Ryan Whitwam (PDF):
Late last year, Google and Epic concocted a settlement that would end the long-running antitrust dispute that stemmed from Fortnite fees. The sides have now announced an updated version of the agreement with new changes aimed at placating US courts and putting this whole mess in the rearview mirror. The gist is that Android will get more app stores, and developers will pay lower fees.
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Representatives for Epic and Google have both expressed enthusiastic support for the newly announced settlement, which is subject to Judge Donato’s approval. The parties say the agreement will resolve their dispute globally, not only in the US.
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The settlement affirms that developers in the Play Store will be able to steer users to other forms of payment. This is what got Fortnite pulled from the Play Store (and Apple App Store) back in 2020. When developers choose to use Google’s billing platform, they’ll pay lower fees as well.
In-app content will now have a 5 percent Google billing fee, plus a 15 percent service fee for new installs. Existing installs will have a higher 20 percent service fee. Flat-rate app and game purchases will be set at 15 percent total for new installs. The service fee for ongoing subscriptions will be 10 percent. These are all modest reductions on the previous rates, which have been cut down in recent years, but the flat 30 percent Play Store share is well and truly dead.
Sean Hollister:
By the end of the year, it will launch a “Registered App Stores” program outside of the US, so that you can download and install third-party app stores (like the Epic Games Store) from the web without the friction that Google erected previously.
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With Registered App Stores, another distinct program run by Google, the company is promising to not charge developers fees at all. “They don’t pay any ongoing fees related to any of the transactions happening in the apps,” says Samat. And installing them onto your Android device should be a relatively frictionless experience.
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To be clear, “Registered App Stores” is not what a US court has ordered Google to create in the United States — Google must instead carry rival app stores inside of its own Google Play Store, and give them access to the full catalog of Android apps so they can meaningfully gain ground against Google and undo its monopoly.
Ian Carlos Campbell (Hacker News):
Google says that its updated fee structure will come to the EEA, the UK and the US by June 30, Australia by September 30, Korea and Japan by December 31 and the entire world by September 30, 2027. Meanwhile, the company’s updated Google Play Games Level Up program and new App Experience program will launch in the EEA, the UK, the US and Australia on September 30, before hitting the remaining regions alongside the updated fee structure. For any developers interested in offering their own app store, Google says it’ll launch its Registered App Stores program “with a version of a major Android release” before the end of the year. According to the company, the program will be available in other regions first before it comes to the US.
Sean Hollister (Slashdot):
On March 3rd, [Tim Sweeney] not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the term sheet — Google’s app distribution practices, its fees, how it treats games and apps — he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store policies, too. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.
The contract states that “Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same.”
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He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out.
And while Epic can still be part of the “Coalition for App Fairness,” the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now.
Jeff Johnson:
This is obviously terrible, but I find it strange that all or most of the criticism is going to Sweeney, letting Google off the hook. Sweeney cynically agreed to the terms for financial benefit, but clearly the terms were demanded by Google, not by Sweeney.
Nick Heer:
Regardless, it is notable for these sweeping changes to be brought to Android phones worldwide in the coming years, while Apple’s App Store is a patchwork of region-specific policies difficult for developers to navigate. It is too bad there is not really competition between these stores. Most people who buy smartphones choose the platform as a whole and accept whatever software experience they are provided. They do not need to bother themselves with the business terms of each store. With the improvements to third-party stores on Android, it sets up the possibility for greater competition within that platform. Apple should do the same.
Ryan Jones:
Apple announced weird (and incomplete) redone fees for EU in June 2025, and said they would clear it up and have one rule set by the end of 2025… that didn’t happen.
I figured the drop dead date was Jan 2026 payment date to devs – that day is tomorrow.
And today Google announced very similar new rules. 🤔
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After screaming for years, apparently everyone has forgotten about the June 2025 change and missed Jan 1 plan.
Previously:
Android Antitrust Business Epic Games Google Google Play Store Lawsuit Legal
Nick Heer:
Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product?
I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given that my scores have deviated from those given by many others, I started to question my own fairness — which, given that I am merely A Guy giving my opinion about a multi-trillion-dollar corporation, is a little silly. Then again, software is made — mostly — by people, and the intent I have in participating in the Six Colors survey is that a person working at Apple might possibly read my feedback.
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The most important factor is whether the features I use perform as expected. If it does so with unique design and flair, that is a welcome bonus, but it must be built on a solid foundation.
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I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.
Riccardo Mori:
I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.
But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable.
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What’s really sad in all this is that many of those “problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps” aren’t structural; that is, they’re not derived from historical faults or shortcomings in the fundamentals of the operating system. They often are the result of more recent bugs breaking something that used to work or a solution that had already been found, and said bugs have been allowed to fester thanks to an unsustainable yearly release cycle that forces engineers to work on new features instead of fixing what broke down in previous iterations.
Nick Heer:
The cycle of having a major new version ready to preview by June and shipping in September means the amount of time Apple spends focusing on the current version must necessarily shrink. How many teams at the company do you suppose are, right now, working on MacOS 26 when WWDC is a little over three months away? Engineering efforts are undoubtably beginning to prioritize MacOS 27. There are new features to prepare, after all.
Marcin Wichary:
Is what we’re seeing overall is really just Apple losing the battle with complexity?
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Today, Apple seems successful on paper, so the pressure needs to come from inside, from someone high up enough to recognize that what Apple is doing vis-a-vis software quality is not sustainable and hasn’t been for some time now. That the bill already came due on all of the decisions where systems thinking and deep testing and focus and preventative maintenance and paying off design debt have been deprioritized in favour of another shiny launch event that stretches the teams and platforms even thinner.
Jesper (Hacker News):
With the possible exception of individual dodgy Time Machine protocol implementations from third parties, all of the issues are directly traceable to components fully in Apple’s control. None of these issues are impossible for Apple to fix. All of them are incumbent on them to do so. Nearly all of them have persisted for at least two major OS releases and multiple Macs.
In the middle of all this, what Apple chooses to focus on is to implement a redesign that no one asked for, that butchers both the most conceivably fundamental usability and the visual pleasantness its user base has self-selected its platforms for; which only saving grace is that it is half-assed enough to not actually really change some things too badly, compared to what it could have been like. Although, had I upgraded to macOS Tahoe, chances are on top of the visual change, I would have been treated to basic Apple Event infrastructure falling apart and stopping working causing hangs, instability and unpredictability.
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The hardware is great and no doubt M5 and M6 variants will run circles around M1, but if I have to sink down further into this bog, that price is too high to pay - a common enough sentiment that it is a matter of public interest to document downgradability or attempting to block dark pattern upgrades.
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My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.
Brent Simmons:
I don’t want to quote the best parts — just go read it if you haven’t yet.
Garrett Murray:
I genuinely hope Jesper is correct here and my pessimism proves wrong in the long run—that the current version of Apple has been so damaged by a decade of simplification and profit obsession, losing so many valuable people who could effect meaningful change along the way.
Joe Lion:
How did the post end? Sorry, Liquid Glass wouldn’t let me get to the bottom of the page
David Deller:
As of today, all mentions of Liquid Glass have disappeared from developer.apple.com (the main home page). This may or may not mean anything… but I’ve been watching for it.
Previously:
Apple Software Quality Bug Design Finder Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Spotlight Time Machine
Gus Mueller (Mastodon):
In episode 680 of ATP, at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him.
I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a regression I don’t even know where to start.
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If I could downgrade my watch safely, I would.
Previously:
Design Fitness watchOS watchOS 26 Workout
Howard Oakley:
To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. Fortunately, SSDs keep track of the amount of data written to them over their lifetime. This can be accessed through better SSD utilities like DriveDx, and I even have a feature in Mints that will do that for most internal SSDs.
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Unless you work with huge media files, by far your worst enemy is swap space used for virtual memory. When the first M1 Macs were released, base models with just 8 GB of memory and 128 GB internal SSDs were most readily available, with custom builds following later. As a result, many of those who set out to assess Apple’s new Macs ended up stress-testing those with inadequate memory and storage for the tasks they ran. Many noticed rapid changes in their SSD wear indicators, and some were getting worryingly close to the end of their expected working life after just three years.
Previously:
Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Solid-State Drive (SSD)
