The “experimentation” of paid content on Telegram may have already come to an end. An angry man implies it Pavel Durovwhich on its own platform announces the retirement of functionality on iOS in that not compatible with App Store terms and conditions. The story is always the same: Apple wants all payments to go through the store, so from withhold the 30% in the form of commissions.
Telegram had tested a system for publishing posts from to unlock upon payment of a certain amount (in practice, if you want to read the message you have to pay X euros which are deducted from the previously saved credit card). The social network then specified that it was not a question of actual tests of paid content, rather thanuse by some payment bot authors third party to add paywall to posts. Test or not, the first warnings have arrived from Cupertino that go something like this: or immediately collect the posts with direct payment, or the app will be banned from the App Store.
Pavel Durov explained how paid content allowed authors to monetize immediately and receive “almost“100% of what subscribers paid:
Unfortunately, we received notice from Apple that they did not approve of content authors monetizing their efforts without paying the 30% fee to Apple. Since Apple has full control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable paid posts on iOS devices.
And here the attack starts: Apple’s monopoly dominates the market, who pays for it are the millions of users who would like to monetize their work. Durov hopes that the institutions will move in this direction, to “take action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a higher tax than any government-imposed VAT“.
No explicit mention is made of Android: the CEO merely says that the platform “will work to provide creators with powerful and simple tools to monetize their content outside of Apple’s narrow ecosystem“It remains to be seen what the position of Google on this novelty will be.
