A coalition of Epic Games, Spotify, Basecamp, Deezer, Blix, Blockchain, Tile, Match Group, and several others have teamed up to form a formidable legal front that will force Apple to change some of its App Store policies. The new group is called Coalition for App Fairness and it seeks to represent thousands of app developers who are offended by Apple’s app store regulations.
Coalition for App Fairness was registered as a nonprofit organization in Washington DC and Brussels, and other members of the group include the European Publishers Council, Protonmail, and News Media Europe, and other firms from around the world.
The group said they created the coalition because judging from the myriad of lawsuits instituted against Apple over its irritable Apple Store policies, there is little to no hope that the tech giant will ever condescend to accommodate the demands of its global customers.
“While it’s great that we have the big names like Epic and Spotify in the group, we’re not speaking just for them,” said Sarah Maxwell, a former worker at Blockchain.
Even before the disgruntled firms came together to wage a common war against Apple, many of the parties had been fighting independently against the tech giant through the law courts. Spotify had filed an antitrust lawsuit in the European Union; and Epic Games, creator of Fortnite which was removed recently from the App Store, has filed a lawsuit against the company at a federal court in California.
Basecamp also accused Apple of limiting the updates to its Hey email app, and Blix alleged that the tech giant stole its idea for anonymous email sign-in and then removed it from the store.
One of the major grouses that the aggrieved coalition has against Apple’s App Store is its 30% cut from in-app purchases. However, the Coalition for App Fairness listed 10 demands it intends to pursue against Apple in the law courts, and some of these include not forcing developers to use App Store’s payment system, giving developers insider access to technical data that only Apple can access, and not demanding that developers use App Store exclusively.
“No developer should be required to pay unfair, unreasonable or discriminatory fees or revenue shares,” the coalition said as part of the “10 Store Principles” they will be pursuing against Apple.
Source: theverge.com
