“Apple continues to aggressively defend its commission structure in markets where it maintains the legal authority to do so, arguing that the App Store provides valuable services including payment processing, fraud prevention, and customer acquisition that justify its fee structure.”
The gambit here is to get Patreon creators on board with the same revenue split as software developers — the latter being incentivized by the logic that if the iOS platform didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a market.
In service of protecting that profit margin, Apple’s calibrating this percantage across anything that takes a payment from their metwork. Creators have to very quickly figure out if it’s worth it to maintain access to an audience of impulse buyers, or if they can afford to cultivate an audience on their own platforms.