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Each app or game, which runs on iOS devices, should pay Apple 30% of their revenue. These are billions of dollars each year. The Fortnite game wanted to avoid
by IvanK_net 6y ago
Each app or game, which runs on iOS devices, should pay Apple 30% of their revenue. These are billions of dollars each year.
The Fortnite game wanted to avoid this fee of 30% by making the game free to download, but the users could pay directly inside the game (the payment mechanism did not go through Apple).
If more apps or games do that, Apple would lose a lot of money. Also, Apple App store is the only way to get apps and games into iOS devices. So if I make a game and I want you to play it, and you know me and my game and you want to play it too, Apple is a "third person", who can stop us from doing so.
- dgellow 6y agoYou're talking about the reason Apple had to remove Fortnite following Epic Game's decision to add their own payment option. That doesn't explain why they reacted so aggressively towards Epic's Unreal Engine by threatening to block it.
- summerlight 6y agoI'm pretty sure that Apple wanted to send an obvious signal to its developers. After Spotify, apparently Apple has decided not to like this kind of antitrust challenges from third party developers, which might be harder than those from users. The simplest option would be threatening developers with retaliation, something like "If you piss me off, I'll make your life miserable". I don't have a gut to fight against such thing, and I guess the same thing may apply to more than 99.9% of other developers as well. This also happened to their internal employees (lawsuit against Gerard Williams III), so I'm not very surprised.
- dkonofalski 6y agoThey did not threaten to block Unreal Engine. Read it again.