- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”
Friendly reminder that you can sideload apps without jailbreaking or paying for a dev account using TrollStore, which utilises core trust bugs to bypass/spoof some app validation keys, on a iPhone XR or newer on iOS 14.0 up to 16.6.1. (ANY version for iPhone X and older)
Install guide: Trollstore
Apple didn’t sponsor the DMA, it was fighting tooth and nail against it. In general, EU politicians are harder to buy because they are more fragmented, and bribery is still illegal BTW.
That said, on the one hand, this fee structure is actually illegal under the DMA, the “core platform fee” nonsense is specifically illegal, and the EU is already on their ass about it.
On the other hand, this is just as if MSFT made Internet Explorer super expensive to license after they got hit by the same kind of regulation way back when. This just means that if you are an iOS app dev, you might want to release on something other than the App Store. I expect Google Play being available on iPhones pretty fast for example, or the Windows Store, or a bunch of other third party stores, and Apple can’t even preinstall or prefer the App Store on iOS over them. All the App Store being more expensive will do is make App Store fade to irrelevancy in the long run.