GP was talking about alternative stores picking up the tab for the apps they distribute. That’s simply not the case.

Now you bring up a new concern.

Namely that useful free apps would get so popular outside of the App Store that they’ll reach 1M installs on EU iPhones within a given year and that the cost per install they owe over installs in excess of that 1M would be prohibitively costly that they’d rather not.

I think that’s a pretty significant difference from the other scenario, one in which alternative stores are on the hook for all the apps they host.
Normally I would chalk it up to a difference of opinion, but we’re talking about significant factual differences.

Meta-discussion aside, I struggle to come up with an example of such an app that currently exists and would be subject to that CTF.

Non-profits, educational institutions and governments are exempt, so you’d almost certainly end up with an app by a company that extracts value out of it whether as a companion app to a service or some startup that’s burning through runway money.

Ultimately Apple wants to be paid for their IP, for the use of their frameworks and toolchain.
Earlier this week some people were saying that Apple then should split off the fee for that from the commission.
This is exactly that, and at a progressive rate where the first million installs is free, seems fair enough to me.

I see no viability issues for third party stores here because one way or another there is no free lunch.

> The more they screw around the more likely that EU will set stronger regulations with less discretion on implementation.

As someone who used to practice law in the EU on an EU and international level this always makes me chuckle.
The EU and its bodies are not some benevolent dictatorship that can do whatever they want.
They too need to move within the bounds of the law and have been burned when crossing those boundaries.

The DMA in its current form hasn’t even been subjected to adjudication, which on its own is going to be quite interesting, much less some hypothetical v2 that is stricter.

The main hurdle for the EU (and the US for that matter) is IP and property rights.
You can’t legislate your way around that without significant overhaul which would reverberate across all of commerce.

Or put plainly: you can’t just say “what’s yours is now public domain”.

Closest you’re ever going to get is “what’s yours should be sold at a reasonable price to others” and it’s going to be one hell of a burden to convince a court that this isn’t a reasonable price at any given day, much less when there ample examples in the market that charge more.

Another, more fundamental issue specific to the EU is that European courts really don’t like laws that look like they target a specific company or individual. The DMA’s issue is that it doesn’t just look like that, it outright broadcasts that it does that.

Apple had a decent chance at fighting the DMA as it currently exists, so to be quite honest, I expected them to make some basic concessions, await enforcement actions by the EC and then fight that tooth and nail.

Instead, to my utter surprise, they capitulated in nearly everything and then went above and beyond the DMA requirements.
The purpose of that is clear, to establish a very strong legal posture for the inevitable court case.