- Apple is demanding a 30 percent cut of Patreon donations to independent creators.
- People are really, really unhappy about it.
- Apple is no longer the friend of the creative class, it seems.
Patreon is a service used by artists and other indie creative folks to get paid by their supporters, and now Apple thinks it deserves a 30 percent cut of every donation.
That’s right. If you pledge to pay, say, a musician $10 per month through the Patreon app, Apple will, from 2025, take more than $3 of that. Not surprisingly, given the reaction to Apple’s Crush video, where it destroyed musical instruments and other objects to create a new iPad, the creative community has gone bananas. It’s especially bad because Apple claims to be the champion of creative folks.
“When you start seeking rent on the livelihood of artists, I don’t think you get to claim you work at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts anymore,” says OG Apple developer Craig Hockenberry on Mastodon.
Taking Rent
For the past decade, patrons have been able to support creative people with subscriptions through both the Patreon website and the Patreon iOS app. For this service, Patreon takes a cut. But now, Apple has decided that it wants a piece of that action. Any creators will now have to switch over to an App Store-compatible subscription model so that Apple can extract its rent. This includes anything purchased in the creator’s Patreon store, like a vinyl record or YouTube lesson.
Patreon has made two options available for its users. One is to let Apple take 30 percent of its earnings. The other is to make in-app subscriptions on iOS more expensive, passing the cost onto supporters.
“[Apple’s] 30% cut is excessive and threatens the livelihood of independent creators who rely on Patreon. Apple’s practices have gone too far. A 30% commission is not sustainable for most creators, who already operate on tight margins,” boudoir photographer Hayley Snyder told Lifewire via email. “This move by Apple will push some creators to stop using the Patreon iOS app altogether, limiting their reach and income.”
It’s one thing to take a cut of the revenue earned by an app-first company like, say Spotify. It’s quite another to take that money directly from the pockets of independent artists and musicians, who are already squeezed by the likes of Spotify and Apple music. Worse, these artists don’t even get to use the lower, 15% commission that Apple usually charges developers that make under $1 million a year. Why? Because it’s charging Patreon, which does make more than that.
Bad Move
People are angry and have taken to Mastodon to make some excellent points:
“Is there any company more out of touch with creatives right now than Apple?” says Apple journalist and founder of Mac Stories Federico Viticci on Mastodon. “It feels incredibly weird to say this, but it sadly is true. Asking for 30% from Patreon subscriptions—in this climate—is garbage.”
It gets better.
“If the web browser didn’t exist and someone tried to invent it now,” says iOS developer Kyle Howells on Mastodon, “Apple wouldn’t allow it; Apple would require every website accessible be manually approved; Apple would require 30% of all transactions and ad sales on all websites accessed via the browser.”
And let’s have one more for good measure, from Alt Store creator Riley Testut.
This is Apple now,” says Testut on Mastodon. “Arguably the greediest corporation around today, with no compassion for indies and artists. Really makes me ashamed to have ever defended Apple as the good guys.”
Ouch. This is also a particularly weird story because Apple has allowed Patreon to operate in the App Store, taking payments via an in-app browser page, for years. In contrast, in 2021, Apple already demanded that a Patreon-like service, Fanhouse, hand over “Apple’s” 30 percent cut.
The enforcement of Apple’s rules is all over the place here and has been for a while. During the pandemic, for example, Apple started taking a cut of money made by Yoga teachers giving lessons over video because they could no longer give them in person.
Meanwhile, Apple does not enforce its rules on in-app purchases for the popular game Roblox, which operates its open in-app game marketplace. And while Apple has asked Chinese tech giants WeChat and ByteDance (the maker of TikTok) to pay up, it hasn’t actually done anything to back up its threats.
Why? It looks a lot like a bully who only picks fights with anyone who cannot fight back.
Ideally, Patreon would pull its app from the App Store and offer a web app instead or just go browser-only. That may or may not happen. In the future, any developers of similar services will probably think twice before creating an iPhone app, which is bad news for everyone, including Apple.
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News Summary:
- Apple Really Is Snatching Money From Patreon Creators' Pockets
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