Apple and Google Given Mid-October Deadline in South Korea for Filing Plans to Allow Outside Payment Systems in Apps

[Morgenland]

This is such crap. I cannot understand why governments think that Apple should somehow subsidize and provide a platform for these developers to peddle their software on but allow them to charge outside of the Apple ecosystem and pocket the cash. They want to force Apple to provide them a free platform at Apple's cost with no cost to the developer. What next? Movie studios wanting Apple to host and distribute their movies but allow for the studios to charge outside of Apple and pocket all of the cash? If I was Apple I would remove them from the system entirely because without the App store, many of these developers wouldn't have near the number of users they have now.

Agree. So are governments stupid... or driven?

 

[ponzicoinbro]

Good Luck to all the Koreans who are going to attract a million scammers and get scammed.

Sorry for your losses in advance.

 

[ponzicoinbro]

As a developer, that's a stupid short deadline for such an all encompassing feature. Heck just *testing* that kind of change would take at least 2 weeks. Planning would take 2-4 weeks.

And preventing scammers and hackers from preying on these third party payment processors will be a forever task.

 

[kk200]

What I mean is ... "No. We're outta here."

how big is the South Korean market? How big is it compared to the rest of the world?

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edit:

it appears that SK has ~50m people and the cell phone penetration is close to 100%.

Pretty damn good.

The phone OS breakdown is close to 50/50 between iOS and Android.

Let's say Apple says "No, goodbye."

Then about 25 MILLION people are going to be looking real hard at the South Korean politicians ...

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never underestimate any Asia markets. 60% world population is living there

 

[Ultimateomega]

Never change a running system, even if you still hold such strange constructs against it..

‘Never’ changing leads to stagnation in my view…

 

[redheeler]

If my logic is flawed, then I should be able to enjoy some of the benefits of your paycheck without contributing anything to you, no?

I would like mom and pop shops on the corner to stop complaining that technology is developing and the world is moving on. The internet has been developing for decades, any business that hasn't adapted yet is just asking to go extinct. "Boo hoo, Amazon has been taking more and more of my business every year for the last 25 years." Okay, what have you done to adapt to the changing times?! "Boo hoo, I can't hire any employees, nobody wants to work anymore." No, nobody wants to work as an expendable cog in your toxic soul-crushing heap for $7.75 an hour, companies paying a living wage are having no issue hiring. "But my business can't survive unless I pay my employees below poverty wages." Then you have a garbage business that deserves to die, slavery has long since been abolished. All of these whiny mom and pop businesses can't get lost quickly enough, good riddance. The great ones aren't complaining because they don't feel entitled to make zero progress over decades and still have money pouring in. They spent their time advancing their business instead of whining and not surprisingly that approach tends to succeed more often.

Third-party apps do contribute a lot to the iOS platform. Unless you have only the stock Apple apps and absolutely zero third-party apps on your phone you should know that.

And not sure what world you live in where any mom and pop shop can start up a successful competitor to Amazon if they just “get with the times”. The minimum wage should be raised but the problem isn’t the powerless mom and pop shops, it’s the rich politicians who continue to stonewall and keep it from happening because they’ve never had to experience living at poverty wages. But this isn’t the PRSI forum so I digress.

 

[H2SO4]

Here's a plan to respond to my comment: know that I don't care if Apple pulls the entire App Store from South Korea just to make a point. I'd encourage it, maybe then South Korean citizens would whip their legislators into shape a bit. Imagine building a world-class platform with hundreds of millions of users that enables developers to generate a tremendous profit, and they are happy to accept the profit but don't want to pay you anything for what you've built. They want all the upside, but you take all of the risk and downside - and make sure the platform stays up so as to not negatively affect their ability to profit from it. Amazingly stupid, every individual would never accept such an offer but Apple is expected to.

Meh. Let's see what happens shall we.
Apple is expected to play by the rules of the country they are doing business in. Just like other companies will be.

 

[ksec]

Um... where are the Apple should pull out of South Korean Market comments?

Edit: Oh they are here.

 

[PC_tech]

But you use outside payment systems all the time. As a matter of fact you use it more than you use Apple's merchant account.

Isn’t astonishing how people don’t understand this?

 

[PC_tech]

Here's a plan to allow for outside payment: remove your app from whichever app store, launch it on your own platform, and accept payments through that. "But then I'd have to build my own platform and it wouldn't have hundreds of millions of users like Apple and Google do." Yeah, that's the point - you have to give in order to get, I don't understand developers wanting all the benefits of these world class ecosystems but without paying into them. I'd love to drive a Lambo at the price of a Civic but I don't live in South Korea so I'd never win that court case.

Here’s a plan, Apple will comply with the locals laws of the place they do business in 🙄🙄

 

[PC_tech]

I wish I could sell product on amazon without paying fees to amazon. Or have a space in a department store at no cost. These guys are pushing apple and google to do the same thing.

They do pay, and they pay yearly otherwise they don’t have access to Apples stuff, why do people keep insisting Apple isn’t being paid? 🙄

 

[briko]

I wish I could sell product on amazon without paying fees to amazon. Or have a space in a department store at no cost. These guys are pushing apple and google to do the same thing.

I wish I could sell apps on macOS or Windows without paying additional fees to Apple or Microsoft (after having paid for their dev program/SDK of course).

Oh wait… I could already do that for decades. And now it looks like it’s coming to iOS soon too.

Finally, the platforms are getting equal treatment. In Apple’s own words: “What’s a computer?”

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Both companies should refuse to implement this ridiculous policy. What is South Korea going to do? Ban the two companies that control all of mobile? It hasn’t become law yet, so I don’t know why they’re told to submit their plans. Just ignore them.

 

[PC_tech]

And when the payment systems and/or third party payment systems used by the developers a) have their systems compromised resulting in stolen payment information and/or b) sell customer data to other non-related entities, don't go crying to Apple and Google for help. As for me, I will continue to use Apple's payment system.

Stop with this crap, the payment systems have been in place MUCH LONGER THAN APPLES and aren’t being breached as often as some of you like to scare people into thinking 🙄🙄🙄🙄

 

[PC_tech]

Both companies should refuse to implement this ridiculous policy. What is South Korea going to do? Ban the two companies that control all of mobile? It hasn’t become law yet, so I don’t know why they’re told to submit their plans. Just ignore them.

Lucky for Apple and Google you’re not running them….

 

[macar00n]

Third-party apps do contribute a lot to the iOS platform. Unless you have only the stock Apple apps and absolutely zero third-party apps on your phone you should know that.

And not sure what world you live in where any mom and pop shop can start up a successful competitor to Amazon if they just “get with the times”. The minimum wage should be raised but the problem isn’t the powerless mom and pop shops, it’s the rich politicians who continue to stonewall and keep it from happening because they’ve never had to experience living at poverty wages. But this isn’t the PRSI forum so I digress.

I agree with all your points. 3rd party apps add value, but much as citizens add value to a society but must still pay taxes, it seems insane to me to feel entitled to use the store to profit massively without sharing a percentage of that profit with the store.

I never suggested that mom and pop shops today can successfully build their own Amazon and compete that way. I'm saying the ones complaining today are the ones that refused to adapt over 25 or so years and obviously, anything that refused to change for so long is doomed. Should we not have switched to electric lamps to spare the candlemakers? Should we not have braced the automobile and decimated the many services established to keep a horse fleet alive and well? Blocks of ice used to be sold by vendors from carts for the purpose of refrigeration. Once refrigerators were invented and started to spread, some of these vendors pivoted to selling and servicing those (still providing the service of keeping food cold) and some failed to adapt and their businesses died. I have no sympathy for businesses that feel entitled to my money when they provide less value and inevitably go under. I also am 100% for raising minimum wage to a livable wage and forcing corporations to pay their fair share to upkeep infrastructure, just as we citizens do. I also agree that corrupt, bought-and-paid-for politicians are a problem.

 

[PC_tech]

Apple should just create a bifurcation in the app store. One Trusted Network that has Apple as the payment processor that uses all apple api and tested on webkit. And the other that doesn't use apples payment and is part of the untrusted network, in order to be listed on the untrusted network you have to pay apple a 30% listing fee.

Mastercard, Visa, etc are “untrusted”, what? 🙄🙄

 

[PC_tech]

While I don't know the legality of doing so based on this ruling, as Apple my solution would be to say to developers "OK, you can accept third-party payments...no problem. With immediate effect we are charging a license fee for the developer tools...and that license fee is on a "per sale" basis."

I build websites and some of the tools I use (plugins for Wordpress) are licensed on a "per website" basis...not on a "per developer" basis, so there would be a precedent for this surely? Sell 100 copies of your app...pay $10 per year (for example)...sell 1 million copies of your app...pay $100k per year...perhaps less with a "volume discount".

That would solve the problem...until some bleating whiner decided to complain that it was somehow "anticompetitive" for Apple to actually be able to set the price of their own products and wait for Daddy Government to step in...

Do they not ALREADY pay for those tools with the yearly fee? I’m sure they do 🙄

 

[macar00n]

Um... where are the Apple should pull out of South Korean Market comments?

Edit: Oh they are here.

It's okay, I too often make assumptions and reply to threads before or without reading them. Seriously, I'm not even making fun, I do this all the time

 

[PC_tech]

I won't trust giving my CC info to a third party system. If I encounter an app like that I just won't use it. It will be interesting to see how many other people do the same.

This is such crap. I cannot understand why governments think that Apple should somehow subsidize and provide a platform for these developers to peddle their software on but allow them to charge outside of the Apple ecosystem and pocket the cash. They want to force Apple to provide them a free platform at Apple's cost with no cost to the developer. What next? Movie studios wanting Apple to host and distribute their movies but allow for the studios to charge outside of Apple and pocket all of the cash? If I was Apple I would remove them from the system entirely because without the App store, many of these developers wouldn't have near the number of users they have now.

It’s NOT FREE, THEY PAY APPLE YEARLY, stop saying they getting everything for free, they aren’t! 🙄🙄🙄

 

[macar00n]

Here’s a plan, Apple will comply with the locals laws of the place they do business in 🙄🙄

Here's a different plan, Apple and Google pull their app stores from South Korea and South Korea builds its own craptastic app store and smartphone and see how many developers they are able to attract. Best part is, they can offer outside payment options or not and nobody will complain because it'll have no users

 

[PC_tech]

Apple must introduce a fee for the app being in store. If it's a large company with an external payment system, the fee should be in the millions of dollars.

Again, they already pay Apple a yearly fee 🙄

 

[Wildkraut]

Majority of developers and consumers will opt in for Apple's IAPs.
IAPs are mostly impulse purchase. Who wants to set up a new account, fill up all payment information, etc, just to get some gems? Consumers will prefer the convenience of Apple's built-in IAPs, and most developers would prefer to use Apple's IAPs since it will require more investment on their side to deal with another payment gateway, the international accounting, and extra customer support requirements.

The only ones getting an advantage here are the big developers where they already have their own payment system setup outside the app store in the first place (eg. Adobe, Netflix, etc).

Doesn’t matter if it’s a big or a small developer, both deserves having a choice.

 

[PC_tech]

Here's a different plan, Apple and Google pull their app stores from South Korea and South Korea builds its own craptastic app store and smartphone and see how many developers they are able to attract. Best part is, they can offer outside payment options or not and nobody will complain because it'll have no users

Here’s a different plan, you’re not running Apple so whatever ridiculous “plan” you want to make up in your head, Apple won’t be listening to you 🙄

 

[macar00n]

It’s NOT FREE, THEY PAY APPLE YEARLY, stop saying they getting everything for free, they aren’t! 🙄🙄🙄

I think everyone with a brain stem understands that $99 yearly from each developer is so close to nothing compared to the tens of billions of dollars in revenue that apps generate that it may as well be nothing.