Could Apple Seriously Hurt Facebook’s Business Model With This One Update?

And what’ll happen to developers?

Photo by Youssef Sarhan on Unsplash

Earlier this week in a story I wrote about Epic’s lawsuit against Apple I mentioned briefly how Apple and Facebook had a little fight. You can read it here,

Epic Isn’t suing Apple for the 30% cut, They’re Suing Them for Something Else

but the TLDR is, Facebook released an update that told users that Apple would take a 30% cut from transactions made on Facebook’s IOS app.

Facebook currently supports a recent feature that allows for paid online events (think birthday’s all the way to small businesses).

Due to the recent pandemic, Facebook said that it would support small businesses and events by not collecting fees for at least the next year, meaning small businesses could keep 100% of their earnings.

The issue is on iOS is Apple takes 30% under almost all circumstances of any in-app purchases. Including the ones on Facebook.

Facebook did try and petition Apple to make an exception given the current pandemic but Apple declined and blocked the update…