Alternative App Store Now Available.* (Terms and Conditions Apply.)

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple announced this week that Brazilian developers can finally distribute apps through alternative marketplaces and offer payment options outside Apple's own system. Cue the fireworks. Cue the press release. Cue Epic Games and the Coalition for App Fairness — whose membership includes Basecamp, Deezer, Spotify, ProtonMail, and Tile — immediately calling the whole thing a junk-fee scheme dressed up as compliance. I'd normally roll my eyes at the predictability of it. Then I actually read the fee schedule. Credit Where It's Due Before I tear into this, I want to say the obvious thing out loud, because it's true and I don't want to pretend otherwise: Apple's "we provide infrastructure and that costs money" argument isn't nothing. App Store review, the developer tools, fraud and malware screening, distribution to over a billion devices, hosting for every update you've ever installed — that's real, ongoing engineering and operational cost. App…