Epic, Spotify, and others take on Apple with “Coalition for App Fairness”

Enlarge / Major developers are sick and tired of Apple's rules and they've made a website about it. (credit: Coalition for App Fairness)

Exactly how much power app store owners should have over developers has been a contentious issue lately, and now several high-profile app developers are banding together to form the "Coalition for App Fairness." The group describes itself as "an independent nonprofit organization founded by industry-leading companies to advocate for freedom of choice and fair competition across the app ecosystem."

Just about every app developer that has publicly clashed with Apple in the past few months is among the 13 founding members of the coalition. They include Epic Games, which had the smash-hit game Fortnite banned from the App Store for implementing its own in-app payment system; Spotify, which filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the EU over Apple's 30 percent cut of sales; ProtonMail, whose CEO said Apple was holding developers "hostage" with the 30 percent fee; and also Basecamp, which called Apple's policies "exploitative" after updates to its Hey email app were blocked for using the same non-Apple billing technique that Netflix uses.

The coalition has a website, AppFairness.org, that lays out its demands. The website exclusively targets Apple's App Store with three main issues: anti-competitive policies that favor Apple's apps over competitors, the 15-30 percent fee in the app store being too high, and Apple's ban on competing app stores and payment methods.

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