Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”
Friendly reminder that you can sideload apps without jailbreaking or paying for a dev account using TrollStore, which utilises core trust bugs to bypass/spoof some app validation keys, on a iPhone XR or newer on iOS 14.0 up to 16.6.1. (ANY version for iPhone X and older)
Install guide: Trollstore
The only way it could work out badly for smaller software developers is if companies like Apple decide to recover their losses by charging heavily for development tools and resources.
If they can’t have walls around app distribution they might try and put them around app development instead.
They’ve been doing that since the beginning. You need a “developer license” in order to publish an app. Back in the day it was like $50 a year I think, but I haven’t done ios dev in about a decade so I don’t know if that’s changed.
A developer account is $100/year right now
App developers add value to their platform, any wall erected there would be torn down in moments. It would be biting the hand that feeds
It’s North Korea in the Apple world.