This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yen also pointed out how such a court decision could help cut inflation in the US, too, "by dropping the price of a significant chunk of digital purchases by 30% overnight".
I bet most companies will just take that extra 30% as profit rather than giving it back to their users like proton has.
Yeah, even of the companies don’t pocket the difference, he’s an idiot to suggest that this will cut inflation.
This guy is just not very smart, I think.
I think he’s a salesperson trying to sell the idea that getting rid of the apple tax is good for consumers.
getting rid of the apple tax is good for consumers.
I mean that's not wrong. I had no idea Apple was double-dipping like this. I wonder if Google is doing the same thing...
Every store does this. Even Holy Valve
Every company who takes a cut from in-app purchases, be it subscriptions or DLC, should be kneecapped by this ruling.
It's one thing for the hosting marketplace (App Store, Steam, Play Store, etc) to take a cut from the initial purchase of a game/app. But it's a whole other issue for that initial marketplace to keep reaching further into the dev's pockets and take a cut from in-app purchases unrelated to where it was originally obtained.
That just turns paid apps into splash screens for in-app purchases though. That way apple never gets a cut because the "purchase" is in-app. Pay to be listed (maybe tiered depending on downloads) seems fair especially because it doesn't incentivize people to do scammy things with pricing. It's already a fee anyway.
That just turns paid apps into splash screens for in-app purchases though
Welcome to Android lol
What? Since when does Valve prohibit companies from redirecting customers to non-Valve purchasing flows? Because that's what this ruling is about, it says Apple can't prohibit apps from telling users to go buy off-platform for lower prices. Valve isn't doing that with Steam afaik, actually I'm not aware of any other platform that does this
Valve will even allow developers to create their own Steam keys free of charge and sell them wherever they want with no commission whatsoever
That’s pretty open I’d say
Yeah, Proton is bucking the obvious trend, with this one. Most companies will totally take the profits rather than lowering prices.
Companies that were app-first like mobile games probably won't cut prices much if any. Companies that were web-first like Proton and Patreon probably will.
Damn. People here sure love purity testing. The guy could pay for their cancer treatment and still slap him every chance because they got it wrong publicly in the past but once you get it wrong publicly once, you're out of the club. Go be a conservative we don't want you. When someone at Tuta has a bad year and ends up in the wrong publicly, find another email service to try and convince people to go too. Probably worse in functionality than Tuta as you go down to smaller and worse funded efforts in this niche field of Internet activism
But people here do it here too to Mozilla because they don't like their social outreach programs and their attempts to get advertising revenue so screw Mozilla too. So because nothing but perfection is acceptable, push away people that may be adjacent/left leaning right and switch to less developed products. Switch from Firefox and attack Mozilla who do the bulk of Firefox development and use Waterfox who do a custom deployment/build. Pure display of perfection being the enemy of good here.
You want people to embrace privacy but keep whiplashing people around when the org/anyone in leadership says something wrong. Screw Signal, they're not perfect. Screw Matrix/Element, some developer said something one day so it's all bad. I'm surprised anyone here uses any privacy software or a major open source software like Linux or Krita or Blender at the risk that someone in the background may be wrong in someway which I am 100% certain they exist in important positions. Same with Lemmy
Go back to the 60s and you all would be shitting on Fred Hampton for accepting the impure and the color coalition for everyone that had ever said something wrong. Al Franken definitely would not make it with y'all. Y'all can't build up leftist communities because y'all are bitter assholes that can't move on and spend so much time purity testing. Y'all are probably mediocre too so can't make a difference in privacy and data ownership activism anyways so should be lining up to support not just Tuta, someone hasn't screwed up publicly yet, and Proton
Reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi. She was under the gun of the military ruling class that permitted limited democratic government and because she didn't make speech as if she lived in the US, a bunch of Americans turned on her and celebrated when the military dictatorship came back to rule and put her in prison the moment it seemed like the civilian government would actually assert more power
It's not a purity test so much as a fear that publicly signaling loyalty to trump devalued their trustworthiness as private and secure. If their CEO legitimately believes that Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats because conservatives want to weaponize the federal government to control speech online, then I don't really trust him not to cooperate with federal authorities when they want to access someone's emails or vpn traffic. Conservatives are simply not trustworthy to me
If they can charge 30% less without Apple's fees, then why are their prices the same whether you buy on their iOS app or direct on their website? Why have they been overcharging users who don't buy through the iOS app by 30% all this time?
Old knowledge disclaimer, but if they didn't change it then:
Because Apple literally tells people that they're not allowed to charge less somewhere else - at least that was the case several years ago...
Some things do charge different amounts though. YouTube Premium for example is more expensive if you subscribe in iOS but maybe that’s just because it’s Google.
They also could have just not let anyone subscribe through the iOS app. Lots of things do that.
I’ve noticed this too, there’s no consistency. Some companies seem to get away with two prices, others not.
This is the same on most platforms. You'll rarely find a product for different prices in different places because if they're listed on Amazon, Steam, Apple, Google, etc. they're not allowed to.
That isn't exactly true with Steam. Valve does allow a dev to offer a discount at a different store as long as that same discount comes to Steam in a reasonable amount of time.
Straight from the docs:"It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time."
Because Apple prohibited that.
Likely they were not allowed to by the terms they agreed to with apple.
Cool! Still not gonna put all my eggs in the fascist-sympathetic basket
“Up to”…… here’s 5% off
Very true. I'm giving you up to* 1000 upvotes.
I am sad because of all the people in this thread who think the CEO is "fascist-sympathetic" because he said Trump did something better than the Democrats one time.
Yeah, having only just switched from GMail to Proton last week my heart sank when I saw “Proton are MAGA”.
Then I spent three minutes reading up on it and it’s like, the CEO said one thing about policy on regulation of big tech that was critical of the Democrats for not doing enough, and the internet has decided that means he’s MAGA.
He said Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats. Republicans tech policy is motivated entirely by the fact that their racist and conspiratorial views were getting them banned on social media sites from 2015 - 2024
Conservatives have absolutely zero principles. If they say they want to break up big tech, it's because they want to control it in some way. They want the platforms to promote speech that's beneficial to them.
If you believe that Republicans truly are better for tech policy than democrats, then you either whole-heartedly agree that a group of criminals and wannabe dictators should be able to destroy any business that publishes speech against them, or you are extremely gullible. Either way, why would I want to give you my business?
No doubt Proton’s CEO will use this to justify his “Trump is better for regulating big tech” claim, while ignoring that the judge is an Obama appointee.
But I already use proton and purchased outside the Apple Store (on the proton website) and use it on my iPhone? What changed?
It's not exactly 30%. For sales below $1M, it's 15%: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/
In Europe, where this was established last year, they started charging a Core Technology Fee to cover the cost of hosting and data transfer: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
And if you switch payment providers, you have to pay at least 2.5% plus transaction and any intermediary fees.
It's nice that Proton is offering a discount, but for everyone else there may be additional ongoing costs.
It's time to end monopolies
Should have done a valve and allowed selling anywhere but require price parity. Now from their greed there will be financial incentive for people to use another platform.
