Tencent Quietly Offers a Cut of WeChat's Revenues to Apple

Chinese tech giant Tencent (OTC: TCEHY) launched a content publishing feature for its messaging platform WeChat in 2012. The in-app articles loaded more quickly than articles on external browsers and corralled users into WeChat's walled garden.

The articles were free to read, but Tencent added a "tipping" feature to the articles, which enabled readers to pay their favorite writers, in 2017. Tencent retained a cut of those tips as revenue, which prompted Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to declare that it was also entitled to a 30% cut on iOS devices -- since the tips counted as in-app purchases.

Image source: Getty Images.

Source Fool.com