Naiyas

As a developer of a subscription based app I’m actually concerned by type resultant actions that will be taken after this ruling. Why? Well let’s go through them:

1. At the moment I pay $99 per year for access to the development tools, APIs and ability to distribute through the Apple App Store regardless of how many apps I ultimately build and publish.
2. I list an app for free and I can monetise through advertising or just have it as a loss leader for exposure if I want. A cost to Apple for hosting it but not to me.
3. I sell a subscription to my app and I receive 70% in the first year and 85% in the second year, BUT if I did have subscriptions sold outside the App Store via online or someone that was on Android that subscribed and switched then Apple gets nothing.
4. I don’t have to deal with payments, marketing, distribution, publishing, etc. most of the effort sits with Apple and that’s fine by me.

Now what could happen to the above is huge:

1. That annual access fee could stick around, but what if that now gets restricted to no listed apps and you now need to pay for listing each app?
2. What if you now have to pay for access to each API Apple currently offers as included?
3. What if you now have to pay for each download of your app regardless of if it’s free or paid or continued to be in use (or some combination of the two)?
4. What if the listing fee is simply to put it on the store, but to have it able to found in search you now need to pay for that ability?
5. They may not care about me having a subscription anymore, but I now need to pay a whole series of charges whether someone subscribes or not.
6. Now I have to deal with payments and all of the regulations and data protection rules that entails - a huge burden for a small developer, especially when you are subject to GDPR.
7. My accounting system now has to be far more complicated because of all the above potential fees, whereas before it was dead easy… 30% year one, 15% year two.

The changes to the charging structure are not out of the question, and there appears to be nothing in the order that would prevent these changes from being imposed. My point is that what looks like a win could easily change to a disaster that benefits big name developers only.

Bel.Air said:

This article should be marked as opinion or even hot take. Apart from what other commenters already stated, there are other misunderstood concepts here about Apple app store restrictions:

1) Apple requires the country on your Apple ID account to match the country of the credit card on file. And the App store content is quite different depending on country (which, if you had asked someone from an EU country you would know.).

2) For those still skeptical a simple example of why this is an annoyance: as a EU citizen you travel (visa-free, without a passport - thanks EU!) from Denmark to say, Greece. There, you have NO extra roaming fee (thanks EU!), public health insurance (thanks EU!), and say you want to download the local public transit app for Athens. And surprise surprise, Apple tells you that the app is not available in your country's App store!

From a EU standpoint this is a ridiculous limitatiom, it's non-compliant with single market regulations and the free movement of goods and services across the EU, so of course the European Commission is doing its job by enforcing it. Basically there should be another tier available (call it Region) that developers should take advantage of, instead of only toggling between Global/1 country. It isn't at all that complex and shouldn't be that big of an issue.

Oh dear. You seem to have fallen into the trap that befalls everyone in the EU... the single market is a mirage. It doesn't really exist. Any business can "choose" to sell its products in any country within the EU - in theory - without any issues. But the critical point is that the business gets to "choose" which countries.

It is NOT a consumer right, it is a business trading ability.

There remain, to this day, additional country level laws that prevent certain goods and services being freely traded within the EU - nuclear technology is a pointed example that overrides EU law. Encryption is another, perhaps more pertinent, example. France, for example, requires additional compliance burdens before selling software within the country that contains any kind of cryptography. That's before we even get to issues of contract law, of which the EU has no legal standing (because it is not a country), it is done at the country level.

Your example is also flawed. It is not Apple that restricts the app, it is the developer - the owner of the app. Apple is simply an intermediary. The developer may have chosen not to list the app in a country's App Store for a variety of reasons (one was outlined above), but it could be for any number of reasons. But as the primary business owners of any app on the App Stores it is not for Apple (or the EU for that matter) to decide what countries the app owner wants to distribute their apps in.

There are many other examples that are not software related, but it all comes down to differences in regulations between the countries of the EU. No amount of shouting that it's a "single market" will change the fact that it really isn't the single market it is made out to be.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Madbum said:

Joe Biden needs to go. I am sorry but I am not usually political but this guy is ridiculous 

This started two years into the Trump administration.

It’s irrelevant when it started. Investigation of a potential issue is completely acceptable. One could reasonably argue, which you have done yourself, that the act of kicking off and investigation has resulted in some improvements being made.

The act of charging is the problem here and that is a decision made under the Biden administration. As you point out the grounds are mostly baseless but it’s been done for clearly political reasons that the Biden team consider beneficial to them.

We may may never know what a Trump administration would have done once the investigation completed - though if he wins in November we may find out if it’s withdrawn.

My simple points are as follows:
1. The act of investigating a potential charge, regardless of administration, was a reasonable decision. Investigations are not evidence of wrongdoing.
2. The decision to charge was a Biden administration one - and it’s a(nother) bad decision from the current administration.

avon b7 said:

What Epic did in the US had nothing to do with the EU but what Apple was claiming it would do now had a lot to do with the EU. 

Actually it does. You see if you are/were a developer you would find that the developer contract you sign to be part of the developer program has its legal foundation and authority in US law - therefore the contract is enacted via US law and any disputes are handled via the US legal system.

it doesn’t actually matter what country you want to do business in, as if you breach the contract under US law then you lose all rights to use Apples IP under the terms of the contract, that includes developing on their platforms.

if you can’t develop on Apple’s platforms you can’t get any certificates… you’re finished.

its been basic contract law since time immemorial, and no EU (or any other country’s) law can stop it from being so.

elijahg said:

Whilst this is true, there have been plenty of times whereby that extra margin as a percentage is in the high teens. That and as Lkrupp rightly (???) said, "What goes up never comes down". As far as I'm aware, Apple has rarely (if ever?) corrected the foreign prices downwards in response to exchange rate fluctuations, only ever up.

The margin will clearly go up and down as the exchange rate fluctuates, just like all prices have the appearance of doing so when you are trying to compare across currencies. This is nothing new and is the normal course of things, hence why there are currency traders, currency hedges, etc. I recall, pre-Euro, going to Spain for holidays, we'd buy our pesetas in the winter as we'd get 250 to the pound vs in the summer where we would get 150 to the pound (costing us 40% less for the same amount of pesetas).

Whilst I also don't recall a time that Apple prices have dropped in the last 15 years related to this, it is also true that the pound to dollar exchange rate has also fallen over that time so there is unlikely to have been a time that a price correction would have gone the other way in this period.

fred1 said:

Thank you. It’s always the same discussion. Prices seem much higher outside the US for this reason.
I, for example, can buy Apple products for a bit less here than in the US because I can claim them as a business expense and be reimbursed for the VAT (it’s actually credited against the VAT that people pay me for my work).  

I'm also in this position as I run my own business which partially zero rated for supply so full VAT recovery. We're still stuck with ~10% import duty and currency fluctuation, but it's not as bad as it seems at first glance for this reason. I have, previously, been a little naughty in that I've taken advantage of the fluctuation and high value purchase to use it as a way to justify a flight to the US for a holiday - the savings on buying in the US vs the UK effectively covers the price of the flight and hotel for a week or two - selling my old computer while there and coming back with a new one - been over 10 years since that kind of difference was workable though, but with the recent price rises it may be possible again soon.