Last week I told you that Apple withdrew the AppGratis application from the App Store and it seems that the abuse of push notifications and the fact that the application promotes other applications from the App Store were the basis of the withdrawal. The CEO of the company that develops AppGratis blamed Apple for the way it chooses to treat its developers, and now the deputy minister for digital economy says that the brutal and unilateral manner in which Apple acted should attract much more careful control from the EU over the App Stores.
France plans to ask the European Commission for tighter regulation of Internet companies following Apple's decision to remove a French-designed app from its App Store. This behavior is not worthy of a company of this size," Pellerin said. She added that certain Internet companies were guilty of "repeated abusive behavior" and said she would ask the European Commission and EU member states to better regulate digital platforms, search engines and social media. In an email to Reuters, Apple said it had had a discussion with AppGratis before removing it from its platform and that the company had disregarded its technical specifications.
The decision to withdraw AppGratis seems to be only the first move made by Apple to remove applications of this kind from the App Store, but so far the company has only withdrawn some that work in the same way. Those from AppGratis are lucky to have members of the government on their side, but even if the EU intervenes, it is unlikely that Apple will be forced to manage its App Store at the will of one government or another. Apple claims that it talked with AppGratis representatives to solve the technical problems before withdrawing the application, but claims that they ignored them, and the withdrawal came as a normal measure.
