Helping sudden success
When Apple’s teams appeared in front of what seemed to be an EU kangaroo court to explain how it was approaching the DMA, one question from one developer rang true. That person spoke about how an app they made had become hugely successful overnight and explained that under Apple’s originally proposed CTF deal he would have been bankrupted by the fees at that time. Apple responded pretty quickly with a range of tweaks.
At first, it introduced a new loophole developers in that situation could use to return to the original terms of business, which I saw as a kind of lifeboat. Today, it introduced a new tweak I think serve to blunt the pain of unexpected success:
As of now, small developers generating under €10 million in global annual business revenue that adopt the alternative business terms receive a three-year free on-ramp to the CTF to help them create innovative apps and rapidly grow business.
What that means is that within those three years, if a developer who has not previously exceeded one million first annual installs crosses the threshold for the first time, they won’t pay the CTF — even if they continue to exceed one million first annual installs during that time. “If a small developer grows to earn global revenue between €10 million and €50 million within the 3-year on-ramp period, they’ll start to pay the CTF after one million first annual installs up to a cap of €1 million per year.”
This sounds incredibly complicated, but basically means that if you are a small developer and happen to introduce an app that generates millions of installs they will not need to pay a fee until they scale their business so they can afford to do so.
No revenue? No fee
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to those wealthy developers whose business has already scaled in that way — rightly, they still need to shoulder the burden to help nurture new dev talent. The one big caveat is that the developer must declare their revenue before their first app surpasses one million first annual installs in order to receive these benefits. Leave it too late and you’ll have missed the chance.
