The law on digital markets must be respected in the territory of the 27 countries that make up the European Union. This forced Apple to adapt to the changes introduced in this antitrust law. Many of these changes They will change the way we know the iOS ecosystem with the arrival of alternative application stores or the release of the NFC chip for payments with systems other than Apple Pay. However, Why, if Apple has already put everything in place to extend these changes in the European Union, is it not doing so in the rest of the world?
Apple only collects 7% of App Store revenue in the European Union
In March, the changes will begin on Apple devices for all users in the European Union who updated to iOS 17.4, a version which is currently in beta period. This update includes over 300 changes to comply with European Union antitrust regulations, led by the Digital Markets Act we’ve heard so much about in recent years.
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One of the main modifications is the arrival of alternative application stores to the App Store users will thus be able to install third-party applications without going through the Apple Store. For the Big Apple, this is a serious security issue that goes against everything they have worked on in recent years when it comes to privacy and user protection, so Tim Cook commented at the economic conference with data for the first fiscal quarter a few days ago. .
Just for context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents approximately seven percent of our global App Store revenue.
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Furthermore, we were able to know that The revenue that Apple gets from the European Union App Store is only 7%. This means that the impact of economic gains may not be as great as expected. But this also explains one of the reasons why Apple might not have wanted to extend all these functions to the rest of the world. Changing payment methods and allowing NFC to pay with other payment systems represents a loss of revenue that is even lower if these changes are localized in a single region of the world.
However, Apple asks to be careful and wait for what this adoption will be. In fact, here’s what Tim Cook said a few days ago:
It is very difficult to accurately predict the choices developers and users will make. So we’ll see what happens in March.
