X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in the town, and it’s from Instagram Threads. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the social network is testing pinned columns on the web. While the Meta CEO didn’t mention what you can […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in the town, and it’s from Instagram Threads. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the social network is testing pinned columns on the web. While the Meta CEO didn’t mention what you can […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Deepmind has taken the wraps off a new version AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only more accurate, but predicts interactions with other biomolecules, making it a far more versatile research tool — and the company is putting a limited version of the model free to use online.
From the debut of the first AlphaFold back in 2018, the model has remained the leading method of predicting protein structure from the sequence of amino acids that make them up.
Though this sounds like rather a narrow task, it’s foundational to nearly all biology to understand proteins — which perform a nearly endless variety of tasks in our bodies — at the molecular level. In recent years, computational modeling techniques like AlphaFold and RoseTTaFold have taken over from expensive, lab-based methods, accelerating the work of thousands of researchers across as many fields.
But the technology is still very much a work in progress, with each model “just a step along the way,” as Deepmind founder Demis Hassabis put it in a press call about the new system. The company teased the release late last year but this marks its official debut.
I’ll let the science blogs get into exactly how the new model improves outcomes, but suffice it here to say that a variety of improvements and modeling techniques have made AlphaFold 3 not just more accurate, but more widely applicable.
One of the limitations of protein modeling is that even if you know how the shape a sequence of amino acids will take, that doesn’t mean you necessarily know what other molecules it will bind to, and how. And if you want to actually do things with these molecules, which most do, you needed to find that out through more laborious modeling and testing.
“Biology is a dynamic system, and you have to understand how properties of biology emerged through the interactions between different molecules in the cell. And you can think of AlphaFold 3 as our first big step towards that,” Hassabis said. “It’s able to model proteins interacting, of course, with other proteins, but also other biomolecules, including, importantly DNA and RNA strands.”
AlphaFold 3 allows multiple molecules to be simulated at once — for example, a strand of DNA, some DNA-binding molecules, and perhaps some ions to spice things up. Here’s what you get for one such specific combination, with the DNA ribbons going up the middle, the proteins glomming onto the side, and I think those are the ions nestled in the middle there like little eggs:
This, of course, isn’t a scientific discovery in and of itself. But even to figure out that an experimental protein would bind at all, or in this way, or contort to this shape, was generally the work of days at the least or perhaps weeks to months.
While it’s difficult to overstate the excitement in this field over the last few years, researchers have largely been hamstrung by the lack of interaction modeling (of which the new version offers a form) and difficulty deploying the model.
This second issue is perhaps the greater of the two, as while the new modeling techniques were “open” in some sense, like other AI models they are not necessarily simple to deploy and operate. That’s why Google Deepmind is offering AlphaFold Server, a free, fully hosted web application making the model available for non-commercial use.
It’s free and quite easy to use — I did it in another window on the call while they were explaining it (which is how I got the image above). You just need a Google account, and then you feed it as many sequences and categories as it can handle — there are some examples provided — and submit; in a few minutes your job should be done and you’ll be given a live 3D molecule colored to represent the model’s confidence in the conformation at that position. As you can see in the one above, the tips of the ribbons and those parts more exposed to rogue atoms are lighter or red to indicate less confidence.
I asked whether there was any real difference between the publicly available model and the one being used internally; Hassabis said that “We’ve made the majority of the new model’s capabilities available,” but didn’t elaborate beyond that.
It’s clearly Google throwing its weight about — while to a certain extent, keeping the best bits for themselves, which of course is their prerogative. Making a free, hosted tool like this involves dedicating considerable resources to the task — make no mistake, this is a money pit, an expensive (to Google) shareware version to convince the researchers of the world that AlphaFold 3 should be, at the very least, an arrow in their quiver.
Image Credits: Google Deepmind
That’s all right, though, because the tech will likely print money through Alphabet subsidiary (which makes it Google’s… cousin?) Isomorphic Labs, which is putting computational tools like AlphaFold to work in drug design. Well, everyone is using computational tools these days — but Isomorphic got first crack at Deepmind’s latest models, combining it with “some more proprietary things to do with drug discovery,” as Hassabis noted. The company already has partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
AlphaFold isn’t the be-all and end-all of biology, though — just a very useful tool, as countless researchers will agree. And it allows them to do what Isomorphic’s Max Jaderberg called “rational drug design.”
“If we think about, day to day, how this has an impact at Isomorphic labs: it allows our scientists, our drug designers, to create and test hypotheses at the atomic level, and then within seconds produce highly accurate structure predictions… to help the scientists reason about what are the interactions to make, and how to advance those designs to create a good drug,” he said. “This is compared to the months or even years it might take to do this experimentally.”
While many will celebrate the accomplishment and the wide availability of a free, hosted tool like AlphaFold Server, others may rightly point out that this isn’t really a win for open science.
Like many proprietary AI models, AlphaFold’s training process and other information crucial to replicating it — a fundamental part of the scientific method, you will recall — are largely and increasingly withheld. While the paper published in Nature does go over the methods of its creation in some detail, a lot of important details and data are lacking, meaning scientists who want to use the most powerful molecular biology tool on the planet will have to do so under the watchful eye of Alphabet, Google, and Deepmind (who knows which actually holds the reins).
Open science advocates have said for years that, while these advances are remarkable, it is always better in the long run to share this kind of thing openly. That is, after all, how science moves forward, and indeed how some of the most important software in the world has evolved as well.
Making AlphaFold Server free to any academic or non-commercial application is in many ways a very generous act. But Google’s generosity seldom comes no strings attached. No doubt many researchers will nevertheless take advantage of this honeymoon period to use the model as much as humanly possible before the other shoe drops.
Opera’s in-browser AI product, called Aria, can now summarize text-based web pages on Android. The AI-powered web page summarizing tool quickly condenses news articles, blog posts or research papers in a short summary that typically fits in one screen.
The new feature, announced Monday, can help users quickly understand a topic and pinpoint the important details. To use it, visit any text-based web page and then tap the three dots in the top right corner of the Opera Android browser and select the “Summarize” option next to the Aria icon. A chat with Aria will then pop up with the requested summary in it.
To access the feature, update to the latest version of Opera for Android and log in to an Opera account, or sign up for a new one.
Aria launched last year and functions like any other AI search companion. The assistant has a chatbot-like interface that answers questions as an alternative to searching the web for answers.
Opera has been building out Aria since its launch and has been expanding its functionality through its AI Feature Drops Program, which enables users to get early access to additional AI features. Most recently, Opera updated Aria with the ability to generate images using Imagen2 by Google. It can also read text answers out loud.
RevenueCat, a top subscription management platform for apps that monetize via in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital as it expands to the web. The company has closed on a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent, following the launch of a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that allows web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later, it will also support Roku.
The timing of the product’s launch is notable, as it arrives amid the implementation of the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which is forcing Apple to open up the iPhone and the App Store to new completion. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the E.U., likely fearing developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under regulatory pressure.
For RevenueCat, however, the changes ahead for iOS — not to mention Apple’s refusal to cut its default 15%-30% commission rate — mean there are now more developers who are looking to the web to monetize their apps.
“It could be for progressive web apps or any kind of customer that wants to take payments outside of the App Store,” explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, of the new web billing product. “It’s going to play within all the new [DMA] rules…it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us,” he said.
The company says it moved in this direction because of the inbound interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to shift their customers to the web to pay.
Though Stripe already enables this functionality, what developers were lacking was a system that’s specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Now, even if developers are processing payments through Stripe or others, they’re getting their data and insights in the same format and within the same dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps are monetizing, overall, regardless of where the payment comes from — web or mobile.
Though Apple has historically not allowed app developers to steer customers to the web from inside their iOS apps, it has permitted steering from other channels — like the developer’s website or emails to customers. The E.U.’s DMA rules should also permit developers to steer customers to the web from inside their mobile apps, too.
With RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, developers can accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases like Paywall, Targeting, and Experiments, which are all designed to help developers grow their revenue. Today, RevenueCat powers subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and handles over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.
The new Series C from Adjacent (led by Nico Wittenborn — a Series A investor, now board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures, and SaaStr Fund. Ahead of this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing its total raise to $68+ million.
In addition to fueling its new products, the fundraise will help RevenueCat expand to new markets, including Japan and South Korea.
“Our main competitor is ‘cobbling together monetization technology yourself’,” said RevenueCat CTO and co-founder Miguel Carranza, in a statement about the fundraise and expansions. “In the U.S., we’ve done a good job at educating developers, product people, marketers, and CEOs on the challenges of building in-house. In many other regions, it’s unfortunately still the default for businesses to sink valuable resources into something that provides zero differentiation or value for that business’s end users. We’re investing in those regions by expanding our support for languages and local currencies later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, as well as hiring in-market where possible,” he added.
Image Credits: RevenueCat
RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says that profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has over $40 million in the bank in addition to around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.
“There’s so much stuff we can build by deploying capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down right now. So while there’s access to capital, which isn’t always the case…the best thing for our customers and investors is to take more capital and deploy it faster,” he told TechCrunch.
“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company driving towards a financial cliff. This may be counter to the prevailing narrative of how venture-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are leading the company to maximize the value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO added in a blog post. “To that end, we’re still aiming to take the company public in this decade,” he said.
It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.
When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible, easy way to play games across multiple devices without buying new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services that let you play games remotely — there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.
But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own, local devices. A French company called Shadow tried something different by bringing your entire computer to the cloud: It isn’t just cloud gaming, it’s cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install anything you want. But Shadow hasn’t become a mainstream service either.
Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Yannis Weinbach — three former employees at Shadow — decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play your games in the cloud, their new company lets you play game demos in the cloud.
In many ways, Playruo delivers on the original promise of Google’s Stadia: It lets you launch and play a video game from your web browser without having to install anything. Just like people share Google Docs links to share a document, game publishers can turn a game demo into a shareable link.
Behind the scenes, Playruo’s streaming technology is based on Kyber, a bi-directional streaming technology created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CTO of Playruo. Kempf is also better known as the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open-source video player, VLC. He has also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by some of the largest video platforms, including Netflix and YouTube.
Playruo relies heavily on open-source software components, such as FFmpeg to encode the audio and video streams, and libVLC to decode the stream on your local device. The company uses QUIC for the transport layer network protocol.
I tried a couple of demos in Google Chrome on macOS, and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just a few seconds after clicking on the demo link, and on a solid fiber connection via Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.
There are thousands of games released on PC and game consoles every year. Unless you have a gigantic marketing budget, it’s hard to stand out.
Even worse, game publishers are also competing with old games. Some of the most played games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade — think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V, or League of Legends. It’s arguably one of the reasons why there have been so many rounds of layoffs in the game industry recently.
Playruo’s pitch is that it can be used by game publishers as part of a launch campaign to maximize their chances of success. For instance, at the end of a video trailer, a publisher could embed thumbnail on YouTube with a link to the demo so you can try out the game easily.
Playruo links can also be integrated in game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer game demo so that viewers can team up with their favorite Twitch content creator.
Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client here is the game’s publisher, and they pay the startup to offer a demo. Chances are that a demo that becomes viral will lead to increased game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Cryptical Path.
“We know the cloud gaming business model pretty well from our past experience. The big pitfall is that the various platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Playruo’s co-founder and head of product, Weinbach, told me.
“It’s a bit ridiculous and counterintuitive. So we thought about a business model where it’s interesting for us that people stay for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo could be considered as a success for a game publisher.
Playruo will have to make sure that it can quickly scale its fleet of servers (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer virtual machines with GPUs, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.
This will be a critical part of Playruo’s model. If the startup has too many servers running without anyone launching demos, it’ll lead to an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup doesn’t have enough servers, many gamers will receive an error when they try to launch a demo.
But if it works well, Playruo can act as the top of the funnel for game purchases. After a 15-minute demo, players can get a link to add a game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address to get more information. And they may not even realize that they played a game that wasn’t installed on their system.
Flipboard, a Web 2.0-era social magazine app that is reinventing itself to capitalize on the renewed push toward an open social web, is deepening its ties to the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and, in time, Instagram Threads, among others. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its fediverse integrations to 400 more Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself.
The latter will allow Flipboard users to see their new followers and other activity around the content they share in the fediverse directly in the Flipboard app. This follows last year’s introduction of a Mastodon integration in the app, replacing Twitter, and the introduction of support for ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the open source, decentralized social networks that include Mastodon and others.
In February, Flipboard announced it would begin to add its creators and their social magazines to the fediverse as well, meaning that the curated magazines of links and other social posts that its creators typically share within the Flipboard app could now find a broader audience. By sharing creators’ posts and links with the wider fediverse, Flipboard’s publishing partners gained their own native ActivityPub feeds so they could be discovered by Mastodon users and those on other federated social apps. That initial push toward federation was started with 1,000 Flipboard magazines and today adds 400 more. In total, Flipboard says there are now over 11,000 curated Flipboard magazines available to federated social networking users.
“This is a major step toward fully federating our platform,” noted Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in an announcement. “We’re not just making curated content on Flipboard viewable, but enabling two-way communication so users can see activity and engage with fediverse communities. Personally, it has made my curation even more exciting as I know it’s reaching new people who may share my interests.”
The expanded set of accounts includes public accounts with one or two public magazines that have activity curated in the past 30 days and don’t have any trust and safety violations. They’ve also participated in Flipboard community programs. Accounts will be alerted to their federated status via email.
While Flipboard is working toward federating its users’ accounts by default, people will be able to “unfederate” by toggling off the “Federate” button in their Flipboard settings.
In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app. With the version arriving Thursday (ver. 4.3.25), Flipboard users will be able to see their new followers from the fediverse in their Flipboard profile, while their Flipboard notifications will now include fediverse reactions and conversations.
This notification window will now contain three sections: Replies, Activity and News. In Replies, users will be able to see and reply to posts from people both on Flipboard and in the fediverse, as well as any other fediverse @mentions. When they respond, their reply is also sent back to the fediverse, making Flipboard more of a fediverse client app than before. The Activity tab, meanwhile, will show users the likes, follows and boosts (the fediverse’s take on the retweet), along with other Flipboard activity. The News section (previously called Content) will now showcase breaking news and other stories recommended by Flipboard’s editorial team.
The company had already begun curating content for fediverse users across a handful of “news desks” (dedicated fediverse accounts) that directed users to interesting articles and links across topics. There is a broader news desk, plus those dedicated to Tech, Culture and Science. This existing curation can help fuel the newly rebranded News section in the Flipboard app.
Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.
Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.
The majority of the Intellimize team — around 50 people — will join Webflow. But some staffers either took outplacement packages or were let go and given severance; Webflow wouldn’t say how many.
Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product meets a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
“The common thread among our many customer segments is that they’re building professional websites that are meant not only to look great, but ultimately to drive business results — and tons of our customers and partners have been asking us to help them improve how well their websites are able to bring them new customers beyond the initial build phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a really impressive product in this space that many marketing and growth leaders raved about — and it soon became very evident that combining the forces of our respective products and our teams can create a much more powerful combination.”
Guy Yalif, former head of vertical marketing at Twitter, co-founded Intellimize in 2016 with Brian Webb and Jin Lim. While in a previous exec role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, Yahoo’s VP of engineering at the time, and Webb, who was an architect on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendation team. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is TechCrunch’s corporate parent.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim — drawing on their combined marketing know-how — set out to build a platform that could generate personalized webpages for visitors on demand.
The motivation? Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated when a website’s content isn’t customized, according to stats cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that do personalize report not only increased revenue, but more efficient marketing spend.
Intellimize taps AI to generate pages, automatically making adjustments in response to how users behave (and where they’re coming from). Companies create a website template, then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, fiddling with various knobs and dials is it were before delivering the top-performing results to visitors.
Now, Intellimize isn’t the only one doing this.
Amazon’s Personalize can drive tailored product and search recommendations on the web. Sstartups such as Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate certain forms of A/B web testing with algorithms. That’s not to mention generative AI-driven platforms like Adobe’s GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny and Blend, which are hastening in new and novel forms of experience personalization.
But Intellimize — whether on the strength of its tech, partnerships or advertising — manage to establish a sizeable foothold in the market for AI-powered marketing.
At the time of the acquisition, Intellimize — which had raised over $50 million from investors like Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners and Homebrew — had several tentpole customers including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already built most of the personalization and optimization tools that we were considering building in-house, and had an impressive roster of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to power website personalization and conversion rate optimization, which we believe would be a very powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform.”
So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the company joins the Webflow fold? Not many disruptive ones, Yalif stressed. Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it’ll increasingly link to — and integrate with — Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” guiding — what else? — personalization product efforts at Webflow.
“Joining Webflow allows us to scale and significantly accelerate our forward momentum,” Yalif said. “Webflow is building out its integrated solution for website building, design and optimization. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization pieces of that vision. Together, we can take on larger, much more expensive, harder-to-use players in the digital experience space.”
Here’s Magdalin’s take:
“Integrating Intellimize expands our primary audience beyond designers and developers … For the initial phase [of the merger], we’re focusing on natively integrating both of our products together — so customers should expect the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize to be available as one unified product experience later this year.”
Truecaller has launched a web version of its eponymous caller ID application that brings a range of features, including SMS and chat mirroring, call notifications, and number search functionality to the desktop. Initially, the web version, called Truecaller for Web, will only be made available to Android users globally, the company said, but it plans to roll out the support on iOS in the future.
All Truecaller for Android users across the world can now link their devices to the web client on a PC or a Mac through a QR code. At the moment, Truecaller is limiting the number of active web sessions to one and is also automatically signing out users after 30 days of no usage. Users can manually de-link a browser from settings as well. This is akin to linking the web version of a messenger like WhatsApp or Telegram.
Truecaller, which counts India as its biggest market with nearly 259 million users, is quite late in offering the SMS and chat-mirroring feature. Notably, Microsoft provides SMS mirroring for both Android and iPhone users on Windows through its Phone Link functionality. Nonetheless, this functionality could provide its users some convenience in quickly replying to a text or accessing one-time passwords (OTPs) for login.
Truecaller also already offers users the ability to look up a phone number on its website, though with some rate limits. Now users will be able to look up numbers without any such limitations on the web client, the company said. The web client also displays real-time caller ID notifications when a user receives a call.
The company said that there are 80 million people who receive SMS pop-up summary notifications every day. This means that these users haven’t denied Truecaller permission to read SMS. But it’s not clear if these folks are using Truecaller as their primary SMS client.
Over the last few months, Truecaller has focused on introducing more AI-powered features. Last month, it launched a “Max” feature update for Android users to block all calls from unapproved contacts or spam detected by AI. In February, the company also brought call recording and AI-powered transcription features to India after launching the feature in the U.S. last year.
After registering lower revenues for the quarter, the company had a 32% stock dip in October 2023. However, the stock has recovered from the low price of SEK24.47 ($2.32) to trading around SEK31.68 ($3) at the time of writing.
After the publication of the story, Truecaller said that it began rolling out the feature globally and not just in India. The story has been reflected to update that.
Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in — and who meet Apple’s criteria, including app notarization requirements — will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites.
It’s a massive change for a mobile ecosystem that otherwise bars so-called “sideloading.” Apple’s walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past. But, in the EU, that moat is being dismantled as a result of new regulations that apply to the App Store and which the iPhone maker has been expected to comply with since early last month.
In March, Apple announced that a web distribution entitlement would soon be coming to its mobile platform as part of changes aimed at complying with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The pan-EU regulation puts a set of obligations on in-scope tech giants that lawmakers hope will level the competitive playing field for platforms’ business users, as well as protecting consumers from Big Tech throwing its weight around.
Briefing journalists on the latest development to its EU app ecosystem Tuesday, ahead of the official announcement, an Apple representative said developers wanting to distribute iOS apps directly will be able to tap into the entitlement through beta 2 of iOS 17.5.
In order to do so developers will have to opt into Apple’s new EU business terms, which include a new “core technology fee” charged at €0.50 for each first annual install over 1 million in the past 12 months regardless of where apps are distributed. App makers wishing to avoid the fee currently have no choice but to remain on Apple’s old business terms, meaning they are unable to access any of the DMA entitlements.
In earlier DMA changes, App has opened up to allow marketplace apps in the EU where developers can run their own app stores on iOS, including marketplaces composed of only their own apps.
Additional DMA-driven reforms include more flexibility from Apple around in-app payments, as well as a ban on its usual anti-steering measures. This means that iOS developers opting into the new T&Cs can inform their users of cheaper offers available outside Apple’s own App Store.
Returning to the new option of web distribution for iOS apps, Apple’s criteria for developers wanting to distribute their software directly include that they be in good standing with its developer program; attest to handle things like IP disputes and government takedown requests; and commit to providing iOS users with customer service, as Apple will not offer that kind of support for iOS apps downloaded outside its App Store.
It also emphasizes that all apps distributed from the web must meet its notarizations requirements, which it says are intended to protect platform integrity.
An Apple rep described this as a baseline safety and security standard, which they said iOS users expect to help ensure their device is protected from external risks.
The company continues to argue that sideloading apps carries inherent security risks for mobile users, suggesting it’s trying to find a way to comply with the DMA while taking steps to limit risks the changes create for its users.
The first time an iOS user attempts to download an app from a developer’s website they will be required to authorize the developer to install apps directly on their device. Apple’s current design of the authorization flow involves multiple steps and requires users to verify that they wish to provide permission for developer via the iOS settings menu and by clicking “allow” on subsequent permission pop-ups (the other option, i.e. to deny permission, reads “ignore”).
After they have gone through this multi-step flow and approved a developer, any future direct downloads involve fewer steps, per Apple.
The design of the follow-on flow that Apple showed during the briefing includes a screen notifying users that “updates and purchases in this app will be managed by the developer,” combined with a suggestion they “verify the information below before installing,” which is displayed above a card showing some basic app info and screenshots, as well as a link to see “more” info.
Apple argues these steps and the information iOS surfaces to users during the authorization process for direct web downloads are reasonable security measures; the DMA permits gatekeepers to apply these steps in order to protect platform integrity.
However critics of Apple’s DMA approach have decried these sort of pop-ups as “scare screens,” arguing the flow it designs is intended to inject friction and dissuade iOS users from stepping outside Apple’s garden — such as by implying direct downloads are riskier than downloads through Apple’s own App Store.
Apple’s approach to a number of other elements of DMA compliance are under investigation by the European Commission, so at least some of these criticisms have spurred EU enforcers to take a closer look at its take on what the law demands.
Last month the Commission announced that it’s looking into Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store and the design of choice screens for alternatives to its Safari web browser, which is another regulated core platform service under the DMA. The EU also announced some “investigatory steps” in relation to Apple’s new iOS fee structure, but, for now, the new core tech fee stands.
Given Apple has only just started implementing web distribution for iOS apps, it remains to be seen whether the EU will step in for a closer look at this aspect of its DMA compliance, too.
It’s also unclear how much demand there will be among iOS developers for direct web distribution. Asked about this, Apple said it’s heard from some app makers they want to have the option but it also pointed out it’s a new capability, which is just starting to be made available, saying it’s unsure how many developers will actually want to take advantage of the option. The option sits alongside the existing (established) and still available option of App Store distribution.
In the EU, developers also now have a third route for reaching users: They can submit a marketplace app to Apple requesting to distribute their software through their own alternative store hosted on its platform.
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