Nearly a week after Apple announced big changes to the App Store because of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules, the company said that the market represents 7% of its global App Store revenues.
The company’s chief financial officer Luca Maestri said that the monetary impact of these changes will depend on choices made by developers to adopt different systems.
“A lot will depend on the choices that will be made. Just to keep it in context, the changes applied to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global app store revenue,” he said in reply to an analyst’s question.
Because of DMA, Apple has to allow alternative app stores and let developers to use third-party payment processors. The company plans to charge a core tech fee if an app crosses a million annual downloads across different app stores.
Amid these changes, Apple noted a record quarter for App Store revenues. The company’s overall services revenue was $23.1 billion with an 11% jump year-on-year.
Apple continued its narrative of defending the App Store and its commission ecosystem by saying that it provides the best privacy and security. CEO Tim Cook emphasized that the company will fall short of providing the best experience to users because of these changes.
“If you think about what we’ve done over the years is, we’ve really majored on privacy, security, and usability. And we’ve tried our best to get as close to the past in terms of the things that are — that people love about our ecosystem as we can, but we are going to fall short of providing the maximum amount that we could supply, because we need to comply with the regulation,” he said.
In the EU, Apple also had to open up the browser ecosystem by allowing other browsers to use their own engine instead of WebKit. When users start their iPhones after updating to iOS 17.4, the company will show a splash screen to let them pick a default browser.
