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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Courts in EU and US have all agreed that Apple is well within its rights to charge a license fee for use of their technologies. No different to companies like Epic or OpenAI.

And I would have doubts that any regulator would want to get into the business of deciding what is a fair percentage to charge for an SDk or API.

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The fee is paid by the user when they buy the phone. No additional cost to Apple exists because the user downloaded an app that I wrote from my website/store. Thus, Apple should not be paid for it. That's really simple - we've been doing this model for general purpose computers for decades already.

Just as Unity has a legal ability to charge a fee for a game engine, Apple has a legal ability to charge for the Swift programming language along with the rest of the SDK.

It sucks because Apple is hiding behind intellectual property rights to protect its ability to tax the app economy.

You can choose a different game engine or write your own. You can not write an app for iOS without Apple SDK

Market power doesn't nullify IP rights.

Disney could allows 3rd party cafes in Disneyland, mandate the use of Disney logos on all products, and charge a $2 royalty of every product sold with a Disney logo.

It's a dick move but shifts the legal argument from one of monopoly / gatekeeper status to one of intellectual property rights, the latter being much more business friendly and entrenched in international agreements.

a) Nobody knows other than Apple about whether the cost of building the SDKs etc are included in the price of the iPhone. So making definitive statements about their being no additional cost makes no sense.

b) Microsoft and Apple both charge for developer programs and in the past it used to be significantly higher than today. So there is a precedent for this.

Apple financial statements are public. We know the income from hardware sales exceeds all costs and R&D by far. The app store fees are basically stealing from society on top of that to enrich themselves.

That argument carried a lot more weight when OS updates were $129 instead of $0.

As if that cost wasn't included in the $1500 phone?

That argument carried a lot more weight when per-unit profit margins were lower than per-unit manufacturing costs.

Not true.

Replace "technologies" with "services and infrastructure" and you're close.

The DMA says that users should be able to choose other service- and infrastructure providers than Apple. Nobody's giving Dell or Microsoft a cut for every software install on a Dell PC, though I'm sure they'd love that.

"Nobody's giving Dell or Microsoft a cut for every software install..."

Isn't that the nature of the OEM agreements they put in place with each other to package their OS?

"For every software install" is very different from "for some preinstalled or promoted software".

Agreed. This is a licensing issue that has far reaching impact if addressed. As long as licensing software is a thing, Apple is well within its right to charge.

And to your point, a judge in one of the recent cases even said they were not inclined to tell Apple how much to charge in their business.

> Courts in EU

I see the Netherlands case on third party PSPs for dating apps, and it was in the scope of apps downloaded and managed within the AppStore. Do you see any other case ruled in the EU on this subject ?

...courts in the EU have already ruled on this new law before it has actually taken effect?

Is Apple being paid when I install a DMG?

This is what it comes down to, at the root.

Apple made a decision early on to "give away" the ability to write and distribute (the $100 fee is nothing) apps for their store, and only take payment from payment received. So you have tons of free apps that just exist on Apple's code and infrastructure, with no cost to the companies.

Yes, if the developers want to use Apple's App Store, they should pay for it, that is not the problem. The problem is that developers are forced to use Apple's App Store instead of another distribution platform. But now Apple is saying "Its okay if you want to use another distribution platform, but you still need to pay us". Why is that okay? (And no, an iPhone itself is not Apple's platform, once the user buys the phone, its their platform).

Once the user buys the phone, they own the physical device, but that’s not all they are receiving. They also receive software and services. They don’t own those - they have a license for them.

Right, but the software and services prevent you from using the physical device however you want

No they don’t. You can do whatever you like with the physical device.

How? The bootloader is locked, so it will only run Apple-approved software.

Then unlock it. The law explicitly allows jailbreaking.

I think what many people are missing and you're pointing out is that this is a licensing issue. It's no different from Unreal Engine taking a 5% cut of every game sold or Sony taking a cut of all PS games. Developing using iOS libraries and tools requires developers to accept the licensing terms put forward by Apple. There is a lot of precedence for Apple's terms and they are better than most others.

If this is an issue we want to address, then we need software/ip licensing in general to be changed.

You are right, and I don't think the DMA applies only to Apple. If PS does not allow anything from other sources, then Sony will have to change too. The Unreal example is wrong though, there are other engines to choose from.

> The Unreal example is wrong though, there are other engines to choose from.

There are other phones to chose from also. This is where the rub is. Apple has already successfully argued in the US that the phone and the software and app store are a single entity. Breaking them apart does not make sense.

Instead of paying 5% for the Unreal engine, I only want to pay 2% when I use someone Unity's networking stack. And, if Unreal isn't happy about that, I will petition the government to force them. It may sound odd or absurd, but it's still just a ip/software licensing agreement.

BTW, any PS game sold digital or physical owes Sony a licensing fee (~15% last I saw). So even if Sony is forced to allow other digital stores on the PS, they will likely still demand a licensing fee for each game sold. Where the game comes from is irrelevant, except with physical sales falling under right of first sale doctrine.

> There are other phones to chose from also. This is where the rub is.

Why do certain people always always fall back on this lame response that's not even applicable.

> It may sound odd or absurd

It's indeed absurd. Unity and Unreal Engine are not gatekeepers in any sense of the word. They do not control any market, they simply sell software and services to developers. Game engines are dime a dozen and games switch between different engines surprisingly often.

This regulation addresses business dealings between Apple and developers working with their platform. Developers have a completely free choice of using Unity or Unreal Engine, it doesn't make a lick of difference to anyone except developers and artists working on the game.

Developers do not have a choice of which platform their customers are using, the developer can't "choose Android" because they need to reach users on iOS which makes up half of their customer base.

Not just in the app market, but in any market - hardware products, physical businesses, government services. All of those need to play by Apple's rules if they want to survive. This is what makes Apple the gatekeeper, they have the power to affect technological development of the entire world.

If Apple decided that apps couldn't use NFC, this could potentially hold back modernization of the entire European public transit system. If Apple blocked apps from using certain bluetooth features, this would sink their competitors in the accessories & IoT market.

It's not acceptable for one corporation to essentially hold the world hostage, hence this regulation.

“Hold the world hostage”? Please.

Developers can certainly choose Android to develop features that Apple prevents them from doing.

If Apple was really holding back progress, it wouldn’t take long for consumers to start choosing the superior Android platform.

Holding the world hostage is exactly what this is and it already happens, most notably with browsers and how Apple drags their feet on PWAs, making them an non-viable alternative to apps. Consumers don't even notice, because progress which can't happen... doesn't happen, and there's nothing to see. Even if they knew, the app simply doesn't exist and there's nothing they can do about it.

The DMA calls this out, explicitly:

> Gatekeepers have a significant impact on the internal market, providing gateways for a large number of business users to reach end users everywhere in the Union and on different markets. The adverse impact of unfair practices on the internal market and the particularly weak contestability of core platform services, including the negative societal and economic implications of such unfair practices, have led national legislators and sectoral regulators to act.

As for:

> Developers can certainly choose Android to develop features that Apple prevents them from doing.

You can't release something like a public transit app only on Android and you know it.

It may not be what we want, but it’s entirely within current restrictions - Apple is treating the phone as a console, not as a computer.

I guess we will see whether the European regulator and courts agree

I suspect they won't because the DMA pretty explicitly doesn't.

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