In January, Apple announced it would soon allow iPhone and iPad users in Europe to download apps from third-party app stores. Actually opening one, however, isn’t easy.
Austin Carr for Bloomberg News:
28-year-old developers [Riley Testut and Shane Gill] saw Apple’s policy shift as a chance to legitimize the unauthorized service they designed several years ago to let users play old-school video games on their iPhones. The pair, who run a bootstrapped startup from the Dallas apartment they share, began slogging through Apple’s approval process for third-party shops. Their experience offers a glimpse of the road ahead for other outsiders looking to take advantage of Apple’s changes…
[Apple] introduced a complicated set of policies for those who want to launch a shop in the EU, as well as a €0.50 (54¢) “core technology fee” on app installs.
Apple says its fees reflect the value it provides developers through tools and technologies that enable them to build and share apps, and that hundreds of Apple team members spent tens of thousands of hours creating capabilities and safeguards for its new EU systems. “Apple’s approach to the DMA was guided by two simple goals: complying with the law and reducing the inevitable, increased risks it creates for our EU users,” an Apple spokesperson says.
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MacDailyNews Take: Security is certainly a major concern.
As for Apple’s App Store commissions:
How much did it cost developers to have their apps burned onto CDs, boxed, shipped, displayed on store shelves prior to Apple remaking the world for the better for umpteenth time? Apple incurs costs to store, review, organize, surface, and distribute apps to over one billion users. — MacDailyNews, June 10, 2022
That said, as we wrote in December 2022:
Those who want safety, security, and privacy will stick to Apple’s App Store, but a single point of control is always a danger, especially when it comes to capricious censorship (see: pre-Musk Twitter, Apple’s App Store in China, etc.).
iPhone and iPad users must, like Mac users, have the ability to install third-party apps; even if they never do, for it will keep Apple honest. The ability to ban an app loses all power when it’s simply available in another App Store.
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