Social-Media
Facebook scales back the prices for the Apple App Store
Facebook has joined the growing ranks of companies publicly complaining about the 30 percent fee that Apple collects for payments made through its App Store.
Those comments came halfway through a blog post about the social network's new feature promoting paying online activities. Facebook said that to help struggling companies, they 're not going to charge any fees for those activities, at least for the next year, which ensures that those businesses keep 100% of their purchases on the site and on Ios.
But Facebook said that wasn't going to be the case on iOS because of the fees for the App Store, and it was targeting Apple with shockingly clear language (at least straightforward for a corporate blog post):
We asked Apple to reduce its 30% App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so we could absorb all costs for businesses struggling during COVID-19. Unfortunately, they dismissed both our requests and SMBs will only be paid 70% of their hard-earned revenue. Because this is complicated, as long as Facebook is waiving its fees, we will make all fees clear in our products.
To this end, the post includes screenshots of how the payment flow events will look on iOS and Android. Android says, "Google doesn't pay for this order," while iOS says, "Apple takes 30 percent of this order."
Facebook said that this language is included in the app update which we submitted to Apple today for approval—suggesting that there is a possibility that the update will not be approved.
This comes around 24 hours after Fortnite has been dropped from the App Store, after Epic Games has added direct payments to its hit title.
It seemed that Epic was deliberately trying to start a war, quickly announcing a lawsuit against Apple and releasing a brief in-game video parodying Apple 's famous 1984 commercial, with Apple acting as a villain.
Although Apple's 30 percent charge has been around for as long as the App Store itself, the issue came to the fore earlier this summer when Basecamp entered into a public battle with the company about its subscription email service Hey, for which the developer sought to bypass the fees of the App Store by only allowing subscription payments on its website.
At the time, Apple's Phil Schiller told us that the uproar was not causing the company to reconsider any of its guidelines, which he said were built for improved user experience — to prevent circumstances where you download the user and it doesn't function.
