If I have an app that makes $20,000 annually and all of the sudden there's a huge influx of new downloads (with no guarantee of converting to paid), then I am bankrupt. Apple will charge $4,500 to me PER MONTH for 100k downloads above 1 million. If I have 2 million downloads, I now owe Apple $45,000 per month.
This means the new structure is incredibly regressive. This will destroy small businesses.
I actually could not believe the fee calculator was correct, so I found the section in the terms[0] section 4.1 (A) lays out the fee, which is 0.5 EUR per app install above 1 million installs.
This could, in theory, be used as a way for groups of people to target and take down small businesses. These downloads include "redownloads" where a user may delete and then download the application again. I can already see the lawsuits if Apple does not implement mitigations for these types of attacks.
0: https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/download/alterna...
A progressive tax means you pay more the more the measure you use for taxation goes up
A regressive tax means you pay more the more the measure you use for taxation goes down
Regressive does not definitionally mean “bad for the small guy” even though that is a deterministic consequence of a regressive tax
However the term progressive in this context is “value free” and simply an indication of the direction of relative increase in percentage given the increase or decrease in the taxable measure
In this case the progression is a cliff so not very incremental
It is not progressive unless for some reason you view the "cliff" this way, though it is not a true cliff in the traditional tax sense, since exceeding does not remove the benefit of the 1m/year download credit.
My argument that it is regressive is not based on it being "bad for the small guy", rather I was just pointing out that, as a regressive fee when looking at revenue/download, it will be very bad for small business.