One example that complicates things is the Floatplane [1] application, where each channel costs a certain fee per month. The app doesn't do anything other than play videos from the subscribed videos. Because they wouldn't increase their price 30% to reflect the additional Apple fees, every single feature that even mentions the presence of a website that you can pay for a subscription at (including help pages!) have so far had to be removed [2].
The "core app experience" of Floatplane is "you get to watch videos in high quality" and "you get to chat during live streams". Their app is an amalgamation of Patreon and the Youtube video player, both of which are on the App Store already.
I don't know why buying video access would be so different from making ads show up. Both are purely digital services. There's probably some vague notion of "consumption" that determines if the fee is mandatory or not, but the rules are as vague as they are arbitrary when you get down to that level.
It's clear that the actual rule is "we can make a deal if you're big enough". Apps like Uber have gotten warnings for pulling stunts that smaller developers would get their dev account banned for. Adding 30% on top of Facebook would kill the feature on iOS and subsequently kill iPhone presence among marketeers.
The "core app experience" of Floatplane is "you get to watch videos in high quality" and "you get to chat during live streams". Their app is an amalgamation of Patreon and the Youtube video player, both of which are on the App Store already.
I don't know why buying video access would be so different from making ads show up. Both are purely digital services. There's probably some vague notion of "consumption" that determines if the fee is mandatory or not, but the rules are as vague as they are arbitrary when you get down to that level.
It's clear that the actual rule is "we can make a deal if you're big enough". Apps like Uber have gotten warnings for pulling stunts that smaller developers would get their dev account banned for. Adding 30% on top of Facebook would kill the feature on iOS and subsequently kill iPhone presence among marketeers.
[1]: https://www.floatplane.com/ [2]: https://youtu.be/Rs4hTm6B9QQ?t=368