this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023

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Apple hit with $1B UK lawsuit over ‘abusive pricing’ in App Store (thenextweb.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Apple hit with $1B UK lawsuit over ‘abusive pricing’ in App Store::undefined

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd be happier with the pricing if there were any apps worth having these days. The top 100 lists are like 90% garbage, 10% social media which may or may not also be garbage.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If I get bored sometimes I'll look for a new app or game and end up closing the app without downloading anything. It's all just complete garbage games and in-app purchases.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Same thing here. I miss the early app store when there were a lot of good games. Now the only decent native mobile game is Bloons TD 6. But even that has micro transactions.

I miss the days of Tower Madness

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

The best games are ports to be honest. I recently downloaded Peglin, which is supposedly a pc port. It has a free trial and no IAPs and is an entertaining little timekiller.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Remember Free App A Day? That was my favorite time for the appstore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Out of curiosity how much leverage does the UK have I’m this case after brexit

[+] [email protected] -12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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…

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

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