Hello
I recently discovered that Denmark's (and soon the rest of the Nordic countries) biggest mobile payment service - MobilePay - is seemingly getting away with selling digital products in their app without using IAP. I am confused how this is possible, as I spent a lot of time making sure I understand the rules -- and I'm quite confident I do, so the only conclusion I can reach from this is that this is a violation that has not been discovered. If it isn't, I would like an explanation.
So, what am I talking about? First; MobilePay is an app that lets you send money to whoever, essentially a Danish version of CashApp. You attach a credit card, and you can transfer funds using people's phone numbers. Nothing about this is problematic. There are some fees involved, which is also fine.
But.
You can select to "wrap your money in digital wrapping paper", which can be unwrapped by the recipient to reveal the amount you transferred. This is, no matter how you spin it, a digital product. It adds about 1 USD to the transferred amount, but that amount goes directly to MobilePay, not to the recipient - and isn't a transaction fee. To me that sounds exactly like the kind of payment that is absolutely mandatory to process via IAP - so how are they not? How does it pass app review? Is there something I'm missing? As someone who has been forced to use IAP for a service I would much rather not share the revenue of with Apple, I find this frustrating, and I'd prefer that everyone was subject to the same rules, especially when it comes to big corporate players like the developers of this app.
You can read about the conditions of buying digital wrapping paper here: https://mobilepay.dk/app/legal/trading-conditions-da-dk - this page is in Danish but should be easily translatable. A theory I had is that maybe this wrapping paper feature is just not available to the test user they provided to Apple, as it is only sold to customers in Denmark and Greenland. But that's almost worse than an oversight, because in that case, they deliberately hid it from app reviewers.
I have attached some photos of how it looks when you select the product in the app and how it just adds the cost on top of the amount you chose to transfer. I just chose a sample transfer of 1 DKK for the amount itself, and the 7 DKK for the "paper" is then added on top. It's not a lot, but given the size of the app's userbase (over 4.5 million according to themselves), we're likely talking a significant chunk of change they're essentially (if you're being cynical) stealing from Apple.
What gives?
For reference, the app in question is this one: https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/mobilepay/id624499138?l=da (currently ranked 4th in Finance in Denmark)
