Apple first rejected, then quickly approved, Epic's app store in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Apple first rejected, then quickly approved, Epic's app store in Europe

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16 pointssamspenc7 comments

Is it really within Apple’s purview to police the styling of an app distributed on an alternative digital marketplace?

Surely protecting developers from these kind of arbitrary restrictions by Apple reviewers is the one of the reasons the EU created the DMA regulations in the first place….

It isn't, Apple is abusing their anti-malware processes to review apps under the guise of security. When the DMA states that Apple doesn't get to have a say in these things at all. None. They can block malware, sure, but they cannot do any sort of "app review"

This isn't the first time they have done this, they've blocked a windows emulator using the same notarization process. Again, notarization is NOT meant to be app review, and again, they have abused it as such.

All that at a time when the EC is investigating them for brazenly breaking the DMA laws

So is Fortnite going to come back to the iOS App Store or are we still continuing with this being all about "user choice" when in fact it is all about developers making the choice for users?

Assuming that is the case (and I highly doubt Epic spent all that time fighting Apple just to go back to the App Store), its been a month (2 months?) and we now have 2 (that I know of) examples of apps that are available on third party app stores but not on the official store (Ironically one of those apps is however available in the US App Store, but not the EU).

The only reason for any of this is because Apple claims the App Store is worth 30% of all revenue for all products that run on their hardware.

So developers aren't using their store anymore in locales that aren't continuing to let Apple run such a monopoly.

So you are confirming it was never about user choice?

That seems to be anyone, epic included, seems to be focusing on. That somehow users wanted it, gives them choices, etc etc.

But clearly it never was about that.

We all knew the reason. But that wasn’t the reason that was cited the vast majority of the time this topic came up. Which is kinda shady on companies like Epic’s part. Since they made it all about “User Choice” when the choice is being removed from me by the developer (in this case Epic).

Surely there's more choice if these stores host apps that Apple refuses to (like real alternate browsers). Users will get the choice to install the apps. And no, not all apps will be on all stores.

As for Fortnite not being on the app store, it was removed by Apple, not Epic.

It isn't a user choice though is the App could be on the Apple App Store and is choosing not too. As is the case with the emulator example. it is available on the US App Store but is not available on the EU App Store since they have an alternative. That is developer choice not User choice.

Admittedly Fortnite is an interesting situation, since Apple did remove Fortnite after Epic tried to get around the App Store rules. It is however not clear to me if Epic could have just stoped trying to get around it and could have gone back on the store.

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