Epic: Apple threatens to terminate our dev accounts and that affects the Unreal Engine – IT Pro – News

Hosting just the app for 99 euros per year seems more than enough, doesn’t it? …. And otherwise they will raise that price, right?

99 euros per year for offering unlimited downloads / updates / promotion of your app? With millions of users and many many terabytes of data traffic? Including checks for malicious behavior of apps and the like? Including fair promotion where the quality and popularity of apps determine who will get the best spots in the app store?
You even call that more than sufficient, so you expect that the entire infrastructure and all data traffic costs well under 99 euros per year so that Apple could keep the App store up and running and even make a profit on it?

I can hope that Epic will go down very hard here. If this were to become the precedent that the app should allow its own payment methods. Then every app will be free and everyone will use their own payment provider. Then you can do a math, number of affiliated companies * 99 euros is the total proceeds for the App store in its current form.
Bona fide apps that steal your credit card details or the like will therefore not be long in coming.

Because the 99 euros per developer is disproportionate to the entire infrastructure, development and maintenance of the required software, supervision of compliance with guidelines, control of unwanted behavior of apps, etc., Apple will be forced to provide alternative revenue models to the app store. to hang. These alternative revenue models will no longer be able to depend on turnover and therefore by definition hit the small developer disproportionately.

At the moment, Apple earns the same amount from all apps per euro turnover, so that there is no financial motivation from Apple to promote one app better than another. Revenue maximization is now the goal there, which overlaps with providing the best user experience by promoting the most popular and best quality apps. which is just as beneficial for the small developer as it is for the big one.

Therefore, having to allow alternative payment providers will lead to a much worse starting position for small developers. For example, by exorbitantly high prices for the best places in the App store, for example by auctioning these places where the highest bidder gets the best place.

What are the desired consequences for us as a consumer and can these actually be expected in the event of a favorable decision for Epic? I expect that in all cases the consequences will be very bad for the consumer. So I support Apple in this, because any alternatives that could come out of this, as far as I can see, will be many, many times worse.

The most favorable scenario that I can come up with is that there is 1 gatekeeper for all apps who assess and offer all apps as honest, neutral and objective as possible. The mandatory authorization of alternative payment providers removes the motivation for Apple to assess and offer apps fairly, neutrally and objectively, and will want to earn as much as possible in their place.

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