Apple hit with $1B UK lawsuit over ‘abusive pricing’ in App Store
Apple hit with $1B UK lawsuit over ‘abusive pricing’ in App Store
Over 1,500 developers in the UK are suing Apple over the company's "excessive" App Store fees.
Apple hit with $1B UK lawsuit over ‘abusive pricing’ in App Store::undefined
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Gotta love the “excessive” fees according to those developers that spend just $100/year to have free:
- IDE and tooling
- content distribution with extreme reliability
- free services like push notifications servers etc
- free advertising/presence in a store that has users because Apple spends millions on advertising to get people on it
- all the billing process taken care of, with refunds, subscriptions etc, accepting any currency from all the international stores
All of that but apparently asking 30% cut is “too much”. It’s not like Apple pulled a fast one on them: they knew that’s the fee to be on it, they still decided to go on it but then complain?!
Entitlement…
Nobody has beef with the annual developer fee.
The problem isn't even that they want to charge 30% for processing app payments. They can charge whatever they want for their own services.
The problem is that Apple prevents users from installing any apps from outside their own app store, then bans developers from using any other service but Apple to process payments. It's anticompetitive 101.
If Apple allowed 3rd party app stores or let apps implement their own payment processing, there would be no issue here.
But that’s the whole point: Apple spent billions of dollars to create a set of phones that are good, built a strong OS ($$$$), and advertised like crazy to get it to where it is now.
The sale of the phones is not enough to cover that, plus all the customer service (they are famous for being very good and accommodating with their support & warranty). Their plan has been to have a store to actually make the bulk of the money.
Now, years and years after they continuously spent $$$$ to get it to a good place, developers are saying “but but but I want this whole thing for free”. If they want to, go make yourself a phone, an OS, and all the rest, don’t force them to changed their business plans.
I’m a developer too, and I fully understand that 30% is a bunch, but I wouldn’t try to force them to open it up to me for basically free
How much would people pay for each of those items if they had a choice?
No IDE is worth 30% of your revenue, neither are all the other services. The only thing of value in that list that even comes close is unblocking the ability of your app to run on people's devices. Ability that is otherwise blocked on purpose.
The free advertising thing is also nonsense - unless an app is already really popular or really niche, nobody is going to find it via App Store search - most likely people will just follow a website link, or learn about the app somewhere else and just search for it directly by name.
But the whole reason why they’d want to run it on their devices is because Apple spent billions to get people to use the phones (and R&D, and writing an OS, and advertising, etc)
This is basically saying “I know you spent years and billions to make iOS become a very profitable place for me to publish an app successfully, but.. I don’t wanna paaaayyyy! Apple is the big meany and they should do it for me because reasons”
So at least we can agree that all the points about how they give you the app store, IDE, push notification service etc. are all bullshit and this is only about not blocking users' access to an app.
Regarding that, it comes down to the long history of general purpose computing - users buy a device, users decide what goes on it. The entirety of today's software ecosystem, and pretty much all of the internet as it is only exists because people were able to run and publish whatever software they chose, host whatever webpages they wanted, without the end user's device's manufacturer having any say in it. Apple likely wouldn't exist today without all the software that was created as a result of that either.
Imagine if they did the same for websites - removed access to the open web and only allowed you to visit approved websites, and also took 30% of each website's advertising and subscription revenue in addition. If they could get away with something like that, they totally would. The only thing that's stopping them is that people wouldn't currently tolerate that.