"The Core Technology Fee (CTF) is an element of the business terms in the EU that reflects the value Apple provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world."
I feel sick. Yet, I am intrigued by what kind of drugs the PR team at Apple is taking... ;)
In my opinion, Apple's proprietary APIs provide a negative value to developers. Shuffling APIs around for no obvious reason is why none of my old iOS / Mac apps still work. I've been forced to issue refunds to people who upgraded their macOS and then afterwards noticed that my apps don't work anymore. And since Apple owns the customer relationship, we couldn't even send an email to warn them that upgrading will break their setup. (Pro Tools had to do that on basically every OS X upgrade.)
On Windows, things JUST WORK! :) and they've continued working with almost no maintenance for almost 9 years. The Windows version is, thus, highly profitable.
But the Mac version was a financial disaster. And discontinued.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I was super happy with Apple from about 2008 to about 2014 and shipped multiple iOS and Mac apps. But needless to say, my impression of them has soured when they started treating us developers badly. I'm now using Pop! OS as daily driver and it kinda feels as nice as OS X was before the stupidification efforts started.
> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first.
The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices.
The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
Yeah this is what I really don't understand. They say they have to be compensated for their R&D work and for providing the APIs and cloud services etc. Okay.
They have to be "compensated" in the intellectual property[0] sense of "we reserve the right to invent new reasons why we need to be compensated". Nothing is ever truly "paid for" or "owned" here.
I’m not sure what % of their R&D budget comes from the $99 fee vs various other AppStore percentage based fees. But… should it be a flat fee? It seems sort of reasonable to charge more successful apps more, they are apparently benefiting more from the ecosystem, right? Like progressive taxation. (If anything, why not institute increasing developer “apple tax” brackets?)
It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?
I think you'd be hard pressed to take the $99/yr they make from the dev program fee and use it to cover the salaries for the engineers implementing and maintaining all of iOS' developer-facing APIs.
Who decided that developers should be the ones paying for the development of those APIs in the first place? Are we just going to ignore Apple's own products and services that their platform allows them to profit off of? And the market share afforded to them by supporting popular third-party apps and services?
There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.
Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.
Isn't having good apps/api a selling point for apple hardware (where they already make massive amount of money), why can't that be a motivation by itself?
and what about the devices itself? doesn't apple get money from selling iphones and ipads?
The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.
Maybe Apple's goal is to become irrelevant enough to not be subjected to the DMA. I mean, making developers despise you is a brilliant first step towards such an end!
Why is size a question here? If apple is subject now, but then dropped to 1/10th the number of users, could they suddenly no longer be required to adhere to the DMA? Why is the size of the provider suddenly a test to determine if consumer protections are in order?
The DMA, digital markets act, is about fair competition, not consumer protection. If you got 5 users, you do not have the necessary leverage to matter.
> The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.
it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".
And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.
And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.
In the EU, the spirit of the laws is what counts in court, not the letter of the law. That means it's a lot easier to understand things if you start with the intended consequences:
Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.
We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.
Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.
You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.
> Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.
if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.
if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.
And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.
Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.
regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.
Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.
The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.
And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.
But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.
Everyone knows the problem has nothing to do with openness or whatever, but that it comes down to the 30% fee and companies not wanting to pay it.
The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.
Game distribution
Steam 30% (25% after $10M, 20% after $50M)
Epic 12%
Humble 25% (15% to Humble, 10% to charity)
GOG 30%
Console
Microsoft 30%
Playstation 30%
Xbox 30%
Nintendo 30%
Mobile
Apple 30%
Google 30%
Physical
Gamestop 30%
Amazon 30%
Best Buy 30%
Walmart 30%
Having tracked API changes fairly closely on macOS and iOS for many years now, I can’t think of too many that were just pointless furniture shuffling. Nearly all of them were to enable addition of new features or to improve developer QoL in some way — dropping 32-bit support for example allowed them to make long desired improvements in AppKit that were impractical prior due to quirks in the way Objective-C works.
That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking if I found myself unable or unwilling to do quick spot checks on each platform my apps run at least once a year, I’d just drop support for those platforms or discontinue the app.
That’s not to say that Apple is blameless here, but I think Microsoft has set an unrealistic standard (while also making some things much more difficult for themselves… Windows on ARM for example will never materialize so long as developers expect to be able to toss a binary over the wall and abandon it for a decade, because no matter how good an x86 compat layer is, it’s still significantly worse than native).
> That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking
There is a fine difference between keeping old binaries running and maintaining your application. I don't expect certain applications to be maintained, but I expect them to run on newer versions of OS for many years. If you think this is impossible, Apple can learn a lot from Microsoft and Linux. And IMHO, Microsoft didn't make unrealistic standards. One of the reasons why Windows has been the most dominant OS for years is exceptional backward compatibility.
16 bit support got dropped from Windows over a decade ago. It's not like macOS drops things at random, Monumental architecture changes are good reasons to break any apps that hadn't been touched in x years.
No, it's still there in the 32-bit version of Windows (10, anyway.) Windows 11 doesn't support 32-bjt, so I suppose you could say it was dropped then, but Windows 10 is still supported.
It's important for platforms to support works of art indefinitely. It is not reasonable to expect, say, decade-old games to be updated (something that can involve weeks or months of work because underlying toolkits may need to be updated as well). This was a huge issue when Apple killed 32-bit support.
That's how platforms are killed by neglect. They become locked into their old forms and become replaced wholesale instead of evolving piece by deprecated piece.
Windows on ARM will never materialize because Qualcomm can't make compelling hardware for it to run on.
Keep in mind that the M1 at launch was as fast as a lot of Intel's lineup running emulated x86 apps. That's what Qualcomm needs to be able to pull off. If the performance is there then people will buy the laptops. That changes the developer story from "please recompile and retest your apps so they'll run on laptops nobody's buying" to "if you recompile your app it'll run 20% faster on this already screaming fast laptop chip".
Proficiency in emulating x86 is just one piece of the puzzle, though. It helped drive M1 adoption to be sure, but users also had a lot of confidence that developers would pull through and provide native binaries in a timely manner, catapulting the capabilities and battery life of their shiny new laptops even further. Apple and third party Mac devs had pulled it off twice already, so there was good reason to believe that they’d do it again.
If the new Qualcomm chips have good performance, it’ll drive sales initially, but enthusiasm will fizzle if 2-3 years down the road developers aren’t making meaningful efforts to port their Windows versions to ARM, because a Windows on ARM device running mostly emulated processes is almost certainly going to fall behind M-series Macs running mostly native in performance and battery life. If Qualcomm can’t keep up substantial performance improvements on a yearly cadence, they also risk getting lapped by traditional x86 machines.
> but users also had a lot of confidence that developers would pull through and provide native binaries in a timely manner, catapulting the capabilities and battery life of their shiny new laptops even further.
Yea. There was a real concerted effort by not Apple employees to get all these *modern* tools working on M1s. I remember at the company I was at, a small handful of engineers working diligently to get our internal dev software and processes working on M1s.
Reminds me of this: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."
> They don't have to believe into what they write.
Imagine the level of sociopathy required for the job. Truly soulless, despicable work, but I almost feel sorry for them. Like, could they even form an authentic human connection anymore, when they have sold out, given up so much humanity to an indifferent market creature? How would you feel about an "I love you" coming from someone payed to lie and manipulate?
The amount of backwards compatibility that Windows has built in is frankly insane. I've been going through a catalog of games and making sure they can run on modern Windows. Other than games that were written strictly for 16-bit, I haven't run into a game that can't be made to run. Sure, some require patches in the form of DLL shims, but it's rare that I even have to break out compatibility mode.
I feel sick. Yet, I am intrigued by what kind of drugs the PR team at Apple is taking... ;)
In my opinion, Apple's proprietary APIs provide a negative value to developers. Shuffling APIs around for no obvious reason is why none of my old iOS / Mac apps still work. I've been forced to issue refunds to people who upgraded their macOS and then afterwards noticed that my apps don't work anymore. And since Apple owns the customer relationship, we couldn't even send an email to warn them that upgrading will break their setup. (Pro Tools had to do that on basically every OS X upgrade.)
On Windows, things JUST WORK! :) and they've continued working with almost no maintenance for almost 9 years. The Windows version is, thus, highly profitable.
But the Mac version was a financial disaster. And discontinued.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I was super happy with Apple from about 2008 to about 2014 and shipped multiple iOS and Mac apps. But needless to say, my impression of them has soured when they started treating us developers badly. I'm now using Pop! OS as daily driver and it kinda feels as nice as OS X was before the stupidification efforts started.