M.G. Siegler on his relatively new Spyglass blog (running on Ghost, which always makes me happy): Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Fees for EU Developers

Basically it feels like Apple is making the changes that the EU clearly is angling for, but doing so in the most pedantic way possible, all but ensuring that the vast majority of developers stay the course in the App Store.

Two things here.

One, a few hours ago I linked to the new rules in a snarky way, but in a generally positive tone because that part of the change seemed good. I must have been in a good mood at the time, because I had completely forgotten about the asinine “you still owe us basically 30% from all non-App Store payments you get from that customer for a year or some shit like that” rule. It’s insane, and while I love most of what Apple does, this entire affair makes it look so bad. Like, “we’re only worth $3 trillion, and we need 1/3 of your income so we can get to $4 trillion.”

Two, sometimes I propose some new feature I want Apple to implement, and there’s a weird vibe from some people who seem to think I expect Apple to implement that feature badly. Of course I would want them to do it well…that’s like the entire reason we use Apple’s stuff, right? Well, this DMA behavior is exactly what those people are thinking about: Apple is implementing features as poorly as they can so that people hate them. I swear this is all the finance guys making design decisions on this stuff.

Anyway, this is all really annoying and I wish they would treat these required changes the way they’ve treated things like adopting USB-C or RCS where they do them well and lean into how they make their users’ lives better. This whole affair looks so petty.