I would not hold my breath. They are adept at malicious compliance. Cook will do a cost/benefit assessment and will come up with another workaround.

The EU should instead set targets.

Ie. "More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU".

That’s a terrible idea. How would they have any control over that. I think you are way overestimating the amount of iOS users that want to use software from outside the App Store.

Agreed, the only realistic way they could hit such a target is to shut down their own app store...

If 3rd party stores didn't charge the Apple tax, I think you'd find plenty of apps moving to other stores, and within a matter of weeks more than half of users would have used a 3rd party store.

That’s my worst nightmare. On my iPhone I want the equivalent of Spotify, not Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, etc.

I want the equivalent of a shops in the real world. One shop doesn't carry everything. Even Spotify doesn't carry everything. For one, Apple doesn't allow adult content apps. Steam does. I'm sure there's a market for adult games on iPhone as Steam's success there would seem to suggest. I don't think Apple should be required to sell adult games but I also don't think they should get to dictate that people can't use their phones for adult games. So, more stores would great.

Why can’t people just buy Android phones that allow for this? They should change, not Apple and their users that like the walled garden.

I mean, you realise nobody is going to point a gun at your head and force you to sideload apps right?

Yeah but these companies will force me to install their garbage third party app stores to install their apps. I really just want one good, properly vetted app store on my phone, is that so hard to understand?

If you ever tried out third party app stores on Android you’ll see what I mean. See also the crappy launchers/stores major game publishers try to force on you on PCs.

It's a bit of a false comparison, since you wouldn't have to pay monthly subscriptions to others stores as you have to for streaming services.

Yeah but I would have to deal with multiple app stores of varying security, quality control, resource usage, and other annoyances. No thanks.

That really depends on the store. If Value made a Steam store, or Nintendo made a Nintendo store with Nintendo exclusives I'd expect millions of installs.

Maybe but that is also not within Apple's control.

> They are adept at malicious compliance.

They just got fined 500 millions for failure to comply so I'm not sure adept is the adjective I would use.

How much additional profit have they made based on their malicious compliance? I bet it dwarfs this fine.

That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that.

So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.

Apple’s take is 30%, but they have expenses that have to be covered by that. The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.

> The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.

It doesn't cost that much to maintain and run the appstore, it is almost all profits.

You are trying to tell me that credit card processing fees are negligible, software engineers work for free, advertising doesn’t require overhead, etc…

I guess that kind of thinking that everything is basically free is why alot of startups just fail so easily.

None of them are close to 30 billion!!!

Your profit is whatever your revenue minus costs. Plenty of app stores have operated in the red that we know this isn’t trivial to get right. It definitely is nowhere near negligible as patent asserted. I’m frustrated by how dumb HN is getting lately.

You are trying to tell me that all of that stuff combined makes up more than a small fraction of $30 billion per year.

If Apple is so bad at this that they have to charge 30%, they should have failed in the free market to a competitor that can do the same or better for 3%. However, Apple has prevented that, not by being better or cheaper, but by implementing DRM that locks users out from having a choice (and the market as a whole ended up being a duopoly with cartel-like pricing).

Whether Apple can be cheaper isn't really the point (they should be, digital services are a very high margin business). It's that they're anti-competitive to the point that the market for paid apps and in-app payments became inefficient (in a financial sense).

Whether it's adept or not depends on what would have happened if they actually complied.

Sure, a half a billion fine sounds like a lot, but if you don't have another number to compare against, you can't tell if it was clever or not.

Perhaps "compliance" is the wrong term, but surely such a tiny fine will do little to convince them to comply.

They have a couple of months (2? 6?) to comply, otherwise they get additional fines.

500 million is like half a days revenue.

The actual fines for this moving forward are up to 10% of a companies global revenue. The EU made a big point to say that this is the first time they are issuing those fines and as a result they are smaller than they otherwise would be especially in the case of repeat offenders.

Isn't it just in the name of competition, i.e. alternative app stores? Or is sideloading an explicit goal of the EU's efforts?

Generally, as a society, we hold that a contract cannot be modified without both parties’ agreement. When you bought that phone, it was with the completely clear, overt, and in no way uncertain understanding that it does specifically X Y Z, and does not do A B C. Now, without additional payment to the counterparty, you’re demanding your phone do A B C. What am I missing? According to accepted understandings of contracts, how are you possibly in the right? How are you possibly in a position to demand government use force to modify a contract you accepted before to somehow benefit you more at a cost to your counterparty?

You are of the opinion that it is reasonable for a company to expect you to read, understand and fully agree with a contract that consists of countless pages of opaque legalese and that you have no say in whatsoever, just in order to use a service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life?

The EU does not seem to share that opinion, and puts some restrictions on these types of 'contracts'. Are you really concerned that this is somehow unfair towards these companies? Companies that retain whole teams of lawyers to create a contract that hardly any of its billion counter parties (individual consumers) can fully comprehend, let alone push back on?

What service? You are free to use cellular service without your iPhone. There are other phones available. Apple is not gating your access to cellular

We're not talking about "other phones." We are talking about iPhones. The market is "iPhone users" not just "phone users".

The parent post said “service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life”. I’m not sure what universe you live in, but in mine everyday life is entirely possible without iPhones.

Ah, didn't catch that line.

"iPhone users" isn't a market. Otherwise every company would be a monopoly. That is absurd.

My rant was about the rationale for government restricting ToS contracts in general. Apple is indeed not as unavoidable for participating in public life as some others. The only alternative being 'agreeing to' the Google contract of course.

There's a range of anti-competitive behavior which can subvert that ideal, and as such there's regulation aimed to prevent it. Apple used to forbid apps from telling users about Apple's 30% cut or cheaper places to buy the app, for instance, hindering users from making an informed choice.

Many of the policies in question are intentionally not publicized to end-users, often requiring first paying to be part of the developer program before you can even see what you need to agree to to publish an app.

Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks. No excuse.

> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.

That's the bare legal minimum in the EU. Many anti-competitive practices are not things consumers find out about within some short fixed period of time, if at all, and others are not solved by a refund even when the customer is aware of the issue.

> They are all available right here, online, without any purchase requirement: https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/

True that it does now all (including schedules 2/3 and the guidelines) appear to be publicly available. Looks as if this was done on June 7th 2021, shortly after the EU Commission had sent the Statement of Objections on April 30th 2021.

> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.

This doesn't respond to what you quoted.

Parts of the contract can be illegal, this is completely within the power of the EU to enforce a crackdown on illegal contracts.

I'm not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.

This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on/in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.

And is it reasonable that the laws are created after the contract was already agreed to and still apply to it? At least here in the United States, laws are not allowed to make things illegal that happened before the laws were written.

Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?

Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.

> Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior

They DO have the power to STOP it, they just cannot punish past behaviour which was legal at the time! At least in USA, this is directly in the constitution:

Article 1 § 9 prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.

Article 1 § 10 prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.

SCOTUS also clarified this in Beazell v. Ohio:

"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."

Now, I know that this is EU and not USA, but my argument is that EU is the ones being unreasonable here. It is illogical to make something illegal and then punish those who had done it before it was made so.

If I have a sales contract with you where I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, I still owe you on Tuesday. If purchases or hamburgers on credit is outlawed on Monday, I most likely still owe you on Tuesday.

Otoh, if I pay you today for a hamburger on Tuesday, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, you can't perform your part of the contract, and we'll need to figure things out.

The rules can change, and when the rules change, continuing service may need to change (depending on how the rules were written); I'm sure part of the contracts involved also describe a) how to make changes in the services, b) what happens when parts of the contract are discovered to be unenforcable or illegal.