Apple Allowing External Payment Providers Into The App Store

The restriction of the iOS developers to the in-house payment system of the Apple App Store is beginning to crumble. In South Korea, the Californian company will begin to integrate external payment services. However, this does not happen voluntarily, as shown in a report by Korea Times emerges.

Accordingly, the South Korean parliament has introduced a legal regulation that prohibits platform operators from exclusively offering their own payment system and excluding other services. However, that will not mean that developers will be able to bypass Apple completely in the future, for example with in-app sales. The money transfers are then processed by another provider, but as a platform operator Apple can still claim a commission. As a rule, however, this is less than the fees that are usually collected when using the AppStore.

External providers are not cheap

You can already see how this works at One Store, a South Korean app store for Android systems. This requires a commission of 20 percent if software and content are billed via the in-house payment system. If the developers use an external payment service, only 5 percent are due for using the download platform itself.

Despite the big difference, most developers still use the One Store system. Because the higher commission covers, for example, all customer contact in payment processing – i.e. support inquiries, chargebacks, debt collection and the like. It is much more expensive for the developers to have a customer service department themselves to take care of it, and external service providers with a comparable scope of services are hardly available any cheaper. Therefore, one can expect that the opening of the Apple platform will only induce a few app providers to go their own way.