Oh I see: it seems like you only pay the fee if you choose to distribute outside the App Store.
Any apps distributed through third parties pay their own CTF if they meet the threshold.
Threshold doesn’t apply to third party app stores, they start paying per install of their store from the first install.
So third party stores can host free apps without worrying about the CTF for those apps.
But that cost to free apps means that useful free apps won't sign up to the program, and therefore won't be available in the third party stores. It's a distinction without a difference. While I'm sure Apple will argue the distinction when they get pulled up on this, it's pretty obvious that the EU is expecting viable 3rd party stores and Apple will be forced to deliver it. The more they screw around the more likely that EU will set stronger regulations with less discretion on implementation.
Now you bring up a new concern.
Namely that useful free apps would get so popular outside of the App Store that they’ll reach 1M installs on EU iPhones within a given year and that the cost per install they owe over installs in excess of that 1M would be prohibitively costly that they’d rather not.
I think that’s a pretty significant difference from the other scenario, one in which alternative stores are on the hook for all the apps they host. Normally I would chalk it up to a difference of opinion, but we’re talking about significant factual differences.
Meta-discussion aside, I struggle to come up with an example of such an app that currently exists and would be subject to that CTF.
Non-profits, educational institutions and governments are exempt, so you’d almost certainly end up with an app by a company that extracts value out of it whether as a companion app to a service or some startup that’s burning through runway money.
Ultimately Apple wants to be paid for their IP, for the use of their frameworks and toolchain. Earlier this week some people were saying that Apple then should split off the fee for that from the commission. This is exactly that, and at a progressive rate where the first million installs is free, seems fair enough to me.
I see no viability issues for third party stores here because one way or another there is no free lunch.
> The more they screw around the more likely that EU will set stronger regulations with less discretion on implementation.
As someone who used to practice law in the EU on an EU and international level this always makes me chuckle. The EU and its bodies are not some benevolent dictatorship that can do whatever they want. They too need to move within the bounds of the law and have been burned when crossing those boundaries.
The DMA in its current form hasn’t even been subjected to adjudication, which on its own is going to be quite interesting, much less some hypothetical v2 that is stricter.
The main hurdle for the EU (and the US for that matter) is IP and property rights. You can’t legislate your way around that without significant overhaul which would reverberate across all of commerce.
Or put plainly: you can’t just say “what’s yours is now public domain”.
Closest you’re ever going to get is “what’s yours should be sold at a reasonable price to others” and it’s going to be one hell of a burden to convince a court that this isn’t a reasonable price at any given day, much less when there ample examples in the market that charge more.
Another, more fundamental issue specific to the EU is that European courts really don’t like laws that look like they target a specific company or individual. The DMA’s issue is that it doesn’t just look like that, it outright broadcasts that it does that.
Apple had a decent chance at fighting the DMA as it currently exists, so to be quite honest, I expected them to make some basic concessions, await enforcement actions by the EC and then fight that tooth and nail.
Instead, to my utter surprise, they capitulated in nearly everything and then went above and beyond the DMA requirements. The purpose of that is clear, to establish a very strong legal posture for the inevitable court case.
What?
Developing, compiling, distributing, and having users run an iOS app is not a "use of Apple's IP". The use of Xcode, SDKs, header files, etc is. What happens when an open-source SDK that is completely free of any Apple-copyrighted code comes around? What would the use of Apple's IP be then?
I ask this not as a gotcha, it’s a serious question.
There is no way to write an app that doesn’t use a single piece of Apple code.
Create a new project in Xcode, simply write print(“Hello, world!) right click on the print method, click “Jump to Definition” and you get to read Apple’s code.
To say nothing of all the boilerplate stuff (and more importantly all the stuff underneath it that is automatically created when you create a new project and that is necessary to run the app.
The open source SDK you talk about might be completely free of Apple’s code, but it most definitely makes use of Apple’s code.
It "makes use of Apple's code" in the sense that it calls iOS APIs. But the resulting binary wouldn't have Apple's IP, which is what matters for the purposes of copyright and patent law. When saying something "uses" an IP, we generally mean the exclusive rights granted to the holder by law. Merely interacting with an already-existing API on an already-existing copy of iOS is not "use".
If the opposite were true, all third-party aftermarket accessories for physical (patented) products that merely plugged in to the mechanisms and didn't implement them themselves would be illegal.
It’s a dance, everybody knows the steps. Tech companies know the longer they can keep making money with their version of “X” the better - even if they know damn well they will lose when it goes to trial - which can take over a decade in some cases.
Microsoft practically invented the game, Google and Meta perfected it, and Apple is catching up.
I find such arguments more than absurd,
1. They have no issue doing that on macOS
2. Apple needs third party developers as much as the other way around. They are not doing this for free, they would sell a lot less devices if third party Apps weren't supported.
The world does not own Apple any level of profit.
So there's not going to be any problem with putting limits on the amount of money Apple can leech. Nor will there be any downside to doing it. Apple will not put any less effort into their platform or tooling even if such limits were in place. Nor is there any chance that Apple will abandon the EU market.
(If Apple was charging a nominal fee instead of a punitive one, they'd have a much better argument. But for Apple, it's not about the money they make from the technology fee. It's about making sure that the regulation can't actually achieve its purpose of promoting competition, because Apple will have smothered the competition in the crib.)
Arguably that's not a new requirement, but simply the EU enforcing the existing single market rules.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/intra-eu-c...
> Before Intra-EU communications were capped, the average standard price of a fixed or mobile intra-EU call tended to be three times higher than the standard price of a domestic call. While the standard price of an intra-EU SMS was more than twice as expensive as a domestic one. In some cases the standard price of an intra-EU call was up to ten times higher than the standard price for domestic calls.
As a consumer, lightning is a more pleasant to use connector than micro and therefore, I’m glad Apple didn’t cave at that time.
I still find plugging in the Lightning cable to be easier (less precise alignment needed) than a USB-C and by the time the iPhone 8 arrived with magnetic charging, any charging advantage to USB-C went away.
Of course if there were a law like that, they will rather point their fingers at the EU, over their users blaming apple for the slight inconvenience of changing.
Which is why new iPhones still have Lighting connectors. Oh wait.
Just give it time to work its way out. We don't live in a cyberpunk dystopia yet.
Fuck around, find out.
Epic is in no way more "European" than Apple.
It's obviously malicious compliance that hopefully isn't justifiable.
(They'll argue that this fee is required to keep the platform save which is obviously bullshit)
This needs to be funded somehow.
I'm surprised there are commenters who have such a strong view - that they should just be able to access all the benefits of the iOS ecosystem that Apple has built over many years, and then have all that access for free too.
Apple sells hardware. They don't give away software for free, you (generally) need their hardware per their licensing agreements.
You have to pay Apple $99/year to develop software for their ecosystem.
I pay them for their hardware, I pay them to let me write software -- you want me to pay them when others use my software? What about when others view photos I take with my phone? Do they want a cut of that too?
How anyone can think Apple's stance here is reasonable is beyond me. I haven't paid Microsoft anything in over a decade, I wonder how they can afford to fund Windows development?
[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-app-marketpl...
I don't trust Apple at all with their capricious and arbitrary blocking of apps/updates. It was bad enough when it appeared to be mostly due to incompetence, but after what they did politically (and in concert with Google, Twitter and Facebook) to Parlor that's when any creditability they had for me in curating the app store went out the window. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, when a company starts to go down that path it's a danger for all of us.
Of course there are costs incurred per install. Previously there were covered by a higher 30% fee on app costs. Now, with opening up the platform to alternative stores, the EU has pushed Apple to a per-install model.
So to me, this seems completely reasonable as a standard iPhone user.
I understand the security and performance of the platform costs more - that is why I use an iPhone not an Android.
I paid $1300+ for my iPhone, I already covered those costs.
How are they covering it on macOS?
Exactly zero, for alternate App Stores.