Of course they can't collect ”commission” on payments they're not involved with. The entire point of the Act is to crack down on anticompetitive behaviour. Your example is textbook, and I am certain the text of the law bans it.
You are using their developer tools and SDKs and like other tooling e.g. game engines they can recoup this cost through a per-sale model.
They tried similar minded tactics already with the Dutch complaints already and they weren't blindly accepted.
And there is nothing anti-competitive about Apple charging for their developer kit.
$99/year for the development kit will probably be seen as reasonable enough for it to be allowed, though they may have to accept allowing 3rd party alternative solutions to publish things to these other app stores or similar. The fixed price of the development kit isn't really the point when talking about the 30% commission though. That's about revenue from consumer purchases and trying to evade that via moving the pricing to the dev kit wholly then requiring the dev kit will not fly just because the DMA doesn't explicitly reference doing that being an example of a bad gatekeeping action.
Is charging a royalty for using the iOS SDK "gatekeeping"? I don't see why that's the case. Is Epic Games "gatekeeping" Unreal Engine by demanding 5% royalty to use their engine? Why should it be any different for Apple to demand royalty for using their SDK?
Even if EU magically made a law that explicitly banned royalties for operating system SDKs, that won't be the end of the story. Such measures could be construed as anti-free trade (given how it disproportionately affects US companies compared to EU companies), and will probably lead to a trade war and/or WTO arbitration between the EU and the US.
Where they'd get into trouble is by trying to turn these things into ways to move the 30% revenue cut. Just moving the 30% revenue from "rights to be on the one and only store" to "rights to write apps against the device with the one and only SDK" is quite clearly a different motive and forced cost model than having a 5% SDK fee where the developer is free to choose a different SDK.
I.e. "but others charge for an SDK" doesn't allow you to then change your SDK cost model to exactly match what was deemed illegally anticompetitive forced market pricing. It just allows you to charge for your SDK in a competitive way, nothing more.
"See this one neat legal flaw that EU regulators hate!" isn't an approach a US$350B-revenue-company wants to take, with a regulator who's already signalled their intent.
Not only that but a bunch of iOS apis incur services costs on Apple's side. Certainly seems valid that they should be able to charge to provide push notifications, iCloud storage, etc. There is a wide industry of businesses monetizing development kit usage and/or enterprise services. Nothing in the EU's regulations should preclude Apple from monetizing their investment into the iOS development platform.
Are you a lawyer specialising in the topic?
Do you actually know anything about this or is this just your opinion presented as fact?
It's not an outrageous conclusion that the law bans blatantly unfair practices, when that's what it sets out to do.
I don't think Apple can have a requirement to use their proprietary tools. That would be anti-competitive. If they want to make money off the tools... they should just charge a fee to buy the tools.
Yesn’t; I don’t think the regulators would look kindly upon Apple restricting third-party JITs, since it’d give Safari/WebKit an unfair competitive advantage over other browser engines on iOS (something I believe the DMA is also meant to open up.)
It would be interesting to see if people can replace parts of ios (sort of like grapheneos cuts out google)