I know the title is a bit misleading but I couldn’t resist because in my previous post on the Digital Markets Act I said this:
And speaking of paying for apps what about piracy? Will you have to pay 50 cents when a pirate installs your app too? This was brought up in the Unity runtime conversation and as no company has figured out the privacy problem yet it’s looking like the answer is yes.
I was very negative on Apple’s new technology fee because Unity had just attempted the same thing and it blew up in their face. And what’s worse they didn’t solve the underlying problems with it: the Unity Runtime fee is still there as problematic as ever, they just capped the amount you’d pay.
And it seemed like the exact same arguments against Unity’s Runtime fee can be applied to Apple’s Technology fee: namely ‘review bombs’ and piracy.
But then I thought about it. And then I realized that Apple’s technology fee isn’t actually so similar after all. It’s significantly more thought through and Apple may have solved the problems that Unity had. Apple may have just solved piracy.
First ‘install bombs’. When the Unity Runtime fee was proposed one of the questions was, “What if people just install and reinstall my game over and over again?” You’d have to do that a lot to make any sort of impact but it is possible that…
