Twitter has paused sign-ups for its Blue tick service
(Picture: Twitter)Twitter may charge those signing up for Twitter Blue verification through an iPhone or iPad more, according to the Information.
It said signing up for verification may cost $11 instead through the Apple App Store and $7 elsewhere. This is likely to equate to around £10 on the UK App Store, based on current pricing.
Why? Twitter CEO Elon Musk has had a rather public spat with Apple over its App Store policy of taking a 30 per cent cut of sales through the store, for developers who earn more than $1 million a year.
The higher cost to the end user makes up for Apple’s cut, and also appears intended to highlight what Musk presumably interprets as Apple’s greed.
There’s a certain irony here, of course, as Twitter will be charging for a slightly altered service that used to be free. And that change arguably makes Twitter verification less valuable than it has ever been from a status perspective.
The status of Twitter verification
Sign-up for Twitter’s Blue verification is on hold, following damaging instances where people paid for a “blue tick” verification mark and impersonated large companies. Some of the tweets went viral, and reportedly further discouraged advertisers from pumping any money into Twitter.
Most notably, an account impersonated pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and proclaimed “we are excited to announce insulin is free now”. The company’s stock fell by 4.37 per cent shortly afterwards, although it’s not clear whether this was a direct result of the viral tweet.
Twitter has also recently altered the wording of the verified checkmark, for those who received a blue tick back in the pre-Musk era, to “this is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable”.
Elon Musk has intimated that in the future all verified accounts, bar those of governments, may have to be paid for.
The Twitter CEO met Apple CEO Tim Cook on 30 November, after suggestions Apple could potentially remove Twitter from the App Store altogether. Following the meeting Musk tweeted that “Tim [Cook] was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”
This is not the first time a major app creator has butted heads with the big app store proprietors.
Epic Games brought a lawsuit against Apple in 2020, challenging App Store rules that mean publishers can’t use third-party payment processing within their iPhone apps, and thereby avoid Apple’s 30 per cent cut.
Apple removed Epic Games’s smash hit Fortnite from the App Store as a result. Google also removed the game from Android’s Google Play app store in the same month, August 2020.
Epic Games runs its own games store but its cut is significantly lower than Apple’s at 12 per cent.
