By Dan Moren

March 12, 2024 12:23 PM PT

Apple adds Web Distribution for iOS apps in EU, loosens other restrictions

It’s been a seismic few weeks for Apple in the European Union, and the company’s approach to distributing iOS apps continues to evolve. On Tuesday, Apple announced a few further changes to its rules, all of which stand to make significant changes to the marketplace for iOS apps. Let’s break them down.

One-stop developer shop

When Apple initially announced third-party app marketplaces on iOS in Europe, one restriction it put in place was that a company could not create a store that featured only its own apps. If Meta or Epic wanted to build a third-party app store, it would have to offer software from any developer that essentially met its criteria.

But that restriction has now been abolished. Which means that if a company wants to gather all its apps in a third-party store, thus reducing its dependance on Apple and avoiding the company’s 30-percent cut, that’s now a possibility. (Granted any extremely popular apps, such as Meta’s, would likely trigger Apple’s new Core Technology Fee.) I’m sure that Meta, Google, and some other large tech companies are doing the math right now to figure out if this new rule works in their favor or not.

An external link’s awakening

One element of Apple’s business practices that has gotten a lot of attention worldwide is its restrictions on apps linking out to the developer’s site in order to offer discounts or promotions. (The company’s harshest restrictions on those external links have gotten them in legal hot water in the U.S. and elsewhere, leading to some relaxing of terms.)

Previously, apps in the EU would have had to adhere to Apple-provided templates in order to provide links out. These templates carefully controlled the way such links would look and where they would appear.

But Apple has now demoted those templates from requirements to optional guidelines, allowing developers to fully choose for themselves where and how they link to their own sites. There’s obviously benefits to that for developers who don’t want to be told where and when to put their links, though it remains to be seen how users will feel if apps start to abuse this ability by getting in people’s faces.

A tangled web

The biggest change that Apple enacted is the addition of Web Distribution, coming later this spring. For the first time, this lets developers distribute apps outside a store for the first time, directly via the web.

If you’re saying “whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that sounds like sideloading“, well, you’re not wrong, but before you get too carried away, I’ll point out that developers need to jump through a number of hoops before Apple will allowed them access to this feature.

Those include being in the Apple Developer Program in the EU, having had two years of tenure within the program, and having an app with “more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Additional strictures include only offering apps from your developer account, corresponding with Apple about safety and security issues, publishing your data collection policies, and other legal and governmental compliance.

So not just anybody is going to be able to slap together a website and put their iOS apps up for download. Apple’s trying to do something similar to what it’s done with third-party app marketplaces, providing some degree of assurance that users aren’t going to be hit by bad actors and that entities providing web distribution will be able to handle customer service, user privacy, and so on. Apps distributed via the web will still require notarization by Apple and can only be installed from a limited number of domains provided by the developer.

These rules also mean that many small and independent developers likely won’t be able to opt in to web distribution—that one million threshold is still pretty high. Do those shops deserve to be restricted from developing their apps on the web? It’ll be interesting to see if those rules stick.

Times they are changing

Web distribution does seem to open up another avenue for developers of a certain level, but it’s still certainly different from the wide-open nature of the Mac, where apps have been distributed on the web forever, with very little (if any) oversight by Apple.

In terms of why those disparities between macOS and iOS app distribution exist, Apple points to its recently issued security whitepaper. One of the company’s big arguments is that our phones are much more personal devices, carrying everything from our bank info to our health data, and protecting them is even more important than on the Mac. And the company sees the decided lack of widespread malware incidents on iOS under the App Store-only distribution as evidence of its success.

That said, while the Mac has been subject to more malware than iOS in recent years, it still remains a pretty secure platform overall.

Of course, we’ve already seen numerous changes to Apple’s DMA rules in just the last couple weeks, and there’s no telling what further alterations might happen as the rubber meets the road. It’s difficult to put legislation this large into effect without adapting it as you go.

Apple, for its part, says that it’s taking into account feedback from developers and other stakeholders. That presumably includes the European Commission, which certainly has a vested interest in the process.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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