By John Gruber
Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.
MacPaw Pulls the Plug on SetApp Mobile App Marketplace
Friday, 16 January 2026
Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:
The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.
In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.
For users in the EU who accessed iOS apps through Setapp’s subscription store, those apps will be removed from the platform after the shutdown date. Setapp advises users to back up any important data before then, as the apps will no longer be available once the service ends. Setapp’s separate subscription-based Mac app store will continue to operate as normal.
Steve Troughton-Smith, on Mastodon:
Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.
It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.
My take is that none of these things had any chance of success. It’s not the Core Technology Fee in particular that doomed EU app marketplaces to obscurity. It’s the fact that Apple doesn’t think app marketplaces are a good idea, users are not clamoring for them, and the EU just isn’t a big enough market to matter on its own. If the U.S. mandated that Apple allow third-party app marketplaces, that might be enough to generate enough support from developers to matter. Probably not, but maybe. But just the EU, and now Japan? Nope. But that sort of mandate is unlikely to come from the U.S. because there isn’t popular demand for it.
The EU can force Apple to enable things like alternative app marketplaces and browser engines on iOS. They can’t force Apple to make them available outside the EU. Nor can they somehow force Apple to make them popular even within the EU — either with users or developers. It’s just bureaucratic folly. Legislation and regulation based on ideals, not practical reality. The core problem with these mandates from the EU is that they’re not based on demand from users. Users don’t care about third-party browser rendering engines. Users don’t even know what third-party browser rendering engines are. Users, by and large, not only are not asking for third-party app marketplaces for iOS, they in fact prefer the App Store’s role as the exclusive source for third-party software. The mandates from the DMA that Apple most strenuously objects to — and thus complies with the most begrudgingly — are based on the desires of Apple’s competitors (like Meta and Spotify) and web developer advocates who object to closed platforms on ideological grounds, not the popular demands of EU citizens who own iPhones.
Apple is getting away what some describe as “malicious compliance” because they’re under no popular demand from their actual customers to comply in any other way. If Apple’s DMA compliance features were unpopular, the outcry might force them to adapt in popular ways. But the only things that register as popular or unpopular are things people care about. By and large, iPhone owners do not care about third-party app marketplaces and they care even less about third-party browser engines. Popular demand isn’t going to come about from additional regulatory mandates or pocket-change fines imposed on Apple.
Anyone who does care about these things, and wants to see iOS change to enable them to thrive, should focus their efforts on creating popular demand for them. Good luck with that.