Matt Fischer, the vice president in charge of the App Store since 2010, will leave Apple in October of this year. His departure will follow a major reorganization that splits the App Store team in two as Apple seeks to avoid further regulatory scrutiny.
One part of the team will oversee Apple’s App Store, while the other will manage third-party app marketplaces.
AltStore PAL, the first third-party app marketplace to launch in the EU, is dropping its subscription model and going free.
Until now, new users had to pay a yearly subscription fee of €1.50 with VAT. This allowed Riley Testut to cover the Core Technology Fee (CTE), which Apple charges from third-party EU app stores.
Patreon, a service that many authors, artists, etc. use to get funding from fans, has to switch its iPhone/iPad application to Apple’s in-app purchase system by November. The company criticized the requirement on Monday, and pointed out this will add Apple’s 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased through the iOS software.
But Patreon isn’t being singled out — Apple makes virtually all applications use its purchasing system. Not that’s everyone is happy about it.
Spotify and Epic Games have criticized Apple for its latest App Store fee and external linking changes in the EU. They claim Apple has again disregarded the “fundamental requirements” of the Digital Markets Act.
On August 8, 2024, Apple announced new EU App Store policies to comply with the Digital Markets Act. This follows the European Commission’s June ruling that Apple violated the act’s steering rules.
Apple is making changes to its App Store policies in the European Union to comply with the Digital Markets Act. It’s essentially easing linking rules for developers, so they can send customers elsewhere than the App Store for purchases. And it’s attaching new fees for sales that result from the links.
AltStore PAL, the first third-party app marketplace for iOS, now lets users install apps created by independent developers. The change, which arrived Wednesday in AltStore PAL version 2.1, makes previously restricted apps available to iPhone owners in the European Union.
“This means apps that have been rejected by the App Store — such as torrenting apps and virtual machines — have another path forward for the first time ever,” Riley Testut, developer of AltStore, told Cult of Mac.
The update is launching with a few third-party apps available now — iTorrent, qBitControl and PeopleDrop — “apps that are only possible with AltStore PAL,” according to Testut.
The number of Android applications on Google Play is likely to drop after Google updated its Minimum Functionality policy to block apps that “only have limited functionality and content.”
Unlike the experience in Apple’s App Store, Android users must wade knee-deep through useless apps to find anything worthwhile. The new policy should remedy this … assuming Google enforces it.
The first PC emulator for iOS is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro. Free app UTM SE allows you to run “classic software and old-school games.”
Apple first rejected the developer’s submission in June, citing a violation of the App Store Review Guidelines. However, Apple appears to have changed its stance regarding PC emulators on the App Store since then.
Starting in September, Microsoft will require its employees in China to use iPhones for work-related activities, effectively banning Android devices from work use, according to a new report. And of course the irony of a new policy stating that Microsoft employees in China must use Apple devices isn’t lost on us.
In a first, a catalog of more than 1,300 classic games will come to the Apple Store for iPhone and iPad as of June 27, retro gaming service Antstream said Tuesday. Antstream Arcade’s upcoming launch on the App Store follows recent worldwide changes Apple made in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
iPhone users spent almost $25 billion in the App Store during Q1 2024, according to a market research firm. In contrast, Android uses spent only $11 billion on Google Play in the same time period.
This despite the number of downloads from Google Play more than tripling App Store downloads. Clearly, a great many Android users aren’t willing to pay for apps.
The Apple Design Awards recognized 14 “best-in-class” apps and games, the iPhone giant said Thursday. It will hand out the awards, which celebrate excellence in design and outstanding technical achievement, to winners at WWDC24 on Monday.
“It’s inspiring to see how developers are using our technology to create exceptional apps and games that enhance the lives of users,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “This year’s winners have demonstrated how apps can create powerful and moving experiences — and we’re excited to celebrate their hard work and ingenuity at WWDC this year.”
And this year the awards added a new spatial computing category.
The App Store prevented more than $7 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions over the past four years, Apple said Tuesday, when it published its fourth annual fraud prevention analysis report.
Apple responded to protests about the Core Technology Fee it charges European developers every time one of their applications is installed. It removed the requirement for apps that generate “no revenue whatsoever.”
Currently, the CTF is only charged in the EU, but it has the potential to expand globally so prudent developers should pay attention to any changes no matter where they live.
Applications that advertised the ability to use AI to turn regular images into nudes have reportedly been removed from the iPhone App Store.
Apple needed to be notified of their existence, though.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: The latest rumors about the iPhone 16 Pro’s camera make it sound better than ever. That’s no surprise, considering Apple makes a big deal out of the iPhone camera every year. But we couldn’t be happier to have even finer photographic tools at our disposal.
Also on The CultCast:
Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video live stream, embedded below.
Following a request from the Chinese government, Apple has reportedly pulled WhatsApp and Threads from China’s App Store. Other Meta apps, like Facebook and Instagram, are still available for download in the country.
The Cyberspace Administration of China asked Apple to take down the two Meta apps, citing national security concerns.
The first third-party app marketplace, AltStore PAL, launched in the European Union on Wednesday. The App Store alternative comes from Riley Testut, the developer who got his Delta retro-game emulator into the iPhone App Store on the same day.
Bimmy, a NES emulator for the iPhone, joined App Store on Tuesday. It was the first retro game emulator approved by Apple and proof that the company really has removed restrictions on this type of software.
However, the developer himself quickly removed the app “out of fear.” That said, more are likely to follow, including Game Boy emulators.
A Game Boy emulator appeared in the iPhone App Store over the weekend. This might be proof that Apple really has removed restrictions blocking retro game emulators.
Trouble is, the iGBA app has already been kicked out of the software store. But it was a very dodgy app that allegedly ripped off the work of another developer. So its removal may have nothing to do with recent changes in Apple policy.
Apple is opening its walled garden to game emulators. The company has updated the App Store guidelines to reflect that developers can now list retro game emulators for download worldwide.
Additionally, the updated guidelines make it easier for music streaming apps to redirect users to an external website. However, this change is only applicable to the EU.
The European Commission opened a noncompliance investigation Monday into whether Apple is fully following the rules that went into effect with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. If not, Apple faces potentially heavy fines.
The Mac-maker isn’t being singled out. The EC also opened similar investigations into Alphabet/Google and Meta/Facebook.
The Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general filed an blockbuster antitrust lawsuit Thursday aimed at forcing Apple to open up many aspects of its ecosystem, from the App Store to Apple Watch.
The 88-page civil suit, which accuses Apple of wielding monopoly-like power, could bring truly sweeping changes to iPhone, Mac and other Apple computers.
EU developers can forgo the App Store entirely and distribute their apps directly to iPhone users from their own websites, Apple said Tuesday. This is a significant reversal from Apple’s original rules, which required devs that wanted to skip the official App Store to place iPhone software in third-party software marketplaces.
In another major change, Apple also will allow EU developers to create app marketplaces that sell only their own software.
Apple just removed a significant barrier for opening a rival iPhone app store in the European Union. Submitting a million-euro letter of credit is no longer required. There are still plenty of other requirements, though.
Rival app marketplaces are coming to the European Union — and nowhere else — because of landmark legislation that forced Apple to broaden the options for installing iPhone apps.