This may be the year Apple’s walled garden ecosystem gets some doors, windows and a breath of fresh air. A bill proposed in the North Dakota Senate in the US aims to ban digital stores such as the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store from exercising a distribution monopoly and to force third-party developers on their platform with their platform-respective in-app to use strictly. payment systems.
Senate Law 2333 (via The edge) focuses on “digital application distribution platforms” that “exceed $ 10 million in annual revenue”, not specifically smartphone app stores. But the broad definition does indeed put the crosshairs on both Apple and Google. This bill, if passed and becomes law for the state of North Dakota in the US, will limit platforms to:
- Require a developer to use a digital application distribution platform or digital transaction platform as the exclusive way to distribute a digital product.
- Require a developer to use an in-application payment system as the exclusive way to accept payment from a user to download a software application or purchase a digital or physical product through a software application.
- Retaliation against a developer who has chosen to use an alternative application store or in-application payment system
In essence, app distribution platforms and affected payment platforms cannot exercise developer monopoly use. They also cannot retaliate against developers who have chosen an alternative store or payment platform. Keep in mind that the proposed legislation will only affect business in the state of North Dakota. But in order to make these changes, both Apple and Google will have to make fairly big changes to their policies, leaving room for these changes to be made in more states, or even the US and the world.
The proposed legislation focuses on situations such as the removal of Fortnite from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store as a result of the introduction of its own payment system by Epic. There is a clear payment monopoly on both the platforms and the platforms that have even made changes that make it more difficult to bypass the commission they charge when using the payment platforms. Apple has cut its commission for smaller developers to 15%, but developers on iOS are still stuck in the Apple App Store as an app distribution platform due to Apple’s walled garden approach to iOS. Android has the ability to sideload, but efforts to gain momentum on anything other than the Google Play Store are gigantic, resigning developers to compete against the Play Store as their only practical means of app distribution success. Many major developers even teamed up to form the nonprofit “Coalition for App Fairness” to oppose Apple and Google. North Dakota’s proposed legislation seems like another falling domino that could change the way apps are distributed on smartphones in the future.