I think 8 was intended to stop that sort of thing, but maybe Apple thinks it doesn't apply?

8. The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services, as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.

You are probably right, and now I wonder if this doesn't also apply to the standard Apple developer program.

I have not read the DMA but in the gatekeeper section of the official website the Core platform services listed are AppStore, iOS and Safari. Let's suppose that you single out iOs, why should I sign up something about AppStore to develop apps?

DMA enforcement only started today. Until today, all these plans were just words on a paper. The EC will only look at the real state of the world now that enforcement has started, and make their enforcement decisions based on that and the public feedback. They aren't giving any kind of pre-approvals or pre-denials to the plans.

(If they were pre-evaluating plans, the optimal play for the gatekeepers would be to propose something totally unreasonable, and then negotiate it to something that's mostly unreasonable but just barely acceptable to the EC. That would be a bad outcome for the EC. So from a game theory perspective, they're better of making the companies guess at what will be acceptable rather than negotiating, since the companies will want to be conservative.)

Because it's still Apple's platform.

And they have a right to prevent apps that harm the integrity of the overall platform which is what notarisation is designed to prevent.

Also companies have always charged a fee for using their SDKs. Even today Epic does this i.e. 12%.

> Because it's still Apple's platform.

It's not Apple's devices, though.

As long as Apple has a higher level of access to the device than the user does, it's still Apple's device. They've just done a great job at making the user think they own it.

Technically yes, legally no.