Is it true that iPhone users pay more for taxi rides than Android users because Apple charges a handling fee?

Recently, a Weibo user questioned the price discrimination of the same service on iPhone and Android, which triggered a round of discussion on Apple's revenue sharing. You consume digital applications and services every day, but you don't understand where the money you pay for the applications eventually goes.

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Not all purchases on the iPhone are divided into

The crux of the controversy on this microblog is that the blogger confused App Store payment with third-party payment, mistakenly thinking that Didi Taxi's taxi fares were collected by Apple and thus had to be shared, and guessed that Didi Taxi passed this part of the fee on to consumers, resulting in excessively high taxi fares. In fact, Didi Taxi's taxi fares are paid by third-party payment, and Apple also made it clear that third-party payment does not belong to in-app purchases, so there will be no revenue sharing. As for why my colleague's taxi fares are higher than mine, there may be other reasons.

In addition to the third-party payment that we use almost every day, Apple also does not participate in the revenue sharing of the following:

• The purchase of goods or services through Taobao, JD.com, Didi Taxi, etc. is essentially also third-party payment;
• Tipping activities on Zhihu, WeChat public accounts, and live streaming platforms;
• Transfers between Alipay, WeChat, etc.

There is a simple rule that can be used to determine whether purchases made on an iPhone will not be divided by Apple, and that is whether the funds pass through Apple's hands.

If it is an "in-app purchase" defined by Apple, the application will call the App Store purchase interface when making payment, and Apple will participate in the sharing of all these consumption.

Not all share ratios are 30%

As a platform content distributor, the App Store will charge developers a certain percentage of revenue for each purchase to make up for the labor costs and hardware investment of the App Store operations.

Until the 2016 WWDC Developer Conference, the ratio remained at 3:7, meaning Apple took 30% of the revenue and developers received 70%. At WWDC 2016, Apple readjusted the App Store revenue sharing rules:

• For one-time paid apps or services, Apple still charges a 3:7 split;
• For the subscription model, Apple will charge 30% in the first year of subscription, and it will be reduced to 15% starting from the second year of subscription.

(The above ratios do not take into account transaction taxes.)

Who will bear the cost of the commission?

As mentioned earlier, building an App Store actually requires a lot of development and operating costs, and also the cost of App Store download traffic. From Apple's perspective, they chose to charge a certain share.

But from the developer's perspective, 30% of the fee is indeed not low. Developers also have different opinions on who should bear this fee.

Some content or service providers have covered Apple's share of the fees themselves, which means that whether purchased on an iPhone, Android platform, or even on the web version, the prices of these content or services are roughly the same. For example, Weibo memberships and QQ Music Green Diamonds are basically the same on several platforms.

Zhihu also treats the web version, iOS users and Android users equally in terms of paid content and books. However, there is an additional concept of "Zhihu Coin" on the iOS side. The reason is that the price of in-app purchases in the App Store cannot be freely priced, but has a fixed level. Therefore, recharges on iOS are all done at a fixed amount, but one Zhihu Coin corresponds to one RMB, and there is no reduction.

Other developers handle it completely differently. They choose to pass this cost on to users and charge higher fees on the iOS platform.

However, these services are universal on multiple platforms, so for consumers, we can purchase services on low-priced platforms other than the App Store, and then enjoy paid services on iOS.

For example, the domestic video service iQiyi has differentiated pricing between the web, iOS, and Android versions. The purchase price of the iOS version is obviously much higher than that of the web and Android versions.

summary

Back to the controversial Weibo post itself, it was actually a misunderstanding caused by the user's lack of understanding of the App Store's profit-sharing rules.

As an independently operated public company, Apple does have the right to freely determine the profit-sharing ratio, but whether the profit-sharing ratio is reasonable is another question.

In addition, when we consume on e-commerce platforms, taxi-hailing platforms, etc., we may encounter that our fees are higher than before or higher than others, which does not rule out the possibility of "big data killing old customers". Merchants use data analysis to determine that you are an old user or a user with higher income, and then automatically charge you higher fees.

What other examples of differential pricing have you seen? Discuss with us in the comments.