William Gallagher, writing last week for AppleInsider:

Judge Rogers maintains that Apple had successfully made as few developers as possible benefit from the court’s original anti-steering ruling. “As of the May 2024 hearing,” she wrote, “only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place.”

So 34 was the number in May last year. But did the number go up in any significant way since then? I was thinking about it this week, and I’ve not only never seen an app that used these link-outs, I’d never even heard about one that did. And I try more apps than most people, and I hear about a lot more apps than most people. If you’re aware of any apps that used this (or even better, if you’re a developer who did use it), let me know.

It seems like no exaggeration to say that, effectively, no developers used this. Which does seem to have been Apple’s intention in setting the terms (27 percent commission, invasive rules for tracking users for a week after following a link from the app to the web, and odious requirements to allow Apple to view the developers’ internal accounting figures to make sure they weren’t cheating Apple out of commissions). But it really makes you wonder how anyone at Apple thought the court would see this plan as compliant.