Japan unleashes regulation Kaiju on Apple's and Google's app store monopolies Japan has joined the list of nations determined to bust the dominance of Apple and Google over app stores on their respective mobile operating systems. The nation's government last Friday staged its seventh Digital Market Competition Conference – the big output of which was a Final Report on Competitive Evaluation of Mobile …
Google crippled microSD card performance 'for security.' Offline maps can't use them anymore unless you use an alternate app store, and possibly ADB commands.
I've had the Google Play Store overwrite my F-Droid OsmAnd with it's own crippled version without permission TWICE, and both while I was on vacation in a place where Google Maps has nothing but paid promotions.
So the problem isn't Appstore monopolies so much as software vendors deliberately curtailing functionality or performance to give their products a marketing edge. Those of us who have Windows know you don't need to go to an application store to get stuff pushed at you that causes functional problems. This should be illegal --seriously, "with extreme prejudice" illegal -- but vendors can blow so much smoke around that regulators are completely at sea about what's really going on.
All the application store noise is about others wanting a piece of the action. Not a competitive piece -- they see a duopoly and want in. Once they've got their seat at the table (trough?) then they'll be just as badly behaved. They're not worth pandering to.
Both Apple & Google generally take a 30% cut from their marketplaces (15% for subscriptions and special cases).
App Store generated $1.1 TRILLION revenue in 2022, so that's roughly $300 billion for Apple...
How much of this do you think they are willing to spend on legal and other costs to fight this? I bet it's a lot.
OTOH, Play store only had $43.2 billion revenue in 2022, so less than 4% of App store.
Another proof we Android users are stingy :-)
Of course Apple and Google will never admit it's about money... They will claim security, privacy, etc. issues.
Google at least seems to have generally given up on fighting EU regulations. There are some doozies coming up with the new DMA rules:
The gatekeeper shall provide to any third-party undertaking providing online search engines, at its request, with access on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to ranking, query, click and view data in relation to free and paid search generated by end users on its online search engines.
AIUI, this means Google must share any ranking and traffic data with other search engines. How about that?
Why does every article that I see about Apple and it's commission only mention 30% (all sites I read do the same thing, it's not just this red top)
That is not always true. Read for yourself...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/08/the-cost-of-doing-business-apples-app-store-fees-explained
The article is not wrong the author is just speculating that the reforms could lead to third party app stores that charge less that Apples standard 30% commission. Apple do have a 30% commission rate.
There was no need to mention that Apple reduce the commission to 15% for SMBs with app revenue of $1 million or less. A fact well known Reg readers and reported in other articles by the Reg, so irrelevant as they were not speculating less than 15% commission.
I'd like to see people given root access to their devices. I bought that phone. I should have the final say on what's installed on it and I should be able to remove anything I want. The OS developers should be able to make a warning appear that warns a user that removing a critical app will cause their phone to not do whatever that app controls (phone calls, sms, etc) This should be limited to only those apps that are needed by the phone to make phone calls, send sms and so on.
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