Apple was sued on Monday by French app developers that accused the company of violating U.S. antitrust law by overcharging them to use its App Store.
The plaintiffs in the proposed class action include Société du Figaro, which develops the Figaro news app; L’Équipe 24/24, which develops the L’Équipe sports news and streaming app, and Le Geste, an association of French content providers.
According to the complaint filed in the federal court in Oakland, California, Apple has abused its monopoly power over app distribution on iOS-based mobile devices by mandating only one app store for those devices…
The plaintiffs are represented by the U.S. law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, and Paris-based Fayrouze Masmi-Dazi.
Monday’s lawsuit resembles an earlier Hagens Berman case against Apple, which resulted last August in a $100 million settlement for smaller iOS developers that called Apple’s commissions excessive. read more
In June, the firm reached a $90 million settlement with Alphabet Inc’s Google over its app store’s treatment of developers.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s App Store isn’t a charity and it’s not free to operate, you cheese-eatin’ surrender monkeys.
How much did it cost developers to have their apps burned onto CDs, boxed, shipped, displayed on store shelves prior to Apple remaking the world for the better for umpteenth time? Apple incurs costs to store, review, organize, surface, and distribute apps to over one billion users. — MacDailyNews, June 10, 2022
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Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
These will only keep coming until Apple relents.
How many different countries / unions are in the process of either suing them or have pending legislation?
In days of old an organization producing a software product (sometimes referred to as “developers”) to sit on a store shelf might only get 40% of the retail price. Some stores even gave those developers as little as 33%. That is after all the production costs of creating disks/CDs/DVDs and packaging which could easily run to 5-10% of the retail costs. Thus the organization could easily end up getting just 30% or less of the retail price.
Apple charges large developers 30% of the retail price leaving 70% to the developers. Apple charges small developers 15% of the retail price leaving 85% to the developers. Developers upload the software (and hopefully upload bug fixes) to a cost that is a very small fraction of the days of old.
Developers are now paying to Apple the equivalent to what they used to get net (and small developers are paying half that).
Large developers are just whining and running to the courts hoping Apple will end up paying them more. It’s simply greed and nothing more. Apple has deep pockets and the developers that are suing are just trying to get some more money from Apple and nothing more.
Doesn’t matter. Artificial single channel sales. Dies Adibe need Apple to sell its wares if not for thus artificial restriction? Does MS? And what should I have to deal with Apple if I wanted to write some shareware? I don’t want them between ny customer and me.
Censorship is only ethical on one’s own property.
You can, it is called web app, it is called Android, it is called Windows, it is called Linux, it is called ChromeOS. Where do you get this weird sense of entitlement that you get to sell to an Apple customer but how dare Apple software be in the mix? Based on that I assume you are just another internet ahem poster.
But even then you can sell to Apple customers for virtually nothing. Tiny App Store fee follow app coding rules that apply to everyone, make it a free app, sell in app “features” on your website. You are now in a store that has upwards of a billion users who happened to have more disposable income than average. Now all you have to do is spend a lot on ad dollars to point customers to your website for feature purchases. Plus you sell app user data for monetization. Of course Apple App Store rules keep your data recording limited so I am certain that would upset you. Just as Apple is far better at keeping their customers (the vast majority who are not technical) away from the multitudes of scammers malware and data harvesting. But I’m guessing in your weirdly entitled world the whole world of Apple users could get scammed all day and night if Apple’s cut gets eliminated.
Apple intentionally limits the APIs that Safari has access to… you still can’t use push notifications in a web app for example.
The other major limitations are an extremely small offline cache that is aggressively cleared by the OS… imagine iOS deleting your apps without telling you even without that option enabled.
Most apps could easily be a web app, but because of Apple they’ve instead been pushed into being a native app instead… one that Apple can of course take a cut off the top of.
Thanks Dan. That’s a much more interesting comment than many of the others I’ve read.
Web Apps are not native code. They also require you be connected at the time. No good for the middle of the sea or the Sahara.
After consulting with Apple BS, you win the day. Do iOS apps run on Windows, Android, Linux or ChromeOS? Dishonesty is not nice!