Apple announces App Store changes in the EU

    Developers who opt for tier one will get access to a limited set of mandatory App Store services, including:
    * App distribution and delivery
    * Trust and safety features
    * App management
    [...]
    Developers who opt for tier two will get access to all services provided by the App Store today.

Am I wrong or does it seem like apps in "tier 1" won't even have access to app notification delivery? That's wild...

It would make sense to provide an alternative if Apple's priority was the privacy of their users. Unfortunately, we have testimony from American congressmembers that suggests they have ulterior priorities: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

Here are the new tiers: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

The document says manual updates are included but not automatic updates (which is just a setting in the App Store that I personally disable).

Whether there will be update notifications is unclear. Is that what you meant by "app notification delivery", or something else?

As an App Store developer myself, I would love to have Tier 1 in the United States, mainly due to no user ratings and reviews. I hate them, and I hate trying to solicit them. As far as I'm concerned, ditching ratings & reviews would be a bonus!

"No user ratings and reviews" - that just means you rank last in app store search, right?

Apple will do whatever they can to ensure that developers that don't pay will suffer the costs.

I swear there must be somebody properly petty in higher management of apple to keep coming with these childish moves that harm image of the company as some sort of serious reliable manufacturer.

I guess to each their own

Tier 1 has only exact match search.

That's fine with me. All of my empirical evidence over the years suggests that my customers are coming mostly from the outside, and Apple is not bringing me many customers from inside the App Store.

There's is absolutely 0% chance this will fly. Apple is begging for a fine at this point, with their bad-faith malicious interpretations of the law.

You're certain the EU didn't just approve this plan?

Our leaders are sometimes spineless, so I unfortunately can't be certain.

I am however pretty certain that said spinelessness wouldn't fly with the European public.

Yep, I have been a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009. But all the malicious compliance and pettiness has me looking at alternatives (at least for iPhone, since it has good alternatives).

I don't recognize the fun, playful Apple of the 00s and early 10s anymore. Its soul has been replaced.

This sounds kinda like what they did when they were forced to allow outside payments in the US. It could only be one link, with a big scary warning, and a 27% cut. They "comply" with the ruling by making another alternative deal that nobody would ever take. Fortunately this backfired in the US and they were actually forced to get rid of all the restrictions in May.

I think this is how Android Play store currently works? If you deploy your app via another means, you get to DIY your own push infrastructure. I remember Square had to do this for their POS units that run Android, but weren't managed by the play store.

That article is a spun version from what appears to be the source article from reuters[0]. Being that they lifted quotes from there and then added a clickbait title by forgetting to add that Google is also compelled by governments to give them the data.

The only "ulterior priorities" I could pick up on was that Apple was most likely following the Government restrictions in a more discerning way than Google by not breaking out the push notifications in their aggregated data for request disclosures. Once it was made public by a Senator, Apple updated their policy and started to break it out to its own section. How long Google did this before Apple is not stated and the DOJ declined to comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple or Google from talking about it.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

“Cook chose poorly.” https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...

I think Cook’s time as CEO will be remembered both by enabling massive scale for the most successful consumer product in history—the iPhone—while sacrificing the company’s soul on the alter of efficiency.

No, Firebase Cloud Messaging is a separate service from Play Store. As long as the device has Google Mobile Services installed the app can be installed from anywhere and doesn't need to be uploaded to Play Store.

Ratings and reviews cost money to maintain. Anti-spam, compute, distribution, security concerns, etc. Apple should do whatever they can to ensure that developers who aren't paying don't degrade the service for everyone else.

Which would be fair game except to my knowledge there’s no API in iOS that enables the use of anything other than APNS for notifications. I could be mistaken though!

Doesn't really matter since the European commission is not voted by us - we have no choice in the matter.

With the web becoming more fuzzy it has become acceptable to other products when you're searching for a specific brand.

But when I want to buy Grey Poupon Mustard, I don't want to see Heinz etc. If you don't have Grey Poupon, I don't want to see anything.

The European commission is nominated by our elected governments.

It is as democratic as the US presidency, which is also nominated by electors.

This is a tired talking point designed to sow doubt in the European project.

Adding layers of indirection makes it less democratic. We should be able to vote for them directly.

Sure it does.

But one layer of indirection is not crazy, that's the way any minister in any country works - or the way the US presidency does.

You can't directly elect every single official - it just doesn't scale. It also doesn't really make sense in the commissioner case as different commissioners have different portfolios and which country gets what is subject to negotiation between member states.

I'm not treating this as a relative comparison, it's a criticism specifically of Apple's service architecture. When you prioritize privacy while refusing transparency, you end up in situations like this very often. That would not be the case if Apple held themselves to their advertised standards for the infrastructure they build.

Apple's complaint will likely be that it's a "technical limitation" because they run the only iOS notification gateway.

Never mind that Mozilla manages to run one for Firefox completely free to users and devs despite being a comically mismanaged nonprofit and if it were really a problem for them they could allow users to enter the domain name for an alternative one.

This issue right here is actually why there have been so few usable open source federated chat apps on the iPhone: the client maintainers must also maintain infrastructure for notifications and are not allowed to delegate this to people hosting their own infrastructure. This is actually the core complaint many people have with how Apple runs their app store and it's very visibly made the internet less usable for everyone.

Yeah that’s a big requirement. To get Google mobile services, you’re required to install Google chrome, Google play, and bunch of other bloatware.

You don’t have to load the app via Google play but your device needs to be managed by Google.

Again, I don’t see how that is different from android.

For android, you need to buy into all the ecosystem of Google to access their push notification service.

You can use android without google’s system, but you can’t use google push system.

The App Store is already replete with terrible promoted software. Apple made an entire business around degrading the top search results so competitors can bid on less relevant suggestions: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_search_ads

No I meant like APNS, which is what iOS uses to send notifications to iOS devices. It's the only way to get iOS to display a notification currently, and it isn't possible to register your own backend for it, so if you want notifications shipped to your users (as in, alerts that happen while users do not have your app open) then you must (to my knowledge) go through Apple.