New EU App Store Terms to Comply With DMA

It's true, if notarization is still required, and any registration for any potential form of payment is required, then nothing fundamentally changes.

Is it about money, or is it about software freedom? Two different questions, and the actual freedom aspect doesn't ever seem to be addressed. Neither Apple nor the EU want to remove the single point of failure/control which is notarization and registration.

Only the money aspect seems to be discussed.

This is a mess to figure out. If I understand it:

26% = Apple distributes + Apple handles in-app payment (like now)
20% = Apple distributes + developer uses Stripe (etc) for in-app payment
15% = Apple distributes + developer uses Stripe (etc) for out-of-app payment (a website)
5% = Developer distributes outside Apple + developer handles payment

The numbers become 15% / 10% / 10% / 5% for the Small Business program.

So it's a 5% tithe to Apple if you want to sell iPhone apps like you can sell Mac apps from a website right now. 5% "Core Technology Commission" tax. And notarization is always required. And Apple still requires the $100 yearly developer fee, which means Apple can Charlie Monroe you at any time, or be retarded in other ways.

How much you want to bet that 5% "Core Technology Commission" tax is being talked about inside Apple for all Mac Apps now? The pesky precedent of Mac App distribution on your own website for 30+ years really screws their argument for it existing.

If you want to do website distribution, incorporate an EU entity, pay Apple 5% for no reason, file all nonsense paperwork with EU bureaucrats and pay their fees, then pay your payment processor. You're probably close to the 15% overhead Apple charges for doing it all on the App Store under the Small Business terms ("what a coincidence"). So it's a lot of extra paperwork and headache for basically no gain.

Meanwhile: Advertising companies like Facebook and Google and scam apps are completely unaffected.

The easiest solution will end up being an edict that Apple is required to offer all costs for devkit / memberships / notarisation etc. on a FRAND basis for all developers regardless of their distribution channel or business model, and is then prohibited from extracting any revenue of any sort from people who do not vend their apps through Apple's stores.

That, or simply prohibiting Apple from selling / offering subscriptions to third party software, period.

Watching Apple wiggle out of this whilst placing a bar of gold on Trumps desk. It's a sight to be seen.

If Apple wants to have their tools be required for distribution and development (Xcode, Swift, CoreGraphics) then they should not be permitted to collect any fees if the develop distributes outside of Apple's App Store.

If Apple wants to charge a "Core Tech fee" they should be required to ensure the fee is optional (devs can choose not to use Apple's tools and technology), charge the same fee regardless of platform (including macOS). If they go this route they should be required to allow third party tools and Xcode free development worldwide and both within and outside of the App Store. It would not work if it was an EU only rule as developers aren't going to build separate apps just for the EU so it wouldn't actually be accomplishing the goal. Developers are also not going to want to build separate apps for regions where the App Store is mandatory so again Apple would be required to allow Apps built with third party tools into their own store.

All of this for a Core Tech fee and the fact that this would likely kill native app development would likely demonstrate that this is a junk fee that exists only when Apple has the power to enforce it. It exists only because Apple has a monopoly like power over app distribution on iOS.

I also think given all of Apple's shenanigans that the EU should setup an EU run App Notarization service and take away Apple's notarization powers for apps distributed outside of their stores too.

@Kristoffer agreed. They are morally bankrupt. When I started using Macs, Apple was this fun, playful company, the underdog. Sometimes arrogant, but frequently they did know better. These days it's hard to tell them apart from the tech {feudal,fac}ists. Total control over democracy and freedom. It's gross. But they get away with it because 1) people are locked up in the ecosystem; 2) it's a fashion item that projects wealth; and 3) they have somehow convinced people that they are the good guys, mostly through advertising privacy (all the while still not doing end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups, so the US government still has access to most of your iMessages, etc. because your contacts do not have ADP enabled).

After earlier attempts, I have successfully left iPhone this year. Mac is *much* harder. Even though I first used Linux in 1994 and I have a Linux laptop. Desktop Linux still too flaky for me to use on a laptop full-time.

@Daniël, the flakyness of Linux is why Apple can charge what it does. But you do always have a choice. But also boy it’s really nice using a Mac with an iPhone together.

Apple is demonstrably better than its competitors — especially its primary one which is an advertising company — but of course, one should go with the one you have to hold your nose at/suffer through the least.

The new/significant news here to me is that there’s going to be support for web distribution.

That could be pretty good for cross-platform mega-games like Fortnite, but I suspect that will come with a lot of bad (for consumers, especially those with cryptocurrency — think wallet scams are bad now?).

Good for European businesses, though, which is what the DMA was written to protect (scams are also a business).

I wonder if future mega-games will launch on the App Store, and if it becomes successful, try to move their customers to web distribution, or start exclusively on the web, especially as big money makers are typically kids who will have to get their parent’s credit card number.

I guess we’ll see how important Apple’s App Store is for marketing and distribution soon enough.

Also, I suspect payment processors will pop up (Epic seems positioned right for that, but companies like Gumtree, etc. might also work), which will try to replicate an Apple’s record of your purchases, per-country payment processing and taxes, proof-of-age etc. because it doesn’t make sense to build that yourself.

"Desktop Linux still too flaky for me to use on a laptop full-time."

What do you mean by that?

I've now received by Framework and I'm running Framework's recommended Ubuntu build, and it seems just as stable and reliable as a MacBook.

The EU is institutionally ordoliberal (German, essentially) to the core. Gruber is therefore wrong—it's not bureaucracy the EU seeks—but the ideal of market competition. It therefore imposes regulation to demand competitiveness, but not the means of achieving it. Hence, regulation imposes obligations but doesn't say how they should be achieved. If you are thinking that demanding fairness without redressing the power imbalances that produce unfairness is monumentally stupid, then you would of course be correct; this is a typical classical Liberal impulse and it will inevitably fail. See also the GDPR, the European Accessibility Act, etc, etc, etc.