| > Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions. The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs). > Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing. They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this. |
The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.
I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.