Eight Things Apple Could Do to Prove It Actually Cares about App Store Users

Roger Stringer
September 03, 2021
4 min read

When you spend money in Apple's App Store, the company generally takes a 30 percent cut, one that adds up to an estimated $19 billion per year. Apple's currently in the fight of its life to prove to judges, government regulators, and its own developers that it deserves those dollars, but not everyone's buying it anymore.

Over the past seven days alone, South Korea declared its disbelief on the global stage, passing a landmark bill that could keep Apple and Google from directly collecting their 30 percent cut, and may inspire other governments to do the same. Developers also expressed their rage at an Apple press release, where the company spun its agreement to settle a lawsuit for $100 million as a $100 million fund for developers — while quietly promising 30 million of those dollars to the lawyers and enacting no truly significant changes. The CEO of Hopscotch shared her story of how Apple's App Store review team repeatedly gaslit her, insisting there was an issue with the well-liked kids coding app that didn't actually exist.

On Wednesday, Apple made a slightly more significant concession for (big) developers, and as Nick Heer writes, the company seems to have momentarily dropped its smug tone. But we don't need to get into complex developer negotiations to point out the head-bangingly obvious ways Apple is falling down on the job.

While the company claims the App Store is “curated by experts,” that it is “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps,” and that it holds apps to “the highest standards for privacy, security, and content,” the company's own emails paint a different picture. They show that Apple knew for years about the exact kind of egregious scams that bilk iPhone users out of millions of dollars, long before our report, and yet they keep failing to stop them from invading the App Store.

It bears repeating: Apple is the most valuable and profitable company in the world. The company currently makes $10,000 every second on average, $3,600 of which is profit, a large portion of which comes from the App Store itself. (The App Store alone has been a bigger business than the Mac or iPad since 2016, see #10 here.)

If Apple wanted to change this system, it could. But I expect Apple will only be dragged kicking and screaming into a world with a more functional App Store, because it seems incapable of taking the blindingly obvious steps that might better protect its users — again, despite being the most valuable and profitable company in the world.

Here are eight to start.

I'll leave it to you to go read the 8 things but I agree with all 8, Apple needs to do some damage control and build better relations.

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