Andrew Orr
Telegram's CEO has announced that the company is canceling its monetization plans, saying it would work outside of the App Store rules, following objections from Apple.
Pavel Durov posted on his Telegram channel on October 28 that Apple wasn't happy with the company's plan to let content creators monetize their posts that used Telegram's payment system instead of Apple's. He also called on regulators to take action.
Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices.
This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content. I hope that the regulators in the EU, India and elsewhere start taking action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is higher than any government-levied VAT.
The full message can be found on Durov's Telegram channel.
Telegram's plan
A report on Thursday had revealed Telegram's plan to let users charge others to view certain messages by way of a "donate bot" and pay-to-view service offered by a third-party.
A person noticed on Twitter that Telegram had begun quietly rolling out the feature to a few channels. Some users implemented "third-party payment bots," according to Durov, to receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid.
The action goes against Apple's rules, which state that developers must use Apple's system for in-app purchases. Telegram says it will work to offer its users other ways to monetize content outside of Apple's ecosystem.
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27 Comments
This 30% Apple Tax on stuff not related to the AppleStore or Apple Servers is going to come back and bite Apple in the a**.
People complain about paying taxes but it's a far better position to be in than not owing any.
So Apple "destroys dreams" even though it only holds 15% of the market. Maybe Telegram should have their "dreams" in the other 85% of the market. Why aren't they crying at other companies who also take 30% for their "walled gardens". 30% may be a bit steep for the in-app payment system, but obviously, users would prefer using Apple's solution than the alternative of giving their payment information to some random app they may, either on purpose or by accident, have subscribed to and their third-party payment system.
Just pondering...
Millionaires complaining about billionaires,are you kidding me? Run subscriptions like you normally do, Apple gets 15% after 1st year.Or run ads,in the app ,Apple isn’t taking any of that.