Apps
have become a huge economy, but the rules that govern them are nearly
impossible to understand.
Apple and Google
have twisted their decade-old rules for their app stores like a pretzel to the
point where they may no longer make sense. This has made buying digital stuff
in apps convoluted as heck.
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One example: In
theory, although not yet in reality, you can use your Amazon account to buy an
e-book from Kindle’s
iPhone app. You cannot buy an e-book in the Android
version of the app. Until recently, Kindle purchases were effectively a no-go
under Apple’s rules but fine under Google’s. Now it’s the opposite.
Confusing? Yep.
Apple and Google have written long, complicated guidelines for apps and have
frequently revised those rules to protect their own interests.
Want more
zaniness? Today, it’s easy-peasy to pay to subscribe to a podcast in Patreon’s
iPhone app. Apple stands aside and allows
Patreon to take your personal
information and credit card details.
But buying other
types of digital subscriptions can be completely different. If you purchase a
platinum membership to the dating service Tinder in the iPhone app, you are
effectively signing up with Apple, and Tinder is on the sidelines.
Apple takes a
chunk of that membership fee forever. If you want to quit, you tell Apple, not
Tinder.
Buying a six-month
membership through the Tinder app costs some people $14.99 a month, but it is
$13.50 if purchased from the website. (The price difference is Tinder’s way of
partly recouping the up-to-30-percent fee it pays Apple for each app purchase.)
Oh, and paying to use dating apps might soon work more like paying for stuff in
Patreon — but only in the Netherlands.
Apple and Google have written long, complicated guidelines for apps and have frequently revised those rules to protect their own interests.
For now, paying
for Tinder through its Android app is more like how Patreon works. But that’s
only because Match Group, Tinder’s parent company, has sued Google to stop the
company from changing its rules.
There are endless
reasons why Apple makes a distinction between buying a subscription from
Patreon and buying one from Tinder. There is logic behind why you can buy a
paperback copy of “1984” from Amazon’s Android app but not the e-book edition,
and why new
Netflix subscribers used to be able to sign up from its Android app
but now can’t. Or, sort of can’t. It’s another pretzel twist.
It took hours of
phone calls and sleuthing to figure out all the details in the paragraphs you
just read. If so many rules, exceptions and explanations are needed to buy
things from an app in 2022, perhaps the logic of the app economy is illogical.
For years, some
companies that make apps have griped about how Google and especially Apple
control many aspects of this economy. They both dictate which apps we can download
easily through their app stores and when they directly handle purchases that we
make through apps.
If we use an app
to buy stuff that exists in the real world, such as an Uber ride or a meal kit
subscription, those purchases bypass Apple and Google. The fight is over buying
things that we use digitally, such as a trinket used in a smartphone app game
or a dating app subscription.
The problem is
that distinctions that seemed sensible when Apple created its app storefront in
2008 don’t necessarily fit the modern digital economy.
In the
Zoom-everything age, does it make sense to have different rules, as Apple
sought to have, for, say, buying gym classes to take in person and those you
take virtually at home? Why aren’t apps like Facebook that make money from
advertisements handing a chunk of revenue to Apple and Google, but those that
sell digital subscriptions are?
And the app rules
often change, creating more complexity.
Google recently
put in place tighter restrictions so it must handle the purchases of more
digital stuff in apps and take a cut.
Again, there is
some sense behind all of these pretzel twists. Apple and Google want to avoid
letting major smartphone video games, the biggest moneymakers in app worlds,
bypass their regulations and fees. And they say they are trying to respond to
complaints that they have too much control or that they burden small
businesses.
But the more
concessions that Apple or Google make to mollify angry governments and some
angry developers but not others, the more arbitrary their app store logic can
seem.
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