The days of the exclusivity of the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad applications may be numbered. The Bloomberg agency assures that the apple company is preparing to allow alternative stores, pushed by the upcoming entry into force of the European Union’s Digital Markets Law (DMA), which will be mandatory for from 2024.
Bloomberg says Apple’s software and services engineers are making a major effort to open up some key elements of the company’s platforms to third parties. The changes will allow iPhone and iPad users to download software to their devices outside of the App Store, thereby avoiding the company’s restrictions and the commission it charges developers, which can reach up to 30% of the amount.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Law (DMA) entered into force on November 1, 2022, although the process for designating companies that meet a series of conditions that allow them to have advantages in their markets, to which the The EU calls gatekeepers (guardians of the doors) will begin on May 1, 2023. After each designation of these digital giants there will be a period of allegations and another more than six months of application, so the rule can only be applied from of 2024.
The companies considered gatekeepers will be those with an annual turnover in the European Union of at least 7,500 million euros in each of the last three years or an average market valuation of at least 75,000 million euros in the last year. In addition, it must provide the same platform service in at least three EU Member States.
Other conditions highlighted in the DMA are that companies have a minimum average of 45 million monthly end users established or located in the EU and at least 10,000 annual business users established in the EU in each of the three previous years.
Among the many obligations that the DMA will impose on large technology multinationals is allowing the installation and use of third-party applications or application stores that do not compromise the integrity of the device or operating system. Apple has always expressed itself against opening the download of apps on its mobile devices, considering that this endangers their security and privacy.
The CEO of the company, Tim Cook, has stated on occasion that this opening of iPhone downloads to alternative stores “would damage both privacy and security.” “Android has 47 times more malware than iOS. Why? -he has observed- Well, because we have designed iOS in such a way that there is an application store, and all applications are reviewed before going to the store”.
The opening of alternative app stores should affect Apple’s business, although of the 95 billion dollars that it has entered between the EU and the United Kingdom in the fiscal year of 2022, applications represent less than 2% of its total income. The App Store represents for the company around 6% of the 400,000 million dollars that it entered in this period.
The opening of downloads to third-party stores can mean, in practice, that many companies that do not want to pay commissions to Apple create their own download platform, which will force them to have access to several of them for the same apps that they already have. is currently available.
Apple anticipates that the changes to its operating systems will take effect from the update to iOS 17 in the fall of next year. The company is studying the possibility of imposing some security requirements, such as verification by Apple of each app and charging a commission for it even if they are later distributed outside its store.
Epic Games, maker of the mobile video game Fortnite, has opened a dispute with Apple over App Store fees. After charging within her app without paying Apple, she was banned from the store. Epic took Apple to court but they ruled that it used monopolistic practices, but a US court ruled that the apple company did not violate federal antitrust laws.
The entry into force of the DMA could mean other important changes in some of Apple’s policies with its devices and services, such as the opening of the NFT sensor of the iPhone to third-party apps, or the FindMy search service to different location tags. to Apple Airtags. The law also seeks interoperability between applications, such as messaging, although the supposed compatibility between apps like iMessage and WhatsApp seems technically unlikely, because one depends on the user account and the other on the phone number. In others of this type, what counts is the device.
