One of the biggest fights in the world of technology is Apple’s commission charge for apps that use its store. The situation, however, is not new. The iPhone maker has already wanted to keep 30% of the amount that users paid to Meta to advertise on Facebook.
The information came to light in a report in The Wall Street Journal, and discussions took place between 2016 and 2018. The sales in question were post boosting —amount paid for a post to appear to more users.
Apple argued that hiring on its devices set up transactions within the app, which would allow it to keep a portion of that money. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said they were ads, which exempted them from charging. Apparently, meta’s understanding prevailed.
Another attempt to make money using the Facebook app was a proposal to sell subscriptions to anyone who wanted to use the social network without seeing advertising. Apple also gets a percentage of that money. The two companies have not reached an agreement.
After the WSJ report was published, another company revealed that Apple wanted to keep a slice of the money earned from a similar service.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, which which which has Tumblr, revealed on Twitter that the iPhone maker has not approved Blaze, the social network’s feature to boost posts. The output was to add the tool as an in-app purchase and pay the 30% to the owner of the App Store.
An added irony in this story is that, in recent years, Apple has adopted a number of privacy-focused policies. One of the major victims of this story was precisely Meta, owner of Facebook.
iOS 14.5, released in 2021, asks for explicit user consent to share their ad ID with developers. Meta estimates that it lost $10 billion in revenue last year because of this tool.
