Last year, the Dutch equivalent of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission became one of the first regulators in the world to require Apple to give people multiple payment options for using dating apps on their phones. Apple has proposed a workaround, but the regulator says Apple needs to do more and has thusly issued $5.7 million fines for each of the past five weeks.
Shira Ovide for The New York Times:
In August, the A.C.M. issued an order that prohibited Apple from requiring dating apps to use only the company’s payment system, which enables Apple to collect a fee…
In response, Apple last month proposed a set of conditions that some app developers said was a hostile defiance of the Dutch regulator. Apple essentially said that dating apps in the country could use any payment system they wanted, but that Apple would collect a fee of 27 cents on each dollar of purchases that people made in the app, and require the dating companies to hand over information and audit it.
The regulator says that Apple’s new conditions don’t comply with the A.C.M. order. “Apple’s so-called ‘solutions’ continue to create too many barriers for dating-app providers that wish to use their own payment systems,” a spokesman for the A.C.M. said in a statement Monday.
A court in the Netherlands will most likely have to resolve the dispute with Apple. All regulation is slow and complicated, but this dispute shows that those involving tech companies with deep pockets might be even more so.
MacDailyNews Take: If a developer desires to include non-Apple payment methods in their app, a new app build and App Store submission would, of course, be required. That’s not too many “barriers” for dating-app developers.
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