Changes to iOS App Distribution Fees in the EU
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
> We believe anyone with a good idea and the ingenuity to bring it to life should have the opportunity to offer their app to the world.
Should that have include "by 'anyone' we mean any person in the EU"? If not, then shouldn't this change also be rolling out worldwide? Or does that statement actually have nothing to do with this fee change and is just unrelated PR BS? Hard to think of any third alternatives, but if there are I'd like to hear them.
“Some court forced us to stop being consumer hostile in their jurisdiction, so we’re pleased to be announcing that we’re creating a special de-shittified product and TOS for that market only! Everyone else can get **ed! We can do this all day!”
Could you even say that they access some core technologies?
I wish there was an amazing desktop / mobile Linux. (Maybe next year lol)
Maybe voice / brainwave powered AI will be able to translate our needs into shell commands which then goes into our contact lens supercomputer running Stallman-approved Linux.
sure? It’s just not something supported in the minimal safari implementation, iOS browsers can implement support if they want.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bluefy-web-ble-browser/id14928...
Maybe you are “not the average consumer”. But it generally seems like a disingenuous and bad-faith response to avoid challenging your (incorrect) assumptions.
Pretty typical for the topic at this point, unfortunately. The android folk have just veered off into “everyone gets their own version of the facts” territory, can’t count how many people have told me there’s no file browser or that you can’t compile your own apps in macOS etc. The end is all that matters, facts are fungible.
Epistemic closure, basically.
The answer is obvious, of course. To force developers to make native apps so they can steal 30%, or whatever these new ridiculous terms are.
Is there an option NOT to use the "tools, technologies, and services" to build an app that runs on iOS?
In theory, it's possible. Apple would be livid though.
This is just greed.
Nah, just garden variety extortion.
> Second, small developers (less than €10 million ... revenue*) ... receive a 3-year free on-ramp to the CTF ...
> the European Commission designated iPadOS a gatekeeper platform under the Digital Markets Act.
I hope to see similar changes to other gatekeepers that are not currently in the list as well, including some popular European companies.
Edit: Spelling and grammar corrections.
I hope there will be a country that forces manufacturers to let you install any operating system of your choice on the devices you buy as long as they have screen output and USB/Bluetooth input.
- Apple's iOS is kicking our app from memory too soon.
- iOS does not allow apps to run continuously and at full power.
- Apple stops push notification and iCloud support for third party apps.
The fact that not a single European company was declared a gatekeeper is getting a lot of attention, some are even calling it a “shakedown of American companies”.
There are a lot of European companies that have monopoly-like powers in the markets they’re in. ASML is one for semiconductor lithography. Just look at the patents many European companies hold and how Europe makes money.
The point that I’m trying to make is that yes the mobile computing platforms should be open and free. However, the line between regulation of markets and going after specific companies not because they’re stopping innovation but instead because they’re not European. I’m afraid that if Trump gets elected, there will be a similar trade war between Europe and the United States as well.
Do you have any example of EU companies that are fucking over consumers like the US ones tend to do? I'm not aware of any. I'm also not aware of any EU company that would be in the position to do so, sadly.
In 90s when Ericsson and Nokia held almost 100% of the cell phone market, none of these topics were brought forward. That is quite the irony.
It is incredibly hard to create a platform like iPhone and also create customer trust into spending money on it. And now that this is a place a significant percent of the commerce is taking place on this platform, it must be regulated. This must be done by laws and regulations. Not with anti-Apple or anti-Europe sentiments. We are even at least 5 years late in doing this.
However, we simply cannot force anybody to work for free or take their possessions. As the Apple executives said in the commission hearing, it is their platform and they have to be compensated for any work they put into it. We want open access to this platform, not kill it.
If an app is being side-loaded, then Apple is under no obligation to provide them any additional services that is not part of the OS. Which things like push notifications, and iCloud are not. Every app would either pay Appple to use those services or setup a connection to their own servers to distribute such notifications and use other object storage services.
We’ve had Windows computers forever and they still don’t support push notifications unless you have the app or the browser open.
Manufacturing the iPhone is one thing but there is billions of dollars of cost in developing and running the iOS. Apple will either recoup this cost somehow, with CTF or some other charge, or simply stop doing it, or worse stop selling it in Europe.
FAANG companies are really powerful and I’m as worried about their downward effects on the society and consumers as you are.
> We’ve had Windows computers forever and they still don’t support push notifications unless you have the app or the browser open.
Not sure what you mean. They support TCP without weird limitations applied to it by the operating system. Every app that wants it has push notifications. They get the choice of implementing this themselves or using a service like firebase to help them out if they so choose. Their choice. Not Microsoft's. Not Apple's.
This is a really bad take.
People do not merely pay for the rearrangement of atoms into what ends up being their phone.
The software is critical and deserves all the money earned to make it happen. Apple still stands up all those servers, engineers, and operations for apps priced at $0 -- at min-cost to the developer (before you start: no, $99/year covers zilch; $99/year is a mode of spam prevention dev account creation).
It is unreasonable, nefarious, and even grand theft for anybody to make money on the phones and refuse to pay for the services that made it possible: the software engineering into Swift, Xcode, CoreOS, Darwin, FoundationDB, Data Centers, the engineers on on-call rotations, and who knows whatever else. All those things don't come for free. App developers who make money off the ecosystem should be held account to pay up.
You need to learn how much software & operational upkeep costs factor into those “44% gross profit margins”
or if they didn't provide all that tooling for you to make apps, they wouldn't be able to sell any phones because noone can make apps for them...
It is funny to see people on HN arguing against paying for software. Of course software should be paid for, unless you want everything included for free - which means outsourced to India.
If I buy a piece of hardware, I can do with it what I want. It's mine, I own it, and everything on it. Nonsensical "terms of service" be damned.
Should you have control of everything on your own hardware? I think yes, but that’s a different thing.
It’s a never-ending uphill battle against entropy and unless you do it, you’re guaranteeing major problems.
Nobody is entitled to dictate what _software_ should be on the device. If end-users have the right to _software_ then that right cannot be selectively applied in the case of phone or laptops: it should fairly applied in all cases: including your refrigerator. Why doesn’t the government compel Samsung to enable Spotify & third party App Stores on those devices?
In fact it still works on Android, Windows, Linux desktop, etc.
Why does the existence of a competing alternative need to force the company in question to adopt the alternative strategy?
Your original claim was that a device owner downloading an application from elsewhere somehow means that Apple could not afford to provide basic development tools. This is demonstrably false.
In any case, most of these outside apps have tended to be free, so if anything sideloading should reduce burden on their servers, which seemed to have been part of your concern.
“Afford to provide basic development tools” is a conniving way to put it. Forcing a company via legislation to fund, and develop tools is more like what’s happening.
What’s happening here is a couple of greedy app developers want to skimp out on paying for the nitty gritty details of making a customer experience actually work.
So, yeah, pardon me for inaccurately categorizing them all as “server costs” — I definitely misused that word — but there’s no way in hell you can expect all of the other tech to come for free or even at a price that the _developers demand the tool maker to set_
All this litigation, back-and-forth is going to tarnish the user experience.
Microsoft: Onedrive, VS, VScode, C#, Visual Basic, .NET (upto and including core), windbg, MSVC, Windows, Windows app stores, etc
Google: Dart, Go, Android Studio, Android, Google Drive, Google Play store & services, etc
Apple: xcode, objective-c, cocoa, llvm, lldb etc all preexist the iphone as well
The facts are: 1. Device owners should be able to install programs onto their phone without any interference from Apple. 2. Apple allowing this will not significantly affect their ability to remain profitable. 3. Most smartphone devices (Android) already do allow this.
How did literally every OS before iOS manage to provide all of that for free, then? (Not counting game consoles, which always had a very similar distribution model, but importantly were often subsidized by their platform operator, and I hope nobody is claiming that iPhones are loss leaders for Apple.)
In my view, SDKs for third-party app development aren't premium/value-add services, they're a core OS functionality. Few people would be happy with an OS that can only run first-party apps.
The only things incurring costs to Apple scaling with the number and popularity of third-party apps that come to mind right now are malware protection and push notifications. If Apple really thinks that baking these into the device price would break their bank, I suppose they could always make an iCloud subscription mandatory for that type of service.
Sounds like you're proposing one of two possible business models: 1. Pay a fixed price for the device at time of purchase that includes costs for services used in the future 2. Subsidize the physical device in favor of pricing the services at a margin to recoup costs for the device
Blackberry for 1. or Amazon Fire Phone for 2.
Why force some other company (Apple) to bend to your will?
Because they exist in a stable world created by rules, governments and people, and ultimately we the people get to decide how they should behave.
Was today the day you learned about governments and laws?
For example when is the last time my customers paid for Ruby, Python, Linux, PostgreSQL? The list can be very long. Companies paid people to work on those technologies, they are not only free labor.
In the case of Apple, they developed those technologies to control the platform. They already got a very good return. It is fair to ask developers to pay for the Apple services they are using (cloud services, messaging?) but it would be even fairer not to force developers to use Apple technologies, starting with having to use Macs to write apps.
Well, those examples are cherry-picked; ergo, I present to you a picking my own cherries: Companies pay for MATLAB, Windows and MongoDB. I will concede this list not "very long". But length of lists shouldn't really matter here right? I mean, one example of MATLAB vs. Ruby/Python is good enough to make a point via counterexample.
The point I'm making is: It would be immensely unfair to expect developers to force MATLAB engineers to submit to whatever business model the devs want instead of the other way around. Companies that develop technologies own the right to price it however they please.
Competition in the free-market ensures companies do not employ price-gouging tactics.
There is no competition here, by Apple's design. You cannot publish an app to an iOS device, fully paid for by the user, if Apple doesn't want you to.
What did it take it the bad old days to actually get your app into consumer hands, a publisher and a retailer who if you were lucky decided to do a deal with you and then you were given a small percentage cut.
Their tooling is absolutely terrible by any modern standard, there's a reason why I'm using Flutter...
Devs target iOS because of its userbase and certainly not because of the quality of the dev environment
Why is it a yearly fee if it's supposed to prevent spam accounts?
I do not know. My hunch is because it's easy. All I know is: Twitter/X is facing a crisis of spammy accounts and their mitigation strategy has been to require new accounts to submit payment info for the X subscription service.
Apple might have a valid court case if they are forced to provide a service for free if it's costing them something. European Union is walking a very tight line and the fact that there is no European company declared as a gatekeeper might lead to some concerns.
The materials that are freely available to anyone on the Internet? Besides, if you develop for alternative stores, you still need to pay the $99/year fee.
> the push notification system
How much does running that system cost for the average app? Is Apple willing to allow alternative push notification systems?
However, we cannot simply force private companies to provide services that costs them money. They are also under no obligation to implement any other continuous communication system to devices on their platform. It is their platform, with good and bad.
Being free or open does not constitute that every valuable product or service Apple created are now in the public domain and nobody should be paying for them.
Ah, but we can.
> They are also under no obligation to implement any other continuous communication system to devices on their platform.
And yes, they are.
Just like how utility companies aren't allowed to shut off the water because someone stopped paying. They can choose to stop doing business if they do not agree with these laws.
Sure. Go ahead. /s