Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union

According to the linked article he actually did work for the European Commission (part of the EU executive) as a civil servant.

"He took up a post at the European Commission in April 1994, working in the TACIS aid programme to the former Soviet Union. For two years, Clegg was responsible for developing direct aid programmes in Central Asia and the Caucasus worth €50 million. He was involved in negotiations with Russia on airline overflight rights, and launched a conference in Tashkent in 1993 that founded TRACECA—an international transport programme for the development of a transport corridor for Europe, the Caucasus and Asia. Vice-President and Trade Commissioner Leon Brittan then offered him a job in his private office, as a European Union policy adviser and speechwriter. As part of this role, Clegg was in charge of the EC negotiating team on Chinese and Russian accession talks to the World Trade Organization.[33]"

> Therefore, the Company accounts for all third-party application–related sales on a net basis by recognizing in Services net sales only the commission it retains.

So the commissions are <=$85B. Given the $1.1T number is from Apple, that implies the average commission rate is <15% (many categories of app excluded from commissions perhaps?).

They list gross margin for services to be $60B but I don't see where they break down net profit with greater granularity or "per division" (the word division does not seem to appear in the 10-K). For example they could make $80B in App Store commission, sell $5B in other services, make $80B in profit from commission, but lose $20B on other services, and that would still be consistent with the numbers in the 10-K, right? And those numbers presumably don't include indirectly related operating expenses which totaled $55B.

Apple has not revealed how profitable the App Store really is, but either way it's a LOT of profit, certainly enough to warrant expensive attorneys and stalling implementing this legislation in good faith for as long as possible.

They used to report this number as sales they "facilitated". A far more accurate descriptor. But now that they are engaged in a PR battle with various governments they have taken to embellishment.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apples-app-store-ecos...

For example, Spotify makes money from people streaming music to iOS devices, but they do not allow you to upgrade from a free account to a Premium account through their iOS app.

Since Spotify handles subscription purchases outside of their iOS app and their app is free, they pay nothing to Apple under the current system.

You're spot on.

Seems more like "this is the money we weren't able to use our monopoly to extract value from, aren't we soooo altruistic!".

People can upvote something because of various reasons. I don't lurk around and upvote only "correct" comments.

you speak of a “secret” Made For iPhone program as if that’s still some conspiracy – https://mfi.apple.com/

my read of the article is that the EU commissioner advised Apple that if the company attempted to negate the USB-C regulations by only allowing full access to Apple devices connected via a cable with an Apple-approved MFi chip… that indeed they would be held accountable by the EU. had that been the case, it would be Apple continuing its regime of connector control over its users’ devices, as it has done up til now by insisting on MFi-certified Lightning cables

If the iPhone were to disappear tomorrow and Apple were banned from ever making phones, Apple's moat would most likely collapse.

If the iPad went away tomorrow, Apple would just lose billions or tens of billions of dollars in revenue and not much else would change.

No, the judges rule with what they have, based on the case’s specifics and the "legislator’s intent" underpinning existing law.

Although it does not become law, their ruling can be used as precedent in later similar cases, until the legislator catches up.

Since there is only one alternative, I am going to assume that this is a rethorical question designed to invite a discussion about how the alternative is significantly worse in your point of view. Not an interesting debating technique, to be honest.

> Pretty much every other company with a mechanism to send photos to the cloud scans your pictures for CSAM right now and nobody cares. They've been doing it for many years.

There are alternatives available that don't do this, but again, your point appears to be written simply to elicit this specific reponse. Your "pretty much every other company" makes it clear that you are also aware that options exist.

> Nobody cares.

Your next paragraph indicates that, actually, a _lot_ of people cared.

> Apple invited community discussion before implementing it.

Not really. Apple made an announcement, and in the face of an absolute, unmitigated _shitstorm_ of criticism from pretty much _everyone_, they -after fighting an incredibly hard and expensive PR battle- grudgingly called a temporary truce and relented on some of the items they wanted to implement. To frame this as "Apple worked with the community and listened" is... fancy.

The point of that debacle, and this sub-thread, is that Apple is irrepairibly damaging their brand. In the "we will scan all your photos on your device to make sure the content is acceptable" story, they destroyed (literally forever, in the eyes of many people) their branding message that they were on _my_ side, when it comes to privacy and unwanted intrustion of all vendors, including Apple, into my device. That was literally the reason I switched from Android, and by retroactively changing that deal unilaterally on devices I already purchased, they instantly and irrepairably invalidated my only reasons for buying into their overpriced and closed walled garden.

In this new debacle with the EU and their -frankly- childish reponse they once again showed their disdain for their users.

Apple sucks.

The olden days equivalent of the HN crowd (Slashdot? Kuro5hin?) hated Microsoft's behaviour but had to build on their platforms because there wasn't an alternative that would pay the bills. So Microsoft kept raking in profits and probably thought that everything was OK and there wasn't an issue.

But that ill-feeling meant that as soon as an alternative emerged (in this case Apple, powered by open-source, Unix, the web - and later smartphones with the iPhone and Android) there was an exodus and Microsoft's attempts to regain ground (IIS, Windows Phone) were widely ignored.

Apple is on the same ground now (and I say this as an Apple-lover). They are pulling in huge amounts of money through their behaviour but I have no doubt, as soon as an alternative appears (probably through some platform shift) they will come to regret it.

UPDATE: and it would be ironic if the Vision Pro was the thing that triggered the platform shift. If the Vision Pro works well as a Mac alternative (a proper productivity environment but with an infinite screen), once others implement the same idea effectively (and maybe not quite as well as Apple has) it could be the catalyst for developers (and hence apps) jumping ship.

When you come from a place of "We have all the right answers and your views don't matter" like how Steve Jobs operated, you can see the harm that mind set is causing in the world today.

In the long term they’ll be forced to give up all the commercial surpluses to local mega apps by the government, and the political/ethical problems require no elaboration.

Suppose there were multiple app marketplaces for iOS. Then some of them could be extremely selective by finding a niche, and thereby be more trustworthy than any unified store that has to carry a million general purpose apps with only cursory evaluation from various publishers of little or unknown reputation.

https://nitter.net/npm_malware has twenty postings in the last 19 hours, quite far from "without".

Tech journalists have literally warned Android users that they need to be wary of apps from inside Google's walled garden.

> With malicious apps infiltrating Play on a regular, often weekly, basis, there’s currently little indication the malicious Android app scourge will be abated. That means it’s up to individual end users to steer clear of apps like Joker. The best advice is to be extremely conservative in the apps that get installed in the first place. A good guiding principle is to choose apps that serve a true purpose and, when possible, choose developers who are known entities. Installed apps that haven’t been used in the past month should be removed unless there’s a good reason to keep them around.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...

A year ago, I also saw a fake advertisement for a squid game. These fake advertisements have already become a meme, but they also offer to download from Google Play a slightly similar game, where after quickly clicking on the screen, the smartphone will suddenly prompt you to buy an expensive subscription and then you will not be able to cancel it, because Google does not provide for them refund. This idea comes from SMS scams since j2me platform, and judging by the comments on this game, people are still losing money, especially if they leave their phones to children.

I don't use ios and won't say whether manual moderation there helps prevent the same crap, but let's not ignore that if you're not tech-savvy, this Android security alternative is pretty easy to get around.

these questions are silly if you pivot them to be about other things rather than the fruit company, just like the arguments that "[company] needs to run open-infrastructure so other companies can build commercial products on [company] servers".

It's rather obvious they're being asked in bad faith with the intention of dragging down the discussion. You know perfectly well what SELinux and application sandboxing are for, and that they're net benefits.

Her phones become really slow because of this.

> search "2048 game" and let me know how many similar games they said no to.

I don’t know how old the rules are for this. I just know it currently exists. Also, it’s possible that a number of them were submitted at the exact same time and there was a race condition allowing the market to be flooded.

iOS apps bring in more money and that absolutely shows in the time and effort companies put into their apps. The big names (FAANG) might have equality but once you leave the top apps the quality difference can be stark.

The discourse is on why we accept that browsers can sandbox websites but we can't place the same amount of trust in sandboxing of apps and historically Android has been better at that than Apple because they actually allow you to do it in the first place, the caveat being that it's not really made clear if this is "safe" or not.

Apple is one step behind Android on this but they're _both_ many steps behind making it transparent to the user that "installing any app from anywhere is as safe as visiting any random website".

Competent in other fields of endeavour, sure.

Jobs was in the business of selling computers that looked (and worked) good to people who would otherwise hate computers. Dealing with geeks was always (and still is) a necessary evil, so he'd have enough of an ecosystem to sell to "normies".

Jobs fundamentally hated the Macintosh and tried very hard to get away from it very early (Newton, anyone?). Once he got back on the saddle, his first Big Idea was to wrap them into colourful shells, and fuck the tech inside (jesus, was the first iMac dog-slow!). His second idea was to co-opt FOSS and Java developers, again to have enough geeks building stuff for his platform; they would be unceremoniously dropped once the iPod got traction and he could finally get to run the "better Sony" he always wanted to have.

The rest is just stories he told to power his reality-distortion field.

Apple Watch, Apple TV and HomePod would like a word.

In any case, the Internet does not have to pay Apple to be discoverable and accessible.

Same reason "McDonalds hamburgers" aren't a market. They're just a branded product within a larger "smartphones" market.

> How do you define market, then, if that's not a market?

Same way the FTC does:

> all goods or services that buyers view as close substitutes

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

An Android is a close substitute for an iPhone, just like a Ford is a close substitute for a Toyota. People switch between them all the time.

Plenty of useful apps like the Orca card reader (see your transit card balance by just tapping your card, no internet required), fun games like Antimine, and such where the devs will only target barrier free platforms as it's a passion project are missing in action on iOS.

Sure, the EU will fix things like they've managed to do in the past with other internet-related stuff (e.g., cookie notices). And I will definitely re-evaluate this take once things change in terms of ads for Windows. But until that happens, I don't see "the EU will fix that" as a valid point in favor of Windows.

Apple has been a status symbol for ages but the iphone made it undeniable. If you've been unaware of that just check out articles such as these:

"New research shows that owning an iPhone is the most common sign of wealth" (https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/08/iphone-wealth-research/)

"Why the iPhone Is the Perfect Status Symbol" (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/status-insanity-why-the-i_b_5...)

"The ‘iPhone Effect’: Are iPhone Users More Attractive Than Androiders?" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2023/12/30/the-ipho...)

As for identity, you may have never met an "apple" person, but it's absolutely an identity for many. It's a subculture (https://www.wired.com/2002/12/mac-loyalists-dont-tread-on-us...). People have called apple users "cult-like" and their devotion to the Apple brand a religion (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3712458). I have met people who were convinced that they couldn't be a "real" artist without owning Apple products (in one case the person was talking about ipods specifically, not computers or cell phones). The influence of marketing on Apple users can be extremely powerful.

As for expense, even in the US the majority of the population (60%) lives paycheck to paycheck and their standard of living is in decline. The high price of the iphone drove up the cost of other brands so the price gap is smaller at the highest end, but most households can't easily afford to get everyone a $1,000+ phone and android devices offer a wide range of prices and features for families who can't afford the top of the line. Even those that can will probably still get more for their money with a flagship android device. Apple users also have to pay much more for software (https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/) and that's not even counting the 30% extra apple charges for their cut of in-app purchases that's been talked about so much lately. Iphone users spend and have more money in general for a reason (https://www.marketingdive.com/news/survey-iphone-owners-spen...) and convenience isn't it.

That said, I agree that the perception of Apple being easier to use does drive sales and for people already used to Apple's weirdness there would certainly be a learning curve in switching away from the platform which encourages people to stay.

If you are expecting less than $25k in revenue (donations, grants, program service revenue, etc.) in each of your first three years, you can use the IRS's abbreviated process and get setup within a month (for the cost of setting up a corporation with your state government). If that exemption doesn't apply, it can take the IRS over a year to approve your application for tax exempt status. There are also significant compliance costs that can be burdensome for a small organization.

The TLF is a big dog for big dog projects, and I was just using them as an example of the structure. The Apache Foundation has their own flavor of governance, as does Numfocus (which sponsors a bunch of scientific computing projects). I'd expect that this move will probably trigger the creation of some "mobile app developer collective" organizations that specialize in this kind of thing, kind of like a "digital makerspace".

Could one sign over stewardship to the FSF? They're non-profit I think.

If you like to have an organizationalnumber, you need to apply to the tax authority. If you do business activity and like a local name protection you need to apply to bolagsverket. Depending on the size of the app these steps might be helpful. I don't think our local chapter of FSF, has done any of the registrations just as an example. They run local conferences and other simular works.

I only ever want to see 2 app stores on my phone, the AppStore, and an FDroid alternative full of free, open-source apps. Anything else is good to be disincentivized.

Apple’s default construction for getting payments for the usage of their IP is via commission on revenue.

This is by definition a differential pricing strategy because not everyone has to pay for the usage of Apple’s IP.

Many didn’t like the commission structure and made all sorts of arguments against it. It would just be for payment processing, it would just be for distribution, etc.

Apple has always maintained it was primarily for the use of their IP, all the rest is thrown in as a bonus. They have structured it as such in the developer agreement and US courts have wholesale accepted it as such.

One alternative that has been floated around a lot by people that accept that Apple wants payment for their IP but didn’t like the commission structure regardless was to split off the fee for IP into its own thing.

Now they do that very thing in the form of the CTF (at a more competitive rate than Epic does for Unreal mind you).

In addition there’s a separate commission for App Store services and a separate commission for payment processing.

Now the new complaint is that this payment for their IP for first installs on EU iPhones per 12 months in excess of 1M installs in the EU isn’t good either.

So what is the desired outcome? Use Apple’s IP for free?

I don’t see how this disadvantages third party stores. Does it disadvantage Steam when Epic comes knocking on my door for their share of the pie?

Epic charges me 5% of all my revenue above a million, Apple charges me €0.50 of all my EU installs on iOS above 1M installs in the EU.

Apple’s fee is directly tied to my usage of their IP, I pay them €0.50 in 12 monthly installments for each installation that goes over 1M, but they don’t touch anything else I make off of that install.

Epic wants 5% over every dollar I make over $1M worldwide.

Don’t get me wrong, personally I was content with my 30% and the 15% is a steal for what I get out of it.

But if commission of revenue is the big bad, then the only logical thing for licensing IP is an upfront cost for usage whether you earn money with it or not.

This is how it was with consoles. Thousands upfront for the right to publish and using the IP + thousands for every build to be certified + commission over revenue.

Indies later on got a reduced rate in the hundreds, until you got big.

The requirements list is very interesting.

For example:

> Meet the following functional requirements to ensure your app is using a web browser engine that provides a baseline of web functionality: Pass a minimum percentage of tests available from industry standard test suites: 90% from Web Platform Tests and 80% from Test262

And:

> Program security requirements: You must do the following: Use memory-safe programming languages, or features that improve memory safety within other languages, within the Alternative Web Browser Engine at a minimum for all code that processes web content;

Is WebKit written in C++? That language certainly isn't "memory-safe" (I am not dumping on C++ here!). I assume that Apple uses fuzz testing and static analysis to find memory safety issues. So... does WebKit pass this rule? Hmm... And, are there any browsers written in memory-safe languages? I assume they would be too slow (Java, C#, etc.) I'm not sure if Rust is considered memory safe here. (Can you have null pointer exceptions in Rust -- dereference a null pointer?)

But not many people will see it here buried down deep in this thread. I suggest you submit it as a new link to HN though. Very interesting stuff!

This is a non issue.

Part of the appeal about iOS for me is that apps are reviewed for quality and don't have obvious scams or spywear inside.

I'm happy to guide my parents to use and download apps from the app store without worrying about it. Compare this to the constant education and guidance I need to provide about websites, phone calls, text messages etc. The amount of targeted scams and spam we receive nowadays is excessive.

I think this is the problem: people want access to the 'app store' while forgetting/ignoring that the tight security and rigid processes are a feature, not a liability.

Based on their new alternative business terms, we can better describe what that bundled deal includes (which is still available):

• 15% tier (first $1mil/yr revenue and subscriptions after the first year):

- 10% distribution

- 2% developer platform

- 3% payment processing

• 30% tier (all other revenue):

- 17% distribution

- 10% developer platform

- 3% payment processing

…except if they value a device that enforces audited software only, because they find it safe and convenient. If they value that they’re wrong, because wanting that is unfair to some businesses who want to sell them things.

> it is better than letting a single for-profit corporation set the terms

This is sort of true, government regulation is better than a single corporation dictating terms. But it’s not that relevant, is it? There are two major corporations in the mobile OS business. Plus a bunch of open source projects and a few small businesses for the adventurous. And web standards making it reasonably possible to not depend on any one of them, if that’s a priority.

Are the big technology companies powerful? Yes. Should they be regulated? Yes. Like this? Probably not.

- if users are happy with the alt store and it becomes highly successful, Apple loses revenue it would otherwise get from its own store

- if users are unhappy with the alt store because viruses, etc., get onto their phones, or it becomes a spam-ware cesspool, Apple gets the blame (the vast majority of users will not differentiate and then Apple has to spent tons of effort to "don't buy from stores X, Y and Z"--much easier to just disallow them)

Remember, most Apple users care about an optimum experience. If they care a lot about openness they would be using Android / Linux and are not Apple's target.

Edit: Seems I misunderstood, I just re-read the relevant section:

>iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.

The fact that they are charging money for apps installed from non-App Store sources is ludicrous to me, if they aren't running the store, then they don't get to collect fees on it, imo.

If we were discussing desktop operating systems, this is the moment where I would advocate switching to a properly Free Software (or near-Free) software ecosystem. Unfortunately there's nothing for me to advocate when it comes to smartphones; there aren't any serious recommendations to make which aren't catastrophically impractical for all but the most obsessive Richard Stallman acolyte.

well yes. That's part of the rub. You'll pay $100/year even if you never launch an app so that makes sense. That's the cost of using Apple's SDK.

But you may now pay $.50 per install even for a free app if you don't/can't host outside of the App store, unless you declare your company/business a non-profit or educational instituion. This was previously $0. So the price hike can become absurd, to say the least.

>Apple isn’t interested in letting anybody just co-opt their baby.

Well tough luck. you made more money off your "baby" than many country's GDP. Microsoft got co-opted for much less decades ago. Governments' interest is in making sure companies do not in fact hoard all the money in the world, and when your product becomes a centerpiece of society something's got to give.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en

The main reason why people shipped their own version of the CRT for VC++ was because they wanted to use a more modern version of VC++ itself (e.g. because of better support of new language features; C++ was just standardized then and all compilers were updating very rapidly to catch up), which then required a new version of the CRT that wouldn't be guaranteed by the lowest target OS version. But even VC++ did not require you to use the CRT; you could just #include <windows.h> and linker had a flag to drop stdlib.

And even when you wanted to use MSVCRT while targeting platforms where the desired version wasn't guaranteed, you still didn't have to ship it. All redistributable packages were (and are!) also published as standalone installers that users could just download and run themselves; indeed, it was not uncommon for open source Win32 software to require one to do exactly that. The bundling packages that MS also provided for integration with your own installer are a convenience, not a prerequisite.

The story with DirectX is very similar. DirectX did in fact ship as an OS component with every version of Windows starting with Win95 OSR2 and WinNT4. The reason why games pretty much always bundled it is because they wanted to use something newer, given how fast things changed back then. But, again, it was always available separately as a standalone installer, and any app that needed it could request it to be installed manually by the end user, and some apps did just that. I will also note that those standalone CRT and DirectX installers were also commonly redistributed, e.g. on large websites like Tucows.

With respect to Win32 APIs themselves being somehow protected through some form of IP, that wasn't the case, either. Again, Borland C++ / Builder used its own headers with no problem. And then of course pretty much every non-C toolchain that wanted to expose the dev to the OS API also had to provide their own equivalent of windows.h, which they all did - Delphi being probably the most prominent third party example, but there were numerous others - Ada, Eiffel etc; and even most scripting languages such as Perl. Again, back in that period, I myself wrote a bunch of Win32 header translations for then-nascent D. I don't recall anyone ever bringing up the notion that doing so was somehow legally risky; it was understood as an obvious and necessary step in development of any toolchain targeting the platform.

XP era also includes early .NET. The interesting thing about that one was that the .NET Framework redistributable (which, again, was provided as a standalone installer) also includes the C# and the VB command-line compilers, and since .NET metadata is embedded into the binaries, the result is that you effectively got a free build toolchain that let you do anything .NET could do. XP SP1 even included .NET 1.0 builtin, which I believe was the first time Windows came with dev tooling sufficient to write a full-fledged app for itself in the box.

The bit about "you never saw FOSS binary releases for Windows back then" is plainly not true. FOSS in general wasn't nearly as widespread then, and people who cared about it generally didn't care much for the DOS/Windows ecosystem, so mainline would often not even bother and just assume POSIX, and porting was a slow effort that required constant ongoing maintenance to keep up-to-date with upstream. But what did exist would normally be redistributed in binary form; examples include MinGW, Perl, and Python. Similarly, when using FOSS libraries like zlib, it was common to download and use redistributed prebuilt DLLs + import libs for your compiler.

So, to summarize: Microsoft never charged developers for access to the platform itself, and you could always write and distribute Windows apps without paying anything to MS. It charged the devs for tooling, but it also left the door wide open for alternative tooling, which did proliferate to the point where in some markets like Europe there was more Windows software written using Borland tools rather than Microsoft tools.

I did years of development work against Windows machines before I got my first paid Visual Studio license, and it was still like a couple years until the first time I bothered actually installing the Windows SDK.

Actually, the result of the Google v Oracle case was ultimately that what Google was doing constitutes fair use - and what MinGW is doing is even more clearly in the fair use zone than what Google was doing. So, current IP case-law is firmly on the side of "copying APIs for interoperability is fair use".

Limiting the ability for dominant companies to crown themselves gatekeepers and toll all who pass was the intent of the EU rules.

If Apple tries to argue that the one SDK is intrinsically tied to the hardware, and also conveniently is required for apps on any store... that starts to sound a lot like 90s Microsoft and Internet Explorer, except Apple doesn't have the "But it's free" defense.

Who is arguing that Apple's libraries don't provide value? Certainly the person you replied to isn't. That's an incredible strawman fallacy

But if we've decided that it's unhealthy to allow dominant tech firms to tax everyone for access to their platforms...

Then an SDK might become the final area where they attempt to do so.

It'd certainly be a lot cleaner if there were 2 SDKs: a base, primitive-only freely licensed one with the bare minimum for interacting with all platform components and a higher-level, premium paid one that had better DX.