Alternative App Marketplaces: Apple’s “Core Technology Fee” or “New Rules for the European Digital Markets Act”, or What Will They Tell Us?

The new app marketplaces are called alternative app marketplaces. On the EU version of the app, users can download a marketplace from the website. In order to be used on an iPhone, those marketplaces have to go through Apple’s approval process, and once you download one, you have to explicitly give it permission to download apps to your device. When the marketplace is approved on your device, you have the ability to download any app that you please, including those that violate App Store guidelines. You can set a non- App Store marketplace as your default.

The company is introducing a new fee for popular apps. The new Core Technology Fee will charge developers €0.50 (around 54 cents) per annual app install; however, this fee only kicks in after a million annual installs in the EU. Under the new business terms, Apple estimates that over 98% of developers will reduce or maintain the fees they owe to it, while less than 1% of developers will pay a core technology fee.

We will have to wait and see if Apple’s new commission rates will satisfy its critics, who have fought hard against the so-called “Apple Tax.” But after years of theoretical debates and hard-fought court arguments, we’re about to find out whether users, at least in the EU, care as much about alternative app stores and payment methods or whether they’ll choose to stick with Apple’s in-house options.

Reports say that the European Commission has opened an investigation into whether or not to designate iMessage as a platform service, but it is not certain if it would be included.

WebKit is the only browser engine that Apple has allowed to run in the App Store. WebKit is the technology that underpins Safari, but it’s far from the only engine on the market. Google’s Chrome is powered by an engine called Chromium, which is the dominant engine by a wide margin — Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera, and many other browsers also run on Chromium. The engine for Mozilla’s Firefox is called Gecko.

Apple is clearly only doing this because it is required to by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which stipulates, among other things, that users should be allowed to uninstall preinstalled apps — including web browsers — that “steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper.” The products and services of Apple are WebKit and Safari. Microsoft has to let people uninstall Edge and Bing web search, as well as cause other changes if they don’t do that.