They might just get away with something as crass in a vacuum, but given that the DMA will go into effect very soon, there will be a point of reference in a similar economy, and I don't think it'll be pretty for Apple.
US regulators (federal or state; I could see something equivalent to GDPR and CCPA) will be taking a very close look.
Off the top of my head...
- Bandwidth
- Running the App Store for users
- Marketing the App Store
- App review
- Security efforts to keep malware off the store
- Making App Store optimisation tools for developers
There's a lot of moving parts to this. You could argue that none of this is necessary if you sideload, but distribution is worth a lot in general to businesses, and I think it's clear that the App Store is a good distribution channel in many ways – easy to use for sellers (vs via traditional publishers, or physical retail), and easy to use for buyers.
Besides that, that list is very bundled. What if I e.g. want the convenient subscription payment processing, but want to (or need to) bring my own CDN for most content? What if I want their marketing and am willing to pay for it, but prefer my own payment processing?
Allowing other app stores would be the big win in competition here, properly forcing Apple to win on value proposition. The DMA could force this, but I'm not certain about the details.
It's an arguably quite sloppy illusion of competition/choice.
> distribution is worth a lot in general to businesses
No, digital distribution is worth so little it rounds to $0.
> App Store is a good distribution channel in many ways
It's the only distribution channel allowed so of course it's the "best" there is no competition allowed.
I get that there's no competition on iOS, but I was comparing to other ecosystems and mechanisms.
> So basically nothing that companies couldn't do themselves if Apple didn't explicitly block it. You pay 27% for fuck all.
No, you pay 27% for those services I mentioned. Those things aren't free if developers do them themselves. Developers may prefer to do some themselves because they think they can do them for cheaper, and in this case payments have been opened up so that there can be competition there – the DMA in the EU will do similar and I look forward to it.
You may disagree with the price (and I personally feel it's high), but these things cost real amounts of money to do. Not just this, but free app developers would also need to pay all these costs despite potentially having no revenue directly attributable to the app.
Even if for some reason you believe that's not true, there's no way they need 27% of all purchase revenue on the store to fund that stuff. The numbers simply don't check out. 30% was an arbitrary cut and that's why they can easily drop it to 27% or (for small devs as of recently) 15%.
In the situations we're discussing, both the app developer and every customer have already given apple hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of revenue. Out of that, Apple has a healthy margin.
Now we're talking about Apple sticking their fingers into developers' pockets for every single transaction even if Apple's participation in that transaction is limited to updating a couple database rows to indicate that Customer XXXXX bought DLC Package YYYY in App ZZZZZ. There is simply no way that is worth 30%. They're not doing that much work.
From my own experience, the app store brings negative value to both the users and the developers in many cases. It's most often seen not as the godsend like Apple portrays it, but as a stupid obstacle course that you need to clear every time you publish a new app or an update to an existing one, and sometimes even when you don't.
The advantage of mandating alternative distribution channels (i.e. sideloading or alternative app stores, both with their own payments infrastructure) would be that it wouldn't be up to a regulator to figure that out – the market could decide.
With limited exceptions, platform vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Sun/Oracle, etc) are generally not in the business of paywalling their development documentation, tools, and SDKs, otherwise it makes their platform far less attactive to third-party developers that they absolutely need in order to.
...and ever and never-mind that Apple's documentation is sub-par[1], even with the billions of dollars they're raking in. It boggles the mind because nothing is stopping Apple from hiring the people it needs to ensure decent documentation and DX, which can be paid-for directly from the $99/yr developer membership fee.
...so with that context in-mind, we don't benefit from - nor really need at all, most of those services you're referring to;
> Bandwidth
We're a small B2B SaaS with a userbase sized under 100,000 users and our old app bundle was around ~20MB and updated a handful of times per year, so even if 100% of our users used the iOS app with auto-updates then that's less than 2GB of data-transfer per published update - the cost of serving that is far less than a rounding-error on AWS/Azure.
> Running the App Store for users
I accept that.
> Marketing the App Store
No-one should be paying for Apple to market their own App Store - and as a B2B SaaS app, Apple would never promote us or do marketing for us.
> App review
I also accept this - but ostensibly this is what your $99/yr developer fee pays for.
> Security efforts to keep malware off the store
This is the same thing as App review; if we look more broadly, then it's better to compare this to Microsoft's Windows Defender which is free, and is funded independently of the Microsoft App Store.
> Making App Store optimisation tools for developers
Again, this is Apple's responsibility to pay for, not ours - and even-then consider that efficient update/patch distribution systems have been around for decades so it's hardly cutting-edge development (e.g. those ~KB-sized binary diff patches for CD-installed games in the late-1990s when we were on dial-up, like EA had for SimCity 3000 or C&C Red Alert 2)
For a B2B SaaS client app for BYOD users the iOS App Store is perfectly fine as a distribution system, and morally I'm fine with paying Apple some kind of fee for the benefits of their distribution system, but Apple has no legitimate claim to any percentage of the subscription fees we get from our users - so what this means is that we can make our app available for free to our users (which is fine, honestly) but (as per my understanding of the rules) we cannot offer any kind of account-management or billing-management for their SaaS subscriptions from within the app which isn't ideal.
I think Apple's main mistake here was deciding that having a single set of rules and fee-schedules/commission/etc for everyone, because the revenue models for exploitative mobile games (especially their gold/gems IAPs) differs massively from my company's unimaginatively dry B2B SaaS client.
On the other hand, non-equal fees ironically seem to be exactly what's made US courts decide in favor of Apple but against Google in two superficially quite similar cases regarding app store fees:
https://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-ver...
I think the main mistake isn't the fixed percentage fee, but rather holding on to the golden goose that is an app store monopoly for too long.
Google has been providing sideloading since day one for example, and except for a few high-profile exceptions, people do genuinely seem to prefer the platform's native app store.
Apple always aims for total control and authority over everything: Their supply chain, the apps running on their systems, the devices allowed to interface with them – and while that obsession with keeping it as *their own platform arguably is part of what makes their devices attractive, I think it won't keep working forever in this case.
<< The DMA covers eight different sectors, which it refers to as Core Platforms Services (CPS). Due to the presence of gatekeepers who, to a certain degree, affect the market contestability, the CPS are considered problematic by the European Commission:
online search engines (e.g. Google Search);
online intermediation services (e.g. Google Play Store, Apple's App Store);
social networks (e.g. Facebook);
video sharing platforms (e.g. YouTube);
communication platforms (e.g. WhatsApp, Gmail);
advertising services (e.g. Google Ads);
operating systems (e.g. Android, iOS);
cloud services (e.g. Amazon Web Services).[4] >>
In the EU has the 30% (or now 27%) been found illegal? I know they’re being forced to allow other app stores or side loading or something. But what about the fee?
The regulatory rules passed in the DMA are written to allow action without the need to go through the whole legislative process.
I predict it will come to that. Apple is gonna fight this tooth and nail to the very end. And unless they change their attitude and business practices, Europe has very little too lose by piling more and more rules on them.
The 27% is not really a problem if there were a competitive market. If one emerges we'll see if not...see above.
I’m curious to see what happens in the EU. Apple could do a couple of things to make their life easy but I know they’re gonna go down kicking and screaming and make things worse for themselves. It’s what they always do.
For obvious reasons, the US government and justice system is probably not interested in being the beta tester for such a regulation – they have relatively little to gain and much to lose. Even "green bubbles" seem to be a much bigger point of contention in US public discourse than sideloading/the 30% tax.
But if the DMA it ends up working well well and consumers like it, and app store customers manage to sell that fact to the US voting population, the wind could change for Apple too.
I don’t think that really matters at all. No one (in the legislative branches) cares enough to pass something about this. Is basically impossible to get things past anyway recently, even far more important things than this.
Even an ineffective regulation that neither hurts nor harms consumers but ends up hurting Apple would probably be seen very negatively.
> Is basically impossible to get things past anyway recently, even far more important things than this.
Very true, and another point in favor of inertia. The only thing that could possibly break that is seeing a similar regulation be a slam dunk in a comparable market, but even then it's a big if, I agree.
I just don’t see us leading (or going in parallel) due to lack of interest/will.