What’s your logic here for this not being terrible?
Non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and governments are exempt from the fee. The full policy is here: developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
If you don’t plan to charge for it, you can also just publish through the existing App Store infrastructure, where there is no fee.
(I’m not being an apologist. There are so, so many shitty things about Apple’s implementation here, but this isn’t one. I believe the EU should blast Apple as hard as legally possible for the rest of their implementation which is intentionally terrible.)
echo64@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 months ago
That's not what they said.
echo64@lemmy.world 3 months ago
There are so, so many shitty things about Apple’s implementation here, but this isn’t one. I believe the EU should blast Apple as hard as legally possible for the rest of their implementation which is intentionally terrible.)
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 months ago
Ah, I thought you meant something else. I'm pretty sure their logic is that apps that don't make a profit would be probably exempt, though as others said, devs aren't necessarily NGOs.
lemmy_user_838586@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Ahh, Gotcha. I’ve never owned an apple product, so I don’t know how their walled garden works for app developers.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This is new territory and it’s changing every week.
Historically, the way it worked is Apple gives almost everything away for free except for a $99 per year fee developers have to pay. But developers who have certain business models (especially game developers) have to pay Apple a huge percentage of their income.
I’ve been an Apple developer since the 90’s - if you go back even further back in Apple’s history… Apple didn’t have a walled garden approach. They simply charged money for all their software and that was very successful. Not as successful as the walled garden but still healthy profits.
cmhe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers. Most projects are from single developers that just throw their project on github et al. and release it from there.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 months ago
True but if you’re a for-profit developer, you can probably afford 50 cents per customer. Facebook, for example, has a “free” app that earned $134 billion last year. I’m not defending Apple, I think the Core Technology Fee is anti-competitive and I hope the EU tells them it’s illegal - but 50c is pocket change for nearly any for-profit app developer.
Small startups don’t pay (less than a million users), and most open source projects with more than a million users are non-profits. The ones that are not could become one or tie themselves to an existing non profit (such as the Apache Foundation, which provides funding and resources to almost 300 open source projects).