Apple sets prices and there’s no reason they need to charge customers for the R&D costs of supporting public APIs. In fact, if they charged developers per call, maybe customers could pay less. It used to be pretty standard to charge for better application development frameworks. Heck, people used to pay for compilers!

I remember how Microsoft wanted non-insignificant amounts of money for its official SDKs and Visual Studio (and I always pirated them).

But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.

Companies set prices however they want, not based on "need". They don't need excuses.

True or false, then: does Apple really need the European market to access the first world as a userbase?

I’m not sure what you mean by that question. If you’re trying to imply that usage based pricing for their APIs is banned by the EU, it’s not.

What I'm saying is that Apple can fuck around and find out. 2 years ago there weren't protections for arbitrary digital market gatekeeping, now there is. If Apple wants European market access, being the vanguard for the World's Dumbest pricing model is a bad start.

Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.

Being the vanguard? Usage based pricing is not new, and framework makers have charged developers for access for a long time.

Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs.

The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!

> Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims.

Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".

Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.

There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.