Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Apps go headless
Agents like Grok Bot and Meta's Muse push services to exist headlessly. The user interface matters less, and what matters is letting an agent that a consumer has deployed transact and navigate on the consumer's behalf. In that setup, the App Store owner has no reasonable claim to a cut of the transaction.
Games without the store
Games show how it plays out. Ask an agent for a game, and it finds an experience and serves it, with in-app purchases handled through a payment service like Stripe, so the App Store never touches the flow of funds. The same goes for Wordle, chess, or cards with friends, which an agent can set up on request.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions work the same way. Think of the revenue share The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal pay on subscriptions, and of how both are roach motels, easy to enter and impossible to leave. With payment credentials stored in an agent, a publisher can offer a headless experience, transact directly, and keep the money that would have gone to a platform.
Why does the App Store take 30 percent?
Apple opened the App Store in 2008 with a split that gave developers 70 percent of each sale and kept 30 percent for Apple. Google's Android store adopted the same split, and it became the standard for digital storefronts. The fee has historically applied to digital goods and subscriptions sold inside apps, while physical goods bought through an app have been exempt. In 2016 Apple announced a lower rate of 15 percent for subscriptions after their first year.
How can a service work without an interface?
Most software already exposes an API, a set of requests that other programs can send directly. A headless service is one where that API is the product and no screen is attached to it. E-commerce has used the approach for years, with a storefront built separately from the inventory and checkout systems behind it. Payment companies such as Stripe sell exactly this kind of connection, taking a card payment through a few lines of code rather than a checkout page.
Why are subscriptions so hard to cancel?
Subscription businesses earn more the longer a customer stays, so every cancellation shortens that customer's lifetime value. Behavioral economists have long documented status quo bias, the tendency to leave a default arrangement alone, and a subscription turns that tendency into revenue. Designers call the harder cancellation paths dark patterns, a term coined by UX designer Harry Brignull in 2010. Brignull's catalog of the tactics included a pattern he called the roach motel.
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