RF-based approaches have the problem that they are not specific to glucose. A molecule of glucose absorbs infrared light at specific wavelengths due to its size and types of bonds. It does not have specific absorption of radio frequencies. In this paper, researchers measured glucose in pure water at concentrations 100X physiological levels. I'd like to see this work with whole blood or a tissue phantom, or measure glucose independently from any other solute.
As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial support, the news is terrible: Patreon informed me that all creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use. The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time off, and only charge people when I release something, thus incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another platform, or come up with some other solution.
Apple has quietly been one of the biggest culprits in the proliferation of subscription software. They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing. Subscriptions are also the easiest way to implement a software demo or trial in the App Store. Finally they use their control of the App Store to coerce anyone doing something different than monthly/yearly subscriptions into that model (as we see here).
In the days of the ipod every single user of it I encountered had apple's UX wipe their music collection.
But maybe that was by design as they decided to call their music shop by the same name as their ipod management software. That is the essence of Apple's UX. Shiny destruction of your property. It remains so.
The UX everyone wanted was copying files onto and off the device presented as storage on any computer it was plugged in to.
They added "in app purchases" indicators in the store for this. I use it all the time. "In app purchases" on something that claims it's free is not free.
Apple's longstanding App Store guidelines always forced a certain level of "quality" and good customer experience, yet they're now allowing apps that are the exact opposite.
Most of these apps use dark UX patterns to trick new users into scammy free trials which convert to $100+/yr subscriptions after 1-3 days. These apps also make it difficult to close out of the subscription window, or make it seem like you have to subscribe when you don't.
It's entirely contradictory to everything Apple once stood for in justifying their gatekeeper App Store experience.
Apple could easily ban these types of scammy UX patterns, but they won't because it benefits them. That's my point.
That's not totally true. Twitter/X is fine, in this regard. The toggle is web based, but there's no censorship once it's toggled. The large amount of age restricted content on YouTube, with nudity, is another example.
They've certainly encouraged subscriptions but the big driver is the drive for recurring revenue, which can be valued up to 20X what one-time revenue is valued. In some cases companies with investors are instructed to not even care about non-recurring revenue since it doesn't matter. Revenue is recurring or it doesn't exist.
Recurring revenue has always been highly valued. What changed is that the Internet and modern automated payment networks have made it so much easier to implement recurring revenue models. Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage. The more companies figure out how to add recurring revenue, the more companies have to figure out how to add recurring revenue.
This is why your car company, appliance company, etc. is trying to get you to subscribe to something.
Can you imagine the hellscape Steam would be if they adopted this phlosophy? It may have fundamentally ended PC gaming as we know it. Literally throwing free money away.
>Now everything can be a subscription and now companies that don't have subscriptions are at a massive valuation and fund raising disadvantage
It won't alter this course, but given recent news I sure hope Biden can do one last kick to this stupid model. The biggest reason subscriptions do this is because so many forget to unsubscribe. An issue as old as fiat currency. discouraging recurring subscriptions could be the US's version of GDPR in terms of how utterly devastating it will be to companies.
> They still don't support upgrades/upgrade pricing.
What would this mean, exactly?
You can sell people a demo→full-version permanent unlock as a one-time purchase, same as you can sell DLC in a game.
And you can also have subscription tiers, where you get more features out of the higher tiers of subscriptions.
And you can, in theory, freely mix these — e.g. charging someone a subscription for the base version, and then charging them a one-time fee to unlock a specific feature.
If you want, you could even charge for app features as consumables (just like F2P games do) — where you pay to have a block of credits that you use up, or you pay for one month and then have to buy it again when it runs out.
The model is the "old school" model for software sales.
The first version you sell to a user at full price and offer a discount for upgrading (something like 40% off). It lets the customer pick when they feel the value prop is worth the cost and lets you offer a loyalty incentive to the user.
Right now the choice is "keep paying for it to keep working" or "fully price for every upgrade".
I don’t exactly remember how it went but ~5 years ago Goodnotes 5 came out and they offered a “bundle” of Goodnotes 4 and 5 together at the same price of Goodnotes 5. Maybe owners of version 4 had some kind of discount on the bundle because they already owned half of it?
Bundles can be used for upgrade pricing, you put the new version up for full price (ie. $20) and and a bundle with the new and old version (ie $30, for a 50% discount on it) for those who own the old version. When you buy a bundle you don't pay for the one you own.
Are there any examples of apps that do that? As a consumer, I haven't ever heard of an app that offers this (e.g. goodnotes, LiquidText, MarginNote, Audulus and Things have new major releases and don't seem to do this)
Couple of the old school macOS dev houses tried this once this hack became visible and little birdies said the hack WAI. (ex. OmniGroup)
Since then, people have backed off.
If you're going to this much work to help users workaround Apple nonsense, you really care about helping them save money, and the support + refund costs of people accidentally buying the bundle with the old version they don't need is > just building out your own server-side system, versus a combinatorial explosion of bundles in the App Store that creates a confusing minefield for users.
By jumping through hoops, tying unrelated tools together, confusing users, and reaping an extra $10 you didn't want to take + support costs thereof, yes, it is possible. It is not what we expected or asked for when we started asking for this in 2007 (we = iOS devs).
There are several vendors who do this, for instance 1Password and the Omni Group both do. You have an in-app purchase option that is unlocked by a previous receipt. The challenge is that Apple does not provide tools to help or guidance. They do indeed think e.g. requiring users to buy an upgrade to keep the app working on a new annual iOS version or macOS version is a bad model for users.
Panic even had an upgrade for MAS users when they released their new version of the now defunct Coda outside the MAS (for sandboxing reasons).
Free upgrades are problematic themselves: once you've saturated your market (a good place to be, right?) you no longer have income to provide upgrades.
There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things:
1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read
2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E.
---
Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1.
Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them.
With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.)
Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX.
The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever.
The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.
So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author now assumes the burden with each new release of maintaining and testing V1 (that’s with all the feature flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like insanity to me.
That would be a choice, not a requirement. It's literally a flag. You can do whatever tf you want with it. It would be trivial to have "V1 full app unlock" feature be the same as "V2 full app unlock" feature.
@jayd16 - it’s been a few years since I read the Apple Developer Agreement but at that time downloading code and executing it within your app was forbidden by the agreement. A sensible security safeguard IMO.
AFAIK, even the iSH developers were never given a proper explanation. iSH was actually removed a few years back[0] and then reinstated with an apology but no policy changes or clarifications.
This was before the change to allow Delta on the App Store, too.
There's a lot of nuance here. Some of it is ours, some of it is on Apple's side. Before I get into it I will say that most of what I say about Apple's side is largely not a position they will clarify or take publicly, and some of it is our interpretation. When iSH was removed from the store we did push them to clarify this in the App Store Review Guidelines but they chose to not do so.
When you run an App Store that involves human review the big problem you have is apps that mask their behavior during review and then end up breaking the rules later. My understanding is that the "don't download code" policy is intended to prevent this, at least in spirit. I think, at least at the highest level of the company, the intent is to keep to somewhere near this at least for submissions made in good faith and not prone to opening them up to a slippery slope. There are distinctions here, though, and policy enforcement is also complicated.
My (and iSH's) position is that "code" should be interpreted very broadly, including native code (which the platform blocks from loading anyways) but also things like embedded webviews updated server-side or those "code-push"/"run JavaScript in an interpreter in your app" things. And going even beyond that, I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
From this perspective you will note that code isn't even really the interesting part here, it's the behavior changing that matters. So this leads naturally what we have described as "scripting apps", which download code but do not change their behavior. Their entire point is to download code. Like, App Store is an app store, regardless of whether you download TikTok or Google Maps from it. iSH is a a Linux environment. Nothing you will do in the app will change that. And notably we have zero ability to change that ourselves, short of submitting a new app. It's not like we can just add Windows emulation as a downloadable JavaScript package without going through review. From our discussions with leadership, I think they agree with us on it, but are not willing to commit to it publicly, because then people will take creative bad-faith interpretations of it to argue what a feature of the app versus something a user does in the app is, or something like that. Or they just want to hold all the cards and reserve the right to take this away. Either way I strongly disagree with them doing this, but for now iSH remains on the store.
You will note that the changes we make (see our blog post about repositories: https://ish.app/blog/default-repository-update) continue to support that position. Again, I cannot say for sure whether this is the interpretation Apple uses, or if they even have a consistent position. It's just an attempt on our side to show good faith. As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment (it says code therefore your app for coding is bad). But again, this is just our experience; we have no idea if Phill will hit his head tomorrow and decide to pull iSH tomorrow because he thinks Linux is the child of the devil.
>As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment
A sadly universal experience. Especially when the not-so-secret is that that frontline is often contracted or outsourced. They do not understand (by design) the subtleties of submission of creative content. They are simply cheap help to do the bare minimum to remove liability, and if a few false negatives happen during that time, oh well. thousands of other apps in the sea.
So like everything else, if you havev the money, clout, or simply sheer persistence (which shouldn't be necessary) then you can force yourself to someone who can actually help. But few will get there, even with persistance.
What you've said largely tracks with my interpretation of Apple's actions here.
> I feel that to provide a full experience for the review team when you ship a feature flag you really ought to list all the behaviors that the app can possibly have, and let the review team test that if they want.
After Epic added direct purchase gated behind a feature flag to Fortnite, I'm genuinely surprised Apple didn't start requiring full control over and documentation of all downloadable configuration files as part of App Review.
While being vaguely on the side of review being not very useful I would agree with Apple doing that if only to make their position more consistent, even though I am sure every developer would riot if this was the case. (Although I vaguely remember someone saying we provided feature flags to Apple when we submitted builds at Twitter. But do take it with a grain of salt, since I wasn't on the release team and my view of them is vaguely positive in that I think they generally didn't try to use tricks to get through review.)
Odds are their "front line" reviewers are not highly technical, so Apple wouldn't want to commit to that. They are more than large enough to afford a few inefficiencies and pick fights the few times something like iSH "slip in".
Lot of stuff can skirt by until it doesn't. That's how stuff like Beeper suddenly explodes into a kerfluffle in a matter of days over some dang blue bubbles.
Re: feature entitlements shared through a shared SSO auth backend and/or Group Container — yes, apps do this. Mostly this is in app "suites" where you can IAP a feature entitlement in one app in the suite, and the entitlement should then become available to the other apps in the suite. (I think the Omni Group apps do it? Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Re: multi-edition shared apps — I'm not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.)
ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?
Oh you too. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's really liked per-creation for years. "I pay my rent if I can do eight posts of comics pages/art/etc a month" was a good kick in the ass to keep working.
Patreon's been trying to kick everyone off of per-creation for like half the time I've been using it, so I'm sure they're pretty delighted to have this excuse to nuke that mode. I don't think I've seen a single Patreon-like that has it and I don't want it badly enough to try and cobble up something out of a few Wordpress plugins.
It is, but monthly subscriptions are too "sticky". There are creators that haven't released anything for several years, but they still earn thousands of dollars from their patrons, because people don't really care about saving $5 a month.
At the same time, people do care about spending an extra $5 on top of $50 they already spend on patronage, so new creators in the same field find it harder to amass a sustainable number of patrons.
Is it really a problem? Right now I am skint so every time I sub I unsub from someone else. Patreon makes it super easy. It shows how much I spend on who and I can see who was inactive for years.
Patreon launched in May 2013. I joined after one of my fans asked me to set one up so they could give me money; my first post there is in February 2014. My account is on the "founders" plan, which has Patreon taking 5% ("plus applicable fees and taxes") rather than the 8/12% (plus applicable fees and taxes) that's what they offer now. Does that qualify me for "OG Patreon" status?
Pay-per-creation mode was available then. It might have even been the only mode. I can't recall for sure. It's certainly the one I chose, if there was an option, and I haven't changed that for ten and a half years. Looking at archive.org's earliest capture of the site (June 2013), it says this:
Pledges are only charged at the beginning of each new month based on whether the artist created any content that the artist specifically labels as supported content after your pledge. Artists can, of course, post new content that doesn't count as supported content.
You'll get notified each time the Content Creator posts new content that the artist specifically labels as supported content, but you won't get charged each time. Artists can also, of course, make posts on their activity feed and even upload new content that isn't labeled as supported content. Charges are aggregated and done once at the beginning of each new month, and you can edit/cancel your patronage at any time. Additionally, you can set a max limit for how much you'll be charged, so you never need to worry about paying for too much content!
This sure makes it sound like the original model was pay-per-post. There's nothing in there about a monthly subscription. "Support me through a monthly recurring tip" existed back then via Paypal's tip jars and some creators were getting by on it but it was a much harder sell before Patreon came along.
Apps are now forcing you to use their website skin even though its damn easy to offer a mobile web alternative that doesn't squander ever precious local storage.
absolutely dreadful. It is quite literally unusable to use the mobile site. I don't even know why they bother hosting it.
Only site where I simply toggle desktop. And now FF mobile can even install RES so that helps mitigate the otherwise clunky navigation (though, I have been unable to enable cloud backup. I can restore local copies though).
Which apps? The only one I know about is Reddit, where the web version is crippled compared to the app. (You can’t read all the comments). But old.reddit.com works fine on mobile - even if you have to constantly zoom in and out.
ultimate-guitar.com is a big offender. The mobile site jams lots of things in your face to and get you to download the app (including an entire fake tab page that you can't interact with but can scroll past on iOS devices). Then on the mobile site you can't tap on any of the chords to see the fingerings (very important!).
You can if you choose to request the desktop site, but then you get an obnoxious bar going across the middle of the page blocking some of the tab.
If you fold and finally download the app, you're greeted with a 10+ page unskippable questionnaire that after you're done ends with a paid subscription call to action. If you then force close the app, and open a tab link from the browser into the app, you are finally allowed to view a tab.
Bonza went under because Qantas/Virgin maintain a lock on airport "slots" in the primary markets of Melbourne and Sydney.
That's why every day, there are flights from both airlines that are "cancelled" and everyone moved to the next flight. Qantas got so outrageous that they were selling tickets for "flights" that they knew were never going to fly.
Australia's airport and airline "markets" are monopolies (airports) combined with oligarchies (Qantas/Virgin).
Like most consumer industries in Australia, there is a natural oligarchy or regulated market size, thing supermarkets (Coles/Woolworths + Aldi/IGA), banks (the "big 4"), Fuel, Hotels/Pubs, etc.
Uber lets you use mobile web. You try that on lyft they text you a link to download the app. As a result a bookmark to mobile web uber lives on my phone rather than the 300mb lyft app.
I don't think this is up to the consumer. The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all? It's not like consumers are clamoring for these apps. Everyone I know hates that you have to have an app for everything these days.
>The companies should just pull their apps from the Apple marketplace. If something can be a website, just be a website. Why even mess with an app at all?
the sad reality is that mobile pretty much "solved" an issue corporations struggle with on web to this day. A closed down (i.e. no adblock), centralized (i.e. you can pay to game the platform to highlight your product), scalable system that can be easily and conveniently monetized. They don't like it, but those corps would 99/100 times take that 30% toll from Apple/Google to gatekeep the adblockers if it means they get more consistent ways to serve ads and subscriptions. That's why being open didn't change most company's decision to serve on Google Play vs an alternative store, nor on the web.
Yeah, though the problem with this is that from my experience with Android, the web version of Patreon is practically unusable. Not that the app is much better, they seem determined to come up with the most horrific UX anyone could imagine across all platforms, but it at least can somewhat consistently handle playing the podcasts I subscribe to without cutting out every five minutes.
I've seen some creators on Patreon "pause" their monthly subscription when they have nothing to release on a given month, so that patrons won't be billed for that month. That could be a workaround for your use case.
It does not. Apple do all the billing. You have no mechanism to link up users and bills or change users billing. The only way would be to notify all subscribers to cancel their subscription, hope they do that, and then notify them all to resubscribe afterwards, which would obviously be catastrophic for subscription revenue, as well as a terrible user experience.
I wonder why Patreon isn't hammering this point more if that's the case. This seems to me to be an almost bigger problem than the loss of the per-creation billing.
Not that losing per-creation billing is good, but Patreon has been threatening it for a while, and there are ways it could in theory be simulated. But this makes it effectively impossible for creators to go on vacations, take a sabbatical, whatever... without continuing to charge patrons. It's a really commonly used mechanism from what I've seen, this would be a loss of a really important flexible tool for creators.
I'm not distrusting you, I just feel like I'd like to see some confirmation from Patreon before I start making accusations about it. Maybe they have some deal or know something about a future unreleased API that I don't know?
But losing the ability to pause a Patreon page would be a very, very big deal. Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from. That's something that people should be talking about if it's the case.
> Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from.
I wouldn't assume this until confirmed. The way I read these news is the typical Apple scenario, where if you subscribe from the app, there's an added 30% subscription fee and a loss of all control from the subscription by Patreon, all control and all limitations handed over to Apple, all subscription cancellations, all billing complaints, everything.
But you can still have a parallel system without the fee on the web, the cannot be advertised or guided to it from the app (at least this used to be the case), but it's also as usual completely handled by the developer.
Patreon is probably removing the on-purchase pay model even on the web because it's inherently incompatible with the basic Apple model and would cause a major disconnect in what the user can expect.
But I don't think the scenario with paused subscriptions is quite the same. Patreon would simply allow them to be paused, while if subscribed with Apple, the button on the web could simply be disabled or gone, or heck, the entire subscription page on Patreon gone, with just info text "This subscription is managed from your device". I mean, many devs do it like that at least.
Patreon does not require creators to pause payments when they go on break.
But that should obviously be a choice that is available to creators, for a variety of reasons. They might be treating Patreon more like a subscription service than a donation platform. They might have personal psychological hang-ups (read about why per-creation pricing is so popular with some creators). I would criticize Patreon if it forced creators into that decision. Forcing them out of that decision is also worth critiquing.
It ought to be a creator's choice when they do and don't charge their patrons. It is not Patreon or Apple's job to decide with that level of detail what the relationship between a creator and their fans should look like. And creators who voluntarily decide (for whatever reason) to temporarily pause charging fans are not doing anything wrong.
To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators. This is a feature that creators heavily use, by their own choice, because it helps them psychologically or because they prefer this style of interaction with fans, or for whatever reason because they don't have to justify their decisions to anyone, least of all commenters on HN.
> Patronage is a specific thing.
Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform. Patreon hosts a wide variety of creators who approach audience interaction in a variety of ways. This has always been the case.
It's wild to me that you're going to jump on here gatekeeping creators off of Patreon, and to act like it's somehow improper for me to suggest that the significant portion of the creator-base on Patreon that uses the platform in a way that makes them happy... should be allowed to keep using it that way.
People have this weird habit of taking creators who are making in many cases at or below minimum wage doing things that they love and subjecting them to purity tests about whether or not they're living up to some platonic ideal of what some random person on the internet personally believes fan-creator relationships should look like.
Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
> doesn't get the idea behind patreon
The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them. Your aesthetic attraction to the idea of a donation platform is not really relevant to that goal. You're not sticking up for creators if you gatekeep how they interact with fans. And your ideal of how patronage is defined has never been the exclusive model for how Patreon as a platform has worked -- nor is it consistent with the model that Apple is forcing creators into.
> To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators
I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.
This would be an anti-feature for me because if it's implemented then there is pressure to pause payments when I don't create for whatever period of time I estimate is "too long" for some average patron. What a freaking can of worms. Turns creators into service providers.
> Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for
Tiers is basically "choose how much change you can spare to support me". Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
> both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform
Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees. If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche. You'll make more money too
> Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?
Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
This is not providing a service in return for money. I create, my choice. You want to support me, your choice. Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have then it's too much money for you, choose a smaller amount. Or don't pay at all. You don't have a responsibility to pay.
See also Github sponsorships.
> The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them
By definition not. There is no generic "creator". People are different. "Comfortable" is different for different people. Patreon is focused on one specific model. They sorta try to do more ("pay per post") but that's feature creep and worse than using a dedicated platform. As patron I hate "pay per post" bc I have to do some math to even tell how much I'm paying you. Just obscurity for no good reason. As creator, see above.
> I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.
Great. Not to be blunt here, but if you're not on Patreon then who the heck cares what your opinion is on this? I feel like it's kind of reasonable to care more about the opinions of the creators using the platform than the creators not on the platform.
As far as I can tell, this "anti-feature" has existed for the entirety of Patreon. Features like pay-per-post are not new, they're not Patreon expanding or losing its way. Quite the opposite, Patreon has tried multiple times to get rid of some of these features, and they were stopped because of creator backlash. Learn the culture of the place you're criticizing.
And maybe this just isn't the platform for you? But it's a wild thing to go to a platform that has always worked in a certain way -- a platform that you are not using as a creator -- and to say, "oh, this is an anti-feature." Who are you to decide that?
> Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.
Great. That is a thing that creators are allowed to do. It is not representative of the entire platform, and it's kind of gross to dismiss the concerns of creators who don't work that way.
> Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees.
What in the heck does it mean to "cheat" on fees? Patreon works great as a subscription platform, and people have used it that way for years, and both creators and fans benefit from it. This isn't a sport, it's not a bad thing for creators to be able to support themselves. I am genuinely thrown off by the idea that someone would look at a creator building things that an audience loves and say, "but they didn't do it fair."
> Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have
Very literally nobody has said that you do. What I've said is that other creators do not have a responsibility to ask you how they should create or how they should engage with their fans.
They don't have that responsibility. You can go off and create however you'd like. You can even use Patreon and not pause your service. Patreon has zero requirements to send regular updates. I follow and support creators who put out one update every year. I kick a few dollars a month to a creator who has not posted an update in nearly two years. Do what you want, but stop getting mad at other creators because they're using a platform in a way that has always been officially supported and allowed by the platform.
> If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche.
Or -- and this is going to be difficult to hear -- creators can do what they want because they don't answer to you. It is wild to me that you are trying to dictate who is allowed to use Patreon as a creator... as someone who is not even on Patreon. Since when do you get to decide who does and doesn't belong inside of a community that you are not even a part of?
> Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".
I don't care what you call it, I don't think quibbling over semantic definitions matters more than people's livelihoods.
> By definition not. [...] Patreon is focused on one specific model.
I mean, no, objectively not, given that Patreon supported exclusive tiers and rewards from the very beginning. I'm sorry if you thought it was focused on something different, but creators on the platform have literally never universally treated it as a donation model. Your idea of what you'd like Patreon to be has nothing to do with what it has always been. Of course, Patreon can be treated as a pure donation platform, and many creators do. And of course, some creators who do treat it as a donation platform still choose to make use of paused payments or pay-per-post, and have written en-length about how that's better for their personal creative process.
Again, I want to point out how incredibly wild it is to walk up to a community that you are not a part of, that has always included a particular set of people, and to point at them and say, "they don't belong there, we're by definition not supporting them."
> As patron I hate "pay per post" bc I have to do some math to even tell how much I'm paying you.
Set a maximum pay-out, this isn't hard. As a patron, you should use the tools available to you to control your spending rather than requiring creators to fit into your model. I feel like for all the nobility you're ascribing to being a "patron" of a creator, asking you as part of that to accommodate the preferred donation styles of creators you support is fairly reasonable.
Nobody is forcing you to support creators who use pay-per-post. But they don't have an obligation to you to handle their funding in the way you like.
> As creator, see above.
As a creator not on Patreon. And that's fine, there's lots of spaces that you can be a creator. But it doesn't particularly matter what your opinion is on what a separate community from you should and shouldn't allow.
Pro tip, don't overuse the word "creator". We are just normal people. And literally no one cares if you are on Patreon or not.
Then, chill. No one is telling anyone what to do. But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature. Like standing it's original idea and not wanting to compete with a bazillion alternatives like Twitch/Bandcamp/Etsy in each niche. Like not turning creativity into a service business. Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
Patreon's original idea included the features you're calling antifeatures.
You are imagining a fictional version of a platform that has never existed and getting mad that the real platform has lost its way from the fictional platform that only lived in your head.
The original idea that you're upset about Patreon abandoning existed only in your head. It has always been a platform for both pure donations and for transactional subscriptions. It was never the idea to serve one of those communities exclusively. That is a thing you have imagined.
> No one is telling anyone what to do.
> if you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche
Sure.
> But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature.
Patreon offers the feature. This is a conversation about whether Apple might remove a feature that Patreon chooses to offer.
I don't know how to make that clearer? Again, the platform you are imagining does not exist; there is no version of Patreon that was positioned against creator services or the ability to pause transactions or per-creation payments. Yes, Patreon could choose not to offer these services.
But they did choose to offer them.
And only one person here showed up and got really mad about the fact that Patreon used the word "patron" in relation to a service they have as far as I can tell, always offered.
> Like not turning creativity into a service business.
> Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)
I don't know if you get to tell people to chill at the same time you're calling anyone who uses Patreon in a way you don't like a hustler, accusing them of ruining creativity, and questioning their ability to know what they do and don't want?
And again, only one person here is mad that Patreon is... doing what they have always done, under the direction of a community that wants them to do it, despite what people who are not part of that community want. Only one person showed up in an unrelated comment thread and said, "stop calling it patronage if a creator chooses not to take someone's money for a month."
I mean, yes, it is irritating and frustrating to hear someone who's not using Patreon as a creator badmouth a significant portion of the community that is doing stuff that people love, and to belittle them and tell them that they don't know what they want or they're hustlers and shouldn't be on the platform. If it means something to you that it's irritating to hear that, congrats! That is irritating and annoying to hear. I'm not sure what that proves, but yes, good job. Belittling creators will make people mad at you, you have cracked the code.
It’s bad, yes. It would be good if Patreon allowed sticking with the billing systems which Apple is forbidding, but I do understand that they may no longer be able to justify the business expense of maintaining them given the anticipated changes in usage patterns.
Practical suggestion:
Maybe you can project a certain number of releases per year, reduce that projection slightly to give yourself a margin of flexibility, announce that target to your supporters, be explicit wit them that the rate of output throughout the year will be uneven, and then charge a monthly subscription price of 1/12 of the total price for your annual target output?
Assuning a good projection would smoothly have approximately the same financial outcome for everyone as the status quo in most cases. I can think of ways in which this could be gamed, but most of those who would want to bother gaming it are probably cash-poor enough that you may not mind, or if too many people do this to preserve your financial objectives I can also think of workarounds for most of the potential abuses.
Yes, it's a reasonable workaround. I believe Patreon also allows creators to "pause" their account, suspending payments for an indefinite amount of time. So, I could just keep the account paused, then unpause for a month when I make a video. Although, I believe that Patreon doesn't want the per-creation model themselves, since charging the same amount each month is simpler, and easier to project revenue, etc, so they are probably just bundling this unpopular change with the Apple announcement.
Patreon doesn't have a choice. Apple is too large to give up having an iOS app - too many customers will just walk away instead of using the alternative (or so they think - but I don't blame them for not being willing to experiment - if they are right it will cost a lot of customers)
Well there is a choice, but it is questionable if suing will or will not result in any change. Even if they win in court it will be several years and millions of dollars in legal fees, and it isn't clear they will win.
They can _not_ charge through iOS though. It’s a very small matter for me to navigate to the Amazon website to buy a new book, then load it up in the Kindle app.
I imagine they already crunched the numbers of doing the Spotify approach vs. kowtowing to Apple. Unlike Spotify and Amazon, Patreon does have non-negligible competition to consider who will take advantage of the more convenient payment.
I don't understand why Patreon has to drop the per-creation model. Can they not just not offer that on iOS, and continue it on other platforms? (Perhaps with a "convert from susbcription to per-creation" feature online?)
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
In other words, every Patreon creator has to be billable through iOS App Store or you get kicked off.
Someone should get the FTC or EU involved. This is beyond the pale.
> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.
This is truly egregious. "At risk"? This is sheer blackmail.
"Nice store you have here. It'd be a shame if anything... bad were to happen to it. A 30% cut for our legitimate businessmen's club should assure you peace of mind... "
This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the web. I think there is some age/line where on one side, your first instinct is to open the browser on your phone and navigate to a website, and on the other side of the line, you open the app store and navigate to an app.
Personally, I agree. I want better/first class mobile websites over an app. I don't want apps for most things. That said, I didn't grow up in a mobile first/mobile only era.
> This is speculation: for younger people, apps are the web
I don’t think age is the driver. For most people, for the last decade, all software in their phone has come from the App Store. Everybody is trained to check there first. Even if you think to google it first, you’re just going to get App Store link in the top results. Company’s own site might be at the top and you’ll instinctively look for the ‘get on App Store’ badge when you click through.
Some small number of android power users are the only people that really know that downloading an app from not the App Store is possible.
following this to its logical conclusion you would never install an app if they offered a web version which also means if you get a DM from a creator on pateron you have to load the website instead of easy access to your app drawer.
It's 2024, if you want a viable business that caters to mobile users, you need an app. There are users who don't care or even prefer the web version, but we're a minority.
I wonder if you could argue this is comparable to Amazon allowing you to buy some things in the app but not others, like ebooks. Obviously Amazon is much bigger but I don’t see why an app shouldn’t be able to allow buying some things but not others. Especially when the limitation is from Apple’s functionality like in this case, rather than their fee like in Amazon’s.
Apps in certain categories (ebooks, music, video, news) can choose to not support purchasing at all in apps, or to use in-app purchases.
Outside these categories (eg a email account as a service, group classes) you are expected to always have in app purchasing.
There have been interesting ways people have explored getting around this, but obviously Apple thinks they should be paid what they are contractually obligated.
Having control of distribution means it is easy on Apple’s side to solve disagreements. You only see it brought to lawsuit by the other side (e.g. Epic’s lost case in the US)
I could be wrong, but I think you’re misinterpreting it. They could remove all billing from the iOS app just like eg Audible does. But I’m guessing they don’t want to. Patreon is looking out for themselves, not their creators or subscribers.
Hard to say. Audible, Netflix, and Spotify have a lot more weight to throw around. Enough that even Apple can't ignore it. I can see these being backdoor deals for them specifically.
Patreon from its very model does not. A very sad exploitation of the little guy, even if this is one of the biggest little guys.
User confusion - if they block users from subscribing to those creators on iOS they will inevitably have support tickets to deal with it. Hence their 16-month project to remove non-iOS-compatible plans.
hey, i answered your email about aleph last wednesday; no stress if you're answering slowly, i just wanted to check to see if it had fallen into your spam filter
unfortunately i don't think i have any other way to contact you other than email and hn comments
That will be just great when Apple finds a creator doing that during App Review and bans Patreon over it. Patreon is going to be forced into the position of policing it for Apple, I'd guess.
> However, the rulings established that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.
> Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure.
Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the website. Send them updates when people post new content.
I've never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS. I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I'd want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my email, and if they're long enough I click a link and read the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.
The app's useful for audio posts. But mostly it's just an extra chance for them to make money. Push notifications, the home screen icon, etc. Most people I know, their inbox is barely functional due to the marketing emails, and they're reliant on features like Gmail's "Important" which only highlights real people, not Patreon content.
You're not the average user, and if the average user gets a billing email and hasn't bothered to read their content email, visit the site or open the app, they are more likely to end their subscription.
There's another erm... "creator oriented" Patreon-like service that works entirely through the web. Specifically to avoid Apple and Google's cut. And they seem wildly successful, although perhaps the type of content may influence user's decisions.
I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill my password but same page as a PWA it won't.
I also did some testing with macroquad [1] and I was finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just didn't work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there's no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.
---
PWAs just can't do the same things that native apps can. This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle man between them and their customers?
PWAs are only able to be limited by technical measures, not business measures. For instance, anti-fingerprinting logic wouldn’t be needed in an App Store. There, Apple can say if they find out you are fingerprinting users without going through Apple’s specific ATT user consent process, you are in violation of our developer agreement and may be permanently banned from the store.
Each update of an app is reviewed, while a website can change completely at any moment (or have different versions served for different people). This is why for instance web extensions are heavily reviewed and audited.
This means they are pretty fundamentally different models.
The prompt for location is different for example because Apple enforces you are using the location information you gather for a specified reason, and has the aforementioned business penalties for misuse, and has tied all that to a real world identity. The browser can’t know if the page asking for location data is for mapping, for marketing tracking, or so that someone can drive to your home. The two features are going to look and behave distinctly.
I know PWAs can't do many things that apps in general can. But people were suggesting that Patreon should just be a website and not an app. And that's why I said PWA. If you can be just a website, you can be a PWA and be a bit better than just a website.
Given Apple's back and forth history allowing or not allowing and limiting or not limiting PWAs, I'd be hesitant to risk my business model on them. Which is exactly what Apple wanted I guess
Aside from many users not being familiar with PWAs and not wanting to install them, I believe they’d also have to drop support for older iOS versions, as for example PWA push notifications were only added in iOS 16.4.
I’ve been trying to figure this out. Just guessing since I have limited Patreon usage.
They don’t want to just be a payment middleman for creators, they want to be “sticky” like Facebook.
So they might add things like chat, media playback (with DRM), creators being able to post with notifications. Maybe you can sign up for additional private streams or even 1-on-1 sessions (like a gamer offering tutorials).
But by having an app to consume digital services, Apple says you have to provide a way to pay for services in the app (because that’s apple’s revenue model, a portion of software sales and resulting digital goods and services off of the App Store)
It's probably a generational divide now. For many middle/younger gen z and the upcoming Gen alpha, apps "are" the web. Not having an app to look at may as well not exist. Especially true of IOS users.
Sure Apple allows it. However it is much easier to have a good UI experience with a custom app than a web app. Some people also think they must have an app for everything and so even if there is a good web experience they will demand the app anyway.
My understanding is that Patreon does not use Google's payment system and isn't subject to a cut of the revenue. This is why the article says "Your prices on the web and the Android app will remain completely unaffected".
At least until 2025 when Google implements the exact same policy change. Every questionable hardware choice Apple does is something Android vendors or Google Play copies within a year.
Remember when Samsung made fun of Apple for removing the headphone jack?
unlike Apple who has managed to dodge scrutiny, Google is being reemed hard by the US courts over multiple antitrust issues. It may happen eventually, but I think the courts doing their jobs will stall such pivots. The last thing they want to do is make their store sound more like a monopoly.
True, but Android at least allows alternative app stores, and there are a few. Obviously it's not as easy as the native store, but if enough developers are dissatisfied, there is a way out.
I've heard horror stories about Patreon as well. Your best bet is probably to spread your risk by being on Patreon, Ko-fi, PayPal+Web, YouTube memberships (if you do video) etc.
managing so many fronts with such different medium (you can host all media on patreon, only really videos on YT but also more limited videos than patreon. then you can't host at all on ko-fi), sounds like a pain both logistically and financially.
In fact, how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template? There are other payment providers.
>how amazing would it be if someone who was about to embark on yet another decentralized protocol fiasco instead just released a Patreon-like template
they probably exist already (minus payment processing). Network effects take hold as usual, though. Patrons are more willing than average to jump, but I can see hesitation signing up and adding payment for a new/unknown website
and honestly all payment providers suck in some unique way. Though most of the fault lies in Visa/Mastercard. That's a monopoly we need to tackle one day.
So the negative point value, currently -1, tells me that I am asking a rhetorical question and I should have said that I'm asking a rhetorical question.
Back on topic:
I am an expert on in-app purchases circa 2020 and do know that there's no working around it unless you have a deal with Apple. Used to be my job.
Paypal or any other financial transaction entity Is all the same to Apple, the user is sending their money while using an apple hosted app, and apple wants to make sure that users don't get fleeced! So Apple taxes those transactions ostensibly to provide oversight Services.
So the only way for patreon to get around this is to not mention in their app that you can also sign up on you know patreon.com To give money, and to allow users who have signed up and sent money on patreon.com to use the iOS app.
If we're being honest, private backroom deals based on a variety of business factors and debates. Venmo is Paypal, Paypal has Musk's and Thiel's deep pockets. They can and will settle something.
There is no real line, just imaginary ones apple draws arbitrarily.
How can another platform be better about this? Wouldn’t they be subject to the same thing? Or is there some component here that is not tied to the Apple demand?
That's a great question! How far does Apple's control extend into markets that are unrelated to their core business? I always prefer using mobile websites on my own android phone instead of downloading apps because of security concerns and general notification spamming, ads, and annoyances, and it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing "apps" with bookmarks. For the current situation, I may look into services like Nebula, doing PayPal directly, YouTube subscriptions and donations, or setting up an online store. Or even.... sponsored videos!! (just kidding)
> it seems to me this would be a great solution ie just replacing "apps" with bookmarks.
I think there are several reasons users gravitate to apps, but the biggest pain point apps mitigate is the login UX. I'd wager that you use a password manager, most people do not and cannot be convinced to do so. With an app, one can create an account and log in once, then stay logged in and never think about the password again until they get a new device, at which time the password can be reset via email and then immediately forgotten.
I know what you are trying to do, but this is he host of an 800k channel. They already generate millions for youtube. Google will at best try to steer that channel to use Youtube's recent-ish dontation and memberships features.
No reason to disrupt money directly from someone they are paying; if they want to do it sneakily they simply change their payout rates and argue over that instead.
As a longtime YouTube creator who uses Patreon for financial support, the news is even worse: Patreon informed me that all creators must switch to a monthly subscription schedule instead of the per-creation schedule that I and many other currently use. The whole point of per-creation is that it allows me to take time off, and only charge people when I release something, thus incentivizing me, and being fair to my supporters. I'm really annoyed by this change, and will start pushing back, but if it happens as planned, I may be forced to switch to another platform, or come up with some other solution.
You can have light boosting binoculars with 1x zoom. Similarly, looking through the viewfinder of an SLR camera will show the light- gathering capability of the lens. The very best light gathering camera lenses (and binoculars) only collect 2 to 4 times more light for a given focal length compared to the human eye. Since our vision is so nonlinear in sensitivity, the 2-4x boost doesn't seem like much. The brightness theorem only says you can't "perceive an object to be brighter than it is at its surface" (my interpretation)
I've owned a DeLorean since 1999. It's body panels do not rust or discolor at all, and the car has been stored outdoors under a cover for most of its life. The panels are "plain" 304 stainless steel, the same grade that is used in kitchens and food preparation machinery. As far as I know the only more corrosion-resistant grade is 316, which is used in medical equipment and smaller items where cost is less of an issue. The panels on the cybertruck are some "secret" alloy called 30X. It's probably very similar to 304, but the work hardening process that Tesla says gives the panels more strength may also lower is corrosion resistance.
Somewhat misleading headline. The only reason 2023 is higher is that companies didn't want to do layoffs in Nov/Dec and held until Jan. Better to just look at the graph: https://layoffs.fyi/ The trend is definitely down.
I recently learned Kyoto has rules about signage and specifically color saturation. Some of the rules seem too detailed, but the end result looks very nice. https://youtu.be/KuX3nu4jdo0
Slightly ironically given the gist of this discussion, the ad shown before that video was actually one I wanted to see and watched till the end (trailer for latest Indiana Jones movie).
I've applied a desaturation filter to a number of websites. The Register for example:
body {
/* A little less bloody red, eh? */
filter: saturate(33%);
}
(Via the Stylus CSS manager extension.)
I also browse extensively on an e-ink (monochrome) tablet, and find that the lack of high-saturation colour is very welcome. I suspect that even colour-based e-ink displays, given their muted pastel palette, might also be an improvement in general.
Edit: That's Stylus, not Stylish, as I'd initially written, Which has Gone To The Dark Side.
RF-based approaches have the problem that they are not specific to glucose. A molecule of glucose absorbs infrared light at specific wavelengths due to its size and types of bonds. It does not have specific absorption of radio frequencies. In this paper, researchers measured glucose in pure water at concentrations 100X physiological levels. I'd like to see this work with whole blood or a tissue phantom, or measure glucose independently from any other solute.