This is how you know it's a cult. "If you want to read the Bible in the vulgate, why don't you become a Satanist? My faith requires that everyone who calls themself a Christian must worship as I do. Your choice to worship otherwise is an injury to me, even if I don't know you."
But at least you can buy audiobooks on Apple Books. There are plenty of services whose gross margins are lower than 30%. Apple's 30% #AppTax renders these unviable, and if Apple doesn't deign to offer its own in-house monopoly version, the service is simply unavailable as an iPhone app.
But that's not the only bad outcome. Some lucky service providers are able to pay the #AppleTax by gouging Apple's *customers*, raising prices to pay the danegeld. That's the second effect.
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Both companies charge a whopping *30%* to process in-app payments, and both companies have strict rules banning app makers from evading this 30% #AppTax by steering customers to the web to complete payments:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores
The companies - nominally bitter competitors - have nevertheless converged on this 30% vig, allegedly without any anticompetitive collusion.
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This is part four of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here. Part five, about enshrining "end-to-end" delivery on social media, is here. Download this whole series...
Download this whole series as a single PDF.Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault. Freedom of the press is a hollow doctrine if the only news media is written or published by...
Then there's the #AppTax. Apple charges app makers a 30% commission on all their sales, which means that certain businesses literally *can't exist*. Take #audiobooks: audiobook sellers have 20% gross margins on their wares. If they sell their audiobooks through apps and pay a 30% vig to Apple, they lose money on every sale. Thus, the only Ios app that will sell you an audiobook is Apple's own #AppleBooks.
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Cory Doctorow
Electronic Frontier Foundation