Looks like Apple just outsmarted the EU
Apple may have made the changes to its business model required by new EU regulations, but the result has satisfied nobody.
Apple’s App Store has always been a walled garden, with tight control over app distribution and financial transactions. The company’s proprietary payment systems and a 30% commission on sales is the cornerstone of its business model. But the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has ushered in a new era of digital market regulation: supposedly designed to ensure fair competition and innovation in the digital sector by challenging these long-established practices, it requires platforms like Apple to open their ecosystems to alternative payment systems and app stores.
Passed in 2022, the DMA is the EU’s most ambitious attempt yet to try to curb the alleged anti-competitive practices of Big Tech, which the regulation refers to as gatekeepers. In September 2023, the EU designated Apple as a gatekeeper and the App Store, the Safari browser and the iOS operating system as “platform services” that would have to comply with the DMA rules.
Apple’s response was next-level legal engineering: it complied with the requirements, but imposed conditions that ensure virtually nobody will benefit from the changes. If people want to sideload and use alternative app stores they can, in theory, but since Apple supervises everything…
