Apple loves silence

Apple loves silence



Sometimes very interesting news can be learned from purely indirect sources. So today's FAS message that it considers its order issued by Apple after the complaint of Kaspersky Lab to be fulfilled, in fact, turned out to be much broader than the cases of a particular company.

The center of the dispute, which has been going on since 2019, was the Screen Time feature, which appeared in iOS 12. After its release, Apple began to restrict the distribution of applications that, according to the company, duplicated functionality, including the parental control tool Kaspersky Safe Kids. The complaint of "Kaspersky Lab" turned for Apple into proceedings with the Federal Antimonopoly Service.

But the regulator challenged not only the restrictions on this particular class of applications, but also one of the rights that Apple gave itself as a distributor of applications in general. Among the reasons for the exhaustion of the dispute, the FAS mentioned an additional agreement that Russian developers can sign for "immunity from not allowing the application in the App Store."

The document, titled "The App for Russian Developers", which has not been widely reported until now, is dated November 2022, when all signs of a stop in Apple's operations were visible in Russia - take the same lack of direct shipments of the iPhone 14. With this document, Apple deprives itself of the right do not publish applications in the App Store without justifying the reasons - however, only if its developer is located in the Russian Federation and conscientiously followed the rest of the store's rules. The document is limited only to the Russian segment of the App Store, that is, the company can remove Russian applications from the store in other countries. The new rules came at the end of an unsuccessful attempt for Apple to appeal the FAS fine in November.

By immediately deciding to challenge one of the main rules for publishing applications in the App Store, the FAS avoided Apple's tricks that regulators in other countries faced. Recall at least the claims of the Dutch authorities regarding payments in mobile applications. Apple, after the decision of the local regulator, allowed developers to implement third-party tools, but only dating service operators can use this right - it was on their complaint that the proceedings were initiated.

It is likely that Apple, not trying to narrow the scope of the exception for Russia in this way, was just guided by the experience in the Netherlands: local officials fined the company ten times until it developed rules that satisfied them. Another conclusion that can be drawn is that regardless of the geopolitical situation, Apple still continues to work in Russia and does not want the bankruptcy of the local division, although it prefers not to shout about it at every corner.



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