'Sabre-rattling': Australian app developers wrestle with Apple's controversial EU rule
Spotify is among the app providers to have hit out at Apple over EU enforced changes to the App Store. Australian developers expect the overhaul to have an impact on these shores.
The European Union's war against Big Tech rages on, and Apple is once again a target. Like many previous clashes, the effects will reverberate far beyond the actual battlefield.
Unlike Google's Android, Apple has always denied companies like Samsung and Epic Games the right to open app stores to compete with the App Store. Through the Digital Markets Act, European regulators are forcing Apple to pry open its iOS operating system to allow for such third-party competition.
Apple last week outlined how it will comply by the March 6 deadline. It will introduce a suite of safety features, to ensure iPhones and iPads are protected from tainted software downloaded from alternative stores. More importantly, it will offer developers two options for how their apps will be distributed. They can continue under the current model, where Apple gets up to a 30% cut of revenues, or they can elect to give Apple only 10% and incur a "Core Technology Fee" of €0.50 (80c) for every download after the millionth one.
Under those new terms, a developer whose app gets downloaded 5 million times in European countries would have to pay Apple €2 million ($3.2 million) even if it generated no revenue.
