The Impact of the EU Digital Markets Act on Developers’ Choice of the App Store and Other Core Platform Services: The case of WebKit, Safari, and Opera

Since the App Store was launched in 2008, it has been the biggest shake-up. Apple announced today that it will change its rules for developers to release software in the EU in response to the Digital Markets Act which will come into force in March. Apple will lose its position as sole distributor of iPhone apps when third party app stores are allowed on the platform for the first time. The changes will be available in March.

The company is also introducing a new type of fee for particularly popular apps. The new Core Technology Fee will charge developers €0.50 (around 54 cents) per annual app install; however, this fee only kicks in after a million annual installs in the EU. The new business terms Apple has made public suggest that almost all of the developers will either reduce or maintain their fees to Apple or less than 1% will pay a core technology fee.

Going forward, developers could pay no commission to Apple at all in the EU, depending on how they choose to distribute their apps. Apple is making changes to how its fee structures work, both in the App Store and for apps newly distributed outside of it. Developers can either choose to use these new business terms or stick with the existing model and continue to distribute through the App Store as normal.

As well as designating iOS, Safari, and the App Store as core platform services, the European Commission also opened an investigation into whether iMessage should be included (which would include having to make it interoperable with rivals), but reports suggest it might avoid being designated, and today’s announcement from Apple makes no mention of changes coming to iMessage.

Since the beginning of the App Store, Apple has allowed lots of browsers but only one browser engine: WebKit. It is not the only engine that underpins Safari, it is the technology that underpins it. Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera, and many other browsers are powered by the engine called Chromium which is the dominant engine by a wide margin. Mozilla’s Firefox runs on its own engine, called Gecko.

The Digital Markets Act of the European Union says that users should be able to uninstall pre-installed apps if they wish, and Apple is being required by this to do so. Apple’s products and services are WebKit and Safari, and iOS is the gateway. The same part of the DMA means Microsoft has to let people uninstall Edge in order to make other changes.