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.