Devs Say Apple Still Flouting Eu's Digital Markets Act Six Months On

Not glorified webpages. Full on apps. Preferably by the banks themselves (sorry bedroom hobbyists, I don't quite trust you with my banking details yet!)

Indeed. It took a court battle, and holding Apple in contempt of court, and perjury by one of Apple's executives before Apple was forced to do it (did it comply?).

Why not everywhere?

> Even in the store, Apple charges 15% if your revenue is below $1 million and charges 15% for renewals after the first year.

No, Apple was going to charge 27% on sales happening outside of the App Store, if linked in the app.

Also, you keep trying to diminish/dismiss this as if was no big deal.

Also, the latest court order was a victory for Apple, not for devs. Apple, again, can charge commission in external links, restrict language in those links etc.

Many of those are things where the value of a single user is very low and then you need a significant audience just to earn an ordinary salary.

> Software has near 0 marginal costs

But it has significant development costs, and the fact that you're required to use Apple's store makes them even higher, because their restrictions are incompatible with free software licenses, which locks you out of even using LGPL code on iOS, much less anything else.

Apple's hardware has those fancy chips in it, right? Suppose you want to create a front end for Blender and run it on iOS. Your front end doesn't have to use the same license as Blender itself if it's a separate program, so you could charge for it. But Blender is GPL so you can't run it on iOS at all. Then you'd have to write Blender yourself, by which point you're talking something that would need a million a year in revenue, and a 30% deadweight loss could very well make the difference between viable and not.

It's also incredibly disheartening, because you do the work and take the risk and then if you actually succeed you know someone else is going to cut out a huge chunk of the revenue, which discourages people from making the attempt.

> Well known publishers have tried the pay $10 once for a premium game on iOS and users wouldn’t pay for it.

Which is kind of weird when they're empirically willing to do it on other platforms, right?

But that's what happens when you establish a reputation for being capricious while taking a large cut. Who wants to make a significant investment into a platform when the platform is eroding their profits and there is a non-trivial chance they could be arbitrarily cut off at any time with no recourse? At which point the users come to expect apps to be scummy and become disinclined to pay for them up front.

The cookie banner requirement is itself a widespread misconception because the actual rule is neither specific to cookies (it would also cover other locally stored data) nor universal (for example it doesn't require specific consent for locally storing necessary data like session/login mechanics or the contents of a shopping basket).

The requirements for consent that do exist originate in the ePrivacy Directive. That directive was supposed to be superseded by a later ePrivacy Regulation that would have been lex specialis to the GDPR - possibly the only actual link between any of the EU law around cookies and the GDPR - but in the end that regulation was never passed and it was formally abandoned earlier this year.

So for now rules about user consent for local data storage in the EU - and largely still in the UK - do exist but they derive from the ePrivacy Directive and they are widely misunderstood. And while there has been a lot of talk about changes to EU law that might improve the situation with the banners so far talk is all it has been.

It certainly does require informed consent in other situations though and the dreaded cookie banners were the industry's attempt to interpret that legal requirement.

The defaults aren’t really relevant because they don’t come up. You can disable Siri and use the action button to use any other app as an assistant.

I'll try your approach, though, and report back.