Netflix Dodges App Store Tax With a New External Sign-Up Page on iOS (pcmag.com) 36
iPhone and iPad users looking to subscribe to Netflix via the streaming platform's iOS app are being redirected to an external website which removes the need to pay the App Store tax. From a report: As 9To5Mac reports, the redirection looks to be rolling out globally and takes advantage of a new iOS API that allows apps classed as "reader apps" to sign-up new users and manage their accounts outside of the App Store.
Reader apps, as described by Apple, provide one or more digital content types -- including magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video -- as its primary function. That includes popular services such as Spotify, Zinio, Amazon Kindle, and YouTube. In the case of Netflix, new customers are diverted to a separate website at the tap of a button in the app to enter personal data, choose a payment method, and select a streaming plan. This update ensures transactions are no longer Apple's responsibility and all subscription management is therefore completed by Netflix. Once signed up, the Netflix iOS app should provide full content access.
Reader apps, as described by Apple, provide one or more digital content types -- including magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video -- as its primary function. That includes popular services such as Spotify, Zinio, Amazon Kindle, and YouTube. In the case of Netflix, new customers are diverted to a separate website at the tap of a button in the app to enter personal data, choose a payment method, and select a streaming plan. This update ensures transactions are no longer Apple's responsibility and all subscription management is therefore completed by Netflix. Once signed up, the Netflix iOS app should provide full content access.
Tax? (Score:2)
Re:Tax? (Score:5, Insightful)
> A tax is something a government puts on a product.
I'm pretty sure there is more than one meaning of that word, but finding an example is taxing my memory.
> I get charged a tax, in most jurisdictions on many products. I also lose my dignity as I get treated like a criminal on my way out.
Live in New Hampshire. No sales tax and once you've paid for something you have no obligation to further prove it. Sure, lemmings still panic when bells go off, but honest freemen keep walking (membership clubs may impose additional agreements). Filing a false police report is also a crime.
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> once you've paid for something you have no
> obligation to further prove it
That's the case in most states. The only place I've shown my receipt to anyone on exit in at least the last 15 years is Costco, where I've agreed to do so as part of my membership contract. The goonsquad at Best Buy, at least, seems to be well-trained enough to know that once money has changed hands I don't them another goddamned thing. The walmart ones do get really pissy and tend to drop into a Cartman-esque "Respect mah
Re:Tax? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a metaphor. Using the word "Tax" implies that Apple has government-like powers over the App Store.
why should apple get 30% when they don't host (Score:4, Insightful)
why should apple get 30% when they don't host any of the video?
It's like best buy saying when you buy our TV you must pay your cable bill with us and we take 30% of that while we don't run or pay for the up keep of the cable system.
Re: why should apple get 30% when they don't host (Score:2)
If safari wasn't deliberately gimped, companies like Netflix could likely rely on PWA rather than needing app stores. There's a good Reddit thread on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/javas... [reddit.com]
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android, mac os, windows , Linux all let you side load and have alt stores.
and windows can't lock out steam as they will get into big anti trust issues with that.
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Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
If Apple doesn't convince you of the truth of that saying, I don't know what could.
Queue Meme (Score:1)
As the meme goes, "That was always allowed".
I can see a company like Netflix struggling with revenue might try something like this, in order to retain more of the revenue from subscriptions.
I wonder though if long term it will actually decrease revenue - for instance on an AppleTV if I want to re-subscribe to Netflix, I can't go to a web page and would have to use the web site, In fact this has already delayed one period of Netflix re-subscription I had by about a month as I didn't want to bother going to
Re:Queue Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Netflix hasn't allowed new customers to buy a subscription through the App Store since 2018. The only thing that is changing is that Apple is now allowing them to provide a link to their website for signing up. Previously, you just had to know that their website is netflix.com. [rolls eyes at Apple]
Seems fair enough (Score:1)
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Good business tactic and within the rules. Are we all supposed to be climbing aboard the Outrage Bus here?
Yes, of course. That's why the word "dodges" was used in the headline. We're supposed to think that Netflix is doing something shady that's outside the rules in order to deprive poor Apple of their deserved piece of the pie.
Similar to Kindle (Score:2)
As alluded to in the post, it is similar to what users have to go through with Kindle on IOS. You purchase a book, you have to go to the web version of Amazon. You can't use the Amazon app or the Kindle app.
It's an extra barrier of stupidosity due to Apple's rules. If Apple were to charge a small, reasonable fee for distribution -- say 50 cents for a purchase -- everyone could end up happy, including consumers. But instead, you have to work around because Apple insists on charging a percentage of the value
Not quite right, but interesting to consider (Score:4, Interesting)
they charge it forever.
Apple charges 30% for the first year of a subscription, then 15% after that.
Now in a world where people are dropping subscriptions every few months then re-starting later - that has probably become much more of a problem for Netflix specifically.
The behavior of people has reduced the helpfulness of Apple's rules around percentages, I think Apple should amend to say "if a customer has ever subscribed, after the first year the fee is 15%".
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they charge it forever.
Apple charges 30% for the first year of a subscription, then 15% after that.
Now in a world where people are dropping subscriptions every few months then re-starting later - that has probably become much more of a problem for Netflix specifically.
No, it hasn't. Netflix stopped allowing you to subscribe or resubscribe from within their iOS app back in 2018. Thus, Any Netflix subscribers who are still paying for their subscriptions through Apple have been continuously subscribed since 2018 or earlier. Anyone who dropped their through-Apple subscription is forced to resubscribe through the Netflix website, and that has been true since 2018.
The only thing new here is that they are being allowed to link to the website for subscribing instead of relyin
Didn't realize it was that long (Score:1)
No, it hasn't. Netflix stopped allowing you to subscribe or resubscribe from within their iOS app back in 2018.
Hmm, thanks - I knew from recent re-subscriptions I did myself (which had to be done on the website) they had not made that change recently, but didn't realize it was all the way back in 2018...
I would argue then in fact it has hurt Netflix, as it probably contributed to the slide in subscribers.
However generally the point I raised is interesting to consider for all kinds of streaming companies, pe
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I think it is likely that Netflix are big enough to negotiate preferential merchant account fees. So they probably pay no more than about 2% per transaction. Even if Apple charged 15% from the very first day, Netflix would lose 13% for every subscriber who subscribed through Apple.
And subscribing to a monthly video-on-demand service like Netflix usually isn't the sort of thing you do on a whim. Most people think before they make that sort of commitment. This isn't like a dating app where people might re
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Which means they would have to gain 15.3% more subscribers by using Apple's payment system just to break even
I did essentially the same math in my head. I still think Netflix would be ahead accepting subscribers through Apple - it would mostly be people on devices without browsers that Netflix would gain... but those are exactly the kind of transient consumers Netflix needs to entice, since fewer people are remaining subscribers.
Like I said, I know for sure they lost at least one month since I delayed a re
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Which means they would have to gain 15.3% more subscribers by using Apple's payment system just to break even
I did essentially the same math in my head. I still think Netflix would be ahead accepting subscribers through Apple - it would mostly be people on devices without browsers that Netflix would gain...
What devices without browsers? I can point any iOS device at Netflix.com and subscribe right now very easily.
Like I said, I know for sure they lost at least one month since I delayed a re-subscription because I couldn't do it on an AppleTV, and came back a month later to actually subscribe. The fact is that lots and LOTS of Apple customers really prefer to pay through Apple, because they know they can cancel easily and they can subscribe from any device. It's just way simpler.
But is that convenience worth a 15% premium? And no, the answer is never "yeah, but the company pays that". You can safely assume that the cost will always get factored into the price, realistically speaking.
Also, if you came back more than 10 months ago, they still came out ahead even after losing a month of your subscriber fees because of the extra hassle of resubscribing. :-)
In fact if Netflix REALLY wanted growth they should allow for truly anonymous subscription, where you could simply buy a subscription without any kind of Netflix login. Then you could only watch through an Apple device but it wouldn't matter, it would help capture a larger overall base of transient watchers (which is the base of people draining from Netflix subscriber base).
I think that anonym
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In fact if Netflix REALLY wanted growth they should allow for truly anonymous subscription, where you could simply buy a subscription without any kind of Netflix login.
Why on earth would that attract subscribers? Also, why do you think that would be anonymous in any way?
let web users keep paying what they are and let people subscribe through Apple for 30% more. Then they lose nothing
That's not how percentages work. If Apple is charging 30%, to make up that loss they'd need to raise their price by ~43%, not 30%.
Then they lose nothing
If they only charged 30% more, they'd lose ~9%
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let web users keep paying what they are and let people subscribe through Apple for 30% more. Then they lose nothing
That's not how percentages work. If Apple is charging 30%, to make up that loss they'd need to raise their price by ~43%, not 30%.
Except it isn't 30% forever. It's 30% for the first year and 15% thereafter. So in the first year, they would lose 9% every month minus the credit card processing fees that they don't have to pay, so probably more like 7%. In the second year and every year thereafter, they would make 10.5% more at that 30% premium (because they would get 85% of that rather than 70%) plus the credit card fee savings, so probably more like 12.5%. So they would break even somewhere around 19 or 20 months. I don't know how
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Apple charges 30% for the first year of a subscription, then 15% after that.
Do you think that makes it better? It's still absolutely ridiculous. This kind of abusive rent-seeking shouldn't be legal.
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Yeah, 30 cents on a one dollar purchase seems high but also seems reasonable for access to the infrastructure.
$30 on a $100 purchase seems extremely excessive seeing that the cost to apple for hosting the content doesn't really change.
The company I work for charges $35/month for our app. That would be an apple tax of $10.50 per month.
We would gladly pay it for the first month as a "finder's fee" but to continue to have to pay that every month is not feasible.
Most companies that are charging $10+ dollars f
Access to the infrastructure (Score:2)
What infrastructure?
You download an app from the Apple store. OK, that's Apple's infrastructure. But from there on, the plumbing doesn't belong to Apple. You stream a movie fro Netflix's servers to your iDevice over the Internet and your friendly neighborhood 5G provider. Apple is not involved.
Most companies that are charging $10+ dollars for an app
Yeah. But that's only once. So hand Apple $3. Once.
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The cost to apple to block malware, etc... should be basically the same regardless of whether you are charging $1, $10, or $100 per app.
My guess is that the free apps are likely more problematic and costly to apple than ones set up to accept in-app purchases.
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Payment infrastructure for one. VISA charges anywhere between 2% and 5% + extra fees for handling a credit card. Besides handling the payment, Apple also handles push notifications, ads, metrics, they do host the app itself, PKI infrastructure, a lot of developer information etc.
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If Apple wanted to price fairly they could charge something like %4 or $20 (just an examples don't know what the exact right values lay) where $20 is the maximum fee when %4 of the gross exceeds $20.
That way they could allow really cheap or micro payment modeled apps to use their stuff without hosing consumers or sellers and still get a bigger part of the revenue for higher priced licenses and use fees.
They could also approach it like tax brackets. Its %30 of the first $2, %15 of the next $8, 2% of each ad
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As alluded to in the post, it is similar to what users have to go through with Kindle on IOS. You purchase a book, you have to go to the web version of Amazon. You can't use the Amazon app or the Kindle app.
It's an extra barrier of stupidosity due to Apple's rules. If Apple were to charge a small, reasonable fee for distribution -- say 50 cents for a purchase -- everyone could end up happy, including consumers. But instead, you have to work around because Apple insists on charging a percentage of the value of the content.
The problem is that Apple insists on doing the distribution itself. By doing so, they have effectively monopolized the distribution part, forcing you to distribute through their store or not at all. So open source projects, which typically already have distribution systems available at no cost, can't reasonably distribute through that mechanism unless it is free, because that would massively inflate their costs. So to pay for those free apps, Apple allows that distribution for free, paid for by folks dis