Apple today announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.
The “long-planned succession” bit is intended to ease speculation that Williams was forced out. Khan, Williams’s longtime lieutenant, certainly has his work cut out for him at a time when Apple’s supply chain is under intense scrutiny all around the world, but most notably by the White House.
Also interesting is that Williams, like semi-retired Apple execs Luca Maestri and Phil Schiller1, will retain a smaller portfolio (at least for a while)—in his case, the design team and Apple Watch. Fans of Apple products who don’t pay attention to the executive minutiae of Apple will probably know Williams best as the face of Apple Watch introductions.
Stephen Hackett pointed out to me that Schiller became an “Apple Fellow” and Maestri’s announcement never used the word “retire.” So perhaps Williams will actually entirely escape the ring eventually! ↩
Fueled by charts, we compile our wish list for a new, low-cost Mac laptop. Will it be a recycled M1 Air or something new? And how disappointingly high will the price be? Also, Apple tries to balance product priorities with its internal teams.
I've long been someone who enjoys a change of scenery: working out of a coffee shop or library to give myself a break from the home office. So this past week, I've spent some time mixing it up in a bunch of different places: the beach, the lake, even the desert.
Are you getting it? These aren't three locations: it's just one. Still my office. But thanks to the Apple Vision Pro, I've been able to get the feeling of working in novel, exciting places without ever leaving the comfort of my desk.1
This is the most time I've spent with the Vision Pro since its release: I got to try the initial in-store demo back when it first launched, as well as a short, mostly guided experience with Apple in a briefing last year, but thanks to Apple sending me a unit to try out for the next few months, I've finally gotten the chance to really put it through its paces.
I've got an overhead fan in my office, and I cannot recommend highly enough turning it on and feeling the breeze while you're sitting in an immersive environment. If Apple could figure out a way to ship that sensation... ↩
Apple added optimized charging for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS about five years ago, with iPhone and iPad support coming a little earlier than the others. Optimized charging should extend the battery life on your various devices by preventing certain kinds of wear.
However, Six Colors reader Dan says he’s not seeing this with a new iPhone. After upgrading from an iPhone XR to an iPhone 16 Plus, Dan set the maximum charging to 80%. He had previously avoided using “smart” charging in Settings:
I never go through [80%] in a day. That being said, periodically, after having my phone wirelessly charging next to my bed all night, it shows 100% charge. There’s been no change in my settings, so I’m a little confused if this is an Apple Intelligence snafu. Or?
Why would his iPhone ignore his attempts to limit charging? We need to dig into how Apple balances battery safety and reducing wear against our stated preferences.
(As always, you can skip ahead if you’d like to bypass the exposition.)
Mmm…donuts
Homer to donuts is like a lithium-ion battery to electrons.
Charging a lithium-ion battery resembles a classic segment in “The Simpsons” in which Homer sells his soul to the devil. While waiting for a trial over his fate, the devil temporarily sends Homer to hell, where a demon feeds him endless donuts. Homer, delighted, swells in size as he says, “More!” (The demon: “I don’t understand it. James Coco went mad in fifteen minutes!”)
While Homer’s insatiable donut need led him to grow in size without consequence, if he were a Li-ion battery, the calories (electrons) in the donuts would have led to an out-of-control thermal reaction, and he would burst into flames. (He was already in hell—would it have mattered?)
When you connect a power system drawing juice from line voltage or a battery pack to a device with a Li-ion battery, the device’s power management circuitry essentially stuffs donuts—er, electrons into a body (the internal battery) that has both limited capacity and parameters that require careful stuffing.
Charging is a process of moving electrons at some density and speed from one place to another, where they can be stored for later “retrieval.” In a lithium-ion battery, charging forces lithium ions to move out of one end of the battery (the “cathode”) and migrate physically across it to be packed neatly into graphite layers at the other end (the “anode”). (The actual electrochemistry is far more complicated than that—and far more than I can explain!) Think of it like airplane baggage handlers needing to efficiently pack luggage into an airplane’s hold.
This graphic shows a high-level view of the nitty-gritty electrochemical process. (Source: Argonne National Labs.)
When a battery is discharging to power a laptop or handheld device, the process happens in reverse: the lithium ions unpack themselves from the graphite layers and migrate back across the battery, while electrons flow through the external circuit to power the device.
This sounds very orderly and neat, but there are significant safety risks. With a battery depleted of electrons, the initial charging must be slow to prevent the battery from being destroyed or overheating. This is like trying to rehydrate a dried sponge: pouring water on it quickly just causes the liquid to spatter everywhere. Now imagine that the sponge could burst into flame, too!
There’s a long, moderate pace of charging between empty and full when charging can happen very quickly as there is enough free chemistry in the battery to absorb energy safely. This is the sweet spot where Apple offers its fast charging option on newer devices, adding a 50% charge in about 30 minutes.1
Fast charging takes advantage of the sweet spot where electrons can be pushed the fastest into the battery chemistry. (Source: Apple)
As a Li-ion battery reaches full, charging slows dramatically. Packing the battery full of energy can break down layers within the battery and cause a thermal runaway. While electronic devices have safeguards against this, something like a phone being crushed in an airplane seat or a faulty component in a battery is why you’ve seen videos of phones on planes and electric cars on car carriers suddenly emitting gouts of fire.
This all sounds dangerous. Why does the worst rarely happen?
It’s a numbers game
I know you have suspected that the “empty” line on your gas gauge means there’s still something left in your internal-combustion engine’s reserves. True! Most cars can drive dozens of miles after that. The same is sort of true of lithium-ion batteries.
A truly depleted battery may become unusable, as the chemistry and structure inside can no longer accept a charge. So a battery stops releasing power, and a connected electronic device shows 0% remaining, when it still has a healthy 10% reserve that you can’t tap but which prevents its demise.
Apple’s advice when storing your equipment for a long period without it being plugged in for weeks to months is to charge it 50%. The company notes, “If you store a device when its battery is fully discharged, the battery could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding a charge.” Even powered down, a lithium-ion battery slowly gives up a little energy over time, so Apple recommends recharging to 50% every six months.
If the battery is depleted somewhat but not too much, “…it may be in a low-battery state when you remove it from long-term storage. After it’s removed from storage, it may require 20 minutes of charging with the original adapter before you can use it.” You may have seen this when there’s a red outline of a battery and your device won’t power on at all. It has to bump the battery to its minimum level before it boots up.
At the other end of the scale, “100%” is probably 80–90% of the stuffed-to-the-gills capacity of a battery. Having that extra overhead provides a safety margin. (Modern batteries and charging circuitry have many other safety precautions.) That “100%” decreases as a battery ages, and some of its internal chemicals have “aged” in Apple’s terminology.
Knowing these extremes helps us understand what Apple offers with battery optimization controls. Before optimization, circuitry would charge an iPad, iPhone, Mac laptop, or Apple Watch to 100% if it was plugged in long enough to an energy source. It would also continue to top up to 100% as the battery consumed power through normal use.
Starting about a decade ago with Macs and a few years later with other hardware, Apple engineered passthrough AC power. If the battery is charged to the optimized level or 100%, depending on the operating system version and battery settings, the device draws power from a connected AC adapter, which, again, reduces wear on the battery.
To adjust charging behavior on an iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > Charging.2 On the last several models of iPhone, you can enable Optimized Battery Charging or use a slider from 80% to 100% to set a charge limit.3 Using the slider disables Optimize Battery Charging. If you slide back to 100%, a dialog appears letting you choose among Allow Until Tomorrow, Set Limit to 100%, or Cancel. If you choose Set Limit to 100% and try to re-enable Optimized Battery Charging, you can then choose Turn Off Until Tomorrow, Turn Off, or Cancel.
You can force a charge limit (left). When you raise it back to 100%, iOS prompts you for how to implement that.
I still haven’t answered Dan’s question! But now you have all the backstory.
You have the power!
When battery optimization is enabled, Apple tracks your pattern of battery usage over time. It uses this—and potentially other clues—to charge your device’s battery past 80% to 100% only when you’re plugged into power and the algorithm’s analysis expects you will be unplugging it within the next few hours. The operating system uses that time to charge you to 100% so that you have as much power as possible at the point in time when you’re most likely to want to have as much battery life as possible.
Otherwise, your device stops charging its battery at 80% and will use AC power preferentially. If the battery drops below 80% by some margin, it will try to charge you back to 80%.
What Dan appears to be experiencing is what Apple describes as an “occasional” override: your iPhone charges to 100% when the charge limit is set for it to recalibrate how it calculcates the percentage of your battery used. This detail is in a footnote at the “About Charge Limit” support page. “Occasionally” might be more like “regular” for someone who only plugs in once per day with an 80% charge limit set. I understand why Dan wondered if Apple Intelligence could be involved, since Apple has intertwined it throughout its operating systems, but the analysis for optimization uses plain old machine learning.4
Now back to determining the maximum number of donuts I can fit into a cell phone battery.
Update: Two readers pointed to the footnote cited a couple of paragraphs above as the likely culprit. I thought Apple might mean a much longer period by “occasionally,” but this is likely the answer unless a bug in the charging algorithm remains the culprit.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Using fast charging puts more wear on the battery, but battery optimization reduces it, a neat balancing act on overall lifetime. ↩
This option isn’t available on iPad—either in iPadOS 18 or 26’s current beta. A Mac’s options are currently limited to disabling optimization altogether or disabling it “until tomorrow” via System Settings > Battery and clicking the info button on Battery Health. ↩
The current iOS 26 beta displays different options and uses a different visual presentation. It’s not clear how optimization settings will appear in the final release. ↩
Machine learning is absolutely a form of what’s called “artificial intelligence.” It involves using training sets of data that are marked for an algorithm to analyze and then produce weighted results. While this might be a billion images to help a deep-learning algorithm to tell you whether or not there’s a cat in a photo, here it’s comparing some large set of usage patterns—perhaps even artificially created—and then comparing them against yours. It uses scoring to determine when you’re most likely to be a few hours away from needing 100%. ↩
You’re going to have to wait a while to fold an iPad, Apple explores its AI options, and cheap MacBooks? In this economy?
Apple folds
Bad news for folding tech fetishists. (Weirdos.) While we are still expected to get a folding iPhone next year, its larger sibling will not be joining it.
My thanks to Sparkle for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Sparkle is a utility that uses AI power to organize your files and clean up your Mac. Most of us try to be good, but with all the work we’ve got to do, it’s hard to find the time to throw out those old files and clean up your folders.
Drop a file on your Desktop? Sparkle quietly organizes it. Download something for a project? Sparkle knows where it should go. Sparkle automatically sorts your files into three intelligent categories: Recents, AI Library (older files organized in a smart folder structure based on the files themselves), and Manual Library (for stuff you don’t want Sparkle to touch).
Sparkle looks at your filenames and creates a folder structure that makes sense. Tax documents go with tax documents. Project files cluster together. Screenshots find their proper home.
Here’s how Sparkle handles privacy: it never sends the contents of your files off your device, only the filenames. Filenames are temporarily stored for performance optimization and deleted after 30 days.
Sparkle solves a real problem without requiring behavioral change. It’s not going to suddenly make you an organized person, but your Mac can be organized anyway.
You can try Sparkle for 14 days for free on their monthly and yearly plans. For Six Colors readers, visit makeitsparkle.co and use code SIXCOLORS for 20% off the lifetime plan. Because life’s too short to spend it cleaning up your Downloads folder.
Whether we’ve secured our Brother printers, our optimism or skepticism about Apple fixing accessibility issues in betas, thoughts on a MacBook powered by an iPhone chip, and the books we’re planning to read—or reread—this summer.
The modern Apple strategy is to re-use older technologies to create more affordable products… Why does the M1 MacBook Air [still] exist? Because Apple wants to have a product available at a (relatively) low price point…
Now let’s imagine a world with a M3 MacBook Air in it. Does Apple discontinue the M2 model, or push it down into the $999 range? Does Apple discontinue the M1 Air at that point? In the Intel era I’d have answered yes, but the Apple silicon era is something different. The truth is, even now, the M1 is more than enough for most potential Mac users.
Just as a thought experiment, consider what Apple might do if it was planning to import the iPhone SE strategy to the Mac. It would take some older, but still quite capable technologies—say, everything that makes up an M1 Mac. The device’s parts are carefully scrutinized with an eye toward eliminating cost wherever possible, without sacrificing a basic Apple level of quality.
More-Affordable MacBook… Expected to enter mass production in late 4Q25 or early 1Q26, with an approximately 13-inch display and powered by the A18 Pro processor. Potential casing colors include silver, blue, pink, and yellow… The more-affordable MacBook is projected to account for 5–7 million units for 2026.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. My thoughts about this rumor are very similar to my thoughts 22 months ago. First off, the M1 MacBook Air can’t be sold forever. I’m sure the margins on a five-year-old product are great, but Apple and TSMC surely want to stop making M1 chips at some point! So how do you make a new product that’s still well below the $999 of the (incredible value) M4 MacBook Air?
Using the same A18 Pro processor found in the iPhone 16 Pro might be a good start. Let’s look at the relative speed of the A18 Pro versus the M series found in Apple silicon Macs:
Well, would you look at that? The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today, its performance characteristics make it perfectly suitable as a low-cost Mac laptop, building a new model on the A18 Pro would not be a bad move. It wouldn’t have Thunderbolt, only USB-C, but that’s not a dealbreaker on a cheap laptop. It might re-use parts from the M1 Air, including the display.
I like that Apple sells a laptop at $649, and I think Apple likes it, too. A new low-end model might steal some buyers from the $999 MacBook Air, but I’d wager it would reach a lot of customers who might otherwise not buy a full-priced Mac—the same ones buying M1 MacBook Airs at Walmart.
Why the macOS Tahoe Menu Bar is the start of something big, Apple may lower the bar when it comes to an entry-level Mac laptop, and we try to parse the reasoning behind Apple’s latest set of EU App Store rules and regulations.
Some have lambasted these rules as “needlessly complex” or “clear as mud” or “I don’t know what lambaste means, it sounds like what you do before broiling those chops, but I’m still angry!” But I’ve completed a careful analytical reading of the new terms, and feel confident that the revised agreement is nothing more than sheer elegance in its simplicity. Allow me to elucidate.
You, the developer, get paid. Apple takes some percentage of that—ah ah ah, yes, I know the question “how much?” is already burning on your lips, but stay with me: I am simplifying.
The amount of that percentage depends on a few basic factors: are you in the Small Business Program? Did you agree to the alternative business terms?…
Apple has intended the Apple Watch to be a nifty complement to your iPhone from its release; interaction with the Mac came later. (With an iPad? Well, it’s not entirely neglected.)
One of the key ways you can use your Apple Watch with a Mac is to unlock it. Two different readers have expressed frustration with how that’s working.
Six Colors subscriber HiddenJester notes:
It’s always had some limitations, where sometimes the screen says the wireless signal is too weak or it occasionally demands a password, but it generally works pretty well. Except … it quit working for me last week, and no amount of toggling the switch off and back on again works.
I noticed this morning while I was looking at the password prompt that it occasionally flashed “Unlocking with Apple Watch …” underneath the password field, but it immediately goes away.
They have tried rebooting their Apple Watch and Mac and are still locked out.
A similar report came in from Six Colors reader Coach Mike via Mastodon:
Any thoughts/ideas on how to fix an Apple Watch that suddenly stops unlocking a Mac?
Rebooted Mac couple of days ago; rebooted Watch this morning. (And yes, Watch is “unlocked, on my wrist and powered on”.)
Why would a convenient feature stall out? My suspicion is that has to do with how Apple manages to bypass using macOS account passwords (or encrypted versions of them) while also ensuring that your Apple Watch remains under your control.
Watch it unlock your Mac
To enable this feature, called Auto Unlock in Apple’s documentation, you first need to meet these requirements:
The Mac must be a model released from mid-2013 or later and have macOS 10.12 Sierra or later installed.
All Apple Watch models offer this feature, but must be running at least watchOS 3 or later.
Your Apple Account has to be set up with two-factor authentication and you’re using the same Apple Account on both devices.
You must have set a passcode for your Apple Watch.1
Both your Mac and Apple Watch must have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled.
(Update: Continuity features like Auto Unlock sometimes require devices are on the same Wi-Fi network; Auto Unlock doesn’t explicitly list this as a requirement. However, Coach Mike discovered after this article first appeared that his watch had shifted to the Guest network at his house. He used Settings on the Apple Watch to change back to his primary network, at which point Auto Unlock worked again!)
With all of that in place, you go to System Settings > Touch ID & Password on a Mac with an integrated Touch ID sensor or with a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID2, or System Settings > Login Password if there’s no Touch ID sensor attached. You can then enable the switch under the Apple Watch label at the bottom to let your wearable unlock your Mac, as well as unlock applications like Password or allow autofilling passwords and verification codes. (The full text reads “Use Apple Watch to unlock your applications and your Mac.”) If you have more than one Apple Watch, such as a day and night watch, you can enable them separately.
Use the switch for your Apple Watch under the Apple Watch label to unable automatic unlocking. (Image: Apple)
As with general Mac password security, every time you restart your Mac, shut down and power it back up, or log out of an account and back in, you must re-enter the account’s password—you cannot use Auto Unlock until after that point.
Now, you just tap a key on the keyboard, move a mouse, or tap a trackpad, and your Mac automatically unlocks.3 This won’t work if a remote device is controlling your Mac’s screen or, peculiarly, if you are using Internet sharing, where you use your Mac to pass an Internet connection or one or more Mac hard-wired interfaces or via Wi-Fi.
If your Apple Watch is close to your Mac, your Mac should simply unlock.
When you’re in a regular Mac session and Touch ID or an administrator password is requested, you also receive a notification on your Apple Watch and can double-press the side button to approve it.4
That should be the beginning and end of it. However, as our two readers note and I have seen myself, sometimes it just breaks.
This may be due to the layered security that enables this to happen at all.
A fragile tunnel?
Auto Unlock isn’t just about letting your Apple Watch unlock your Mac. The same technology allows your iPhone to unlock your Apple Watch after it restarts or starts up, or when it loses a connection with your body, such as after you’ve charged it and put it back on your wrist. (Go to the iPhone Watch app > Passcode > Unlock with iPhone.) It’s also used in some cases when you’re wearing a mask to let you unlock your iPhone with your Apple Watch.
Auto Unlock doesn’t involve storing or revealing passwords. Instead, setting up a connection between your devices allows them to pass secrets that prove their identity to each other coupled with proximity detection to ensure your devices are near one another. When this system fails, intentionally or not, it provides unuseful feedback—or none at all.
When you turn on Auto Unlock features, Apple creates an end-to-end encrypted tunnel using what it calls a Station-to-Station (STS) protocol. One set of long-lasting keys gets created when the feature is turned on to allow STS to work over time. However, the protocol doesn’t simply rely on that. Instead, it generates a unique session key to use whenever Auto Unlock is invoked. Because this feature works with Macs without the Secure Enclave5, the end-to-end tunnel uses Secure Enclave at both ends when available, but can also terminate on earlier Macs at the Mac’s kernel (its core operating system component).
This operation relies on Bluetooth—in particular, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It also relies on peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, which is used to let two devices roughly calculate the distance between them, helping deter longer-range cracking attempts. Those attempts are themselves highly unlikely to succeed due to the layered encryption employed: all transactions over both networking types are separately encrypted.
The initial secret is sent by a “target”: the device that will allow itself to be automatically unlocked, such as a Mac to an Apple Watch. This secret passes over the STS tunnel using a BLE connection. When an unlock request is triggered, a new peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection is established, and the distance is calculated. If the two devices are close enough to each other—seemingly a few feet, but it’s not documented. (Apple describes this as your Apple Watch being “very close to your Mac.”)
If the conditions are met, the unlocking device sends the target back the unlock secret it previously received. The target sends a new challenge that the unlocked device solves. Voila! The target unlocks, and transmits a new secret for the next go-round.6
There could be a few things going wrong that result in a silent failure or a failure with the wrong error message:
Despite being close enough, the two devices decide they are more than the requisite distance apart. This should result in a message stating that the Apple Watch connection is too weak. However, I’ve seen that error even when my wrist is inches from the Mac, so it must be displayed when it is provably false or instead of the correct error.
A glitch causes the handshake to fail between the two devices. Instead of announcing it, perhaps Apple chooses to let the process break without a message to avoid providing feedback that attackers could use to hone an exploit.
Gremlins?
There’s one way around it.
The time is out of joint
The key problem—pun definitely intended—is that enabling Auto Lock sets a trigger that’s later released. Disabling the Auto Lock feature deletes associated keys, including breaking the STS tunnel. The correct order of reset is:
Disable System Settings > Touch ID & Password (or Login Password) > Apple Watch > your device.
Restart your Mac and your Apple Watch.
Log into your Mac and enter the passcode for your Apple Watch.
Return to the Auto Unlock area and re-enable.
If you haven’t tried this sequence in precisely this order, now is the time to do so. If you have and it hasn’t worked, try it again. We all know that repeating the same actions with computers shouldn’t produce a different outcome. Yet, like rotating a USB Type-A plug three times to get it to fit, some parts of the technology world defy explanation.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Apple doesn’t require a passcode to use an Apple Watch, but you miss out on many features and basic security protections without one. ↩
Sometimes, I can be sitting on our house’s main (and sole) floor above my day-lit basement office, and my Apple Watch says it’s mysteriously unlocked my computer. ↩
Approving these logins requires a slightly later system version than for Auto Lock: macOS 10.15 Catalina or later and watchOS 6 or later. ↩
Intel Macs received a full Secure Enclave via the T2 Security Chip, starting with models introduced in 2018. All Apple silicon Macs have a Secure Enclave subcomponent in their M-series chip. ↩
You’re not just watching the show, you’re attending it. Sit in the front row with other fans and direct your own experience by switching between cameras in real-time, getting up close to the conversation on the stage… VR filmmakers have always struggled with where to put the cut. We give that agency to the viewer, and the effect is unexpectedly magical.
I was sitting in the front row of the theater off to the far left, right behind Sandwich’s capture camera, and Theater remarkably replicates that experience. When you swipe to move between cameras, you also move locations in Theater’s immersive venue, maintaining geographical sense and the illusion of watching John Gruber and his guests on stage. It’s not immersive video in the way Apple has defined it, but it’s 3-D video playing on a stage inside an immersive environment, so it’s pretty close!
According to Sandwich, “the production uses a combination of stereoscopic 6K cameras and iPhones with AI 3D conversion.” There are more details on how it was all put together in a video by Adam Savage and Tested.
Apple has a movie out? Who knew? The company makes a better beta and begrudgingly complies with EU rules.
Unhappy meal
Welcome back to the summer of “F1”, already in progress. If you’re just joining us, F1 F1 F1 EFFFFF ONNNNNNEEEE!!!
VROOM-VROOM! WHHHHRRRRRRRROOOOOOM!
OK, lemme give you the 411 on “F1”.
[scoots closer, puts arm around reader]
Look, I don’t know if you’ve heard… but Apple… yes, the company that makes those things. And the other things. That’s right. That’s the one.
Anyway, you probably haven’t heard this, but Apple… has a new movie out.
I know. No one could be more surprised than I. I wish they would have told someone.
It is called… you might want to get a pencil and write it down so you don’t forget because it’s a bit of a sleeper… it is called…
“F1”.
“F1 – The Movie” if you’re nasty.
I’m not going to link to a story about it because online outrage is not exactly a new or even particularly noteworthy phenomenon, but just know that people are mad.…
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Why American sports is so dominated by gambling content, DAZN and the Club World Cup, TNT gets spun off but may still bid for sports rights, Netflix gets into French broadcast TV, the NFL faces an existential crisis in court, and our TV picks.
Tiered App Store fees. For today’s full-service App Store, developers will now pay 13% on sales, reduced to 10% for Small Business Program members. Or developers can opt into “Tier One”, which comes with a 5% fee but does not support a raft of App Store features we’ve come to expect, like automatic app updates, App Store promotions, placement in search suggestions, ratings and reviews on product listings(!), and more.
Core Technology Commission. Apple is going to move all developers over to a new tax called the Core Technology Commission, in which developers who opt to sell apps outside the App Store will pay 5% of sales made through in-app promotions. The €0.50-per-install Core Technology Fee will be dropped as of January 1.
Free linking. Developers can promote offers broadly, are no longer limited to a single static URL without tracking parameters, and can freely design the interfaces for those links and promotions.
New business terms. Developers have to pay a 2% fee for digital goods and services purchased by new users for the first six months after a user first downloads an app; members of the Small Business Program don’t have to pay this fee.
“The European Commission is requiring Apple to make a series of additional changes to the App Store. We disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.”
Apple always disagrees and always appeals, but these are pretty big changes. The introduction of a lower App Store tier with lower fees (but more spite?), combined with the reduced rates to the regular App Store fee structure, is especially fascinating. One has to wonder if Apple would’ve had as much trouble in the EU if it had made changes like this much sooner, but here we are.
