After the world's richest man, Elon Musk, announced that he bought Twitter for $44 billion, he continued to use his vast influence on social media to make all kinds of surprising remarks. Last week, he shouted "I want to buy Coca-Cola", and this week he aimed his finger at Apple and fired at it!
Musk said in a tweet on the 4th, "Apple's App Store is like levying a 30% tax on the Internet, which is definitely not OK." （Apple's store is like having a 30% tax on the internet. Definitely not ok.) went on to say, "Apple charges a 10 times higher commission." （Literally 10 times higher than it should be.）
In fact, Musk is not the first celebrity to criticize the App Store's monopoly. U.S. regulators are currently taking action against the business practices of Apple and Google's software stores, known as the Open App Markets Act. Referred to as OAMA), this is an antitrust bill being developed by the US Congress. The bill, which aims to prevent Operators of the App Store and Google Play from engaging in anti-competitive behavior in the App market and preventing Apple and Google from preferring their own products in the Software Store, was promoted in the Senate on February 3 this year.
EPIC Games' most popular survival game, FORTNITE, was one of the triggers for the antitrust bill. In August 2020, Apple and Google forcibly removed FORTNITE from the software store on the grounds that Epic Games had launched its own in-app payment system, thereby violating the in-app charging mechanism.
At the time, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney filed a lawsuit against the two tech giants. According to the New York Post, during the litigation, a senior Apple executive mentioned that during the two-and-a-half years that FORTNITE was on the App Store, Apple earned more than $100 million in commissions.
From the second quarter financial report released by Apple at the end of April this year, the total revenue of service items including the App Store, iCloud and Music was 19.8 billion US dollars, accounting for about 20% of the company's revenue; it is obvious that the App Store is indeed one of the company's large sources of revenue. In response to the controversy of too high a percentage, Apple has also made a compromise to reduce the percentage of developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue to 15%, and even Google has followed this practice.