Can you feel it? The Apple world is abuzz with something. Are they bees? It would be exciting. There haven’t been any bees since that fateful summer of 13, when a laid-off Scott Forstall took up beekeeping in an attempt to stay active.
But no, it’s not bees this time.
According to Mark Gurman, while the Apple headphones will be the headliner of this year’s WWDC keynote, another announcement will also rock the Apple world.
Apple is working on overhauling the software to open up the iPhone to sideloading – the downloading of apps outside of its official store – to comply with new European regulations by next year.
Now, before you get all excited or hot and bothered or relentlessly stung by bees, remember this is Apple we’re talking about here. The company has a strict policy of giving a millimeter where regulators legally mandate an inch.
” What will they do ? GOOD We? Ha-ha-haaaa! We can pay your fine of tens of millions of dollars a week until the universe heats up and never notice!”
It’s not an actual quote, but it might as well be.
As you can imagine, this rumor has everyone on Twitter, even Mastodon. Marco Arment commented on a MacRumors article claiming that developers would no longer have to pay Apple’s 15-30% fee:
No chance. Apple will simply use another method to collect its “commission”: https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitlement/
The link provided by Arment is for Apple’s policy on dating apps in the Netherlands, where the company details its expectations for continuing to get paid even if the developer uses its own payment system.
IDG
Le Macalope thinks Arment is right, that Apple will always try to get paid for apps that are sideloaded, at least as a starting position. It would take additional regulation to get the company to allow the kind of freewheeling, side-loading everything they used on smartphones in the old west.
Arming continues:
Remember: Tim Cook views our customers as THEIR customers, our sales as THEIR sales, and the 30% as what they rightfully deserve for giving us a platform to which we offer no other value.
In effect. Which is pretty funny when you think about how Tim Cook described the App Store in his interview with QG two weeks ago :
“The App Store we developed was intended to create a place of trust where developers and users could come together in a two-way transaction,” Cook explains.
Nobody else involved in this transaction, Tim?
It certainly seems like a messy business to have to get developers to report revenue outside of App Store payment processing, but Macalope can’t believe Apple would be willing to pass up that money. If so, it would risk turning the iOS App Store into the not-sterile but surely second-rate regional mall that the Mac App Store represents. The kind of mall with a Ross Dress For Less as an anchor. The kind of mall with generic soda machines instead of Coke. Ironically, the kind of mall with a third-party Apple retailer instead of an Apple Store.
If developers are able to charge the same amount and take 100% of the revenue, the only reason they would stay on the App Store is for discovery. And if you stay on the App Store for that… well, God help you.
Looking again at Cook’s quote, Macalope thinks he figured out what Cook really meant. This is not a bilateral transaction. These are two bilateral transactions. One between the developer and Apple and one between the customer and Apple.
It makes more sense.
