But as of iOS 17.4 they do allow alternative app stores in EU.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/
https://proton.me/blog/apple-dma-compliance-plan-trap
> Introducing the Core Technology Fee (CTF), a junk fee that serves no purpose other than trapping popular apps in Apple’s current shakedown scheme. By charging a €.50 fee for each install after the first 1 million, Apple effectively uses a popular app’s scale against it to prevent it from using an alternative payment system or app store.
> If you decide to use anything other than Apple’s in-app purchase system, you’re forced to display a “scare screen” designed by Apple, which you cannot modify.
> Once you choose which policy you want to implement — the current App Store policy or Apple’s proposed new policy — your decision is permanent. So if you decide to take the risk of trying out alternative payments and it ends up working worse for your business, Apple doesn’t allow you to go back and instead traps you permanently.
8. The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services, as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.
I have not read the DMA but in the gatekeeper section of the official website the Core platform services listed are AppStore, iOS and Safari. Let's suppose that you single out iOs, why should I sign up something about AppStore to develop apps?
(If they were pre-evaluating plans, the optimal play for the gatekeepers would be to propose something totally unreasonable, and then negotiate it to something that's mostly unreasonable but just barely acceptable to the EC. That would be a bad outcome for the EC. So from a game theory perspective, they're better of making the companies guess at what will be acceptable rather than negotiating, since the companies will want to be conservative.)
And they have a right to prevent apps that harm the integrity of the overall platform which is what notarisation is designed to prevent.
Also companies have always charged a fee for using their SDKs. Even today Epic does this i.e. 12%.
It's not Apple's devices, though.
Epic opened a developer account under their european subsidiary company, which applied for this, and Apple just banned that account, so Epic can't create a store. Perhaps if someone else (Google, Microsoft, Meta) made a store, Epic might be able to upload apps to that store, but because in the Apple world everything traces back to the developer accounts, I'm pretty sure that would be blocked by Apple as well.
As much as it might seem like Tim Sweeney was exaggerating about Apple's DMA "compliance" changes being hot garbage, a horror show, and malicious compliance -- he really wasn't. Apple are in full on villain mode here.
The part that doesn't make sense, is why Apple are choosing to be such dicks about everything, when the EU is already breathing down their necks. They're inviting more and harsher regulation upon themselves and making the rest of the world hate them in the process.
Most companies won't deal with actors who continually do this.