> Neither party is innocent here, they’re both multinational tech giants fighting over our money.

That is true, people seem to think that just because in this particular case I prefer the way that Apple is doing this as a user it means that I necessarily agree with everything that Apple is doing or that they are saints or whatever.

My problem here is that so much of this is focused on Developer choice, but no one is talking about user choice. Or developer somehow twist this into a thing that users care at all about. When most really don't.

Is Apple's cut high? Sure. But it is lines up with the rest of the game industry with Steam, Consoles, etc.

There is an important part of this that I feel like developers are missing, I feel like they think that every user will just go over and give them the same amount of money where for me I will just not give them my money.

Which I fully realize I have the choice to do that and not give them money. And that is great. But That still means I cannot make the choice to use something I want without also being forced to make a decision that I don't want to make (use an alternative store).

I fully realize that I am not being forced to download Fortnite. But my concern is that as this becomes more and more normalized that the idea that I could only get my budgeting app, instagram, banking apps, or whatever other thing that I am used to using now only outside of the App Store becomes a reality. And again this isn hypothetical, look at Epic with Fortnite. Apps like Fortnite, Facebook, and others will be the gateway app that normalizes other apps not shipping through the App Store. Since they will already be on your phone.

Hopefully, it will motivate Apple to make the App Store more competitive. The existence of third-party options will really make them work to make that 30% fee look attractive.

On the PC gaming side, Valve regularly gets developers to abandon their own storefronts and pay their fee instead. Valve has huge market penetration, offers App Store-like services and has invested in a truly feature-complete platform. Because they have all this, publishers like EA and Ubisoft almost have no choice if they want to compete. Their own storefronts completely failed, despite continued investment and even the occasional attractive deal/title.

I really do hope Apple is afraid of these consequences. They will be forced to differentiate themselves in more meaningful ways, and move past their obsession with service revenue and distribution control. If users are able to get a better experience by avoiding the App Store, I'd say that's Mission Success for the DMA.

> Which I fully realize I have the choice to do that and not give them money. And that is great. But That still means I cannot make the choice to use something I want without also being forced to make a decision that I don't want to make (use an alternative store).

Can you not see how you're being unfair here? You're saying you would not buy something not distributed through the App Store which is fine and a valid choice but on top of that you want others who've made a different choice to be forced to distribute their work through the App Store and give up 15-30% of every transaction to Apple. Would you agree to pay that markup for having that choice?

No, I am not.

I am advocating for the choice of the User. My first sentence in my original post. To me that is all that matters, I frankly don't care what the developer may or may not be forced to do if it comes at potential harm to the User.

A developer choosing to only put their app on another store, regardless of the reason, is removing a choice from the User.

Is 30% high, sure. But I also don't fully buy it being the end of the world considering it is the same cut that Steam, Xbox, and Playstation take.

> I am advocating for the choice of the User.

But you aren’t, though. You’re advocating for a user to be able to download their app of choice through the App Store. But in advocating for that you’re advocating against the user having choice of which App Store they use.

The reality is there is no perfect solution.

But people, like myself, bought an iPhone knowing about the App Store and the restrictions it has. If I wanted a more open platform I could have gotten an Android phone.

Those restrictions do not harm me.

What would harm me is apps suddenly not being available through the App Store because developers are the one that choose to distribute on another store.

Which again is not a hypothetical concern when you look at Fortnite.

That isn't giving me more choice, that is giving the developer a choice and I just have to choose if I want to follow along or not if I want to use a specific app.

Would it be great if I really did have that choice and every app was still available on the App Store and I could use Apple's billing if I want. Yes! And if that was the case I would not care at all. But it's clearly not going to be that case for at least one app and possibly others if it becomes normalized.

The most likely reality is that it will be a developers choice not the users, if an App Store from Facebook or Epic become big enough why would they force themselves to play by Apple's rules?

I feel like I just watched you go through every stage of grief. Yes, there is no perfect solution - that's the nature of authoring solutions in the first place.

The status-quo is not perfect either though, and some might say it's imperfections are expressly anticompetitive. The existence of nice features like free long-distance calls on Bell telephones is not an argument against fundamental infrastructure problems. You're making a rallying-cry that avoids even accepting the EU's criticism on it's merits.

> But it's clearly not going to be that case for at least one app and possibly others if it becomes normalized.

I don't know which planet you live on, but that has never been a thing. Your payments aren't all routed through Apple unless you sustain yourself off Genshin Impact draws somehow. You buy food, you pay rent, you pay taxes and exist in a non-Apple world and non-Apple context. Not exclusively relying on Apple to aggregate your payments is the norm, you're steelmanning a nonexistent lifestyle.

You can keep repeating the "I could have gotten an Android" line until your face turns blue, but the DMA is not about enabling Android phones to run iOS apps. It's about directly addressing Apple's internal market neglect, and their refusal to compromise on a clearly-anticompetitive distribution scheme. Every single defense that does not mention how it directly relates to distributing iOS apps is a strawman that is unrelated to the text and intent of Europe's DMA.

> I don't know which planet you live on, but that has never been a thing. Your payments aren't all routed through Apple unless you sustain yourself off Genshin Impact draws somehow.

I... never claimed it was? I am talking about my iPhone. That's all... I never even claimed that all software I bought were through iOS.

I buy games through Steam, Xbox and Playstation fairly regularly.

I feel like you are trying to somehow catch me in not understanding what I am saying or something, but bringing up food makes zero sense.

To be clear, I accept what the EU is criticizing. However I will once again ask why the focus is on the developers so much, and not the users. That is my problem here, developers cried and now we got something that users were not asking for.

> Every single defense that does not mention how it directly relates to distributing iOS apps is a strawman that is unrelated to the text and intent of Europe's DMA.

That is not true, because the how something is distributed also includes the rules and restrictions put in place by the place that is doing the distribution.

We have to be able to analyze the repercussions of other stores and not just diminish them to "well it's a different server" as you seem to want to do. When in is far more than that.

The fact remains, you could have gotten an Android phone. If as a user I wanted a more open platform, I could have gone that route. But I didn't. I chose to get an iPhone due to the restrictions put on developers by the App Store.

The vast majority of the complaints are from developers, and I frankly don't see why they are the ones that somehow get to determine that a reason I bought my device is no longer valid. Apple has that privilege because again, I bought my device for that reason.

So yeah, is the status-quo perfect right now? No, never claimed it was. Is it better than developers having all of the power and choice and I have to just follow along with their decisions with the illusion of choice of downloading other stores. 100%

> However I will once again ask why the focus is on the developers so much, and not the users.

Because users don't create an anticompetitive system. Users buy things, they are ostensibly the customers that the market protects. It's akin to asking why Boeing is being lowlighted by the government while passengers are still buying 737 tickets. There is no correlation between the righteousness of a business and the desire for customers to patronize them.

> I... never claimed it was? I am talking about my iPhone.

Even on iPhone, nobody I know is refusing to buy Amazon Prime or Netflix because it goes through the browser. It might be a legitimate complaint, but it feels entirely tangential to how Apple chooses to implement their payment API.

> The fact remains, you could have gotten an Android phone.

Sure could - and the fact remains, it would have nothing to do with the regulation of the digital markets therein.

> Is it better than developers having all of the power and choice

There is literally not a single platform, even Linux, that exists with such a security model. Your hyperbolic misrepresentation of the situation is why I can so confidently and repeatedly say that you're wrong.

Obviously, iOS does not give developers "all of the power and choice" by forcing Apple to comply with the DMA. Apple still gets to choose whether they participate in the market, as well as how they implement compliant features. They can ship iPhones that default without sideloading features, and craft their user-experience however they see fit. The only caveat is that there has to be room for fair competition at the software level, or they can't operate in Europe. If that's equivalent to surrendering to developers, then it's proof that Apple was never competitive in the first place.