Apple excludes video and news partners from new App Store rules around external payments

Apple this week against Apple over commissions. As a result, developers can now promote alternative means to pay for their in-app purchases and subscriptions via links or buttons inside their iOS apps. But Apple’s compliance comes with several caveats, including technical requirements, an application process, and even what sort of apps will be allowed to direct customers to their websites. In

Apple has used entitlements to set up exceptions to its App Store rules — for example, when ordered to allow developers to point users to other purchase options if they chose.

In the case of the new U.S.-based Link Entitlement, Apple is again demanding to first vet which applications can include external links and control how they’ve been implemented. Apple is able to do this because the court said it didn’t plan to “micromanage” Apple’s new framework. It also said that Apple was still allowed to require developers to use IAP (Apple’s payment platform) for in-app transactions and it could “take steps to protect users” from the new threats that emerge from sending consumers to websites to process their payments.

The latter resulted in what Epic Games calls “scare screens” that are meant to discourage users from transacting outside the App Store.

Someone needs to add this to the Wikipedia entry: “malicious compliance” — Snazzy Labs (@SnazzyLabs)

where developers are instructed that links must go to their website “without any redirect or intermediate links or landing page.”

The page also can’t mimic Apple’s in-app purchase system — nor, in a case of Apple policing what developers post on their own websites — “discourage users from using it.”

In addition, the payment processors have to meet “certain industry standards,” Apple says, and have to provide users with processes for disputing unauthorized transactions, managing subscriptions, and requesting refunds. This part seems fine, as it’s more in line with Apple’s goal of protecting users from possible subscription scams.

One interesting tidbit, however, is that Apple notes in the filing that “apps participating in the Apple Video Partner Program or the News Partner Program are not eligible for the Link Entitlement — an exception also documented on the when customers sign up through IAP and their customers are allowed to transact within their app on things like rentals and purchases using the payment method on file with the company, if the customer had already signed up with a payment method outside the app.

News Partners, meanwhile, also , and a related lobbying group of app developers, the Coalition for App Fairness, have taken issue with how Apple has complied with the court order, with Epic dubbing it “bad faith” compliance and Spotify calling it “outrageous” and “abusive.”

That may be, but knowing Apple’s lawyers, it’s likely legal, too.

Based on reporting by techcrunch.com.