Yes, it's a legal one. Under the DMA:

The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware

The DMA absolutely allows charging money for access to a regulated platform. The Core Technology Fee is the only thing Apple is charging that can even remotely seem like it may be prohibited. We'll see how that goes:

> Pricing or other general access conditions should be considered unfair if they lead to an imbalance of rights and obligations imposed on business users or confer an advantage on the gatekeeper which is disproportionate to the service provided by the gatekeeper to business users or lead to a disadvantage for business users in providing the same or similar services as the gatekeeper. The following benchmarks can serve as a yardstick to determine the fairness of general access conditions: prices charged or conditions imposed for the same or similar services by other providers of software application stores; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for different related or similar services or to different types of end users; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service in different geographic regions; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service the gatekeeper provides to itself.

> The Core Technology Fee is the only thing Apple is charging that can even remotely seem like it may be prohibited

The CTF is the exact topic of discussion in the context I provided the clause

The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs. That's the distinction, and why it isn't automatically illegal. It would only be illegal if it gives Apple's App Store an unfair competitive advantage.

And as you can see from the text of the DMA, in order to declare the CTF illegal, the EC has to conduct a fair, impartial, fact-based investigation that considers Apple's viewpoint. Then they produce a preliminary report which Apple is allowed to rebut. After that they can issue a final ruling, and Apple is allowed to appeal that to the court of justice. Even if the CTF is found to be illegal after all of that, Apple gets 6+ months to make changes unless the EC can prove that they were working in bad faith.

> The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs.

Since Apple already charges $99/yr for a dev account, for which the Xcode price is included, and the CTF applies even when not using the App Store... what are they charging for if not API access in the form of the dev's user's devices? That's the only thing that's left

The CTF applies when not using the App Store, because the equivalent of the CTF is baked into Apple's 30%. People asked for unbundling, and this is what Apple came up with.

Those who are surprised that you have to pay for access to an ABI have obviously never had to pay for their compilers from their software vendors (the price for the HP-UX garbage compiler was eye wateringly high).

> Those who are surprised that you have to pay for access to an ABI have obviously never had to pay for their compilers from their software vendors (the price for the HP-UX garbage compiler was eye wateringly high).

But that doesn't seem to be the case, as Apple hasn't monetized Xcode and the iOS SDK libraries differently since the DMA came up.

Apple can charge for the SDK and all that it entails, but they can't charge for apps getting to run on users' iOS copies, as that's not something IP law contemplates.

What happens when a fully FOSS iOS dev environment comes out, like the way you can compile Windows binaries on Linux right now? What would Apple be charging for then?

> What would Apple be charging for then?

The CTF offsets Apple's costs in developing and maintaining the "core technology": the OS and the frameworks that the developer uses in their application.

Those costs are paid by the users when they buy their devices.

GCC works on HP-UX, so I don't know what this is trying to prove. They can charge for Xcode whatever they want, but what does that have to do with installing apps.

Exactly. Not to mention, the HP-UX business model famously flopped in the face of Linux, BSD and Free Software. It's almost the perfect example of how Open software distribution provided a better experience than the alternatives.

The CTF is it's own refutation. A competitive market should not need to kiss anyone's ring in order to function.

Back when I was working with HP-UX, GCC worked if you wanted something completely independent and didn't need to link against system libraries. For the companies I worked for when using AIX, that wasn't an option.

At least on AIX and other UNIXes, the system compiler and GCC worked together. HP-UX was a special kind of hell.

A sibling reply pointed out that developer kits and distribution deals for consoles (which are general purpose computers, regardless of how they are presented, as much as modern smartphones are) are extremely expensive (and there are no alternatives for distribution).

The point that I am making is that the idea that you can develop and distribute for free on any platform is a relatively new one.

It is not new on microcomputers, though, and those have essentially defined the expectations for consumer devices going forward. That is why it was such a big deal back when Apple first introduced the app store with all the restrictions - that was new, even compared to other mobile devices in the market (even feature phones had J2ME by then).

But regardless, it seems like a good idea in general, and proven to work, so why shouldn't we want more of it? I don't see the problem with applying the same logic to game consoles etc - that racket also needs to go down.

Dev kits for consoles are so even more insanely controlled and costed.

> The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs

So the distinction is that they're charging devs to be allowed to run their app on iOS period, rather than charging for access to a particular set of APIs (which would be illegal)?

Because if so, there's a hole in that argument. Right now I can run any web app I want on my iPhone and the developer need pay no platform access fee. However, that app is blocked by Apple from accessing many native APIs, despite it running on my hardware. And to access those APIs it would need to pay Apple a fee...

So in conclusion, Apple should charge every website operator a per-user annual fee for using the Apple's platform.

Web apps are forced to use webkit, and the EC is fine with it. Because apparently web apps are not a core platform regulated by the DMA.

Why do you say the EC is fine with it? I bet you can't produce any statement from the EC even marginally supporting it. All you know is that Apple proposed something blatantly illegal, and then backed down from that plan.

It's impossible for the EC to have given Apple any kind of guarantees about it being fine to restrict PWAs to just Safari. That's just not how the process works.

Well, is there a legal basis for Apple charging this fee? I'm licensed to use Xcode presently, which means I can legally produce iOS binaries without paying them. I'm legally allowed to distribute those binaries because I own the rights to them, the apps being original works (and not derived works).

What, specifically, is the core technology fee for other than dissuading competition? It's not for using Xcode (I already have that now), and it's not for redistributing Apple software (iOS binaries aren't that). What technology specifically? Is it a software license? Is it for a patent license? Is it payment for a service? What is it?

Have you actually read the licensing terms you agreed to for Xcode and Apple SDKs?

> Except as otherwise expressly set forth in Section 2.2.B., You may not distribute any Applications developed using the Apple SDKs (excluding the macOS SDK) absent entering into a separate written agreement with Apple.