Despegar

Their commission is for their intellectual property (SDK, patents, etc). Payment processing was just another service internalized in their commission to facilitate collecting it.

To bypass their commission you'd have to make a web app and not a native iOS app, which is something developers have been able to do since the beginning of the iPhone.

They'll still get their commission even with sideloading.

That's exactly what it is. The US decided (beginning with the Trump administration) that the status quo was unacceptable and has decided to "decouple" and increasingly contain China's development with export controls. No one should be surprised that there's retaliation, but everyone pretends that it's the other side that is the aggressor while they are simply the innocent victim.

All the countries in the region have overlapping claims to the waters, it's not unique to China.

I guess everyone is over the anti-"self-preferencing" policy push over the past few years and is back to normal. Sherlocking is in fact good.

Apple will likely make all the money from it in the end anyway.

This is part of the new Cold War and you can expect this kind of Red Scare thinking shaping US policy in the decades to come.

If the FOSS universe wants to make web apps, that's great. But they didn't need this law to do that. If they want to make native iOS apps, well now they'll be using Apple's intellectual property, which won't be for free.

What the Epic v. Apple antitrust trial showed was that no one actually got better terms than anyone else. If you have evidence of Microsoft, Amazon, or Netflix getting terms that aren't available to anyone else, please link them.

And then everyone realized web apps sucked and demanded that Apple release an SDK, which they did, and the rest is history.

I definitely agree it's going to be the worst of all worlds. The current model was the most efficient one for Apple and developers. There will be additional costs for everyone involved (great for lawyers and accountants though). The current model was a virtuous cycle that benefited Apple, developers, and users. High trust from users made them amenable to spending money on software, grew the Apple developer ecosystem, and unleashed a wave of innovation which spawned industries since 2008. Importantly, all developers got standard terms which created a level playing field. I suspect we're moving into a world where large developers (Spotify/Netflix/Microsoft) will have much more negotiating leverage than a small developer. But that is the 'business as usual' world, which makes this a reversion to the mean.

The EU is mandating sideloading, it's not mandating Apple do it for free. Until now, developers have been licensing Apple's intellectual property in a bundle through the Developer Program License Agreement. For anyone that goes through the sideloading route, they can expect to enter into a different contractual agreement with Apple to license their technology.

Otherwise they're building a web app, which they've always been able to do!

I certainly understand why developers would prefer that Apple have that business model, but that's not the one they chose for the iPhone. And these laws don't prohibit it.

These laws don't expropriate Apple's intellectual property. Apple will always be able to license it for something.

>To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may need to be verified by Apple — a process that could carry a fee.

Developers are about to get a surprise about what they're actually paying for. This is the problem with believing their own talking points about "paying 30% for payment processing."

So now they'll be paying for actual third-party payment processing, as well as lawyers and accountants to ensure they're complying with Apple's royalty agreements to license their technology.

There's no point in marring good PR from the news they announced today with the CSAM tech. When governments pass legislation targeted at E2E they will likely land on Apple's proposed solution as a good compromise, at which point it will be out of Apple's hands and they can just go forward with it.

It was definitely a win in a narrow and politically naïve sense.

This was the point of their plan to introduce CSAM detection on-device. Unfortunately the reaction to that was histrionic and couldn't see the writing on the wall.

Governments will eventually pass legislation targeting E2E and CSAM was the one issue where Apple's method would have defanged support for that kind of law. But one good thing about making those plans public is that any proposed legislation will likely land on Apple's method as being a good compromise. Better for Apple to wait until they're forced by governments to do it.

No government is going to expropriate Apple's intellectual property just to move some money from Apple to developers. It also wouldn't get passed courts.

Neither the Open Markets Act or the Digital Markets Act will do anything about Apple's commission. You can have alternative app stores, sideloading, whatever. It doesn't change anything about using Apple's intellectual property and having to pay for it. All it will do is make the products worse for users. But developers aren't going to get the outcome they want, which is to ride the rails for free.

The Communist Party won't take the bait. It took the US decades of neocon foreign policy in the post-Soviet states to manufacture the Ukraine war. It will take much longer in Taiwan because there are no ultranationalists to use like Azov/S14/Svoboda/Right Sector in Ukraine.

Tech might be "embedded" but that doesn't mean their stocks had reasonable valuations. Small/mid cap tech is down 50-75% because they weren't. Every Apple employee is watching their stock portfolios melt down and AAPL holding up relatively well. Bargaining power is shifting from employees to Apple in real time. Suddenly job security is more important than WFH.

VC will follow the public markets, as it always does. Valuations will tank and funding will dry up.

The tech recession is going to be great for Apple's back to the office plans.

>And even if the EU might be wrong, Apple must comply.

Well no. If they're "wrong" then they'll lose the case when it heads to the General Court and/or the ECJ.

It would have been a disaster for competition if Trump had managed to ban TikTok.

The App Store policies were always for the benefit of customers (and Apple). These policies will keep happening because the basic incentive of Apple's business model has been unchanged since 2008.

If Apple wants a cut, they can just change the terms of the developer agreement so they get a cut from advertising revenue. The more Facebook earns, the more Apple would earn.

This was the correct decision legally and from the public interest perspective. The App Store complaints were always a contractual dispute between businesses. Developers hoped to ride the antitrust wave that emerged over the past 5-6 years to renegotiate the terms in their favor. Unfortunately for them there was never any legitimate antitrust issues with Apple, as the district court has now confirmed.

There's no reason for consumers to care about the business dispute developers have with Apple any more than they care about the carriage disputes between media and cable companies. And there are plenty of reasons why they would side with Apple, some of which were discussed in the court's decision.

People who believed the propaganda about "charging 30% for payment processing" are in for a surprise when they pay Stripe's fees but then realize they're still on the hook for Apple/Google's commission. It will just be collected in a less efficient way.

>Apple is treating CSAM as an engineering problem.

No they're treating it as a political and legal problem (with the UK and the EU being the furthest along on passing legislation). Their implementation is the compromise that preserves end-to-end encryption, given those political winds.