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Apple has been fined €1.8bn ($2bn) by the EU after an investigation found it had limited competition from music streaming services such as Spotify.
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The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said a smaller fine would have been nothing more than the equivalent of a parking fine and the €1.8bn was designed to act as a deterrent against a repetition of such practices by Apple or others.
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“Apple’s rules ended up harming consumers. Critical information was withheld so that consumers could not effectively use or make informed choices. Some consumers may have paid more because they weren’t aware that they can pay less if they subscribed outside of the app,” Vestager said.
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Vestager said consumers may have paid two or three euros a month more for music streaming because of the lack of open competition. However, she conceded that the fine would not be distributed to customers who had been allegedly exploited but to individual member states.
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She said the fine represented 0.5% of Apple’s global turnover.
Developer here.
I usually need to develop for iOS in North America, the UK, Japan, or any other country where iOS holds a bigger slice of the pie.
And even when I do release in the EU, where Android is king, the money that iOS users spend can be too tempting to ignore. They might be 1/3 of the users, but they might also spend more.
I say this as someone who has released a lot of e-commerce apps all over the globe and is close to the sales data.
Top 20% generate 80% of the total revenue. High chance those 80% buy iPhones because they are more expensive and money is not a problem for them.
Ye, fuck that company. Great software (except the part about being locked in) backed by a greedy corpo.