John Gruber wrote a commentary on a WSJ article about the effect of apps on the web.

Christopher Mims, writing in the WSJ::

Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting credit cards. When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

As Gruber pointed out, this is a misconception that confuses in-app purchases with transactions made in the app.

That’s patently false. Even with Mims’s own example, Amazon. Just a few minutes before sitting down to write this piece, I used Amazon’s iPhone app — the one distributed through Apple’s App Store — to buy some stuff. I added items to my cart, signed in with my getting-close-to-two-decades-old Amazon account, and I was done. Apple won’t see one penny of that transaction. Not one.

If Amazon started using Apple Pay in their app, Apple would have gotten a fraction of a penny of each dollar I spent — but those pennies would have come from my credit card company, not Amazon.

Retailers who sell through native apps do not pay Apple anything, let alone 30 percent. What Apple charges 30 percent for are purchases for in-app digital content. I can’t buy Kindle books in the Kindle app, or Amazon MP3 music, because of this — but I can buy everything else from Amazon.

It makes sense for Apple to charge for in-app purchases because the digital content is delivered by Apple’s servers to the consumers. Apple does not earn a commission from in-app transactions that are not handled by Apple. In Mims’s example, Amazon is the one delivering the purchases to the customer, not Apple.

Mims rightly suggested that the web should be kept open.

The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things — something some of its early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.

But the irony of that, as Gruber pointed out, is, his article is published on a site with a pay wall.

Paul Ford wrote on The New Yorker about the group that rules the web.

You might have read that, on October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5. And you might know that this has something to do with apps and the Web. The question is: Does this concern you?

The answer, at least for citizens of the Internet, is yes: it is worth understanding both what HTML5 is and who controls the W3C. And it is worth knowing a little bit about the mysterious, conflict-driven cultural process whereby HTML5 became a “recommendation.” Billions of humans will use the Web over the next decade, yet not many of those people are in a position to define what is “the Web” and what isn’t. The W3C is in that position. So who is in this cabal? What is it up to? Who writes the checks?

What do you know about the people who decide on the standards of the internet?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rates the security of messaging apps.

I’d like to see WeChat and LINE on the chart.

In an attempt to blow your mind, Samsung has written an unofficial review of their own product on the official Samsung blog.

Maybe they decided to skip paying others to review their products and just do the review on their own.

Finally. If you’re still facing this problem, you can deregister your number here.

But with the recently-released web tool, all you need to do is enter the phone number you wish to uncouple from Apple’s iMessage system. Apple will then send you a confirmation code over SMS — type it into the browser window and you’ll be home free. via The Verge

Android Central reported on Samsung refusing to pay Android royalties to Microsoft because the latter was a direct hardware competitor.

We reported a while about Microsoft’s action against Samsung.

Samsung is now stating that since Microsoft owns Nokia’s devices unit, sharing sensitive data with the company would result in a breach of US antitrust laws.

If Samsung is so adamant about not breaching antitrust laws, perhaps Samsung should stop using Android. That way it won’t have to pay licensing fees and won’t invite charges of collusion.