this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
735 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
3039 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And Apple released a letter that sounds petty and greedy.
MS and Google are also continously fined billions by the EU over anti competitve and anti trust practices and, so they don't get particularly preferential treatment.
The issue here is that Apple only allows devs to let users sign up for their service through Apple. Apple also demands 30% of the subscription fee when doing this. They don't allow a developer to have a button in the app that allows to sign up through their website, or to mention that you can sign up through a website.
So the devs only have two options aside from not having an iOS app: Eat the cost and lose 30% of income to Apple, for who it's basically free money. Or charge the extra cost over the normal price to the user.
The EU has rules against this and to do business there you need to comply with those rules. Multi billion companies basically ignore those rules until they get fined, which in most cases is just considered cost of operation. After which they may or may not continue the practice if the fine is lower than what they'd lose by stopping.
"Reader" apps like Spotify can have a link to sign up on their website. There are more rules around than there maybe should be, but it's allowed, and Apple's letter says Spotify chooses not to do it.
Yeah, because that's basically irrelevant. Their problem is about where payment is made and how ridiculous it is to have users have to set up subscriptions on the web. Having them sign up there doesn't help that problem at all. It's just Apple fishing for more sympathy.