Comment by giarc
9 years ago
It frustrating. I tried to get a legit app through the app store that had a link to our website where people could sign up. The iOS app is for customers with accounts, so it made sense to us to have a link where users could see our website (discover our Saas product and sign up). Apple repeatedly rejected it since they wanted their 30% cut of our revenue. So we now have to make it clear in our description that this app if for current customers only.
However, these scamming apps make it through.
The app store guidelines very clearly prohibit what you tried to do, and it's been well-known that this is prohibited for many many years.
If you want to be able to get new users with your app, you need to provide an IAP subscription option.
I was rejected for linking to a THIRD PARTY service that happened to have a paid plan too. Didn't get any revenue from that and couldn't very well offer IAPs even if I wanted to... after being in the store for a year, too. The reviewers are grossly incompetent more often than not.
Doesn't Netflix's app's first screen say sign in or visit Netflix.com to sign up?
They used to do that, and that is ok. But you can't link them to an external site to pay and sign up.
But now they just bit the bullet and give up a portion of their revenue to Apple and Google. Although I believe 30% is only for the first year. It goes down after that.
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I'd imagine there's some companies that even Apple can't bully.
You can get new users through your app, you just have to provide a free version. Then if they want to use the premium features, they can log in on the web and pay. But you can't link them to the site or to an external payment method.
It's completely ridiculous. There's one way to distribute software on the second-largest mobile platform in the world, so we either have to pay whatever cut they shake us down for, or provide a terrible user experience by not even letting users click on a link to using our own subscription backend.