Apple Plows Forward with its Bad Faith Compliance Strategy

Apple’s infamous belligerence in the face of antitrust regulation continued unabated this past week, with the consumer electronics giant defying credulity on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, Apple is embroiled in a hearing tied to its antitrust case with Epic Games, with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers trying to determine whether Apple’s new fees requirements comply with her 2021 ruling in Epic v. Apple. Spoiler alert: They do not.

As part of her mixed ruling, the judge required Apple to halt its anti-steering policies and allow developers to provide links in their apps to outside payment methods on the web. This would help users to save money in many cases because developers could then charge less for paid services—like paid Netflix and Spotify subscriptions—than is possible with Apple’s out-sized 30 percent and 15 percent App Store taxes.

Apple’s response to this legal requirement defies logic and common sense: It allows developers to link to web-based payment points, but it still extracts 27 percent fee in most cases, or 12 percent in certain cases. These numbers aren’t arbitrary. Credit card companies collect a 3 percent fee on transactions on average, and so using an external payment method won’t save developers, or their customers, any money. That is, by undermining the spirit and letter of the ruling, Apple is also undermining its own customers to retain its unfair fee structure.

Apple sees it otherwise.

“We are trying to enable what the law requires,” Apple Fellow Philip Schiller said Friday during a compliance hearing in front of Judge Gonzalez Rogers. “There was mentioned in the order about if Apple has a right to a fee even without” developers using its in-app payment system.

That clause refers to in-app payments, not payments for services that companies offer to their own customers directly. Under the terms of the ruling, Apple is free to continue charging its fees on purchases made in the app, not outside the app.

I didn’t find a report discussing Gonzalez Rogers’ eyes rolling, but the judge has come down hard on these fees repeatedly throughout the hearing. Earlier this week, she lambasted Apple App Store senior director Carson Oliver for just inventing a fee structure that doesn’t reflect Apple’s costs.

“Your assumptions [about why App Store fees are so high] are just that,” she injected when Oliver tried to dispute an outside study claiming that Apple’s fees were at least 50 percent more than they should be. “They are assumptions. There’s no data for it.”

We can expect Judge Gonzalez Rogers—who practically begged Epic to provide more evidence of Apple’s crimes in the original trial—to come down hard on Apple for its non-compliance compliance.

Meanwhile, Apple’s at it again in Europe too, where it’s required by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) laws to let third-party browser makers ship apps with their own browser rendering engines. Apple has responded to this requirement as it has to most DMA-instituted requirements, by which I mean belligerently. In this case, it’s established an incredible set of rules for web browser app developers that all major third-party browser makers have complained is purposefully restrictive.

And now there’s a new rule. This one limits the testing of iPhone and iPad apps with third-party browser engines to devices physically located in Europe. It’s a rather onerous requirement that significantly limits access to this new capability, though developers elsewhere in the world can test these apps using an iPhone emulator on their Macs. That won’t help individual developers or those with small teams, of course.

“Apple isn’t serious about supporting web browser or engine choice on iOS,” Google Chrome vice president Parisa Tabriz tweeted in February when Apple unveiled its compliance non-compliance with the DMA. “Their strategy is overly restrictive, and won’t meaningfully lead to real choice for browser developers.”

Well, it’s even more restrictive now. And with the EU now actively investigating Apple’s non-compliance, it can add this new rule to its lengthy list of grievances.