‘Apple’s Requirements to Hit Creators and Fans on Patreon’

Patreon:

As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024.

This has two major consequences for creators:

  1. Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.
  2. Any creator currently on first-of-the-month or per-creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue earning in the iOS app, because that’s the only billing type Apple’s in-app purchase system supports.

Before we go any further, we want to be crystal clear about one thing: Apple’s fee will not impact your existing members. It will only affect new memberships purchased in the iOS app from November onward.

Patreon’s messaging on this change seems pitch-perfect to me. They’re not whining, they’re not calling for users to get their pitchforks out, but also, they’re making crystal clear that these changes, and the timeline for implementing them, are demanded by Apple — and that Patreon benefits from these changes not at all.

This might epitomize the way Apple can be penny-wise but pound-foolish when it comes to the App Store. However much money they think they might get from these Patreon subscriptions once the Patreon iOS app switches to IAP, I refuse to believe it’s worth the further degradation of Apple’s brand that this dispute with Patreon is incurring. The paying users of Patreon are fans. They are such dedicated and devoted fans of certain creators and artists that they choose to pay those creators money. And now these users are being informed that Apple is putting the squeeze on these creators and inserting themselves into a relationship that these fans see as being between them and the artists they support.

In some sense it’s fair that Apple is applying these rules to Patreon, because there are other Patreon-esque platforms, like Fanhouse, that have been required by Apple to use the App Store’s IAP all along. But the fans of Patreon creators aren’t going to see this as fair at all. How do you put a price on that goodwill? How do you put a price on the number of Patreon iOS users — who are all, by definition, Apple customers — whose view of Apple will shift from “Apple is a company that supports small indie creators and artists” to “Apple is a company that uses its position of power to extract exorbitant rent from small indie creators and artists” because of this change?

★ Monday, 12 August 2024