Spotify issued a statement harshly criticizing Apple’s new tariff policy in the EU, prompted by the need to comply with antitrust requirements from local regulators. In a post on Spotify’s new tax website, the company calls Apple’s “guidelines” a “complete sham” and calls the new tax, the Core Technology Fee, “plain extortion.”
To comply with the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple was forced to allow developers to install third-party app stores and browsers on iOS. This means that developers will be able to make their apps publicly available, bypassing the App Store, using other options instead of Safari, etc.
Formally, Apple gives freedom to entrepreneurs, which is what antitrust authorities tried to achieve, but in reality the corporation is looking for ways to force developers not to leave its stores. And new “recommendations”, collaboration rules in the AppStore and other app stores, as well as new tariff policies are becoming burdensome for brands.
In particular, Spotify assures that the new fee will mainly affect developers of free and shareware applications:
“Based on what we see in Apple’s proposal, the developer will have to pay this fee even if the user downloaded the app, never used it, and forgot to delete it,” Spotify wrote in the appeal.
The tax, which Apple calls the core technology tax, requires developers who use third-party app stores in addition to the AppStore to pay 0.5 euros for each annual app installation after 1 million downloads. The company also does not completely waive the commission for placement in the AppStore, although it reduces it from 30% to 17%.
“This will make it as difficult as possible for a developer to choose between the status quo and this new program,” Spotify adds. “Given our Apple EU install base of 100 million, this new tax on downloads and updates could dramatically increase our customer acquisition costs, potentially increasing them tenfold… Under the new terms, we cannot afford these fees if “We want to be a profitable company,” explains Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on his X account.
The situation is similar in the Internet browser sector. Technically, Apple will no longer force EU browsers to use WebKit (the core engine that powers Safari). But in fact, the work of third-party applications on iOS is complicated.
“We are still reviewing the technical details, but we are very disappointed by Apple’s proposed plan to limit the recently announced BrowserEngineKit to specific EU applications,” says Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte. “The effect of this would be to force a standalone browser like Firefox to create and maintain two separate browser implementations, a burden that Apple would not have to bear.”
And since browsers will have to juggle different versions, it turns out that Apple’s proposals “doesn’t offer consumers real choice, making it as painful as possible for others to offer competitive alternatives to Safari.”
In addition to Mozilla and Spotify, Epic also criticizes the innovations (calling Apple’s new rules a “horror show”). But the corporation itself considers the updated tariffs and rules to be completely justified:
“The changes we are sharing with apps in the European Union give developers options – new options for distributing iOS apps and processing payments. Each promoter can adhere to the conditions currently in force. And under the new conditions, more than 99% of developers would pay Apple the same or less” (statement by Apple representative, Fred Sainz, to The Verge).
However, Apple’s recommendations have not yet come into force and are still awaiting approval from the EU Commission.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
