Forced big changes in Apple's Policies

[OpenXTalkPaul]

So a couple of years back when the EU court handed down this decision ( went bad for Apple, good for app-consumers and developers), I mentioned, specifically to a certain person who could possibly influence such move, that LiveCode Ltd. should immediately start working on delivering an indy-dev-centric 'AppStore' (I was thinking of similar to Itch.io ). Maybe it wasn't such a good moment to make that suggestion due to the context of when I made the suggestion, but perhaps they should've listen to that idea anyway because now, after appeals delays and such, the time has come when Apple must comply with the courts decision.

So Apple must allow for 3rd party 'AppStores' and non-Webkit Web (JS) engines.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/25/th ... -ios-17-4/
This is great news, IMO!

Unfortunately Apple only has to comply with this in the EU, but it can make more sense with some things to make the changes globally across the board, and hopefully people outside of the EU will demand the same anti-monopolist policies from Apple in their own countries.
In the US, due to a seperate court case with Epic Games, at least Apple must now allow in-app content purchases to be delivered by 3rd party from outside of Apple. Apple still takes a big cut. I'm not sure how they do the accounting for purchases made outside of the AppStore nor what 'service' they are expecting to be paid for, since all they're doing is allowing a link: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/16/us ... se-option/

Apple is really not happy about all of this, and has tried some ridiculous arguments to try to avoid following laws.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/04/ap ... -browsers/

Just having an alternative to Apple's WebKit Browser/JS Engine on iOS would be great, but 3rd Party App Stores (without having to jailbreak/root) would be super-fantastic!!!

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Oh apps still need to be notarized for iOS to allow installing them.
Here's the message Apple will be attaching to apps that it notarizes for 3rd party Appstore apps:

PNG image.png (1.76 MiB) Viewed 585 times

Which doesn't seem fair if your app doesn't even have any in-app purchases, hopefully there's a different message if that entitlement isn't being used.