HUGE win for EU and for Developers with apps in Apple’s App store! 🚀
It’s not a win. Apple is still requiring apps to undergo app review and even more exorbitant fees than distributing through the App Store. Apple is doing their best to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the EU ruling.
It will be fixed. It’s gov. So baby steps. The EU is working hard and it’s going to be a while before we get everything we want.
Sure but hundreds of millions of dollars will go into compliance enforcement and litigation against Apple, which is taxpayer money. Apple should be fined Apple money right now for their bad-faith efforts to meet the requirements. They’ve already run the numbers, and they know making third party apps jump through all sorts of hoops, pay exorbitant fees, and fight the system tooth and nail is still cheaper than just complying in good faith.
App downloads through websites don’t need to go through app review. The developers have some requirements that restrict it to profit-making developers though, see my other comment.
It’s a less stringent review process than the App Store, but apps distributed outside of it will have to be “notarized”: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/25/alternative-app-store-notarization-process/.
I disagree - it’s definitely a win.
There’s still more work to be done (you shouldn’t need to first deploy an app with a million downloads on the Apple App Store in order to deploy outside of it for example…) but I expect the EU will force them to change that rule.
It will be interesting to see where they land on the Core Technology Fee. At face value it seems pretty clearly anti-competitive to make developers pay more if you don’t use an Apple service. But at the same time, the government can’t force Apple to give things away for free.
I expect a middle ground will be reached with much lower prices and hopefully a per-app price (e.g. pay once to have your app go through an anti-malware scanning service) rather than a per-user price. Or even better, in my opinion, is to make users pay a fee to have their device scanned for malware by Apple. A cost that could be built into the price of the hardware.
To use this feature, developers will have to opt into the new App Store business terms, which means they will pay the Core Technology Fee of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.
Non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and governments are exempt from the fee. The full policy is here: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
If you don’t plan to charge for it, you can also just publish through the existing App Store infrastructure, where there is no fee.
(I’m not being an apologist. There are so, so many shitty things about Apple’s implementation here, but this isn’t one. I believe the EU should blast Apple as hard as legally possible for the rest of their implementation which is intentionally terrible.)
“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers. Most projects are from single developers that just throw their project on github et al. and release it from there.
Euros* which are worth more than dollars. That said, such a dev probably wouldn’t meet the other requirements to distribute anyway, so they’ll probably use the existing unofficial sideloading.
Euros* which are worth more than dollars
1 Euro is currently 1.09 US Dollars. So technically “more” but realistically they’re about equal.
Don’t look at the original article’s comments. So much walled garden shills in there.
There are a handful of different eligibility requirements that developers must meet to be able to distribute apps via their website:
- Be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU (or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that’s listed in App Store Connect). The location associated with your legal entity is listed in your Apple Developer account.
- Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
- Agree to, among other things,
- Only offer apps from your developer account.
- Be responsive to communications from Apple regarding your apps distributed through Web Distribution, particularly regarding any fraudulent, malicious, or illegal behavior, or anything else that Apple believes impacts the safety, security, or privacy of users.
- Publish transparent data collection policies and offer users control over how their data is collected and used.
- Follow applicable laws of the jurisdictions where you operate (for example, the Digital Services Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, and consumer protection laws).
- Be responsible for handling governmental and other requests to take down listings of apps.
The “good standing” rule is the most problematic one - but I don’t see it lasting.
Keep in mind just last week Apple described Epic Games as “verifiably untrustworthy”… only to immediately backflip and decide to trust Epic. I can see the same thing happening here.
Two continuous years and a million existing customers is way too high a bar. It’s literally impossible for any new developer to meet that criteria unless they first spend years deploying apps inside Apple’s walled garden and the entire point of the DMA is to get rid of that wall.
I just hope a developer has a sketchy domain like notavirus.zip
