The DMA goes into force only tomorrow. We will see if they will get away. I guess they will get bonked, because they apply more favourable conditions for their own App Store. They might get away if they would charge the fee for all Developers, but the Bullshit with "staying inside the old conditions" will surely get them into trouble

Most companies e.g. Unreal charge a fee for using their SDKs.

The idea that you would be forced to give it away for nothing would be a pretty extraordinary and unworkable intervention in the market.

They can charge licensing fees for their SDKs, but the "core technology fee" is not structured that way. As currently structured, it would apply even to an app written from scratch in ARM assembly language (not that a reasonable person would build an iPhone app that way).

CLI apps are not supported on iOS.

So at some point you have to interact with Apple SDKs.

Making system/library calls to display something on the screen does not necessarily require the use of an SDK either; it might require quite a bit of reverse engineering work. As far as I understand copyright, that doesn't involve copying/distributing the library code and wouldn't be legally encumbered unless there's a patent covering it.

Unreal is a game engine, iOS is an operating system.

In almost every other case application software is not considered to be a derivative work of the operating system it runs on. If this wasn't the case, then Apple could have easily sued Cydia and AltStore for offering the equivalent of iOS fanfiction. Hell, even the Copyright Office was perfectly fine with adding a DMCA 1201 exemption for jailbreaking iPhones to install non-Apple software on them - and they're extremely tightfisted with those.

The reasons why this is different is very simple: you don't distribute Apple's SDK along with your application, but you do distribute Unreal's. The user got access to Apple's code when they bought their iPhone, you have to give them Unreal Engine, so you need a license for that.

The fee kills any real world possibility of an OSS App Store though.

1 million downloads for an app sounds like a lot for a paid app.

But on the desktop, popular OSS software packages do those kind of numbers in well under a year. There's no reason to believe OSS mobile apps on iPhone would be any different.

Non-profit organisations are exempt from the core technology fee.

Cool, that might make it workable then. :)

They haven't hit the deadline yet, lobby your national and EU representatives if you want rid of this.