the website. On a computer. Old school.
@Sine_Fine_Belli 😡 Tim Cook is a bad man. Do not federate with him!
Technofeudalism.
Most of you would applaud if this was gaben.
You’re not a very observant person, are you?
Cook needs a new boat
@Ron @Sine_Fine_Belli bezos is the amazon guy… but they booth need probably
