That doesn’t describe Apple’s situation though. Most businesses don’t distribute software at all; those that do mostly don’t need to distribute native iOS apps; those that do mostly don’t need to pay App Store fees; those that do mostly have to pay 15%. It’s only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that need to pay 30%.
Good on the UK for not backing down. 15% or 150%, Apple should not be exempted from participating in a true market economy.
This case only concerns Apple's App Store fees before 2020; it was a blanket 30% charge for paid apps until they introduced those changes following the whole Epic Games legal saga etc.
Apple are not paying a penalty for anything after 2020 when the new rules allowing those with lower turnover to pay 15% came into effect etc.
> It’s only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that need to pay 30%
During the first 12 years of the App Store, everyone paid 30%.
This is still not correct. The original claim was “every single business on the planet”. That’s ridiculously overstated.
Even if you massively narrow the scope to only businesses that have iOS apps that make money directly through the app, it’s still not true. The 30% specifically applies to buying digital goods and services through iOS apps.
Take Uber, for instance. They make vast amounts of money through their iOS app. They do not have to pay Apple 30%, or 15%, or anything beyond the basic $99/yr developer account fee. They absolutely do not have to pay 30% for access to the platform.
More interesting would be if they'd be forced to allow other app stores.
and google is surreptitiously flagging several of the top alternatives to their spyware bloatware on android, as a prelude to the change.
this is clearly an action that can be easily attributed to incompetence, but is a thinly veiled way to ensure a flood of verified open source joining early on the ransom for signing whitelist.
Where does the 17.5% come from? I can't find it here or in the link Reuters article. Is that just the number that the tribunal decided was fair? If so I'd love to read the analysis of how they got there.
919. The comparators available to us (the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Steam’s lower headline rate) suggest that the competitive rate of commission would be in the range of 12 to 20%. We do think it is reasonable to make some adjustment to that range to accommodate the points made by Apple about its premium brand, the quality of its offering and its established market position. However, we do not think those would be sufficient to displace the upper end of the range and are likely to operate mainly at the lower end, where the offerings are arguably less attractive to users for those reasons.
920. Applying again an approach of “informed guesswork”, on the basis of the evidence before us, we find that the likely range of Apple’s Commission for iOS app distribution services in the counterfactual is between 15% and 20%. For the purposes of quantifying the overcharge (for both the exclusionary abuses and the excessive and unfair pricing abuse) we will use the mid-point of that range, which is 17.5%.
Apple bans all such activities, has held the entire app ecosystem and seeks rent. If they think their offering is superior, then they should be OK competing. The fact that they have not opened it up says that they are happy to overcharge.
Remember, competition is always good. Let Stripe and Apple duke it out on payment processing, and let the best one win.
Let games me hosted both on Epic Store and App Store, and let users decide where to download it from.
That will be fair.
And also not require those apps to be also approved by Apple, which they are trying to do with AltStore and the DMA.
Users should be able to go to a dev's website, pay them directly, and download the ipa and install it with a click from the website. Having to go through any kind of "app store" at all should be optional.
Apple completely opens up the iOS platform. Do whatever you like.
Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.
And people will. That's how competition works. If someone thinks they can make a profit by offering a) better product b) same product at a cheaper price, you'll see investment.
VCs will be pouring money to capture that market.
And it will likely be much better too.
We would be back to the real days of computing.
Add a licensing fee for UIKit, Core Data, Core Text, Core Audio, Core Graphics, Metal, Network, SwiftUI, Quartz and all the other libraries apps use constantly.
Heck, why not for the OS itself? If you don't want to pay, they could conceivably dump you into an isolated VM and force you to write your own OS and userspace device drivers.
The competition will find the most profitable process, not the one that serves customers best necessarily.
The biggest change the iPhone users are going to see an increase in spyware. They'll also notice in a few years a bunch of websites go Chrome only.
Case in point: Steam is taking 30% too. But you've heard much less fuss over it, right? Why? Is it because of players' cult-like behavior around Steam? (probably partially) But more importantly it's because Valve doesn't own Windows and Steam Deck is a far smaller fry.
A closer example is game consoles, whose associated stores also take 30%, and nobody seems to complain about.
I'm not sure what you mean. Every game dev now refers what Steam algorithm gives you "organic sale."
It's difficult for me to really trust this stat though because purchasing decisions are complicated.
Cult-like or not, I find it reasonable to support companies that do things which you agree with. Valve's non-adversarial approach to business (as opposed to many rent-seeking corps these days) probably helps that perception.
Or provide alternative ways to install software.
This is a problem of their own creation.
How do you solve that problem for side-loaded apps?
If they ignore the warnings and get scammed because they are unable to identify reputable software from disreputable software, they learn a life lesson. Life goes on. There should be no societal expectation that everyone is prevented from ever taking an action that could bring themselves harm, by preventing them from taking actions at all.
It's not that it's not worth something, it's that they're abusing their patents and monopoly to extract further compensation after I already bought the device.
If Apple wants to take that defence, they should be required to have abandoned every patent they own on iPhones prior to my purchase of the device.
If Apple believes their portfolio of patents protecting the iPhone is worthless, they should abandon them. That they haven't precludes the argument that they are.
Edit: I don't, for instance, have issues with how they use patents with macbooks. There they don't abuse their monopoly on certain hardware features to get and extract money from a secondary monopoly on software.
I don't think that supports your case that Apple's patent keeps other phones from being equivalent given that the sensor isn't in the iPhone and it's not even Apple's patent.
For what it's worth, I'm typing this on a Pixel which is also a rounded rectangle, so I'm skeptical that patent is really holding other phones back, either
I wasn't specifically thinking of that case, though it's likely why my mind chose that sensor as an example. Apple has patents on blood oxygen sensors, of course, because Apple has patents on basically everything they do. Here's a recent example that I just picked off of Google https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2024216430B2/en?q=(Oxyge...
If you want to buy Apple cables because you think it is better, sure - that's great. But preventing ugreen cables from working makes no sense.
You shouldnt say 'buy a different phone' if you want to use ugreen cables.
If you're a consumer, you should be on the side of more choice and more competition. If you're a Apple/Apple employee, you should 100% say what you just did :)
And if new entrants can't enter the market because the existing monopolies make it impractical, then what?
>It’s an admission we’re all at the mercy of Apple until daddy government steps in.
That has always been the case when market participants become too dominant e.g.
United States v. Paramount Pictures (1948)
United States v. AT&T (1984)
United States v. Microsoft (2001)
Anti-trust regulation would have dealt with Apple, Google and co by now if the lobbying weren't so out of control compared to previous times.
Or if you only want to use iPhones then it seems like the downsides of the locked down app store aren't worth switching in which case it seems like you've already made your choice.
The app sideloading changes they're about to introduce[0]? Affects their Pixels, Samsungs, OnePlus, Sony, etc, old and new. It can't be disabled. The work around is to use ADB to install apks.
So while you have more choice of hardware, Android skins with more or less features, different long term support, and pricing, in practice you're stuck with what Google wants. Your options are Apple or Google.
---
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-si...
I've always used this method: work out what are the most benefits, with the fewest annoying 'features', between various manufacturers that have items within your budget, and choose something. In my country we call it 'shopping'.
Ergo, if you care about maintaining a free market, then you care about limiting what kind of moves you can make in the free market, in order to preserve a free market. A truly free market with no rules has an end state where it is not a free market, more like a much more sophisticated version of the nobles of the land owning everything. So we declare many activities that make it difficult for others to compete that are not simply about manking a better product, "anti-competitive" and illegal.
What makes you think the "free market" always produces the best outcome for consumers?
An unregulated market leads to monopoly and anti-competitive practices.
Capitalism is one of the best models we've discovered, but its markets must be appropriately regulated.
Capitalism should be difficult. An eternal treadmill. You shouldn't be able to wedge yourself into a market as a quarter-century long hegemon.
You shouldn't be able to capture the key touch point of all consumers to their digital life and then tax it for eternity. It's putting incredible strain on innovation and all other market participants.
Companies should die and be replaced by younger startups regularly. It's a renewing forest fire that de-ossifies technology.
Rewarding startups puts the capital rewards in the hands of innovation capital rather than large institutions. Large companies do everything they can to minimize labor costs. Venture funds are even hurting in that the monopolies put a cap on the number of startups that can reach decacorn or centacorn status.
And before I field any complaints that consumers don't care about this - most consumers are laypeople and do not understand what is happening to them. They can't articulate these points. This is why we require regulators to police the system.
You're saying, companies should be able to do whatever they want, even if it's bad for the consumer. How can you describe that position as "being on the side of the consumer"?
The Government needs to break up this duopoly.
Mobile should have hundreds of choices, three or four OS options, and free web-based installs without a gatekeeper or taxation.
Mobile providers shouldn't be able tyrannically set defaults for search, payments, or anything else either.
>I agree there should be personal accountability, but that clearly hasn't been working.
It has been working on Android just fine. And if Apple is supposedly so concerned with security, then why did it take them so damn long to implement a simple mechanism to stop thieves from simply changing your password using your pin? Only after relentless pressure did they implement additional security, which took them far too long. The "security" ruse is nothing but propaganda to protect Apple's monopoly on app distribution.
[0] https://tidbits.com/2023/02/26/how-a-thief-with-your-iphone-...
Outside of the absolute bare minimum to check this box for a plurality of observers, I can’t imagine anyone actually saying the App Store has a quality control process with a straight face, especially not one that would be championed as acceptable as a market practice.
The Apple App Store sold more than one trillion USD in 2024, how much of their 30% cut (300+ billion) covers operational costs? ¿10%?
That is before I get into my personal objection to having to ask permission to put software on a computer I bought. I own an iPad but I can't just install anything I want on it, Apple needs to approve the software first. For me that's just anti-creative and anti-everying-I-love-about-computers.
All I really want as a software developer is to be able to write software and have people use it if they choose to. I don't want Apple or any other company inserted as a middle-man.
Apple is not bringing its users value by prohibiting sideloading of arbitrary apps. Rather, this is an extreme example of rent-seeking which has affected almost all countries around the world. It needs to be regulated away.
https://www.catribunal.org.uk/judgments/14037721-dr-rachael-...
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