Why wouldn't they?
Apple isn't dominant in the market worldwide (Android is), and they are competing against Android. Apple often implements things Android did first. That's how competition works.
Apple's global marketshare is 30% or just under.
Apple isn't dominant in the market worldwide (Android is), and they are competing against Android. Apple often implements things Android did first. That's how competition works.
Apple's global marketshare is 30% or just under.
Anybody (possibly except Epic Games) can develop and publish on the App Store. There's a cost associated with it, which in Apples case is 30% (or whatever you negotiate apparently). If you play by the rules, you can keep doing that as long as you like.
If you rent a shop in a shopping mall, there will be costs associated with that as well, and it's almost guaranteed to be more than 30%.
That is essentially what Apple is providing for those 30%, they provide a shopping mall where you can expose your goods, and people can pay for them. They handle the pesky stuff like refunds, (international) taxes, compliance with various government requirements, EU rules, and everything else. They even handle potential lawsuits for you (provided your app wasn't the one breaking laws).
They also vet (mostly automated) apps to ensure they're not using private APIs. That is for your protection. It's not an evil scheme by Apple to keep competitors out, it's for protecting the end user from bad actors like Meta scooping up all your personal data for "backup purposes" via some internal API.
Here in Europe we've had "alternative app stores" for a year or so, and despite living in a country where ~70% of the population uses iPhones, I don't know a single person that has ever used an alternative App Store, just like I don't actually know anybody that has downloaded an alternative keyboard despite those being available for a decade or more.
There is really very little you cannot do on the App Store in terms of features, so for many end users it is not a problem.
You may not like the price associated with it, which is what most of these complaints are about, the fact that Apple scoops up 30% of recurring subscriptions created through the App Store as well. People tend to forget that running your own infrastructure is also not free, especially when you need to handle refunds, legal matters and international compliance.
And that's the core of the problem, most of these companies complaining wants to use Apples built in App Store tools, but they want to direct them to their own App Store for free, ditching the complicated stuff of dealing with users on Apple. They're more than happy with Apple to handle payments and refunds if they do it for free.
Sideloading is usually a very bad idea in this day and age. In northern europe at least, your phone is quickly becoming your most trusted device in matters concerning anything state or municipality, and here we have a national ID app on our phones, along with social security, healthcare, drivers license, micro payments, taxes, childcare, hell, there's even video conferencing with your GP, in an app that has access to your medical records, including bloodwork and various scans. There's literally no way in hell I'm trading the perfectly walled garden for the Wild West outside.
Anecdotally, where I live, most companies don't allow Android phones as company phones as they're considered insecure, and instead mandate iPhones. The more regulated the industry (medical, banking, power, etc), the more certain it is that you'll be getting an iPhone.
I wrote a comment about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426128#44427725
> You may not like the price associated with it, which is what most of these complaints are about, the fact that Apple scoops up 30% of recurring subscriptions created through the App Store as well. People tend to forget that running your own infrastructure is also not free, especially when you need to handle refunds, legal matters and international compliance.
Simply having a link in my app to a page where someone pays through Stripe instead of through Apple Payments, costs nothing to Apple and creates no obligation for Apple to do anything.
> Sideloading is usually a very bad idea in this day and age.
Then don't do it. Who exactly is forcing you to?
The problem is, when the option exists it opens up an attack vector that I need to defend against, as it will surely be exploited by malware at some point, downloading an app when you visit some scam site, and boom you're now infected.
> Simply having a link in my app to a page where someone pays through Stripe instead of through Apple Payments,
But it hardly stifles competition, except alternative payment methods ?
> costs nothing to Apple and creates no obligation for Apple to do anything.
The problem is, when stuff breaks, people will contact Apple support. Yes, one call is negligible, but Apple has 2.2 billion users, and it all adds up.
Provided you provide your app for free and charge subscriptions, that also has a cost to apple, as they're providing downloads for your app (again, potentially 2.2. billion of them), as well as any legal troubles (app contents excluded).
I guess Apple could enforce a alternate subscription model where they require you to charge for your app and they take their 30% cut off of that, and lets you use whatever payment provider you like for recurring payments.
It would of course either cut into sales, as people aren't as likely to buy an app and then subscribe to it, though something with "first month free" could probably lure some people in. Alternatively a developer would have to develop a free app, and if people want to have the full experience they'd have to purchase the full version.
Except, developers don't want that. They want to be able to give away their app and sell subscriptions, and they expect Apple to foot the bill for the infrastructure required to provide downloads.
This makes no sense. There is no "boom". You can't accidentally do it. There are a series of very deliberate steps, with numerous warning signs. Even on Android I have to specifically enable an option to even be able to install apps from alternate sources, and it is a separate permission per source, and this option can be locked down on a managed device (e.g. a work phone).
By your logic, there should be no web browsers on iOS, since someone might visit a scam website and give away all their money.
> They want to be able to give away their app and sell subscriptions, and they expect Apple to foot the bill for the infrastructure required to provide downloads.
Nobody expects that. What the EU wants is, simply let another app store compete. That new app store will host the downloads.
You keep shedding tears for the costs to Apple's infrastructure, yet as I keep repeating - what many developers really want is to NOT use Apple's infrastructure. NOT use Apple's payment processor. If the problem is that we're being a burden to Apple, well then I'm in full agreement with you, let's stop doing that!
This is completely fabricated. I've been using Android for more than 15 years, and this has never happened, ever. Nothing even close to it. To be clear, you're advocating to take away people's freedom to install software of their choosing in order to mitigate a hypothetical security problem. It's not a good trade.
As per Apple, they rejected 2 million app submissions in 2024 [^2]
So from a birds eye perspective there doesn't appear to be much difference, with iOS even taking the lead, but the key difference is that Kaspersky is not Google, and can only detect malicious software after it has been published. Apple has rejected app submissions over privacy issues, meaning those 2 million apps never made it to the public.
According to Zimperium Global Mobile Threat report [^3], 25% of Android devices have sideloaded apps, and 20% are malware infected (correlatoin is not causation, yet). Zimperium telemetry also reveals that 38% of detected malware attacks could be tracked to sideloaded apps [^4].
So no, it is certainly not some fabricated threat, but a very realistic and probably threat scenario. I'm also not trying to take away anybodys freedom, you're free to install whatever you want, but you don't need root access to do it. Very few use cases on a phone requires the user to have root access.
[^1] : https://securelist.com/mobile-threat-report-2024/115494/
[^2] : https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/the-app-store-prevent...
[^3] : https://lp.zimperium.com/hubfs/Reports/2025%20Global%20Mobil...
[^4] : https://zimperium.com/blog/the-hidden-risks-of-sideloading-a...
In any case, generally the threat against most people is fraud, not some technical minutiae.
There is nothing wrong with sideloading applications. Protection against malicious applications is taken care of by the OS through sandboxing and a granular permission model. Malware scanning and app signing also have no dependency on the App Store.
Really all you are missing out on is the App Store review process, which is not worth much from a security perspective anyways.
You've been tricked into thinking that you're not qualified to select software to run on devices you purchase. I wouldn't hand over control of your digital life to Apple so readily.
Apple isn't building features to compete with Samsung only in the US. It's a global dynamic. Local competition is restricted to tiny subsets of features.
And it's only 57-42 for Apple in the US anyways. If it were 90-10 then sure. But 57-42 is what you get with strong competition. Having a majority doesn't mean there's a lack of competition. It just means one company is currently ahead, as one of them usually will be when there are two main players.
But I don't see much that's local about Apple vs. Samsung. It's the same phones for sale in the US or in Thailand. Literally as one-size-fits-all global as you can get.
They actually aren't. US iPhones no longer have SIM card slots. Most international phones don't support the same radio bands that US carriers use. This used to be a bigger issue with CDMA, but still an issue with the many 4G/5G bands and VoLTE. That'll be most Xiaomi and Oppo phones in the US. And there's Huawei phones that are banned and not allowed on US carriers; so it makes zero sense to include them into any marketshare calculations for a US consumer.
So even an iPhone 16 Pro has different models: A3293 (International) A3083 (USA) A3292 (Middle East, Canada, Mexico) and A3294 (China, Hong Kong). The A3293 and the A3294 do not support T-mobile's 5G band 71. This isn't uncommon, and Samsung will do similar international vs US models. Samsung is even worse sometimes, having completely different CPUs between regions.
And of course there's software differences too. Chinese iPhones can disable internet permissions for individual apps but not anyone else for some reason. Google Pixel's Gemini isn't available in EU countries. Apple Intelligence did similarly at launch.
While local marketshare isn't the perfect indicator, it's definitely better than using global marketshare.
Competitive markets have enough similar suppliers that they are forced to adapt to customers instead of the other way around.
This happens to be incompatible with capitalism due to phenomena like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and fascism (as well as other corporativist ideologies). Capitalism survives and reproduces through monopolies and oligopolies, i.e. undemocratic forms of rent seeking and price cartels.