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Apps have become a huge economy, but understanding the rules that govern them is nearly impossible.

Apple and Google have bent their decade-old rules for app stores like crackers to the point where they may no longer make sense. This enabled buying digital stuff on convoluted apps like heck.

An example: In theory, you can use your Amazon account to purchase an ebook from the Kindle’s iPhone app, although not yet in reality. You cannot purchase e-books in the Android version of the app. Until recently, Kindle purchases were virtually ineligible under Apple’s guidelines, but were fine under Google’s guidelines. Now it’s the opposite.

Confusing? Yes. Apple and Google wrote long, complex guidelines for apps and frequently revised them to protect their own interests. (Previously Apple’s enforcement rules much longer than the United States Constitution.)

Want more craziness? Today, paying to subscribe to a podcast is easy on Patreon’s iPhone app. Apple steps aside and allows Patreon to collect your personal information and credit card information.

But purchasing other types of digital subscriptions can be completely different. If you buy a platinum membership to Tinder, the dating service on the iPhone app, you’re effectively signing up with Apple and Tinder is in the middle.

Apple takes a portion of this membership fee forever. If you want to quit, tell Apple, not Tinder.

Buying a six-month membership through the Tinder app costs some people $14.99 per month, but is $13.50 when purchased from the website. (The price difference is how Tinder partially compensates for the up to 30 percent fee Apple pays for each app purchase.) Oh, and paying to use dating apps might soon work like paying for something on Patreon – but only in the Netherlands.

For now, paying for Tinder via the Android app is more like how Patreon works. But that’s because Tinder’s parent company, Match Group sued Google. prevent the company from changing its rules.

{DEEP BREATH.}

I can bore you with the details of why Apple makes a distinction between purchasing a subscription from Patreon and purchasing a subscription from Tinder. There’s a reason why you can’t buy a paperback copy of “1984” on Amazon’s Android app and not buy the ebook version, and why you can’t now if new Netflix subscribers were able to sign up from the Android app before. Or it can’t be. This is another pretzel twist.

It took me hours of phone calls and detective work to understand all the details in the paragraphs you just read. If so many rules, exceptions, and explanations are needed to buy something from an app in 2022, then perhaps the logic of app economics is illogical.

Some companies that practice bored About how Google, and especially Apple, controls many aspects of this economy. Both determine which apps we can easily download through the app stores and when they directly take charge of the purchases we make through the apps.

If we use an app to buy things that exist in the real world, like an Uber ride or a meal kit subscription, those purchases bypass Apple and Google. The struggle is about buying things we use digitally, like a trinket used in a smartphone app game or a dating app subscription.

The problem is that the distinctions that seemed logical when Apple created the app store in 2008 don’t necessarily fit in the modern digital economy.

I’ve written about YouTube video creators before. I can not understand Why are Apple or Google eligible to receive some of the money their fans pay them through an app – potentially forever?

In the age of zoom-everything, does it make sense to have different rules? like Apple wanted to haveFor example, to take physical education classes to take in person and to take them virtually at home? Why are apps selling digital subscriptions and not apps like Facebook that make money from ads that generate some revenue for Apple and Google?

And implementation rules change frequently, creating more complexity.

This month, Google stepped in tighter restrictions so it should make more digital item purchases in apps and make a cut.

Again, there’s a meaning behind all these pretzel twists. Apple and Google i want to avoid It allows it to bypass the regulations and fees of major smartphone video games, which are the biggest moneymakers in the app worlds. And they say they are trying to respond to complaints that they have too much control or are a burden to small businesses.

But the more concessions Apple or Google make to temper angry governments and some angry developers, but not others, the more arbitrary the app store logic can seem.

Before you go …

• Mark Zuckerberg once said that protecting elections is his company’s top priority. My colleagues Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang statement Meta has now shifted its focus, but the risks from fake online election information remain.

• This smells: Reuters spoke with college students who accepted jobs from tech companies like Twitter, Coinbase, and Bolt. these job offers have been canceled when companies go through a rough patch. A recent college graduate said she may have to leave the US as her job has been taken away.

  Before On Tech: Tech recruiting is still crazy.

• Ultra-wide selfies that make people look crooked are totally cool. well author a certified youth, my colleague Kalley Huang.

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