Comment by SanjayMehta
8 months ago
I would not hold my breath. They are adept at malicious compliance. Cook will do a cost/benefit assessment and will come up with another workaround.
8 months ago
I would not hold my breath. They are adept at malicious compliance. Cook will do a cost/benefit assessment and will come up with another workaround.
> They are adept at malicious compliance.
They just got fined 500 millions for failure to comply so I'm not sure adept is the adjective I would use.
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.
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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.
The EU should instead set targets.
Ie. "More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU".
That’s a terrible idea. How would they have any control over that. I think you are way overestimating the amount of iOS users that want to use software from outside the App Store.
If 3rd party stores didn't charge the Apple tax, I think you'd find plenty of apps moving to other stores, and within a matter of weeks more than half of users would have used a 3rd party store.
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That really depends on the store. If Value made a Steam store, or Nintendo made a Nintendo store with Nintendo exclusives I'd expect millions of installs.
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Agreed, the only realistic way they could hit such a target is to shut down their own app store...
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