Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US (opens in new tab)

These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.

There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.

There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

It's not an issue from time immemorial. it's an issue from the late 19th century, if not post WWII. the child consumer class did not before that. Toys hardly existed before that. Even an adult consume class with disposable income had hardly existed. Kids spending hours every day zonked out at screens is a distinctly new phenomenon on top of that

I think the persistence of advertising is an issue overall. I think we are worse off today now that you get bombarded with targeted ads and there's usually a seamless buy now button displayed within them.

Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.

Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.

I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.

What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.

But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?

This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.

In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.

Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.

The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).

Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.

So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.

You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.

So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.

The way my favorite boss told me, it was "don't let `great` be the enemy of `good enough.`"

I often say you have to judge people based on their time and the environment around them and you need to encourage whatever good moves you see. In other words, I'll take a greedy bloodsucker over an evil greedy bloodsucker any day.

*Perfect

Why would different business practices shield console makers in the first place, legally speaking? As in, even if all consoles were always sold at a loss, how would that help someone's legal case that they should be excluded here? Does the law state that, "if your business practices are incompatible with antitrust legislation, and you'd end up having to raise prices, shut down, or decrease your CEO's paycheck, if we enforced it on you, then we won't do it" or something along those lines?

Except there are indeed productivity tools for consoles as well, e.g. anything done with UWP on Windows Store can also be targeted to XBox UWP ERA environment.

Ask him if he can see the geolocation of every Fornite user; or easily guess it by their chat logs, IP Address, and other behaviors.

390 million users. Say 10% on iOS. 39 million users. 18Gb on iOS last time

Yeah app distribution costs something. Finger in the air 10's of petabytes...

"buy IAPs out of boredom". Because they keep you "engaged" doing the same thing forever.

A class action lawsuit from other developers is inevitable, at least for the time period where Apple took the money after the judgement.

To me it's felt like coasting. Just release very minimal updates each year to all their main products let others die on the vine like HomePods. iOS 18 marquee features were Apple Intelligence and customizing the home screen. One that didn't ship and one that has been a staple of Android since day 1.

Only real advancement I've seen is in Apple Silicon. Which is fantastic but very much on a tik-tok cycle like Intel. Really wish these companies would cut back on constant model upgrades and instead spend more time polishing the products.

> Steve Jobs was quite famously against upgradability since the start. That is not something new for Apple.

And yet during his time we had upgradeable MacBooks and Macs. Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.

>Spotify is the one who screws everyone. They deserve it

How? They pay the exact same percentage as Steam does to it's creators, 70%.

Beyond the morality of taking money in this situation, Apple soured it's relationship with everyone who makes income off Patreon or other apps with their unstoppable greed.

The idea Apple deserved a cut of Patreon podcaster's monthly subscription fees was beyond the pale.

The entire thing they got contempt of court for was trying to find a way to continue to squeeze customers as long as they can.

This is the Big Tech playbook. Apple and Google know what they're doing isn't legal. But they make so much doing it, that it's worth the lawyer fees to delay and delay and appeal and appeal as long as possible to keep the money train flowing. Historically the fine has never been as big as the profit, so even if they eventually get in trouble for it, it makes sense for them to profit in the short term.

They can just get a presidential pardon for now and all future acts. Companies are people. Unkillable people. Unjailable people. They don't sleep. They have a thousand arms, a thousand eyes, a thousand legs, thousand brains. They get better financing, they can walk away from their financing. I can send unlimited money to politicians. They can exist in a thousand places, countries, legal systems at once.

This is HN, the Church of the Free Market is well represented. If you haven't yet seen someone give the "free markets create competition" speech on Monday and the "my company aims to capture this space and then entrench a monopoly with economies of scale / network effects / platform effects / two sided markets / last mile dynamics" pitch on Tuesday, just hang around HN a bit more. You won't have to wait long.

I think a more interesting question is: who is “self”? US is historically more prone to favor business, while EU seems more concerned in protecting consumers. And of course there is the noise generated by incompetence/corruption/lobbying that makes the question of “in the interest of whom are laws made?” very nuanced.

> who is taking the concept of free markets seriously

The EU. Let me explain, because this was confusing:

In US political debate, free markets have become synonymous with ”let companies do what they want”. Today, most of US ”markets” are neither free, nor (arguably) even markets at all, such as Amazon or health insurance. It is a mix between feudal system and protection racket.

Just like ”freedom isn’t free” in terms of civil liberties, same goes (imo) for markets. If you want to optimize for ”freedom” of markets, that means a non-zero amount of regulating them. This is obvious both in theory and by opening your eyes and looking outside.

As far as how to regulate them, I believe the EU is doing a good job, especially in the face of novel technology and business topologies. Basically, allow everything that isn’t deliberately anti-competitive. Because, drumroll, competition is fundamental for markets to work, at all.

Sorry for the confusion. It’s hard to make points when words mean completely different things in different parts of the world.

I don't know about iOS, but on Android you can just pay through a Google Pay pop-up, you don't need to input any kind of payment information to the app itself. Does iOS not have such a mechanism?

Noiiice, tx for feeding my mind.

Also don’t forget, only very large companies can make this kind of calculated risk; when the parking ticket isn’t calculated based on your income, the parking ticket for some is just a fee to park while to others it means not making rent that month, the fines stifle competition while the big players can take advantage

I’m no expert, but it may be the case that if you place an app on, say, the EU app store, you’re technically doing business in the EU, not the US, and are therefore subject to EU law, not US law. Wasn’t that the case with the DSA requirements? https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/apple-purges-apps-without-...

You mean the model that has shifted to where apps that used to be a single $10 unlock, now have a recurring subscription of $24.99/month?

Personally unclear how much less predatory the shift to subscriptions for trivial feature unlocks is than loot boxes...

Yeah, it's mobile, so it's not all games with loot boxes and escalating pay to play. Some of it is infinite slop addictionware, brain rot, gambling, payday loan apps, shovelware, and spyware.

Apple sucks for their monopoly tactics, but it's very hard for me to have any sympathy for the rest of the mobile ecosystem. It's probably the most exploitative toxic software ecosystem.

If you’re an Indy developer making less than 1 million a year, you are paying 15%. Is it really not worth 15% (where if your product has value you should be able to charge enough to make up the difference) for credit card processing (3%-4%) and distribution?

If you're an indie developer who self-publishes, do you want to spend your time working on your app or on payment platform integrations?

Especially the smaller self-publishing developers won't benefit from this at all. It's just the large publishers like Epic who can afford the developer resources to build their own payment systems who have something to gain here.

Apple’s rules leveled the playing field. All this ruling does is give a competitive advantage to the big fish.

Depends how much cheaper.

If my Shonen Jump subscription goes from $2 to $1.70, I'd rather pay the 30 cents than have to click and type for 2 minutes, and then have to solve a mystery to cancel it later.

If my ChatGPT Pro (hypothetical, I don't pay for that) went from $200 to $170, maybe worth it.

Probably.

Though you could make the argument that it would be more complex than it's worth. There's regional issues, like can I redeem your gift code from cdkeys.ru in the US. Can I return the app afterward if I don't want it for a 160 rubles credit? They might already need to handle that stuff for gift cards though.

Apple has an integrated “gift this app” function in their app store. I’m not sure you can use it for in-app purchases, however.

My personal opinion makes no sense? I don't really care if an app only has subscriptions or purchases through their website, I'm just saying that I wouldn't use it when there's an easier and more convenient alternative available.

Adopting the language of the abused to describe being inconvenienced by the company that makes your phone is uhh, something.

True, but at the same time, "Justice delayed is justice denied"[1]. An excessively slow justice system means that you need substantially more resources (money, and time living under the uncertainty of the outcome) to deal with it, which is part of why the threat of court action against you from a large corporation (or another entity with deep pockets) is so concerning. I know someone who was in court defending against a civil suit for ten years, and the fact that someone is litigious and able to sue is a much larger threat than it should be.

Sure, there's checks and balances, and those are good, but it's ridiculous when we allow cases to drag on and then normalize it.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_delayed_is_justice_den...>

1. Yes it's already a thing

2. The US court found that Apple's implementation/requirement is bullshit and ordered it to stop. Apple complied, in the US only

Oh, worst of all, the app owners still have to pay apple's cut!

What!? Yikes that’s an overstatement. I prefer to use web apps over downloading an app to do a single action and then deleting.

There are lots of good web apps. The problem is that companies more often than not prioritize native (let’s be real, react native) apps over web. And not mobile web, desktop web. So you have a second thought of a second thought when designing and building a mobile friendly web app.

I build most of my clients’ apps as web apps. I target their main platform of choice first and branch out from there. But if I start with desktop, I pre-plan for mobile as well.

You can have high performing web apps if you continually optimize for state and rendering performance.

> They are a bloated, overcomplicated mess.

Id like to hear your opinion on native apps built on a unified framework like react native. IMO they are a much buggier mess than web apps.

Bloated and overcomplicated are design issues, not technology issues. Plenty of native apps are bloated and overcomplicated.

Making good apps is hard.

Yes! Ditto for most Electron apps. 1Password, this evil eye is indeed looking right atcha.

Dom api is too low level for application.

I didn’t say they are. I implied a connection though. And the reason for that should be obvious: if native apps hadn’t existed then we’d have never travelled down this road with an App Store

If you think the android ecosystem is just fine as it is, why don’t you just use it instead of trying to change one that many other people are happy with?

> The itunes store predates the iphone.

As does thousands of other online stores but that doesn’t mean they are App Stores too.

> The lack of native apps was resolved within a year of the iphone launch with the second generation. Probably they weren't ready for native developers and freezing APIs.

You’re basically just reiterating what I said here but in more favourable language.

At the end of the day, public demand was for native apps and the App Store was born from that. So all I’m doing is making a throw away comment about how times have changed.

> And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone.

Oh it really was. At the time it was heads and shoulders above anything else’s available for portable devices.

App Stores weren’t but native apps were:

> Back then, native apps were considered a “must have” feature for smartphones.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. More and more services have adopted a web-first interface. So the benefits of native applications have dwindled when you’re basically just using web technologies regardless.

And then there is the massive abuse of spyware in mobile apps. For that reason alone, I rarely bother with native apps if I can help it.

>Is this the final nail in the pay one time for games coffin?

No, these will continue to be made. Just that the Premium iOS Games market will also stay much smaller than the IAP horror world the rest is.

Now Apple has less incentive to allow exploitative IAPs and lootboxes on their store. Problem solved.

Sticking to his first point is sufficient: This is what credit cards themselves insulate you from. You don't need Apple to also insulate you.

They don’t always grant refunds for App Store purchases, I’ve heard from many customers whose refund requests were denied after we referred them to Apple. As a developer I would love to be able to refund them myself, but we can’t refund IAPs at all, it’s entirely up to Apple.

If the customer requests too many refunds (say 3-4 within a few months) their Apple ID is likely to be banned from making further purchases.

I feel that this is orthogonal to my point - it's not about how generous or not a given mechanism is, more to question why the App Store is any different from other transactions we need to protect. You either have to argue that App Store transactions need more consumer friendly refunds than other credit card transactions for some reason, or otherwise that credit cards should have no-questions asked refunds.

As another commenter said, in some cases Apple's power in the relationship is detrimental to the consumer - if a user issues a chargeback then Apple can disable their entire Apple account.

I don’t need no-questions refunds. I need fair transactions.

Apple is too powerful in this relationship to provide it. If I have a problem with a merchant I can go to my credit card company about it. If I have a problem with my credit card company I might lose out on that one transaction but I can get a different credit card.

If I have a problem with Apple (or Steam or Nintendo or…) I either have to take the abuse or lose past “purchases”.

And the merchant themselves can do no questions asked refunds anyway.

Then let's allow consumers choose if that service is worth 10x higher fees.

Apple knows it's a rip-off: Apple has explicitly forbidden app developers from ever informing users how much they're paying for Apple's services.

There's plenty of ways to ensure that. Don't let Apple's bad UI fool you into accepting Apple's bad business practices.

Apple could have created an API for other payment providers to integrate with, so that you could sign up for IAP with whoever you want (imagine your IAP and subscriptions run by PayPal if you enter a PayPal account instead of a credit card).

Banks and payment processors already have tons of policies requiring payments to be presented in a clear way, refunds and cancellations processed properly, etc. There are also plenty of trademark and consumer protection laws that forbid misrepresentation. It's a solved problem that Apple pretends to be unsolvable and spreads FUD about to keep their cash cow.

What do you mean? The app can use Apple's system and its own. If the developers don't want your money on terms fair to you, you don't buy.

Some things are relatively easy to refund via Apple, but not all of them. It's nearly impossible to get a refund for in-app purchases, gift cards, balance top-ups, auto-renewing subscriptions, redeemed digital goods, and so on. Coming from the EU, if I paid for these things directly with a credit card, I'd be able to get a refund in line with our consumer protection laws (if the item was sold deceptively, if it has a fault, if I am not satisfied for any reason within 14 days) that cover more or less all digital purchases - no problem.

To borrow your words, Apple's system is taking away trust. I like the refunds my European bank offers me because it operates under consumer-friendly laws. I don't trust Apple's refunds.

Anyway, opening any system to more choices for the consumer cannot decrease trust. If the consumer trusts the original payment option, they can use that. If that is not provided, but the customers don't trust other payment methods, the app won't make money. The market will soon negotiate so that the payment methods that customers and sellers find acceptable prevail. Apple fears it won't be their extortion (I mean payment system), and rightfully so. Aside from the Stockholm syndrome, there's very little reason to use it.

> You're not free to continue using Apple's payment system as a consumer.

Previously, apps could still require you to not use the apple payment option.

For example, Spotify only let you subscribe on the web because apple's 30% cut is larger than their margin, so they'd lose money if you subscribed in-app.

The "Buy" page in the app was just text saying "You cannot buy a subscription in the app". It couldn't link to the webpage since apple's rule banned that. It couldn't say "You can buy a subscription on our webpage" because apple's rules banned that.

Before, an app could simply not have any payment option in the app, and tell you "You cannot pay here". Now, an app can still choose to have no in-app payment and instead tell you "You can pay on the web", or embed that web payment option in-app.

You are still welcome to refuse to use any apps that don't support apple pay, as you could before.

I’m pretty sure this ruling just lets developers add an external payment option (and charge less for it). Apple’s IAP is still a requirement, so you’ll still have that option if it’s worth the 30% premium to you (it definitely is not for me).

Well in that case, there must be a single endpoint, a common interface, to initiate a payment, track chargeback and view payment histories. Customers should have the option if they want to trust Apple with their payment details or 3rd-party.

You're free to pay the extra 30% yourself.

I already don't trust Apple's payment systems.

This is unambiguously a win.