
Fortnite Removed from App Store - shamoo
https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/fortnite-pulled-from-ios-app-store-after-epic-circ/1100-6480913/
======
Hokusai
> Apple has removed Fortnite from the iOS App Store.

So this is the hill Apple wants to die on. It makes sense. 30% of all the apps
economy is a lot of money.

I hope that antitrust and other government agencies take note.

The ability to take down the 7th top grossing iOS game without blinking shows
the kind of power that Apple has over everybody else.

~~~
jandrese
They really don't have a choice. Every app developer thinks the 30% fee is
excessive and if Apple lets one company get away with it everybody else is
going to follow suit.

~~~
pilif
Amazon already got away with it with their video streaming service.

You totally get away with it if you have something that Apple needs badly
enough

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erwinkle
Discussion of Apple topics here on HN almost always gets reduced to the
argument that Apple is not a monopoly, so what they are doing is OK. I want to
present an alternative viewpoint. It's not a monopoly issue, it is an anti-
competitive issue. In Canada, we have three major cell carriers. None of them
has a monopoly, or anything close to it. None of them has even 50% market
share.

You can have a 10 GB smartphone plan with Rogers for $75. If you don't like
that, you can switch to Bell's 10 GB plan for $75. If you don't like Bell, of
course you can switch to Telus's 10 GB plan for, wait for it, $75.

The Big 3 operate smaller brands with fewer bells and whistles and lower
costs. You can get a 4 GB cell plan from Koodo (Telus subsidiary) for $50, or
from Fido (Rogers subsidiary) for $50, or from Virgin Mobile (Bell subsidiary)
for $50.

Sometimes one of them has promotional pricing, like $45 instead of $50 for
4GB. The other two offer the same pricing for the same duration. Sometimes one
of them increases their prices by $5 a month citing reasons such as
infrastructure investments, lower Canadian dollar value, or inflation. The
other two increase their prices by the same amount a couple of days later.

And none of this is collusion in the legal sense. They don't gather in smoke-
filled rooms and decide how to screw over their customers. There is not back-
channel communication whatsoever. And it is not because the competition is so
perfect the prices have been commoditized. In fact, Canada has some of the
highest cell plan prices in the world, even adjusting for factors such as
population density and GDP.

It's just that the big companies have decided to stop competing. If you live
in, say Alberta or Ontario or BC, you have three options and they are all the
same overpriced crap. Cell carriers in Canada are not a monopoly, but you
don't have to be a monopoly to harm customers with anti-competitive behaviour.
Apple and Google, Android and iOS do not have a monopoly or a collusion
agreement. But they are harming the customers all the same.

~~~
erwinkle
I think this is called tacit collusion. You see something like this with
gasoline pricing - major brands will have "competing" stations across the
street from each other, but their prices moves in lock step without a race to
the bottom.

Memory vendors have explicitly colluded in the past, but they really didn't
need to - they just needed to copy their competitors' posted pricing.
Presumably that is what they do now.

If there are high barriers to new competitors entering the market, then the
situation is unlikely to change.

~~~
kjs3
While it looks like collusion, collusion is fiendishly difficult to prove and
prosecute, much less disrupt. I think you're right...unless there's a
substantive change in the market landscape, nothing will change.

------
mwnivek
Main discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146902)

------
seebetter
It’s amazing that one company could control the hardware and universal
functions like texting in such a restrictive hyper-capitalistic way.

“You can write apps for our hardware but all your purchases we take 30%...”
imagine Microsoft trying this tactic in the 1990s.

~~~
jandrese
The year of Linux on the Desktop probably would have actually happened.

But that's really not the right comparison. It would be more like back in the
pre-clone era IBM taking a cut of everything that ran on a PC. They might have
even gotten away with it had the courts gone the other way on the BIOS
copyright lawsuit. Probably would have set personal computing back for years.

