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Telegram’s Durov accuses Apple of creating myths about App store to fool users

The entrepreneur emphasized that the company is making up these myths to justify the exuberant 30% tax for app developers

Pavel Durov Manuel Blondeau/AOP.Press/Corbis via Getty Images

Pavel Durov

© Manuel Blondeau/AOP.Press/Corbis via Getty Images

MOSCOW, July 28. /TASS/. Founder of Telegram Pavel Durov has slammed Apple for cheating their customers by manufacturing unfounded myths about App Store, Durov wrote in his Telegram channel.

In particular, the entrepreneur emphasized that the company is making up these myths to justify the exuberant 30% tax for app developers. Durov believes that one of the myths is that the 30% tax makes it possible for Apple to maintain App Store. "In fact, running an app store costs only a fraction of what Apple takes from app developers. Every quarter, Apple receives billions of dollars from third-party apps. Meanwhile, the expenses required to host and review these apps are in the tens of millions, not billions of dollars. We know that because we at Telegram host and review more public content than the App Store ever will. Actually, any company running a massive video platform will need both more servers and more moderators than a company running an app store," he wrote. Durov also pointed out that Apple has around $200 billions of free funds that the company does not know what to do with.

The messenger founder also debunked the idea that anyone can create their own operational system to compete with Apple as it is a very complicated process convincing developers to make apps for this new potential system. "There’s a vicious circle: devs don’t build apps if the OS doesn’t have enough users, and users don’t buy phones if there aren’t enough third-party apps for them. Even Microsoft, with its huge influence among developers, failed to have apps (such as Instagram) built for their Windows Phone, and Microsoft had to shut down their OS. So no matter how much you invest in building an alternative, the 2020 mobile OS market is closed to new entrants," he noted.

Durov also highlighted that developers have no other choice but iOS or Android and "if they want to create a service that is socially relevant, they will have to build apps for both platforms in the mobile duopoly." "Try to imagine Telegram or TikTok as Android-only apps and you will quickly understand why avoiding Apple is impossible. You can’t just exclude iPhone users. As for the iPhone users, the costs for consumers to switch from an iPhone to an Android is so high that it qualifies as a monopolistic lock-in," the entrepreneur pointed out.

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