Telegram founder Pavel Durov has accused Apple of destroying dreams and crushing entrepreneurs with its App Store policies. In his latest post on his official Telegram channel, Durov said that Apple is abusing its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their content.
“This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users trying to monetize their content,” said the Telegram founder. wrote In your post on the forum.
He said, “I hope the EU, in India and elsewhere will start regulatory action, before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is more than any government-imposed be over VAT,” he said.
His comments came after Apple forbade Telegram and creators to monetize their content by bypassing Apple’s in-app payment systems.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Telegram was testing a new ‘paid-posts’ feature in its iOS app that would enable content creators to earn more revenue by selling their posts in the messaging app. In short, the feature allowed creators to charge people money for viewing specific messages.
However, the feature did not rely on Apple’s in-app payment system, which requires developers to take a 30 percent cut to the company. Instead, content creators began using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts in their Telegram channels. This enabled them to receive almost 100 percent of the payments made by their customers, which the Telegram founder said was “very cool”.
As word spread, Telegram was asked to turn off the feature because it bypassed Apple’s in-app payment system and was therefore against the company’s App Store policies. “Unfortunately, we got word from Apple that they weren’t happy asking content creators to monetize their efforts without paying a 30 percent tax to Apple. Since Apple has full control over its ecosystem, we don’t have access to iOS devices.” But there was no option but to disable such paid posts, ”said Durov.
That said, Telegram’s founder assured developers and content creators that the company was working on offering an “easy-to-use tool to monetize their content — outside of Apple’s restrictive ecosystem.” One such effort is a platform called Fragment in which users can buy Telegram usernames. “In a few days, we will also introduce the ability for users to sell their existing usernames on Fragment,” the Telegram founder said in a separate post announcing the feature.
“For the first time in the history of social media, a fair, transparent market for usernames has been established. Ultimately, people will have ownership of their social media addresses, secured in the immutable ledger of a decentralized blockchain network.”
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