Apple Updates App Store Guidelines To Allow Links To External Payments

Apple has updated its App Store Guidelines to comply with a court order from the Epic Games lawsuit, now allowing U.S. apps to include external payment links and buttons without needing special approval. "The App Review Guidelines have been updated for compliance with a United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps. These changes affect apps distributed on the United States storefront of the App Store," Apple said in an email to developers on Thursday night. 9to5Mac reports: Here are the full changes to the App Store Guidelines with today's revisions:

3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.
3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.
3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action. "We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court's order and we will appeal," Apple said in a statement to 9to5Mac yesterday.

Spotify, Patreon, Epic Games and others are already working to circumvent Apple's App Store fees.

Great.

[eclectro]

Now when do we see an alternative to the visa/masticard oligarchy??

Re:

[Kitkoan]

You mean like American Express, Discover, UnionPay, and JCB?

Re:

[RealMelancon]

He/she means a Non-American payment system. Not sure why banks still do free publicity to VISA/Mastercard. Lack of alternatives ?

Re:

[Kitkoan]

UnionPay is Chinese, and JCB is Japanese. These aren't American.

Re:

[DarkOx]

I am not sure I am really 'happy' with the outcome here. I like Apple's walled garden. I chose to use it because it is a (comparatively speaking) safe part of internet-town to walk about in.

The situation here is not exactly like Mastercard/Visa networks. Your iPhone was an 'App Store shop' period, your grocery store does not have to pick between accepting Visa or Mastercard as payment processors, they can chose both, none, or either, can do ACH, select from among any number of smaller operators, they ca

Re: Great.

[ArmoredDragon]

The walled garden is still very much there. Absolutely nothing has changed in this regard.

Though the walled garden is and always has been security theater.

Re:

[PPH]

The walled garden is still very much there.

Maybe. Can Epic (and others) choose to offer only their own in-app purchase methods? Perhaps if you want to play Fortnight and buy stuff for the game, Epic will be the only cashier.

Re:

[nicolaiplum]

Almost globally: Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay (link to bank account in some countries, particularly ones with advanced banking systems)

China: UnionPay, Alipay.

In USA: Zelle, Paypal, Cash App

In Netherlands: iDeal

In the UK: Faster Payments

In Eurozone, UK, Denmark, etc: SEPA payment (to an IBAN)

In much of Africa: M-Pesa.

etc.

Be careful what you ask for

[hdyoung]

Im totally fine with this. This is ffrreedddooommm. Now, every company can have its own payment arrangement. So far so good. But itll have effects that a lot of people dont think about. In the past, if you had issues with payments in an ios app, there was one place you called - Apple. They were huge, provided good fast customer service, and their pockets were deep enough that issuing refunds and fixing problems was fairly fast and ez. Now, if you have a payments issue with an app, who do you call? Apple? The app maker? The parent company that bought the app maker last month? Some third party that the company outsourced the payment processing to? The OTHER fourth party that the third party processor even further outsourced to? Who knows? But if you get the app settings wrong and your kid racks up several hundred dollars of charges on an iOS game before you even know it, guess who gets to sort through all that? You do. You cant just call Apple anymore. You paid through some non-Apple portal that could be literally anywhere on the world. Apple didnt process the payment. They have no clue where your money went. Now, you get to spend a lot of time on the phone. Hope you enjoy spending hours running circles on automated chat menus designed to exhaust you because the company does NOT want to give any money back.

This one is going straight to zero.

Re:

[PPH]

So what. Apple is not special.

But they are, according to other posters. They have a well defined, uniform and working process for dealing with incorrect charges. They are motivated to maintain this because it's part of their "safe walled garden" image. And they can detect and toss really bad actors out of their store.

What I don't agree with is a 30% charge on _every_ purchase to cover charge-backs and other errors. The error rate can't really be that high. And credit card companies seem to manage that job with a fee of a few percent.

Re:

[unrtst]

IMNSHO, your doom-and-gloom stuff is not doom-and-gloom-worthy.

"(You) have no clue where your money went." Yes, you certainly do. Apple isn't going to facilitate the payment, so, well, they won't be facilitating the payment, and thus you'll have to setup the payment options with the seller directly.

Fear of a kid racking up big bills because of a misconfigured app? In this case, they could only rack up the bills in that one misconfigured app, whereas they'd be able to rack up bills across any and every app i

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

They could have ALLOWED for external payments, but they could have required that apps provide the option of paying via the Apple store.

There was only one voice of sanity there - Phil Schiller has long been advocating for changes like that, but Apple loved that huge cut and was blinded to reality by its allure. They're paying the price now. One of their execs just might even see some jail time for perjury.

Re:

[msauve]

>They could have ALLOWED for external payments, but they could have required that apps provide the option of paying via the Apple store.

If that is allowed by the court order, they can still do that. What they just did was what they could do quickly to avoid further pissing off the court.

Re:

[Cyberax]

I wish Apple had compromised before it reached this point. They could have ALLOWED for external payments, but they could have required that apps provide the option of paying via the Apple store.

They should have just reduced their MAFIA-like cut to something reasonable, like 5%. Then there would have been no real incentive to integrate third-party payment systems.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

I don't know why you have a problem with that option being presented. Let the payer decide - that's what everyone has been asking for. If they want to pay $1.29 for a $0.99 purchase in order to have whatever added value they think they're getting by running the transaction through Apple, that's their business.

Re:

[Pizza]

If you think the app maker will discount their prices by 30% because they're not forced to pay apple a cut, you're delusional.

The most likely outcome here will be that the price to the end-user will be exactly the same, only the app maker will make more profit.

(Note: I'm talking about stuff that's only accessed via apps, not subscriptions to services that can be used in a web browser on a PC or whatever. Incidently, for some time now, Apple takes a much smaller cut of recurring subscriptions)

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

Please tell me how any of that is different from any other purchase you make online that isn't specifically a phone app for an Apple device?

You've been navigating these hypothetical situations for years already. Calm down. You still have the option of calling the issuing bank for your payment card and issuing a chargeback if a vendor is being a piece of shit, just like you did yesterday.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

And I'm completely good with Apple not being the Customer Service arm of whatever app I'm using.

The fact that Apple allowed a situation to exist, where kids could accidently rack up hundreds of dollars of iOS game before you knew it, doesn't exactly reflect well on Apple. It's not enough to just provide "good customer service" after the issue happens. They should never have allowed this to happen in the first place. At the very least, require a password to authorize payment.

Hopefully someone goes to prison.

[SlashDotCanSuckMy777]

They knowingly told thier employees to lie under oath.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

And if that's proven, that's a criminal conspiracy and prosecutable.

Re:

[Njovich]

The judge specifically called out Tim Cook too:

Judge Gonzalez Rogers added that internal company documents she reviewed showed Apple deliberately violated the injunction. The documents reveal "that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option", she wrote.

She said CEO Tim Cook ignored executive Phillip Schiller's urging to have Apple comply with the injunction and allowed CFO Luca Maestri to convince him not to.

If they go for it as criminal contempt of court, t

I might give Apple a chance now.

[leptons]

I purposely designed my hardware product not to use a phone app, and instead be an IoT wifi enabled web app, so that I wouldn't have to give apple 30% of hardware purchases if someone came to my storefront through the phone app. Now I might actually make a phone app for their app store for my hardware product.

But now I'll have to pay them $100 a year for the ability to create an app for their app store, even though their competitor requires no such payment. I'll likely also be forced to buy their hardware

"We strongly disagree with the decision."

[RitchCraft]

Suck it up, Tim.