Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint
These conversations always rapidly devolve into the same old generic iOS versus Android nonsense. But I&#x27;d like to try to keep a super narrow scope here. The specific problem Epic and others are fighting here is <i>&quot;App Store payment system and control over app downloads&quot;</i><p>Now to be fair, as far as &#x27;App store payments&#x27; goes, both Google &amp; Apple charge the 30% fee on all transactions. The reason Epic is battling Apple here mostly has to do with the &#x27;walled garden&#x27;, and the fact Apple&#x27;s &#x27;control over app downloads&#x27; is totally locked down. Epic avoids the Google play 30% fee by having users side-load the APK, so that&#x27;s a fight for another day I suppose.<p>Now, for the 30% fee problem. Does anyone really think that is fair an equitable? Come again? They hover up 3&#x2F;10ths of all business transactions? It just seems so obvious to me that the answer is <i>absolutely not</i>. There is no way I can twist my brain to believe there is <i>any</i> justification for that. If the issue is that it costs Apple (&amp; Google) a lot of money to maintain servers and infrastructure to provide the app store services, then there are other ways to charge developers to cover this cost, and even make some profit.<p>Apple charges $100 a year for the &#x27;Apple Developer Program&#x27;. This yearly fee model is the fair way to do this I think. You could add more tiers too this that scale with usage. $100 for the entry level package, and that covers &#x27;X&#x27; amount of usage. There could be enterprise tiers for huge customers like Epic. They are using more of the resources of the app store, then they should pay more. I&#x27;m sure Epic would be happy to pay, IDK I&#x27;m just making up a number, something like $500K a year for their developer license instead of 30% of every transaction.<p>I&#x27;m just spitballing here, I&#x27;ve not fully formed all these ideas, and I don&#x27;t know what fair pricing for tiers &amp; usage would exactly look like. But I think most of us can agree a system like that would be much more fair and equitable. I have just never heard a convincing argument of why Apple &amp; Google deserves to own 3&#x2F;10ths of all the business on their platforms.