Our Take: Standing Up for Small Business When It Comes to Competition in App Stores
Regular readers of this blog and listeners of ACT | The App Association’s podcast, Tech Swamp, are familiar with the DC rumblings around antitrust felt over the last Congress. Well, those rumblings are now reaching the magnitude of a minor earthquake; if the tremors before were only detectable on a seismograph, you certainly hear the fine china shaking in the cabinets now. Unfortunately, the impending tectonic (“tech”-tonic?) shifts are unlikely to help—and would actually hurt—small app companies. Though many are [...]
SB 2311 would benefit billionaires at the expense of Illinois app developers
Fighting back against “Big Tech” is all the rage in state houses these days. After unsuccessful attempts to convince Arizona, Georgia, and North Dakota lawmakers that the future of their economy hinges on better prices on V-Bucks to use in Fortnite, The Coalition for App Fairness and its backers Epic Games, Basecamp, and Spotify, has its sights set on Illinois. While we don’t disagree the app economy is a critical part of Illinois’ economic growth, the sponsors of this bill [...]
ACT | The App Association Applauds the Department of Justice Restoring 2015 Business Review Letter Interpretation
The U.S. Department of Justice recently restored its 2015 Business Review Letter supporting key clarifications on standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing issues made by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA). The App Association welcomes the DOJ Antitrust Division’s decision to restore the 2015 Business Review Letter in support of IEEE-SA’s efforts to clarify its patent policy by clarifying and strengthening its fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing requirements. The policy provided much-needed certainty on the meaning of the FRANDcommitment that patent holders make [...]
A Brief History of Time: The App Stores
Here at ACT | App Association, we care about the app economy – because our members drive it and the larger ecosystem of developer services, funding, and workforce development it created. Alongside the rise of the smartphone and other smart technologies that rely on apps, the app ecosystem grew exponentially since the first app store was launched in 2008. Since then, our members and millions of app developers around the world rely on platforms like Google Play and the Apple [...]
Net Neutrality is Good and so is Sponsored Data
For years now, ACT | The App Association has urged Congress to adopt a set of requirements that establishes net neutrality principles in statute. The debate came back to a head in 2017 as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undid its classification of internet services as Title II, thus removing the FCC’s own ability to develop net neutrality rules. California stepped into the void, adopting its own net neutrality law, going slightly further than the Obama Administration’s federal rules in [...]
Member Spotlight: SyndoHealth
Every startup begins with the identification of a problem, followed by ideas to solve it. For the Belgian app maker SyndoHealth, this problem is helping patients with chronic diseases cope with their illnesses. Their solution is mobile technologies and wearables. In the European Union (EU), common chronic illnesses account for 78 percent of all healthcare costs,[1] and this percentage will likely increase in the future. Lifestyle behaviours and patterns, as well as genetics, social environment, and the healthcare system, all [...]