Russian parliamentarians continue to attack Apple. Today it became known that Anton Gorelkin, a deputy from the United Russia party, initiated an inspection of the Apple company by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). He believes that domestic teams have difficulty accessing App Store tools.
As the Kommersant newspaper writes, Gorelkin in his address to the FAS says the following:
- the teams complain to him that they cannot register their developer accounts in the Apple system;
- without this account, they cannot publish their apps in the App Store;
- to appear in the store, they are forced to purchase accounts on the black market that are registered in the USA and China;
- problems with registration are explained by the fact that its payment through Russian banks is not accepted (due to the special data format);
- in the USA and China, the identity verification algorithm works differently (via popular payment systems);
- different rules speak about the company’s discriminatory policy towards, among other things, Russian developers.
The FAS has already received an appeal and plans to consider it. She also notes that she has not received such statements from the developers.
According to the publication of Kommersant, there are indeed problems with registering a developer account in Russia. Representative of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications Karen Ghazaryan highlighted the following:
- the requirement to pay for an account only with a card registered to an individual specified in the account (they say, “this is difficult in Russian realities”);
- blocking or refusing to moderate applications that may unreasonably, from Apple’s point of view, connect via VPN;
- the slowness of the support service.
By the way, at the end of 2019, a topic was raised on various sites in the Russian-speaking environment (VC, 4PDA, Habr) concerning problems with paying for the developer’s account through Russian banks. In most cases, it was noted that it was solved by contacting the technical support service.
Important: judging by the comments, not all developers have encountered the problem. However, at the same time, the problem was at least widespread.
This is the second parliamentary initiative regarding Western stores since the beginning of September. On the first day, a bill “On Marketplaces” was introduced, proposing to limit the commission in all app stores to 20%. Before that, in the summer, the FAS recognized Apple as a violator of antimonopoly legislation in a case initiated at the request of Kaspersky Lab.
Also on the topic:
- The State Duma proposed to oblige to reduce the commission in ALL stores to 20% and give a third of the commission to the stateWhy the bill “On marketplaces” in Russia, most likely, will not be accepted: lawyer’s comment
- Is there any news?
Share it with us, write to press@app2top.ru