Switching from one platform to another represents a technical challenge for software publishers, but certain legal and economic aspects also deserve attention.
- Compliance with Licenses and Copyrights
Switching platforms often requires revisiting the licenses of your current tools and libraries. Make sure your licenses comply with the new platform’s rules.
- License audit: Review all the licenses of the components used in your software to identify those that may cause issues during the migration.
- Intellectual property: Ensure that the elements of your application (code, design, content) comply with the copyright and intellectual property rules of the new platform.
- Compliance with App Store Policies
Each platform has its own policies regarding the distribution of applications through their stores (App Store for Apple and Google Play for Android).
- Pay attention to regular updates, which may be more frequent than on Windows, for example. This may require adjusting your monitoring processes.
- Personal Data Management
Protecting users’ personal data is a major challenge, regardless of the operating system. However, the specific mechanisms of the Google and Apple Stores may introduce new issues. For example, do some data transfers occur outside of the EU? Are specific usage trackers installed in your application?
- Business Model and Platform Compensation
Migrating to a new platform may bring surprises to your business model, particularly regarding compensation and fees imposed by the platforms.
- Commission fees: Analyze the commissions charged by Apple and Google on app sales and in-app purchases. Some stores take up to 30% of revenue, which can significantly impact your business model.
- New monetization options may be available, such as subscriptions, advertisements, and in-app purchases.
- Contract modifications: Do your commercial contracts need to be adjusted to include the new compensation arrangements and ensure transparency with your partners and users?
Our team of technology law attorneys can assist you with the migration of your software, helping you find solutions tailored to these new commercial environments.
