Apple Loses Uk App Store Monopoly Case, Penalty Might Near $2b
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Apple loses a UK court case over alleged App Store monopoly abuse, potentially facing a $2B penalty, sparking debate over the fairness of Apple's commission rates and the effectiveness of antitrust regulations.
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is what the parent comment said, which overlooked web and assumed native app installs
That doesn’t describe Apple’s situation though. Most businesses don’t distribute software at all; those that do mostly don’t need to distribute native iOS apps; those that do mostly don’t need to pay App Store fees; those that do mostly have to pay 15%. It’s only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that need to pay 30%.
Good on the UK for not backing down. 15% or 150%, Apple should not be exempted from participating in a true market economy.
This case only concerns Apple's App Store fees before 2020; it was a blanket 30% charge for paid apps until they introduced those changes following the whole Epic Games legal saga etc.
Apple are not paying a penalty for anything after 2020 when the new rules allowing those with lower turnover to pay 15% came into effect etc.
> It’s only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that need to pay 30%
During the first 12 years of the App Store, everyone paid 30%.
This is still not correct. The original claim was “every single business on the planet”. That’s ridiculously overstated.
Even if you massively narrow the scope to only businesses that have iOS apps that make money directly through the app, it’s still not true. The 30% specifically applies to buying digital goods and services through iOS apps.
Take Uber, for instance. They make vast amounts of money through their iOS app. They do not have to pay Apple 30%, or 15%, or anything beyond the basic $99/yr developer account fee. They absolutely do not have to pay 30% for access to the platform.
This is not correct at all and grossly misrepresents how Apple collects revenues on the store - the 30% applied to the list price of any paid app as well.
Prior to 2020, if your app had a price tag on the app store, you paid 30% of said price to apple on every sale. There is no ifs, no buts, no lower rate for smaller players like today. You had a price tag, you paid 30%, whether you sold 100m copies or 5.
The decision taken by the CAT here concerns the fee for paid apps (what they call the distribution charge) as well as in app fees, the latter of which had some exemptions for specific transaction types from the likes of Amazon, Uber etc (but famously not Spotify or Epic Games, or the Amazon Kindle app etc etc...). The "distribution charge" did not.
Only apps with more than $1,000,000 annual revenue are paying 30%. Most apps are smaller than that and are hit with a 15% fee.
The percentage rate should go down the more you sell. That’s usually how scale works.
And of course, when they announced this big discount it was reported to apply to about 5% of actual IAP spending, which would make the average commission fee being paid around 29%.
tldr; it's a weaselly discount.
Yes it is. The percentage of developers in the App Store who make more than $1 million per year is tiny.
According to this analysis[1], it's a single digit percentage. Hardly anybody pays 30%.
[1]:https://sensortower.com/blog/app-store-revenue-share-analysi...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/small-developers-on-t...
The UK is one of the most arbitrarily defined places in terms of law. It’s why they can have and enforce a 2-tier system. “Stirring things up” is literally a charge a judge can arbitrarily rule on. Place is hilarious.
He's the genius behind that.
The same Robert Bork whose SCOTUS nomination got held up by the Senate in a deluge of fire and fury, only for Antonin Scalia to get the job and make the same kind of rulings much more articulately.
More interesting would be if they'd be forced to allow other app stores.
and google is surreptitiously flagging several of the top alternatives to their spyware bloatware on android, as a prelude to the change.
this is clearly an action that can be easily attributed to incompetence, but is a thinly veiled way to ensure a flood of verified open source joining early on the ransom for signing whitelist.
Where does the 17.5% come from? I can't find it here or in the link Reuters article. Is that just the number that the tribunal decided was fair? If so I'd love to read the analysis of how they got there.
919. The comparators available to us (the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Steam’s lower headline rate) suggest that the competitive rate of commission would be in the range of 12 to 20%. We do think it is reasonable to make some adjustment to that range to accommodate the points made by Apple about its premium brand, the quality of its offering and its established market position. However, we do not think those would be sufficient to displace the upper end of the range and are likely to operate mainly at the lower end, where the offerings are arguably less attractive to users for those reasons.
920. Applying again an approach of “informed guesswork”, on the basis of the evidence before us, we find that the likely range of Apple’s Commission for iOS app distribution services in the counterfactual is between 15% and 20%. For the purposes of quantifying the overcharge (for both the exclusionary abuses and the excessive and unfair pricing abuse) we will use the mid-point of that range, which is 17.5%.
It’s from a tribunal. They make judgements.
By your logic, each of the two companies could use the other as an example and then both get away with breaking competition law. Two wrongs don't make a right.
There's a section "112. On 10 June 2022, the CMA published the final report in its MEM Study, which contains a number of findings in relation to both Apple and Google."
It's amazing that you never even tried to read the actual document but already immediately assume a position that is trivially proven wrong.
Interesting to accuse people of not reading the document in a post where you don’t read a 3 sentence comment (and reply to the wrong one, but we can chalk that up to HN UI).
Imagine if you actually read and understood the document instead of pressing on with your ignorance.
The court considered Google Play. And explained how Google Play has the exact dame issues as AppStore. So whatever Google Play is doing is irrelevant to a case against Apple.
It's not a difficult document to read and understand. Just lengthy.
I would quote relevant sections, but that would be a completely wasted effort.
Adieu.
Apple bans all such activities, has held the entire app ecosystem and seeks rent. If they think their offering is superior, then they should be OK competing. The fact that they have not opened it up says that they are happy to overcharge.
Remember, competition is always good. Let Stripe and Apple duke it out on payment processing, and let the best one win.
Let games me hosted both on Epic Store and App Store, and let users decide where to download it from.
That will be fair.
Apple completely opens up the iOS platform. Do whatever you like.
Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.
And people will. That's how competition works. If someone thinks they can make a profit by offering a) better product b) same product at a cheaper price, you'll see investment.
VCs will be pouring money to capture that market.
And it will likely be much better too.
Add a licensing fee for UIKit, Core Data, Core Text, Core Audio, Core Graphics, Metal, Network, SwiftUI, Quartz and all the other libraries apps use constantly.
Heck, why not for the OS itself? If you don't want to pay, they could conceivably dump you into an isolated VM and force you to write your own OS and userspace device drivers.
We used to pay for OSes and OS upgrades. Heck, you still have to pay for Windows.
The idea that devs owe Apple for use of their SDKs and API development is absurd. Apple already profits from it as people by their phones due to the amount of third party app support. See how Apple's profits go when WhatsApp, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix Uber, banking apps, are all no longer available on their devices.
What Apple really needs to do is mimic their old policy of no fees except for games. Let everyone develop for it, and then rug pull by making the fees apply to everything
But they can’t do it twice. So the Vision Pro ends up with no ecosystem
We would be back to the real days of computing.
That's what people literally did, multiple times, for multiple systems, and did a much better job than encumbents
It's entirely possible to build apps to run on OSX without touching Apple tools .. except for notarization, which they force you to use.
The competition will find the most profitable process, not the one that serves customers best necessarily.
The biggest change the iPhone users are going to see an increase in spyware. They'll also notice in a few years a bunch of websites go Chrome only.
Why is that for one platform, everything needs to go through AppStore while the other it is OK - and both are equally secure?
Are you sure you're not falling for Apple's reality distortion field?
iPhones outnumber Macs something like 10:1. The user base tech literacy is lower on average. The usage habits are different.
The payoff for creating freemium and ad slop stuff on iOS is way higher.
And also not require those apps to be also approved by Apple, which they are trying to do with AltStore and the DMA.
Users should be able to go to a dev's website, pay them directly, and download the ipa and install it with a click from the website. Having to go through any kind of "app store" at all should be optional.
Case in point: Steam is taking 30% too. But you've heard much less fuss over it, right? Why? Is it because of players' cult-like behavior around Steam? (probably partially) But more importantly it's because Valve doesn't own Windows and Steam Deck is a far smaller fry.
A closer example is game consoles, whose associated stores also take 30%, and nobody seems to complain about.
I'm not sure what you mean. Every game dev now refers what Steam algorithm gives you "organic sale."
It's difficult for me to really trust this stat though because purchasing decisions are complicated.
Apple is incredibly strict with the content they allow to the point that it feels like a they exclusively cater to children. It’s easier to vibe code the apps that I want under my own developer account because at least I can side load those.
Steam does allow this. But, has recently started restricting some adult content [2].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/19/steve-jobs-android-porn/
[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/whats-going-on-with-steam-and-...
It's because Valve doesn't routinely screw over developers and gamers. Steam never removed a game from Steam because it could cause "customer confusion" because it was too similar to one of Valve's own games. When Valve released the Steam Deck, they didn't layer on a bunch of trash for "safety", they sold gamers a portable Arch Linux box that, other than running Windows games on Linux, also runs local LLMs, games from GOG, and development environments. You can write games for Steam on a Steam Deck, compile them, and run them. It's the exact opposite of what Apple is doing - Valve offers total control, and you can use it to do awesome stuff without having to pay a tithe to some overlord corporation that thinks they still own hardware that you purchased from them.
Cult-like or not, I find it reasonable to support companies that do things which you agree with. Valve's non-adversarial approach to business (as opposed to many rent-seeking corps these days) probably helps that perception.
Or provide alternative ways to install software.
This is a problem of their own creation.
How do you solve that problem for side-loaded apps?
I have vivid memories of loads of relatives in the Windows XP era with browsers laden with toolbars that spy on everything they do and slow the computer to a crawl. Those users see something like the iPhone as a massive breath of fresh air. Nothing you install on the App Store can inject adware into the rest of the operating system like that.
That has literally fuck all to do with the app store. That's called sandboxing - the app store has nothing to do with sandboxing. They are different things.
Why are we being dishonest.
If they ignore the warnings and get scammed because they are unable to identify reputable software from disreputable software, they learn a life lesson. Life goes on. There should be no societal expectation that everyone is prevented from ever taking an action that could bring themselves harm, by preventing them from taking actions at all.
This shows that younger kids aren’t using traditional PCs, at least not to the same degree. They just use phones and tablets. At best they may play games on their PC by installing via Steam. Very few of them are becoming proper technologists (able to install and use any software, script the computer, or write their own software).
The phenomenon you're talking about now is so completely in another universe that it's insane you would conflate the two. I actually can't finish typing this response properly because it's hurting my head every second I continue to think about your argument. To sum it up really shortly: smartphones universal, required to even participate in society, people now given smartphones from early age, multi-functional as phones, cameras, etc, they fit in your pocket, more than sufficient for normie use cases and in fact more suitable for many use cases that don't entail sitting at a desk at home, computers are specialised tools for specialised functionality that many people have no need for. There are 100000000 reasons why smartphone usage displaces PC usage that aren't because they explicitly abandoned PCs for the crime of allowing them to choose what software to install, which was your claim. Not even having mentioned that globally, 75% of smartphone usage is Android which doesn't lock its users in the cage (for the time being).
Now you have a multibillion-dollar supranational corporation playing judge jury and executioner for any of your choices.
E.g. App Store prohibits adult content (which is not illegal). Prohibits emulators (which are not illegal) [1]. Prohibits or hinders the use of better alternatives to pre-installed apps (Photos, Camera, Maps, Siri) [1]. Removes any and all apps if there's a hint of displeasure from wannabe dictators.
Basically, you don't have your range of choices. You have Apple's range of choices.
[1] Some of these choices are now better on iOS precisely due to Apple losing the fight against governments. They finally allowed emulators after they lost a battle against alternative app stores. They finally gave options to change some default apps (but not all, and not in all countries, see e.g. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma...)
Edit: It's also telling that you need to go back to XP to make your case. It's 2025. Security practices have improved a ton to give people more protection from themselves without outright taking away their freedom to make choices.
Also, let's again re-iterate that Android usage outnumbers iOS by three-to-one, so it is clear in practice that people are in fact willing to adopt a phone that allows them to make mistakes (if they try very hard to).
Which actually makes the case for "Apple cannot control what people install on their devices or demand that apps pay them and can't even use other payment providers"
That’s how fine PC’s have been doing software.
Search for your preferred PC brand and list of CVEs.
I’ve had Windows / malware roll back a BIOS update to a previous version that had a know (published CVE) remote code execution vulnerability complete with published proof of concept.
Having a single way to pay, subscribe, cancel, browse apps, beta test versions, and update apps, proved to be a huge game changer for making software accessible while also minting millionaires around the world in terms of small development teams.
Incidentally, while looking this up, I discovered that 2/3rds of that $522b in app revenue comes from in-app advertisements. And here somebody was trying to mock Windows for being adware friendly circa 2005. Good lord.
What percentage is consumer vs corporate spend in each category? How much of that 373b is SaaS revenue vs local installed apps?
> And here somebody was trying to mock Windows for being adware friendly circa 2005.
The adware in 2005 was actively hostile and infested entire systems. It replaced browsers, search engines, and even injected itself onto every webpage you viewed. In contrast mobile ads are interstitials during game play.
Just by companies listed on the stock market who got that data "legally" in our current walled and "safe" garden.
I appreciate a lockdown for kids and elders, but let's not pretend our data is locked safely away in this walled garden.
It would be a total disaster!
2. Apps are actively encouraged by Apple and Google to be spyware.
3. An app store cannot prevent spyware.
4. Sandboxing is unrelated to an app store.
5. Most source code is not available on the app store, and Apple and Google are actively hostile to open source apps.
6. There is zero source auditing done on the app store.
If there's any benevolent gatekeeping, I'm not seeing it.
They do not review source code. There is malware on the Apple app store, because they do not review apps for malware. Because they do not review source code.
Any other opinion is just not true.
It's not that it's not worth something, it's that they're abusing their patents and monopoly to extract further compensation after I already bought the device.
If Apple wants to take that defence, they should be required to have abandoned every patent they own on iPhones prior to my purchase of the device.
If Apple believes their portfolio of patents protecting the iPhone is worthless, they should abandon them. That they haven't precludes the argument that they are.
Edit: I don't, for instance, have issues with how they use patents with macbooks. There they don't abuse their monopoly on certain hardware features to get and extract money from a secondary monopoly on software.
I don't think that supports your case that Apple's patent keeps other phones from being equivalent given that the sensor isn't in the iPhone and it's not even Apple's patent.
For what it's worth, I'm typing this on a Pixel which is also a rounded rectangle, so I'm skeptical that patent is really holding other phones back, either
I wasn't specifically thinking of that case, though it's likely why my mind chose that sensor as an example. Apple has patents on blood oxygen sensors, of course, because Apple has patents on basically everything they do. Here's a recent example that I just picked off of Google https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2024216430B2/en?q=(Oxyge...
Yes, all the other phone manufacturers also have patents. Yes, these also all hold Apple back. That's the deal we make with patents, you invent something, you get a monopoly on producing that thing.
All the other phone manufacturers are basically respecting that deal. Apple is not - they're taking that monopoly and extending it to a monopoly on distribution of software which just happens to run on the device with the thing. This is what anti-trust law, the doctrine of patent misuse, etc should prevent. Either they don't get a monopoly on the things they invented (and all the other phones get better) or they don't get to abuse that monopoly to extract money from people who already purchased the device - i.e. after the patent rights are exhausted.
Equivalent as in a literal exact copy of an iPhone. Lots of factories can produce those, seeing as Apple contracts out production. If we get rid of those patents and give free choice to those factories and consumers, well they would be glad to produce a modified "Open" iPhone.
Lets make a free market by stopping this government intervention of the patent system that supports monopolies.
What matters is the competitive situation. Given that you're practically required to have either a Google or Apple device to participate normally in modern society, Apple and Google should be precluded from forcing customers and suppliers[0] to use their other services, like payment services, app stores, delivery networks, ad networks, etc.
But if Apple were the 4th biggest phone platform with at most 10% of the market, Apple would definitely be entitled to remain a walled garden. Even if their phones had features no-one else can implement due to patents.[1]
0: E.g. app developers
1: I'd claim this is the only position that is consistent with being in favor of patents. But I'm mildly anti-patent, so YMMV.
I.e. I'm entitled to anti-trust protection. Or I'm entitled to patent-misuse protection. I don't really care which set of laws you put it under.
Even if Apple were 10% of the phone market they would still have 100% of the distributing software to devices with Apple's patented technology market, and that should be enough for anti trust protection to kick in.
(I'm also mildly anti patent, but I've been carefully selecting only arguments in this thread that I believe are entirely consistent with a pro patent belief system. E.g. if Apple treated their phones like their laptops - where they also have patents - all the positions and arguments I've taken would not have an issue with their behavior)
If you want to buy Apple cables because you think it is better, sure - that's great. But preventing ugreen cables from working makes no sense.
You shouldnt say 'buy a different phone' if you want to use ugreen cables.
If you're a consumer, you should be on the side of more choice and more competition. If you're a Apple/Apple employee, you should 100% say what you just did :)
And if new entrants can't enter the market because the existing monopolies make it impractical, then what?
>It’s an admission we’re all at the mercy of Apple until daddy government steps in.
That has always been the case when market participants become too dominant e.g.
United States v. Paramount Pictures (1948)
United States v. AT&T (1984)
United States v. Microsoft (2001)
Anti-trust regulation would have dealt with Apple, Google and co by now if the lobbying weren't so out of control compared to previous times.
Or if you only want to use iPhones then it seems like the downsides of the locked down app store aren't worth switching in which case it seems like you've already made your choice.
The app sideloading changes they're about to introduce[0]? Affects their Pixels, Samsungs, OnePlus, Sony, etc, old and new. It can't be disabled. The work around is to use ADB to install apks.
So while you have more choice of hardware, Android skins with more or less features, different long term support, prices, etc, in practice you're stuck with what Google wants. Your options are Apple or Google.
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[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-si...
I've always used this method: work out what are the most benefits, with the fewest annoying 'features', between various manufacturers that have items within your budget, and choose something. In my country we call it 'shopping'.
Ergo, if you care about maintaining a free market, then you care about limiting what kind of moves you can make in the free market, in order to preserve a free market. A truly free market with no rules has an end state where it is not a free market, more like a much more sophisticated version of the nobles of the land owning everything. So we declare many activities that make it difficult for others to compete that are not simply about manking a better product, "anti-competitive" and illegal.
Outside of Apple and Samsung (only because they make a lot of their own parts), the phone market is a commodity race to the bottom
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