Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
As much as so many hate how Apple acts, they’ve gotten better since day 1.
They let developers choose more price points. They offer only a 15% cut of subscriptions in a number of circumstances instead of always taking 30%. IAPs and subscriptions have given developers more choices of how to monetize their apps.
At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers. Even the yearly developer fee is still $99 despite the HUGE increase in App Store revenue.
It’s understandable people want Apple’s cut to shrink, but that doesn’t appear to be legally required. They didn’t make things worse so it seems they’re in the clear.
(They still lost on the alternate payment method thing)
I had never thought about it but I wonder if this is why they’ve never tried to raise rates.
It would certainly be a PR nightmare. But would it also immediately open them up to the “iOS monopoly abuse” case so many think this case was/wanted it to be?
Nope, on J2ME and Symbian phones, unless you had a developer kit, you would run what the telecom provider made available on their stores, reachable via WAP or SMS download links.
