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Apple has been fined €1.8bn ($2bn) by the EU after an investigation found it had limited competition from music streaming services such as Spotify.
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The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said a smaller fine would have been nothing more than the equivalent of a parking fine and the €1.8bn was designed to act as a deterrent against a repetition of such practices by Apple or others.
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“Apple’s rules ended up harming consumers. Critical information was withheld so that consumers could not effectively use or make informed choices. Some consumers may have paid more because they weren’t aware that they can pay less if they subscribed outside of the app,” Vestager said.
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Vestager said consumers may have paid two or three euros a month more for music streaming because of the lack of open competition. However, she conceded that the fine would not be distributed to customers who had been allegedly exploited but to individual member states.
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She said the fine represented 0.5% of Apple’s global turnover.
How much goes to those that were affected?
A big fat 0!
That depends on how you define who’s affected. The fine is part of EUs budget and the fees paid by member states will be reduced by the same amount for next years budget. Every* member of the EU profits from this. And since anti competitive behaviour affects the entire market, the involved parties got compensated.
*Except perhaps apple users… And one might argue they’re the ones affected. But it’s also self-inflicted.
1.8 billion fine and that’s only 0.5% of Apple’s yearly revenue. That’s insane.
Their writeup that they published makes them sound very petty and hurt however.
Honestly tho… it seems like they have a point. It isn’t just blind ranting, there’s a lot of truth here.
And I say that as someone that doesn’t even particularly like Apple, I use Windows and prefer Android.
Yeah, for a second I was “fuck apple” but what they wrote in there does make sense. Now, I’m still “fuck apple” but I am also “fuck Spotify too”.
Fucking hell, that’s reads like they are a kid at a playground that took all the toys and is mad that a parent forced them to share some toys with the other kids.
It’s extremely embarrassing that a company of their size acts like this. Grow up.
Apple: If the App Store helps your app facilitate a sale, we should get a cut.
Developers: Makes sense. So, if I don’t want to pay your finder’s fee, I have to let people download my app from my site?
Apple: Doing that isn’t secure. If you want people to download your app, you have to use our App Store, or an App Store that we’ve blessed.
Developers: Ok, so I avoid paying you if I use a different App Store?
Apple: 3rd party app stores must pay us a commission.
Developers: I don’t find your rules worth access to your user base. Luckily I have the option to release my app on other stores on Android, so I’ll simply do that.
Developer here.
I usually need to develop for iOS in North America, the UK, Japan, or any other country where iOS holds a bigger slice of the pie.
And even when I do release in the EU, where Android is king, the money that iOS users spend can be too tempting to ignore. They might be 1/3 of the users, but they might also spend more.
I say this as someone who has released a lot of e-commerce apps all over the globe and is close to the sales data.
Top 20% generate 80% of the total revenue. High chance those 80% buy iPhones because they are more expensive and money is not a problem for them.
Ye, fuck that company. Great software (except the part about being locked in) backed by a greedy corpo.
Also if you’re a developer they won’t let you develop unless you own their apple device.
Which is a complete non-issue.
lol
Why do you consider it an issue?
Let me put it this way: if the costs of buying a Mac is too much, you certainly can’t afford the developer that needs to use that Mac. The cost of the hardware is such a tiny part of the total cost of developing an app that it’s laughable to consider it a major obstacle.
It’s a completely arbitrary and unnecessary bullshit hoop Apple makes you jump through to spend money on their crap.
Furthermore, development is not the only existing field. Security research is actively hindered and made harder because Apple is a greedy snowflake.
What is arbitrary about it? Porting the iOS developer tools to Windows would be an enormous amount of work with little benefit.
Developer time is expensive, hardware is cheap.
The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said a smaller fine would have been nothing more than the equivalent of a parking fine and the €1.8bn was designed to act as a deterrent against a repetition of such practices by Apple or others.
Still a drop in the bucket for them (that sounds crazy just saying that) but def a step in the right direction.
Still a drop in the bucket for them
It’s really not - this is something like two years of revenue for Apple Music in Europe.
Spotify is free to sue Apple in every other jurisdiction around the world. Imagine if Spotify wins the same amount of money in a couple hundred more countries? Anti-competition law is largely the same everywhere in the world and Apple has the same business practices everywhere, so Apple would lose the same lawsuit elsewhere. It could easily end up with hundreds of billions in damages and why wouldn’t Spotify sue Apple in every country?
I bet Spotify and Apple are working as we speak to settle this dispute out of court with a settlement that applies globally — this one is only for the EU.
EU not messing around no more
