Closing Setapp Mobile Marketplace
The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.
In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.
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These alternative app marketplaces, as Apple calls them, are a relatively new frontier for app distribution on iOS, but they face hefty challenges, such as navigating Apple’s controversial Core Technology Fee, and competing with its established App Store ecosystem.
Epic Games currently pays the Apple fees that EU developers incur when distributing their apps through the Epic Games Store. However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said it is “not financially viable” for Epic Games to pay Apple’s fees in the long term, but it plans to do so while it waits to see if the European Union requires Apple to further tweak its rules for third-party marketplaces under the DMA.
Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.
It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.
Previously:
- Japan: App Marketplaces, External Payments, New Fee Structure
- Epic Games Sees Benefits From Streamlined Install Flow
- Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA
- EU App Store Tiers and Core Technology Commission
- Apple’s DMA Compliance Criticized
- MarketplaceKit License Renewal Problems
- iOS 17.5 “Fixes” client_id But Breaks App Marketplaces
- App Marketplaces: AltStore and Epic Games Store
- Setapp for iOS
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Keep it up, Apple, keep alienating, gaslighting, and abusing developers. I hope you liked what you saw with the Vision Pro--no developers wanted to touch that thing with a ten-foot pole. Enjoy experiencing that with every new product you develop.
I hope the EU sees that Apple is doing this on purpose. There really shouldn’t even be any fees for devs outside of Apple’s store
