Epic Games today officially launched a rival app store for iOS in the European Union, marking the first time Apple’s own App Store has had to face a serious rival. The Epic Games Store will initially offer Epic’s games, including Fortnite, for users to download onto their iPhones, with plans to start onboarding third-party developers’ games beginning in December.
The launch, the most dramatic outcome of a series of new EU tech rules passed over the last year, imports the long-standing rivalry between Epic and Apple onto European soil. Epic says its app store will take a maximum 12 percent commission on sales, undercutting Apple’s App Store, where fees can reach up to 30 percent. The Epic Games Store, says Max von Thun, Europe director at the Open Markets Institute, has “a good chance at taking a chunky bite out of Apple’s highly lucrative app store business.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney hailed the arrival of the Epic Games Store to iOS as a way to fix the “largely broken” mobile gaming industry. “Competition wouldn’t crush Apple’s App Store,” he said. “It would force Apple to compete with better prices and with better features and better promotions and better marketing deals and less advertising.”
Epic is making use of a new EU regulation known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to make changes to give rivals more access to their closely guarded communities of users. In Apple’s case, that means the company has to allow alternative app stores onto European devices.
“The European example shows that this kind of regulation can have teeth and can succeed,” Sweeney said, adding that this can be a template for other regulators. Apple has changed its business terms for European developers four times this year as it attempts to dodge EU fines for failing to comply with the DMA—penalties that could amount to up to 10 percent of Apple’s global revenue—while implying that alternative app stores are a security disaster waiting to happen.
To others, the arrival of the Epic Games Store on iOS is a sign that the EU can force tech giants to change. “The alternative app store could become the most visible way for showing how competition can work,” Andreas Schwab, a member of the European Parliament who helped draft the DMA, tells WIRED. Alternative app stores prove “the DMA can stimulate competition and thereby bring down prices for consumers,” Schwab adds.
The Epic development is a blow to Apple’s hegemony in iOS apps. Sixteen years ago, the company launched its App Store marketplace, described by WIRED at the time as a “defining moment in the history of personal computing.” Apple grew that business to generate $1.1 trillion in sales in 2022; it is now one of the company’s main drivers of revenue.
Yet over the years, the developers making iOS apps slowly started to turn against the company. First, developers grated against the commission—30 percent at its peak—that Apple took from some in-app payments. There were the privacy changes—specifically the “Ask App Not To Track” option, which cut into apps’ advertising revenue, translating to an estimated $12 billion hit to Facebook alone. Finally, there were the rules about what developers could and could not submit to the app store. App updates that included links to the company’s website, for example, were not allowed.