Telegram
AppleInsider may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made through links on our site.
Telegram’s CEO has announced that the company is canceling its monetization plans, saying it would work outside of the App Store rules, following objections from Apple.
Pavel Durov posted on his Telegram channel on October 28 that Apple wasn’t happy with the company’s plan to let content creators monetize their posts that used Telegram’s payment system instead of Apple’s. He also called on regulators to take action.
Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices.
This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content. 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.
Telegram’s plan
A report on Thursday had revealed Telegram’s plan to let users charge others to view certain messages. Since the company uses its payment system instead of Apple’s, it would bypass the 30% App Store fee for developers.
A person noticed on Twitter that Telegram had begun quietly rolling out the feature to a few channels. Some users implemented “third-party payment bots,” according to Durov, to receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid.
The action goes against Apple’s rules, which state that developers must use Apple’s system for in-app purchases. Telegram says it will work to offer its users other ways to monetize content outside of Apple’s ecosystem.
