https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/25/apple-says-third-party-app-marketplace-creators-must-have-e1000000-letter-of-credit/
Apple today officially announced support for third-party app stores in the European Union, as part of iOS 17.4. In a...
Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.
Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.
The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.
This is why copyleft licenses like gpl, agpl, mit, creative commons exist. If they use those projects then the derivatives would also need to be open source.
Edit: mit is not copyleft
MIT is free for commercial use and just requires attribution, you aren't required to open source software derived from MIT licensed code.
GPL is also free for commercial use... all open source licenses are. The rendering engines used by Safari (and Chrome/Edge) are GPL.
GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.
Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.
Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.
If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.
The thing is that source code is just a small part of an application. For example, Quake games are open sourced, but their assets like textures, models and music are not. Thus you can't just compile the game and call it a day. Another example is all kinds of certificates, they are never part of the source. You can compile the app, but it won't work.
Source code, GPL or otherwise, doesn't matter.
Thanks for pointing it out. I was making a project that uses this license and derivatives had to use MIT license. I forgot that it's not copyleft and so it allows derivatives to be proprietary.
Correct. This is also why Apple switched to zsh as the default shell over bash. They still ship Bash 3.2 in macOS, because from 4.0 on, Bash started using GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.
I'm not against the idea of creating proprietary software out of open-source software, if the license allows that. However, I am always against this practice of "closing the door behind you".
I agree. If they use open source code. They should give back. It doesn't matter if it was copyleft or permissive.
Note that third party app stores like F-Droid still aren't first-class citizens like Google Play, since every installation still needs to be confirmed by an os popup, they can't automatically install updates on most phones.
TBF if it wasn't without a popup it would be insanely easy to install malware without the user knowing
You even get that popup on windows when installing something.
The only thing I see a problem with is that something like fdroid can't be installed from the play store
The thing is, Google Play doesn't have that for each app it updates. If I can choose to trust Google Play, I should be able to choose to trust F-Droid in that regard.
Google doesn't want you to have that app. Why'd they make it easier?
Regulations are the only way they'd notice.
they should at least give an option to be able to skip that. like the user manually enabling a special permission for a single app that before enabling it you see multiple scary warning screens, confirming that you know what you're doing.
it's my fucking phone, just let me update my software without having to go through manually clicking on update 30 times.
F-Droid can do unattended installs, you just need A13+ and the basic client.
NOTE: The Basic version of F-Droid Client has a reduced feature set (e.g. no nearby share and no panic feature). It targets Android 13 and can do unattended updates without privileged extension or root.
The whole point of side loading apps is to not need the app store. One of the most important features of an app store is to distribute and update apps. Storage and bandwidth isn't free, but it is quite cheap.
I'm sorry if it hurts apples feelings when we tell them they're not allowed to charge for every aspect of their hardware. But if they didn't want us to own our iPhones then they shouldn't have sold them.
EU should double down with a regulation stipulating that people are free to install whatever OS they want on devices (smartphones included) and companies can't gatekeep it.
the problem is firmware. the community has been porting postmarketos to android phones for years, there are a ton of phones where PmOS will boot but most things like camera, phone service or bluetooth won't work because they are missing the firmware necessary.
I didn't get in the details. But, of course, a such regulation includes the availability of the firmware.
It'd be one hell of a battle considering companies would probably just pull a Microsoft and release the specifications as horrendously as possibly so no one can use them but their army of devs
What a shitshow. I didn't see the whole story, but which is it: the regulators didn't see all these ridiculous demands coming, or intentionally left loopholes in the legislation that basically allowed apple to retain their control and even profit from it? What was their original intent?
Can someone help me understand: marketplace makers will need to prove they have access to $ 1 million. Then Apple will charge 50 cents per marketplace install? So that means no possibility of a 100% free store for open source apps. Is that correct?
Non-Profits are exempt and nearly all large open source projects are non-profits. Small apps are also exempt - the 50c fee only applies if at least 2% of people in the EU use your app.
... however it seems like these exemptions might not apply to third party app stores for some reason.
If that’s the case, then it really defeats the purpose of the whole 3rd party store idea for me. Most apps I would consider installing are open source projects.
“App store is not a monopoly”
“We’re going to defend this non-monopoly till our dying breath”
I don't expect the EU to fine Apple enough that it might actually hurt them, but if we suppose the regulators wanted to, is there anything to stop them?
The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion. As far as I know nothing is stopping the EU from imposing higher and higher fines with continued breach of guidelines there, and I would expect these fair market regulations to work similarly.
Also for reference, that fine was against meta, who had 34 billion in revenue in 2023. So that fine cost them around 3% of their global revenue, which I'm sure is tolerable, but definitely approaching the point of hurting.
The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion.
This isn't the GDPR but the DMA. That said, fines there are even steeper, 10% of global revenue for the first offence, 20% for repeated offences.
This is what I hoped to see. Apple's at actual risk of harm (or pissing off its shareholders) by messing with the EU.
Here in the States, our regulatory departments are entirely captured so there's little to stop corporate anti-competitive shenanigans.
I am by no means an expert but this seems like a ludicrous response from Apple.
They can’t take this fight as, like you say, pissing off the shareholders will force them to change direction; if the EU do start talking about repercussions.
10% of revenue is going to hurt. That said I din't think Apple will budge until that fine is hammered down on them. They don't seem to have enough foresight to walk the tightrope succesfully.
Now that Apple are aggressively displaying their monopolistic attitude to anything 3rd party and their wanton greed. I wonder if we'll see regulators going harder on them.
I very much doubt it and fully expect the regulators to effectively say "Oh well we told them and gave them parameters!"
Edit: All their products are fucking over priced, When YOU purchase YOUR phone YOU should be able to do what YOU want with it. Disagree? FUCK YOU
Apple are clearly fleecing anyone who purchases their shit and will continue to fuck you at every opportunity.
Delaying the inevitable. The fines that are coming are inevitable too but for Apple it's just a cost of running their business.
The EU under the DMA can find 10% of global revenue the first time and then 20% thereafter.No corporations can maintain that.
Apple revenue in 2023 was ~$380b and their cash reserves were ~$160b. They can take a couple of worst case scenario fines technically, especially given that they'd be challenged in courts for years. Just makes you realize how important that 30% cut is for them.
Uh, for that kind of money I could start my own Top Level Domain.
Of course, in this interest rate economy, I would only dare create one dedicated to sharing cat pictures or pornography. Anything else sounds too risky.
You can honestly start your own TLD for a lot less with any DNS server. That doesn't mean anyone else will necessarily use it, but you can.
It is such a shame that you have to jump through extra hoops to get a .cat domain. They could make so much money.
No awards to anyone who correctly guessed that Apple would drag their feet on this and put up as much resistance as they could possibly get away with.
God bless the EU for taking this fight, and many others, on behalf of all of us. Only major entity actually making an effort at the moment.
Hasnt apple crashed and burned yet. Why are so many shiny hunting round edged magpies still sucking apples pecker
I feel every other hardware manufacturer with a store that sells software for it should be held to the same rules then… Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo…
Honestly, it doesn't surprise nor please me that they're looking exclusively for the corporations with the large amounts of money capable of running a full system, as opposed to the random Joe down the street running an f-droid repository.