We kind of missed the beginning of the whole Dutch/Dating App/App Store thing around these parts. I’m pretty sure that’s because it started on Christmas Eve. Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s Apple 3.0 ran a couple of pieces over the weekend about how the whole thing began. Bottom line - it began with MatchGroup, which owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, PelntyOfFish, and plenty of other dating apps. MatchGroup, by the way, also a member of the Coalition for App Fairness, which - this time last year - was lobbying a number of states, including North Dakota, Arizona, and Minnesota, to enact legislation to force Apple to allow third-party payment methods in the App Store. The supposition of one Apple 3.0 reader is that the dustup in the Netherlands is about “finding a convenient venue to establish a regulatory precedent somewhere in the world.”
Above Avalon’s Neil Cybart picked up on all of this a littler earlier. Writing of the moves from Dutch authorities, he said:
This order is not the byproduct of a multi-year study into the App Store’s impact on the Netherlands economy. It’s not a result of Dutch consumers demanding change. It’s not even driven by a grassroots campaign consisting of small businesses and indie developers. Instead, it’s the result of a $30B dollar company wanting to reduce the need to go through Apple to reach users on the iOS platform. For our discussion, instead of saying the order applies to “developers with dating apps in the Netherlands,” we will just say “Match Group in the Netherlands” as that description more accurately reflects the situation.
