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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

Europe represents ~25% of Apple's revenue (https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...)

That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much.

Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.

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Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have. That's not a real risk. I work in Europe and the people I know commonly switch between WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal. I still use the Apple messenger by default because it is a noticeably superior product to the other two.

Similarly, my experience is that software produced in the EU commonly has worse support on Apple, including at companies I worked for. Again, that's already the reality. This fact was sometimes raised as a reason the apps had difficulty getting traction in iPhone heavy markets like the US.

There are reasons for Apple to stay in Europe but these aren't the reasons. I've commonly observed that the iPhone is more of a status symbol in Europe than in the US (where it is usually just the phone most people buy by default), which creates different market dynamics. In the US good interoperability with other iPhones is more important because that is a primary reason people buy them.

>Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have.

Americans in Europe like you, or Americans in the US? Because for the latter, the statists would disagree, as in most use iPhones and just default to iMessage.

According to Apple's CFO [1] it's more like 7%, at least for the app-store, but it's hard to see how that wouldn't correlate to overall profits just as it does elsewhere. The regions are ... creatively named.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...

I'm not sure I'm getting it - what does that figure, which talks about the AppStore revenue, have to do with sales in the EU?

Indubitably it would hurt Apple a lot if they lost a quarter of their revenue, would it not?

The EU is a subset of “Europe in that report. Pretty sure Gruber also mentioned that the Middle East is also lumped in there as well for some reason.

So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else.

Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.

> the nordics

This one is a big stretch. Sweden, Denmark and Finland are part of the EU, while Norway and Iceland are part of the EEA where the DMA also applies.

Nuclear option? Looks more like a fart to me.

Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.

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