Attacked in court by publishers including Epic Games (Fortnite), Apple has chosen to make concessions about the App Store and the purchases that users can make there.
While the California-based company takes a 30% commission on every financial transaction or 15% for newcomers and developers who made less than $ 1 million in revenue (after commission) in the previous year, it just open up the possibility for publishers of mobile applications to offer their customers means of payment outside the App Store.
Concretely, publishers will be able to send an email to users of their app to inform them that they can buy a subscription, for example, via their website. In this case, the publisher will not pay Apple a commission. In addition, this agreement provides for giving more leeway to developers to set the prices of their apps, subscriptions or purchases within the applications.
Still, this agreement, which offers more latitude for application creators, has not yet been ratified, while several legal actions accusing “Apple of taking advantage of its position” are still pending.
547 billion euros spent in 2020 on the App Store
Recently, US senators proposed a law to regulate the two dominant stores and force the Google-Apple duopoly to open up much more to competition. Seized of a complaint from Spotify, the European Commission estimated in April that the group at the apple has well “distorted the competition” to oust its rivals in the music streaming sector. In addition, the court ruling in the lawsuit that Epic Games has brought against Apple will be rendered in the coming weeks. The publisher of the game Fortnite, like many other small and large developers, accuses Apple of “abusing its dominant position by taking too high commissions on consumer spending and by imposing the App Store as a mandatory intermediary between them. and their users ”. An accusation also brought against Google about the Google Play Store which allows access to Android applications.
In 2020, users of the App Store platform spent around $ 547 billion on apps, according to Apple. The apple firm specified in a statement in early June that small developers (less than a million downloads and less than $ 1 million in revenue over one year) now represent 90% of publishers on the App Store and that their income has tripled since 2015.