Epic Games Challenges Apple’s Dominance With New iOS App Store

Epic Games contiguous officially launched a rival app store for iOS successful the European Union, marking the archetypal clip Apple’s ain App Store has had to look a superior rival. The Epic Games Store volition initially connection Epic’s games, including Fortnite, for users to download onto their iPhones, with plans to commencement onboarding third-party developers’ games opening successful December.

The launch, the astir melodramatic result of a bid of caller EU tech rules passed implicit the past year, imports the long-standing rivalry betwixt Epic and Apple onto European soil. Epic says its app store volition instrumentality a maximum 12 percent committee connected sales, undercutting Apple’s App Store, wherever fees tin scope up to 30 percent. The Epic Games Store, says Max von Thun, Europe manager astatine the Open Markets Institute, has “a bully accidental astatine taking a chunky wound retired of Apple’s highly lucrative app store business.”

Speaking to reporters connected Wednesday, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney hailed the accomplishment of the Epic Games Store to iOS arsenic a mode to hole the “largely broken” mobile gaming industry. “Competition wouldn’t crush Apple’s App Store,” helium said. “It would unit Apple to vie with amended prices and with amended features and amended promotions and amended selling deals and little advertising.”

Epic is making usage of a caller EU regularisation known arsenic the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to marque changes to springiness rivals much entree to their intimately guarded communities of users. In Apple’s case, that means the institution has to let alternate app stores onto European devices.

“The European illustration shows that this benignant of regularisation tin person teeth and tin succeed,” Sweeney said, adding that this tin beryllium a template for different regulators. Apple has changed its concern presumption for European developers 4 times this twelvemonth arsenic it attempts to dodge EU fines for failing to comply with the DMA—penalties that could magnitude to up to 10 percent of Apple’s planetary revenue—while implying that alternate app stores are a security catastrophe waiting to happen.

To others, the accomplishment of the Epic Games Store connected iOS is simply a motion that the EU tin unit tech giants to change. “The alternate app store could go the astir disposable mode for showing however contention tin work,” Andreas Schwab, a subordinate of the European Parliament who helped draught the DMA, tells WIRED. Alternative app stores beryllium “the DMA tin stimulate contention and thereby bring down prices for consumers,” Schwab adds.

The Epic improvement is simply a stroke to Apple’s hegemony successful iOS apps. Sixteen years ago, the institution launched its App Store marketplace, described by WIRED astatine the clip arsenic a “defining infinitesimal successful the past of idiosyncratic computing.” Apple grew that concern to make $1.1 trillion successful income successful 2022; it is present 1 of the company’s main drivers of revenue.

Yet implicit the years, the developers making iOS apps dilatory started to turn against the company. First, developers grated against the commission—30 percent astatine its peak—that Apple took from immoderate in-app payments. There were the privateness changes—specifically the “Ask App Not To Track” option, which chopped into apps’ advertizing revenue, translating to an estimated $12 billion deed to Facebook alone. Finally, determination were the rules astir what developers could and could not taxable to the app store. App updates that included links to the company’s website, for example, were not allowed.