Telegram has disabled the function of paid posts in its messenger for users of iOS devices due to the requirements of Apple, said the founder of Telegram Pavel Durov.
“Some content creators started using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts in their Telegram channels. This way, content creators could receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid, which was great,”
said Pavel Durov on his Telegram-channel.
However, Apple responded to such behavior of users, sending a letter to the management of the messenger, which expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that content creators monetize their work without paying Apple a commission of 30%.
“Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices,”
Durov said in a statement.
The Telegram founder criticized Apple and said its claim is "just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance."
Durov promised that his company would continue to work on "powerful and easy-to-use tools” for monetizing content outside of the Apple ecosystem.
“I hope that the regulators in the EU, India and elsewhere start taking action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is higher than any government-levied VAT,”
said Durov.
On Oct. 27, the social network's verified "donate" bot was launched in Telegram, with which users could publish paid posts in their Telegram feeds. Before purchasing, users see the outline of the photo or video and the amount of payment, and after purchasing, the app will allow access to the full media, according to the donate channel. Paid content can be published by channel authors, and payment is made through Smart Glocal Payments and funds are credited to the owner's account.
Outrage over Apple's commission has been expressed before, and the 30% level was expected to be non-permanent, but it has been in place for more than 12 years, says Mikhail Shikhmuradov, an expert at the BRICS Competition Centre. Among the reasons iPhone users should be concerned about the 30% fee were high prices, censorship, privacy issues, delays in updating apps, etc. In addition, in 2020, Pavel Durov summarized Apple's main theses in defense of its commission policy, the implementation of which has been associated with higher prices and lower quality apps.
Apple's almost ostentatious reluctance to listen to users' opinions about the minuses and shortcomings of the ecosystem, including certain elements of the company's policy, is understandable in terms of Apple's focus on profit maximization (Apple reported record revenue of $124 billion for Q4 2021), especially given the technogiant's dominant position, Shikhmuradov says.
"However, it should be assumed that more loyal to the opinions of users of monopolists should make proportional amounts of antitrust fines to their behavior,"
notes the expert.
