Malcolm Owen
Microsoft's gaming chief has his eye on the iPhone, and has said that the company is planning its own store to bring Xbox games to Apple hardware outside of the App Store once EU rules come into force
The European Union's Digital Markets Act will make major changes in March 2024, including enabling third-party digital storefronts to coexist on the iPhone and iPad alongside the App Store. It seems that Microsoft wants to capitalize on the situation.
According to Microsoft Gaming chief executive Phil Spencer, Microsoft wants to open up its own app store for iOS and Android. Pending the clearance of its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, that storefront could go live in 2024 at the earliest.
"We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play," Spencer told the Financial Times before the annual Game Developers Conference. "Today, we can't do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up."
Though Microsoft is in talks with regulators over the acquisition due to the potential impact on competition, Spencer believes the deal could help boost competition on smartphones, the "largest platform people play on."
"The Digital Markets Act that's coming - those are the kinds of things that we are planning for," Spencer believes. "I think it's a huge opportunity."
Offering its own app storefront would be useful for Microsoft in many ways, including enabling cloud gaming to grow.
Under existing rules, Apple requires cloud gaming services to list each game in the App Store rather than operating from a single app, akin to Netflix. Cloud gaming is possible on the iPhone, but via a web browser instead of a dedicated native app.
With the opening of its own store, Microsoft could offer its own games, apps, and services unencumbered by Apple's App Store rules.
According to Spencer, it would be "pretty trivial" for Microsoft to adapt its Xbox and Game Pass apps to sell games and subscriptions on mobile devices. However, it needs Activision Blizzard to fill an "obvious hole in our capability" to offer mobile gaming, and that major titles under the deal would be "critically important" in securing players away from the App Store.
Apple is allegedly bracing itself for the prospect of competing app storefronts once the EU changes take place, with one December report indicating that behind-the-scenes work is underway to ensure compliance.
However, Apple is almost certain to fight the rules, or at least attempt to delay their implementation.
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9 Comments
While the used car salesman stigma is still there for me with Microsoft, I certainly trust them to run an app store far more than I do sleazy companies like Epic. I hope the EU ruling gives Apple the ability to deny app stores from known scammers. As PT Barnum said in a parallel universe: there's a scammer born every minute.
I really hope Apple fights this to the end... Apple implemented the App Store and iPhone ecosystem for the exact reason of benefiting the USERS of the platform and maintaining control in the name of safety.
Of course this doesn't make any sense to those of us who have been enjoying the privacy, security, and robustness of what Apple has provided to its customers for so many years. No matter how well managed and reliable a company like Microsoft is, and Microsoft is one of the few non-Apple companies I actually trust at a near-Apple level, you simply cannot ADD something to a system that's not broken without introducing the risk of compromising everything that Apple has worked so hard to protect for us. There is no way that adding more ingress points into what is now a protected system can make it more secure.
At best adding additional ingress points can "not fail," but at worst they can fail miserably and destroy your system. Of course Apple will do everything it can to keep that from happening like they've done on macOS by allowing foreign apps to be let inside the security gates by raising risk warnings to the user, which the user can decide to override. But macOS has a long legacy of allowing additional ingress points into that system. But let's face it, when it comes to privacy and security the developer community was admittedly a lot stupider and naive back when macOS was first conceived. The doors were opened back then and once open it's hard to close them.
The designers of iOS learned from their past mistakes and weaknesses and recognized they needed to take privacy and security a hell of a lot more seriously when creating their next generation OS that operates at a far more intimate and personal level than macOS. Devices that are built around iOS and its derivatives like iPadOS are single-user devices and are effectively physical extensions of the one person who is assigned to the device. Leaving the house without your iPhone on you feels like you're not wearing pants. I would bet that one of the reasons that Apple hasn't slapped macOS on to the iPad, even with iPads having Mac-like processing power, is because they want to maintain that 1:1 ratio of devices to users.
My hope is that these alien app stores will be completely optional and not automatically baked into the base OS setup. If they are, say because of additional EU overreach, they'd better be removable or provide provisions to completely neuter them and render them useless. FU EU. If companies decide to limit the distribution of their apps to an alien App Store I will no longer buy or use their apps, just like I do with businesses that provide customer facing services exclusively via Facebook.
Maybe with the ruling, it should also be included that any host of an app store also assumes liability for any rogue app on the app store that is a scam or malware.
Personally, I wouldn't ever want to use a third party store, but plenty will, and with it, malware will become a huge threat to iPhone users who have become accustomed to relatively safe apps on the current store model.