Radical change for Apple users: paying outside the App Store will be possible

The American technology giant announced Thursday a radical change for its customers. Apple will allow mobile application publishers to offer their customers payment methods outside the App Store

 

The Californian company has proposed several changes to the rules of its essential app store. Specifically, applications will be able to send an e-mail to their users to inform them that they can buy a subscription, for example, via their website. In this case, the publisher does not pay a commission to Apple. These changes still need to be approved by a court to stop lawsuits from small companies that design apps.

 

Well-known streaming services like Spotify or Netflix were already getting around the commission by not offering the possibility to subscribe via the app. But they could not direct them to their website. On the Spotify app, this message appears next to the paid plans: You can't take out a premium subscription on the app. We know, it's not ideal. 

It is up to the user to understand, as with Netflix, that he must subscribe on the online platform. What he did willingly for such popular services, but not necessarily for small applications.

 

The new agreement will also give developers more leeway to set the prices of their apps, subscriptions or in-app purchases. Finally, Apple intends to create a fund to help small American publishers, earning less than a million dollars a year for all their apps in the United States.

 

With these concessions, the iPhone manufacturer is probably hoping to ease the pressure on various fronts. Indeed, Apple is soon awaiting the verdict in the lawsuit filed by Epic Game. The publisher of the game Fortnite, like many other small and large developers, accuses Apple of abusing its dominant position by taking too high commissions on consumer spending and imposing the App Store as a mandatory intermediary between them and their users.