Creator Platforms Should Be a Special Category on the App Store

Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, on Patreon being required by Apple to offer in-app subscriptions through their iOS app:

But we also don’t think that Apple should be wholly blamed. This unfortunate situation, in which creators ultimately bear the biggest costs, is a structural issue rooted in how the commercial internet has evolved (or not) over the past couple of decades. [...]

But creators aren’t Apple’s traditional customers. They’re not app makers or game developers. They don’t actually have a piece of real estate in the App Store. They instead find their distribution through media platforms, including the likes of Patreon and Substack. It might feel weird for someone who publishes a podcast through Patreon, or a publication through Substack, to receive the same treatment from Apple as Netflix.

The emergence of the creator economy presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for Apple, and some delicate questions for Patreon and Substack. We want creators and subscribers to benefit from the power of Apple’s in-app purchases. In fact, at Substack we have been working with Apple to bring in-app purchases into our app, because we believe that anything that reduces the friction of a subscription is great for creators. We’re doing everything in our power to make the implementation of in-app purchases as creator-friendly as possible.

First, a correction: Yesterday I wrote that Substack didn’t offer in-app purchases in its iOS app. I was wrong. They do. How I got it wrong is that I checked, in the app, by looking at a publication to which I was already subscribed at the free tier, for an option to upgrade to a paid account. That showed me a panel that read “You cannot manage your subscription in the app.” But that’s because I started the subscription on Substack’s website. For Substack subscriptions made on the web, you must continue to manage them on the web. This probably isn’t merely about avoiding Apple’s payment fees, but a practical requirement. I don’t think there’s any way, technically, that an individual subscription you started paying for on the web could be migrated on-the-fly to Apple’s payments, or vice-versa. For a Substack publication you aren’t already subscribed to, even at the free tier, you can subscribe via IAP in the Substack iOS app.

What I should have done is look at Substack’s listing on the App Store itself, which clearly shows that it offers in-app purchases. Each Substack publication offers a distinct SKU for each paid subscription it offers, so the Substack app’s listing shows the most popular ones.

Second: McKenzie’s observation that it’s weird for individual creators “to receive the same treatment from Apple as Netflix” is interesting, because Netflix doesn’t receive the same treatment as most apps. Netflix is a “reader app”, a special category Apple carved out in the App Store for “apps that provide one or more of the following digital content types — magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video — as the primary functionality of the app”.

It seems obvious to me that creator-platform apps like Substack and Patreon ought to be in a new category of their own, the basic idea of which would be for Apple to take some sort of smaller cut of these transactions.

★ Tuesday, 13 August 2024