[klaustopher]

> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.

That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first. The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices. The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.

[dbbk]

Yeah this is what I really don't understand. They say they have to be compensated for their R&D work and for providing the APIs and cloud services etc. Okay.

...but the program fee already does that??

[kmeisthax]

They have to be "compensated" in the intellectual property[0] sense of "we reserve the right to invent new reasons why we need to be compensated". Nothing is ever truly "paid for" or "owned" here.

[0] "Federal contempt of business model"

[bee_rider]

I’m not sure what % of their R&D budget comes from the $99 fee vs various other AppStore percentage based fees. But… should it be a flat fee? It seems sort of reasonable to charge more successful apps more, they are apparently benefiting more from the ecosystem, right? Like progressive taxation. (If anything, why not institute increasing developer “apple tax” brackets?)

It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?

[judge2020]

I think you'd be hard pressed to take the $99/yr they make from the dev program fee and use it to cover the salaries for the engineers implementing and maintaining all of iOS' developer-facing APIs.

[CivBase]

Who decided that developers should be the ones paying for the development of those APIs in the first place? Are we just going to ignore Apple's own products and services that their platform allows them to profit off of? And the market share afforded to them by supporting popular third-party apps and services?

There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.

Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.

[tonfa]

Isn't having good apps/api a selling point for apple hardware (where they already make massive amount of money), why can't that be a motivation by itself?

[CogitoCogito]

Why would that fee pay for all that? Why wouldn’t revenue from sales of iPhones pay for that?

[dbbk]

Of course. But they could just raise that fee.

[joking]

and what about the devices itself? doesn't apple get money from selling iphones and ipads?

The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.

[jijijijij]

Maybe Apple's goal is to become irrelevant enough to not be subjected to the DMA. I mean, making developers despise you is a brilliant first step towards such an end!

[judge2020]

Why is size a question here? If apple is subject now, but then dropped to 1/10th the number of users, could they suddenly no longer be required to adhere to the DMA? Why is the size of the provider suddenly a test to determine if consumer protections are in order?

[jijijijij]

The DMA, digital markets act, is about fair competition, not consumer protection. If you got 5 users, you do not have the necessary leverage to matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

[paulmd]

> The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.

pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.

it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/03/windows-1...

And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.

And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.

[fxtentacle]

In the EU, the spirit of the laws is what counts in court, not the letter of the law. That means it's a lot easier to understand things if you start with the intended consequences:

Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here

Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this

[bee_rider]

“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.

We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.

Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.

[klaustopher]

You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.

[paulmd]

> Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here

> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this

this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.

if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.

if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.

And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.

Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.

regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.

Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.

The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.

And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.

But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.

[bombcar]

Everyone knows the problem has nothing to do with openness or whatever, but that it comes down to the 30% fee and companies not wanting to pay it.

The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.

[shagie]

.

    Game distribution
    Steam       30% (25% after $10M, 20% after $50M)
    Epic        12%
    Humble      25% (15% to Humble, 10% to charity)
    GOG         30%

    Console
    Microsoft   30%
    Playstation 30%
    Xbox        30%
    Nintendo    30%

    Mobile
    Apple       30%
    Google      30%

    Physical
    Gamestop    30%
    Amazon      30%
    Best Buy    30%
    Walmart     30%

Source: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2019/09/Gam...

Note that this is from 2019 before Apple and Google changed their rates for small developers in 2020.

Question: will this also prevent GameStop from buying something for $20 from the distributor and marking it up to $26?

[_cenw]

Everyone knows that?

I'd say that's a misunderstanding of the motivations behind EU law.

If you think this is the result of lobbying work or protectionism, let me ask a simple question: Why does the GDPR exist?