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It has been found that Apple restricted a Facebook update that informs users that the company would be collecting 30 percent App Store fee in a new online events feature on Facebook.
A Reuters report says that Apple is forcing Facebook to remove the message to get the feature to users.
Apple said that the update was in violation of an App Store policy that doesn’t let developers show “irrelevant” information to the users.
As per the report, Facebook says that it had asked Apple to waive this fee but Apple refused. The revenue was to go to the event organisers. The payment feature is now available but without the message that Apple is taking a cut.
Earlier, Facebook had released an image of how the message would appear if a user was making a purchase.
The report also says that the message doesn’t show up on Android smartphones as well. The planned message was supposed to read “Facebook doesn’t take a fee from this purchase.”
Facebook has said that it will find an alternative way to let users know that Apple is taking the 30 percent cut for every digital purchase but how exactly it plans to do that we don’t know.
Apple is currently waging a battle with Epic Games over its in-app purchases policy as Epic believes that apps should be allowed to have their own payment gateways and users should not be forced to use Apple’s payment services.
Other apps like Netflix, Kindle, and Spotify, for example, are also not allowed to mention that Apple takes a cut.
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