FEATURE
legislators and government regulators
this past year. In Apple’s case, it’s
because of the App Store and what
some have argued are anticompetitive
practices in the way the business is
run. Apple’s lowering of its cut might
be an attempt to slip away from this
scrutiny, but given that the complaints
from developers and customers
only partially involve the amount of
money paid, and instead deal more
with Apple’s rules and restrictions on
what can and can’t be done within
the store itself, the reduction to 15
per cent probably won’t do much to
permanently silence critics.
Add in a new US administration
that might be more friendly to reining
some of the Big Tech companies and
it’s quite likely that the App Store
is due for more attention, not less,
as 2021 progresses. That said, the
Small Business Program might only
be Apple’s first foray into addressing
these kinds of concerns–perhaps there
are more changes to come.RUN EVERYWHERE
Finally, on the technical side, we’ve
moved into a new era, one where apps
developed for iOS can be run on Macs
built around Apple’s own processors.
This means that app creators now have
decisions to make about how andwhether to target Macs as potential
markets for their products.
So far, the iOS apps that have made
their way to M1-based Macs have
mostly been on the underwhelming
side – they are nothing more or less
than transplants from the mobile side,
with all of the pitfalls and shortcomings
that accompany the move to a platform
with a fundamentally different
interaction model.
But the path forward is there.
Apple’s Mac Catalyst system provides
one option for creating iOS apps
that behave like better Mac citizens,
and the company has pointed to
its SwiftUI system as the eventual
direction for apps to run across all of
its platforms. The transition to Apple
silicon on the Mac is in its earliest
stages, and developers will be taking
a variety of different approaches to
this new market. But 12 months from
now, we – and the App Store – may
well be in a very different places from
where we are now.