I'm not going to fall all over myself defending Apple, but it's not as cut and dry as being a price gouge. Apple spent mountains of money on R&D to create wildly popular consumer devices, build and maintain the systems, build and maintain infrastructure, security systems, app distribution systems, and operate payment systems.
There's no reason Patreon must use Apple's store. They could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site. iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content, and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if the services Apple is offering do have value, and people are just arguing about the bill.
I don't have an explanation from Patreon as to why they didn't ship a webapp, but I can at least provide some plausible explanations.
The thing is, while iOS is only 27% of the global phone market, that percentage increases when you look at high-value customers. That is, the people with disposable income to spend on fancier phones[0], the people who pay for apps, and the people who would, most critically, donate to an artist's recurring crowdfunding campaign. This isn't even something I made up, it's specifically one of the allegations in the DOJ's lawsuit against Apple.
Now, you are a counterparty to this $3tn megacorporation[1] who owns all your customers. Said corporation is altering the deal: you either bill through our royalty-bearing[2] payment processor or we kick you off the platform. You have two options:
- Upend large sections of your business model to comply with Apple guidelines, including killing an unusually quirky billing model some fraction of your creators make use of, or,
- Leave the platform where all your creators' customers are, hope said creators can get people to follow along through Apple's convenient and extremely discoverable six-step process[3] to install a PWA, and enjoy degraded access to push notifications[4], having to fight Google SEO spam for discoverability, and the ongoing business risk of Apple having complete and total editorial control over how your webapp works on iOS[5].
I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
[0] To be clear, high-end Android phones cost more than iPhones now, but iPhone is still a status symbol.
[1] Incidentally, this is about half the current budget of the US government.
[2] Apple's argument in the Epic lawsuit was that the 30% is a copyright royalty for the use of iOS, which doesn't quite make sense but the judge bought it.
[3] Navigate to the website, press the Share button, scroll down to "Add to Home Screen", fill out the form to name your new home screen icon, tap "Add", relog into the PWA again
[4] Yes, I know iOS added push notification support. I'll believe it when the Google Fi PWA actually notifies me about text messages on my iPad.
[5] Yes, this risk is higher for webapps. Apple can't modify submitted apps after-the-fact (just refuse to host them), but they can modify webpages behind your back by changing Safari. To quote Cory Doctorow: "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." If users can block ads, Apple can block whatever else they want, too.
> I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
This is just hand-waving away my point, though: they can absolutely be on iOS through the browser and nobody has to pay Apple a dime. The fact that they've done the math and decided they must be a distributed iOS app in the Apple App Store means it offers undeniable value. Whether or not it 'screws over creators' is incidental to Patreon, their business model is extracting revenue from creators. Of course they're going to chafe at competition and make sure creators blame Apple for the business expense Patron is passing on to them.
Yes, but "only when it harms both allocative efficiency and raises the prices of goods above competitive levels or diminishes their quality."[1]
[1] https://law.stanford.edu/press/congress-hears-challenges-to-...