They were great until they put fast downloads behind a paywall. It's like they're going out of their way to throttle download speeds nowadays

It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business

If someone spends just one day on a video production set at any level, they will never pirate media again.

Actually Patreon has played it perfectly by offering an android app, ios app and a website, and increasing the prices on the ios app to cater for the fees. The next thing should be to provide a clear notice on the ios app that lower prices can be found on the other apps. Then they will be able to objectively tell how many people value the app store's value additions enough to pay extra

Afaik from other discussions of this Apple do not allow apps to inform users that they can pay cheaper outside the app

You can't put a notice saying your prices are increasing due to Apple, it's against the App Store TOS :)

Is it allowed to put a notice that Android and web users are given a 30% discount on the normal prices, which accidentally are only for iOS users.

Or just add a clickbait title: "See here to find out if you are eligible to discounted prices!" to a link to the web site.

Of course buyer has to be able to disable the 30% discount on the web site, to make it plausible that the normal prices are the ones on iOS. And all billing lines in the invoice always have to include a 30% discount line on Android and web purchases.

> Is it allowed to put a notice that Android and web users are given a 30% discount on the normal prices

No. You are not allowed to provide customers any details about other payment options. Apple has provisions that basically say, "you must not encourage the user to use a different payment option." And Apple can interpret that quite broadly; telling users that another platform has a discount would be treated as a violation.

> "See here to find out if you are eligible to discounted prices!" to a link to the web site.

This would be a violation of Apple's policies.

I sort of understand why people have a hard time grasping this, and I don't think it's through any fault of their own. It's because it's such an obviously anti-consumer, anti-competitive policy that I think normal people assume "it cannot possibly be the policy that Apple has."

There's almost a defense in audacity: Patreon must be lying about its options because, come on, Apple wouldn't seriously ban links, right? No company would be that bold, right?

The policy is so blatant that people assume there must be something they're misunderstanding about it.

Exactly, they should be sued for this. I think the only people who are defending Apple are the ones who did not read the ToS carefully.

It's no longer a competitive market. MS can lowball like crazy now

Clearly there is a preferred age group amongst the electorate, so the open market solved this problem

He's clearly trying to follow the photopea playbook and make money through ads

They were ex-Ivy league and friends from college. They fit into the current investor meta perfectly

The high Healthcare costs in the US are caused mostly by high physician salaries though, and that's probably highly correlated with why they are able to make all these breakthroughs

Last I checked, physician pay represents a fairly small (single digit) fraction of healthcare expenditure. If I recall right, administrative overhead and insurance is significantly more of a contributor to pricing.

Do you have a source for that? Physician salaries do not account for all that large of a portion of healthcare spending. A $300,000/year doc performs a lot of procedures annually, and the amortized amount isn't huge compared to other costs.

That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game