No, it isn't. There is Google Play, Microsoft, Amazon, and a whole host of other app stores out there. Remember, the market is mobile devices altogether, not just iOS devices.
"Only legal gap is declaring Apple's app store on its platform a monopoly, the second that is done then everything else naturally falls into place and Apple receives antitrust violations."
Which will not happen, because you can't have a monopoly on your own platform.
> No, it isn't. There is Google Play, Microsoft, Amazon, and a whole host of other app stores out there.
Apple has banned all of those from iOS. It allows no third party app stores.
> Remember, the market is mobile devices altogether, not just iOS devices.
You cannot just tack on the word "remember" to make something an established fact. We don't know what the scope of future legal decisions will be until they're in fact made.
> Which will not happen, because you can't have a monopoly on your own platform.
You, nor I, have any way of knowing or proving that. This will likely go to SCOTUS in our lifetime, until that happens we won't know the scope of what is a monopolistic market.
"Apple has banned all of those from iOS. It allows no third party app stores."
Which is irrelevant, as Spotify can still sell apps through those stores. Remember, the market is mobile as a whole, not just iOS.
"You cannot just tack on the word "remember" to make something an established fact. We don't know what the scope of future legal decisions will be until they're in fact made."
It is currently an established fact. If that changes, then we will have to revisit. But as of now, it stands.
"Why are you copying and pasting? I won't reply to this again, you already posted this above."
Yet, you continue to say the same thing in every one of your comments, trying to define the market so as to ignore other mobile OSes. If you're going to post the same thing, then expect to get the same responses.
It's way more complicated than that. Antitrust law doesn't care about "the market", it cares about "the relevant market", where "relevant" is a legal term of art that may or may not have anything to do actual markets.
There were 6 factors considered in establishing the relevant market in the Microsoft case (paraphrasing Court's Findings of Fact, §2)[0].
A) Servers were not cost-effective replacements for consumer hardware and were excluded from the relevant market. It's not clear whether the discrimination also goes the opposite way (e.g. instead of "smartphones" we compare "flagship smartphones"). If so, that kind of market definition would really make iOS look gigantic.
B) PowerPC and other non-Intel-compatibles were excluded from the relevant market since consumers could not install the competing OS on their hardware (that's right, "the relevant market" was constructed so as to exclude Apple, MS's only serious competitor). It is an interesting question whether the fact that you can't run Android on your iPhone for non-ISA reasons would be viewed similarly to an ISA difference in the hardware, but the way I read the ruling, it seems likely to be viewed similarly, or perhaps much worse. The reasoning all stems from whether consumers have choices to install their own OS, nothing to do with ISAs per se.
C) Various "borderline formfactors" were excluded from the relevant market. In the 90s this was e.g. WebTV, thin clients and game consoles. Today this might be things like tablets, VR platforms, chromebooks, etc. These are (today) all Android form factors, and excluding them to focus on "traditional" formfactors makes iOS look a bit larger than it does in Netcraft surveys.
D) The court observed that market conditions create a feedback loop, e.g. more people write apps for the dominant platform, that make the dominant platform more attractive to write apps for, round and round it goes, etc. This is obviously true for the smartphone market.
E) The court was concerned that nobody could realistically enter the market and "in less than a few years, present a significant percentage of consumers with a viable alternative to incumbents." This seems probable for the smartphone market, based on Mozilla and Canonical's misadventures, RIM and Nokia's inability to make a comeback, and even Windows Phone.
F) There was also a discussion about why "portals" (like today's cloud computing and/or webapps, basically) are not an effective substitute for doing computing locally and should not be in the relevant market, as well as a discussion of why Java is not a substitute for Windows (obvious to us, but not to lawyers)
All of this to say, it is really not so obvious from a legal POV why Apple are not a monopoly or are in any way different fro the Microsoft case. The real reason is probably nobody wants to sue them; I have seen estimates of the Microsoft case that suggests MS spent more than $500M defending it, and the taxpayers (with much cheaper lawyers) spent more or less $100M to prosecute it and didn't get much for their money.
Then there is the question of who gains by spending that money: Apple is well-loved by their customers so it doesn't have the election appeal for politicians that the Microsoft case did. Google would prefer to implement Apple-like policies in their store and don't want them found to be illegal. That leaves bit players like Canonical or Mozilla, and for them the legal costs are likely prohibitive.
"D) The court observed that market conditions create a feedback loop, e.g. more people write apps for the dominant platform, that make the dominant platform more attractive to write apps for, round and round it goes, etc. This is obviously true for the smartphone market."
Is it? Android dominates mobile marketshare. Yet iOS is not hurting for apps.
Everything else considered, you would have to make an extreme stretch to say that the app market does not include Android.
At this point there are only two mobile phone platforms with apps. iOS is smaller, but has tons of apps. It started the trend and people seem to like to pay more money on iOS for apps than they do on Android (I don't know if that's as true today as it used to be, but I think it still holds). Even if users don't like paying as much on android or paying it all, Android has a larger market share in thus is still worth developing for. Both platforms have hundreds of millions of users.
Windows phone is dead. BlackBerry is dead. Palm OS. The previous versions of Windows Phone. The Sidekick. Amazon Fire Phone. Canonical's phone, the Firefox phone, whatever other Linux phones I can't think of.
It doesn't matter how big the company backing it is, even if they actually do a good job (like supposedly the recent Windows Phones). At this point the first mover advantage for Android and iOS are too big. Even if you spend all the time to make a great platform no one's going to buy it because the top hundred or thousand apps aren't available. Because no one's gonna Byatt know it's gonna make apps for because there's no one to buy the apps. You're stuck in a cycle.
Microsoft tried to buy their way out of it, and blackberry did too to a degree. But it doesn't matter if you pay to get the top 40 apps from iOS, because nobody uses all of them. They use some percentage of the top hundred apps. Or 500 apps. So every users going to have a couple of apps that they really want that are unavailable and will never get ported. The apps that do exist (like Twitter and others) often don't get updates, and if a game or something does come out for the platform it's not until years after the big two.
Until something very different comes along, or some HUGE external force appears, we're only going to have two big phone OSes. The only thing that slightly possible (in my eyes) would be someone as big as Samsung pushing their own OS in other countries and possibly getting a good foothold there. Maybe Xaiomi.
No, it isn't. There is Google Play, Microsoft, Amazon, and a whole host of other app stores out there. Remember, the market is mobile devices altogether, not just iOS devices.
"Only legal gap is declaring Apple's app store on its platform a monopoly, the second that is done then everything else naturally falls into place and Apple receives antitrust violations."
Which will not happen, because you can't have a monopoly on your own platform.