I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it seems pretty minor compared to the fact that:
1) Apple's apps come preinstalled on every iPhone.
2) Apple's apps have permission to do things that 3rd party apps cannot.
If I search for "Web Browser" on the App Store... well, technically I'll get results from third parties, but every single one is just a UI skin around Apple's own browser. That strikes me as a much larger problem.
> However, when a user is clearly searching for alternatives on the app store, it matters how far down you have to scroll to find a 3rd party app.
If I delete Apple's Calendar, install a third party Calendar app (like Fantastical), and click a date link, I'll get a message asking me if I want to reinstall Apple's Calendar. I think it's pretty darn clear in that scenario what the user actually wants.
On the other hand, Apple products are (or were) frequently marketed towards the tech illiterate ("it just works") and so it's possible grandma accidentally deleted the calendar, tried to re-download via the App Store, downloaded the wrong one, etc.
Even if they also installed a third party Calendar app?
That strikes me as a frivolous concern, but if it worries Apple, there's an easy solution—add a "defaults" menu in Settings, like every other OS. Set it up so the default can only be changed by the user, and remains associated with the first party app even on uninstall.
We're coming up on the 13th version of iOS, and Apple hasn't done this yet. I don't think it's because they haven't gotten around to it.
Actually, I suspect that advantaging their own apps is a key part of Apple's business strategy for the future. Consider their recent shift towards "services". If the iPhone didn't exist, it would be silly to expect Apple to outdo major incumbents like Spotify, Netflix, and Venmo, but Apple thinks it can leverage its status as iPhone platform holder against competitors.
>On the other hand, Apple products are (or were) frequently marketed towards the tech illiterate
This becomes a vicious self-justifying cycle that is profitable for Apple but harmful to those consumers, who are kept tech illiterate when they're denied the opportunity to step outside their comfort zone and learn something new.
They simply use the Chrome app URL scheme instead of the generic URL. Similar to how you go to an app’s website and it redirects you to the app itself. There’s an app called Opener [1] that uses this and you can do similar with the Shortcuts app.
Other apps can take advantage of this too. Apps like Reddit and Outlook have similar settings to do the same. They even offer options for other browsers like Firefox. But, developers would need to add each browser option themselves, instead of relying on a defaults system from Apple.
I see it differently. Way back when Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer with Windows it ruined companies. We see companies being arbitrarily ruined by Apple's actions every month. This platform abuse triggered massive antitrust actions in the US and EU that Microsoft lost quite spectacularly, costing them a fortune and forcing many changes to their software.
Microsoft shipping IE in Windows did not ruin companies.
What ruined companies (and what MS was actually prosecuted for) was Microsoft telling PC manufacturers "we will only sell you Windows OS if you agree to NOT install any other browsers on your computers." Those agreements were how MS abused their OS monopoly to wrongfully exclude other browsers from the market. Up to that point, Netscape was selling their browser direct to Dell, HP, Gateway, etc. to be preloaded on machines they sold.
Microsoft was a supplier to PC companies and the market they distorted was the software supplier market. Apple themselves are the device manufacturer and have under 50% share in that market; it's not a comparable situation.
The similarity is ruining companies via abuse of their platform position, which doesn't depend on market share or monopoly or replicating Microsoft's particular malfeasance.
Actually, in the US, Microsoft lost, won the appeal, then settled.
Notice this key quote from below, "However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future."
> Spotify being the 23rd result for a "music" search is absurd
I have hard time believing this was not intentional.
Edit: on Android Spotify is at place 2-4. iTunes is nowhere to be seen but that could be explained with the horrible reviews it has received (some are even legit).
I have a hard time believing it was. iTunes search is wicked bad and has been since day 1. After they started allowing tags for apps it got worse, which is an impressive achievement.
Judging from the sheer number of "ASO" companies that contacted me the week I put out an app on the store, I believe that the main problem is mainly really bad spam control.
Yeah, companies frequently put their competitors' names in their keywords. Not going to name any names, but it's particularly bad in the ride sharing industry.
The advantage to using Google Play is that apps containing ads are clearly labelled as such. Apple won't tell you this in advance. (This was my biggest surprise, recently switching from Android after the CopperheadOS meltdown)
Honestly I care less about ads and more about trackers.
Google Play says nada about trackers. Exodus project (and therefore F-Droid) does.
If you come from CopperheadOS I can recommend /e/ or LineageOS + microG (/e/ also contains microG). microG does not implement GAds. You will still need to block trackers though.
I agree with you about the trackers, but I just assume ads=tracking. I cannot see any app marketplace saying their apps contain tracking in the main description (it's always buried in the fine print).
My understanding is that GrapheneOS[0] is the successor to CopperheadOS, and I think that's what I'll try next. There isn't an Exodus Privacy or F-Droid for iOS and these are sorely missed.
For me, Spotify is the 4th app when searching for "music", but it's the first app that doesn't contain the word "music" as the first or second word in the name.
It goes:
1. Apple Music
2. Music
3. Music>
4. Spotify New music and podcasts
If I search Google for 'music', Spotify dooesn't come up on the first page either.
YouTube - Music Channel
music.youtube.com
play.google.com/music
play.google.com/store/music
Music - Wikipedia
MusicChoice.com
Youtube Music on the App Store
Mtv.com
I don't even get Spotify on the second page of results - but I do get articles from The Verge and TechCrunch about Spotify. Spotify itself shows up on the third page.
For me Google even has a "Related search: Music platforms" box that contains YouTube, Google Play, SoundCloud, iTunes and TIDAL (no Spotify)
>Spotify being the 23rd result for a "music" search is absurd.
That search term is so broad it's difficult to figure out exactly what the users intent is for that. Do they want to listen to music? Do they want to create or record music?
FWIW, I just searched for "music" and saw: An ad, a story ("run with music"), apple music, two music players I've never heard of and finally Spotify in position 6.
>That search term is so broad it's difficult to figure out exactly what the users intent is for that
I disagree. It's broad in the sense that that the user could be searching for any number of things. It's not broad in the sense that the user is likely looking for a music listening app.
Think of the real world equivalent. In common conversation when someone says "I like music", do you presume that they enjoy listening to, or making, music?
I'd say the intent is pretty clear for the majority of users.
>That search term is so broad it's difficult to figure out exactly what the users intent is for that.
Search optimization. Determine what most users ultimately end up selecting for specific queries, build up your data set over time, then weigh priorities and determine result order based on that.
When I was new to iOS, I wasn't always looking for alternatives. Sometimes finding out an app was already on my phone related to what I was searching for was genuinely helpful. I didn't realize that "Books" could play Audiobooks, for example. It didn't end up being the best app for me, but it was useful to see Books as a search result so I knew that it could do something I was looking for another app to do.
It's 4th for me, after something called "Playtune" that has a logo that's a ripoff of Youtube, and is placed in the "Photo and Video" category instead of the "Music" category.
That still feels like Apple is penalising Spotify ...
I performed this search and Spotify is the 4th result, following Apple Music and two nearly exact matches (and not counting the ad). Also, the name is too long.
Spotify 23rd was a reference to the article in the NY Times.
It's 5th for me today, not including the Pandora ad at the top.
Quote from the infographic in the article:
"Before Apple Music arrived in the App Store, Spotify was for years the first result in searches for “music.” Shortly after Apple Music was added to the store in June 2016, it took the top spot. By then, Spotify had fallen to fourth place. In Feb. 2018, Apple apps suddenly appeared in the top six results for “music.” By the end of 2018, there were eight, some of which were unrelated to music. At this point, Spotify was the 23rd result. Spotify complained to European regulators in March that Apple was abusing its role as the gatekeeper of the App Store. By April, all but two of Apple’s apps disappeared from the top results for “music.”"
I feel you should be okay with that. It is just an extension of what you have accepted: Apple makes the hardware, software… and owns/controls the App Store.
Not only that, but the autocreated links to addresses in the messaging app will not work with other map apps. In fact, if you've uninstalled the apple maps app, the address links in messenger are completely useless.
* unless i'm mistaken, but I'm a fairly adept technical user and haven't found a way to make address links work.
You're not mistaken. I'd classify that under "3rd party apps have permission to do things other apps cannot." Yet another example would be how Apple Pay comes up automatically near payment terminals. Or how most of the default actions in the Share Sheet—all of which are for Apple Apps—cannot be turned off.
Did you read the article?
If you search for Podcast not only is Apple’s podcast app is first, but so it is follows by their compass app, find my friends, their tips app, their tv app, their watch app, their files app, their iTunes app, Apple Books, their reminders app, their news app, their contacts app, then their voice memos app before any 3rd party podcasts app appears.
Meta comment regarding HN community... looking at the comments here it seems like most people didn’t read the article, and just assumed what is being reported.
Regarding the HN community, the guidelines are pretty specific on the topic of your comment:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
If a strong conviction that others haven't read the article could supersede the guideline, the guideline would be quite useless. Anyone who comments "Did you even read the article?" presumably believes that the parent has not read the article.
(Just for what it's worth, I did read the article in full before commenting, and I don't think the paraphrased portion changes what I wrote.)
I had an Android a few years ago and #2 was a big issue. AT&T installed all types of apps including an automatic WiFi connecting app. I had to flash a google image to get rid of it. I’d be driving down the road and my maps or other apps would lose connections. Turns out I was being forced to connect to AT&T stores and Starbucks at red lights (anywhere attwifi was detected).
1. Granting more permissions to third party apps won't cause the iPhone to ship with Samsung bloatware.
2. I'm not necessarily advocating for 3rd party app privileges to be significantly expanded. However, Apple's own apps should mostly play by the same rules. If they can't, that's a sign the rules are too restrictive.
New app permissions must be added judiciously, as it’s been proven time and time again that developers can and will abuse them in whatever ways they can, including training and desensitizing users if necessary.
Apple tends to open capabilities up once they’re confident they’ve been able to make them reasonably airtight against abuse. That seems like a very sensible policy to me, even if it means that certain features come at a glacial pace.
But then Apple is not only putting themselves at a disadvantage against other platforms for long stretches of time (“iOS can do that with Apple stuff” is better than “iOS can’t do that”), but also giving up their ability to dogfood new APIs and test them in a much larger capacity than even a public beta would allow.
In order to remain competitive, they’d be forced to release half-baked/under-tested APIs, which is never good. That’s exactly how the Android developer story got as bad as it did at its lowest points.
Whose apps should have come preinstalled on iPhones? Samsungs? No apps, let the user install everything from scratch?
The whole value proposition from Apple is that you get something that "Just works".
It might have issues and bugs, like everything has, but the idea behind "just works" => is more or less ready, no fiddling required for the regular Joe.
I never forget the IE war, when everybody complain about the preinstalled browser. And that time they called "monopolistic practices". At apple, they even don't know what these words mean... /s
I can understand new iPhones coming with a Camera, Web Browser, etc preinstalled. However, the Apple Watch app (for instance) really doesn't need to be there.
Agree with this wholeheartedly. What's considered "basic functionality" should be present on the phone.
Pixel 3 lacks a basic pre-installed app which iOS includes: Voice Notes/Recorder. Scouring the Play store for a simple functionality like this seems silly, and it made me appreciate that Apple's pre-installed kit includes this staple feature.
Scrolling a dozen entries to find an alternate Podcast app, however. That's a joke.
While the pre-installed option is a convenience, it should be much easier to find an alternative, when desired.
However, if I were Spotify, I wouldn't be too concerned about this particular problem. Apple Music and Apple Podcasts come preinstalled on every iPhone, so Spotify effectively lost the discoverability battle before the user even got to the App Store.
By contrast, I'd be quite concerned that Apple is outright preventing me from making my app as good as their first party offerings. Spotify will not ever be able to open Podcast links shared from Safari, or fully integrate into Siri.
for half a year ago when i searched for "Spotify" in the norwegian appstore the first result was some kind of rip-off app with tons of complaints by users thinking it was the official app. Spotify the real app was number 2.
Apple is abusing its market position, it has been obvious for me long before this article and the lawsuits. But coming from a country not a member of EU or strong enough on its own, its hard to do anything about it.
The algorithm examines 42
different signals, they said,
including an app’s relevance
to a given search, its
ratings, and its popularity
based on downloads and user
clicks.
[...]
If you searched for “podcast”
in May 2018, you would have
had to scroll through as many
as 14 Apple apps before
finding one made by another
publisher.
[...]
“We make mistakes all the
time,” Mr. Cue said.
“We’re happy to admit when we
do,” Mr. Schiller said. “This
wasn’t a mistake.”
I have to say, it stretches credulity to claim any non-faulty algorithm would put Apple's "compass" app as the second result in a search for "podcast"
It's difficult to make any sense at all of such a result.
Ranking by count the all apps installed by users who have previously searched for <term> might do it.
Not saying that's a good algorithm, but one _might_ be tempted to think that with enough users it should be fine. The 'bug' being that all Apple's users are Apple users, so Apple apps would get pushed high for any search.
I'm certainly not suggesting that's what happeened (or even that it would be something so simplistic), but it gives me an idea at least how something that, when presented only with the symptoms, seems so unbelievable.
Agreed, but the end result is that their algorithm pre-fix was clearly faulty and should be considered a mistake. Their gymnastics to the contrary just come across as either a bad-faith argument or self-delusion.
What comes across as cherry-picking to me is pointing out a single random inconsequential web search and the result it used to have in a previous year.
Not a single search, but many searches done repeatedly over time, proving the result is highly unlikely to be happenstance. Oh, and the results only happened to changed after Spotify launched an official complaint. The WSJ article the NYT links to is even more detailed.
For those on mobile/small screens, a better formatted quote:
> The algorithm examines 42
different signals, they said, including an app’s relevance to a given search, its ratings, and its popularity based on downloads and user clicks. ...
> If you searched for “podcast” in May 2018, you would have had to scroll through as many as 14 Apple apps before finding one made by another publisher. ...
> “We make mistakes all the
time,” Mr. Cue said.
> “We’re happy to admit when we do,” Mr. Schiller said. “This wasn’t a mistake.”
For those on desktop, please stop formatting quotes like code. They’re just impossible to read on anything but a very wide screen.
What gets me is that if you do it now, Overcast is about 9th and Pocket Casts is 25th or something. Those are two very popular podcast apps. I stopped scrolling looking for Castro.
Can I go a little off-topic and comment how really well done this webpage is?
Very mobile optimized and nice the “scroll to discover” kind of behavior.
Haven’t noticed how long NYT has been doing this kind of stuff but very well done.
I agree! The graphics is what made me read the rest of the article.
This article has "interactive" in the URL. Note sure, but I think this is some special articles they do with a focus on just that? I believe there have been some other examples posted here previously, like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quic...
Interesting: I feel precisely the opposite: reading text is incredibly efficient and having to mess around to uncover the content is distracting and annoying.
I'm not trying to say "you're right, I'm wrong", or the opposite: different strokes and all that. I found your excitement about the design quite interesting.
Jobs' "On Flash" letter seems like aeons ago, (~10 years) but even then people were commenting on the obvious implications. It pointed to Adobe Flash apps as battery-intensive and riddled with security bugs (both correct), and proposed that native apps were the solution.
But it went one step further by providing the casus belli against the distribution of software outside of Apple's walled garden. Create something Apple didn't approve of, and you get booted. A clear break from its desktop programs, which could be freely installed from wherever.
Now the full picture is beginning to emerge. It was good going for app developers when Apple was largely a devices company, but as it moves into software and content creation/delivery, its position as marketplace gatekeeper means that everyone else will have to start paying tributes (in the form of ads, which appear above organic search results) if you don't want to end up relegated to the bottom of its search algorithm.
Leaving aside the obvious problems with this, it also is just a shitty user experience. A search for “podcast” should not return a compass app. For a company that is supposed to be at the pinnacle of user experience and usability, the App Store buitin search is pretty unusable.
Just out of curiosity, how do you imagine that would work in the real world?
Apple's main thing is security, and one important aspect of how they achieve it is by only allowing signed code, which Apple also does some basic tests on, to be installed on the device. Many think this is a valuable service.
In the third party App Store scenario, does the developer still submit an app to Apple for approval? How does Apple then make the approved app available to the third party? How is this different from a website that gives App recommendations?
Apple seems to balance security and freedom in MacOS, by asking if you are sure you want to uninstall unidentified software, outside of the Mac App Store [1]. Why can't they offer that same balance in iOS? Imagine how different the MacOS experience would be (particularly for small developers) if every piece of software had to be installed through the Mac App Store.
I think the security expectations for those two platforms are very different, and that's why Apple balances them differently.
MacOS gives up a lot of security for those extra abilities, and on MacOS I don't feel like I ever really had security. For example, I begrudgingly run shell injection attacks on myself every time I download some large codebase, which I am never going to review all of, or run brew, etc. It has been that way since the very beginning. Not so with iOS.
Personally, I think the best outcome for everyone would be if Apple relaxed the restrictions on the App Store. Eg: not blocking an app update because they do not like the screenshots (I have personally suffered from this), letting third party browser engines (all iOS browsers use Safari web views), or even allowing apps that resemble their own apps (see what happened with Windmill recently because it competed with TestFlight).
That said, I would only agree (ideologically speaking) to Apple being as unreasonable as they are now if they allowed third party stores and let users chose which store they prefer. I really don't know how that would work but it would not be my first option.
I wouldn't say I have trouble considering this issue, I know what my opinion is. The ramifications feel uncomfortable because Apple is the Goliath, it feels bizarre their behavior should need defending.
The idea I get hung up on is Apple doesn't control the market, they control access to the customers companies want. And those customers made a free choice to enter apple's ecosystem. They could get an Android, they could get none of the above. The game consoles have had an incredibly locked down marketplace. nintendo had to basically build their brand on it in the wake of atari in the 80s. Why do mobile marketplaces get such additional scrutiny? The orders of magnitude more money? The pervasiveness of mobile devices? The utility of the devices?
The area where I do struggle is the apple tax, they don't pay it while everyone else has to. My reflexive feeling, is that if you can't provide 20% value over what apple can provide, there might be intrinsic issues; your product might be a commodity. But for something like spotify, where the service exists way beyond the iOS platform, it seems wild that apple get 20% of anything that goes through its platform.
How is that any different than Nintendo's first-party games? They don't pay a license fee to themselves (and such an action would be a pointless accounting fiction if they did).
When you buy a Switch it means you can only play games Nintendo has approved. Unlike the app store, the policies are much more restrictive there. Random Joe can't put a game on the Switch. When you develop for the Switch it means if you have a game similar to a Nintendo game _they won't sell you a license and your product is dead in the water_.
People love to forget: The App Store was the first major distribution mechanism where anyone can join the program, no pre-vetting required, and so long as you obey the rules you can sell any app you want. Prior to that every distribution mechanism (sans selling it yourself on the web) was far more discriminatory, restricted, and took a bigger cut of your sales.
That's the point, the behavior doesn't seem different, but the levels of scrutiny aren't even comparable, that's the question.
Does the behavior matter as much as the size of the market in which the actor is in. Do people care because, apple is large, because the addressable app market is large, because politicians have iphones but don't give a toss about a mario game?
There's not much they can do in this regard; they might actually pay the Apple Tax in the accounting sense, but the tax taken goes into the same bank account. They can't take less money from the $10 Apple Music charge since the tax has to go somewhere, and they can't just charge less money for their services since that would just be changing the price for the users, making competition even angrier about Apple undercutting them.
Apple does not control a market, but it controls a marketplace. Perhaps the fact that Apple's marketplace isn't the largest by most measures allows it to set rather market-fixing terms to the stalls it allows others to put in it, perhaps that's ok.
But once the other stalls paid their legal due to the marketplace owner (i.e. assented to the various terms, as unfair they may be), they and the customers have a justified expectation that competition would be fair from now on - the default is fair and free competition, and inasmuch as the other stalls haven't signed their rights off, these must be respected.
Now if the marketplace owner would then put in further roadblocks to make the other stalls hard to find and his stalls easy to find, despite that not being in the original terms, that should be not legal. As far as I know, nowhere did Apple reserve the 'right' to hide other due-paying apps and promote its own in searches.
For that alone, Apple's behaviour should be banned outright, even if it is their marketplace. If Apple can constantly alter the deal, than no stall or customer can be safe. The long term process would then be in favour of eliminating competition, both internally in Apple's marketplace, and in general as vendors flee to the largest marketplace since it is regulated by law. That's not in the public interest at all.
Good job answering your own question! Mobile platforms deserve more scrutiny precisely for the reasons you mentioned — the utility, the power, the importance.
Note that the article links to a previous WSJ expose, which was posted here in the past[0] (without comments). The WSJ story has more detail, and is IMHO pretty damning when it comes to the podcast app.
Quick observation from the data presented in article (very well done, by the way): Beginning iOS 11, if I remember correctly, Apple finally added the ability to delete stock apps. Deleted apps could be downloaded from App Store later. Perhaps the « boost » in search rankings for the stock apps was related to that ? If the dates match, I assume they would have wanted these to be found easily and screwed up in scoring. This is assuming good faith, of course.
Edit: I did not remember correctly! This feature was added in iOS 10, released in September 2016.
I don't mind that at all. What bugs me much more is the complete lack of useful search and filter options in the AppStore and the resulting nonexistent discoverability. You basically only find those apps you know exist beforehand or that pop up by happenstance (if you're lucky). What point is there in boasting about how many million apps you have in your store when 99.99% are invisible for all practical purposes?
The story isn't particularly about Apple offering its own apps -- it's about it throwing lots of its apps into the top of search results when they're questionably relevant, and then doing its best to avoid saying there might have ever been anything suspect about the correctness of that behavior.
Apple is definitely better than most, but don't hand them a blank check. They recently stopped a Siri "grading" program after it was discovered that they were sending voice recordings to employees of a third-party contractor without users' consent: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20751270/apple-stops-contr...
> The same company that won't admit hardware flaws won't admit they use your Data.
Although I agree that one shouldn't trust anyone, there's a difference here: certain uses of personal data come with reporting requirements, or are outright forbidden, whereas I think that there are no such requirements around hardware flaws.
The executives said the company did not manually alter search results to benefit itself. Instead, they said, Apple apps generally rank higher than competitors because of their popularity and because their generic names are often a close match to broad search terms.
No need to if the algorithm includes to artificially normalize having some of their apps syroketing their raning value.
Does this feel like a scramble to make up for lack of innovation lately? Apple is taking away from the community that builds them up which seems like a play to make quick profits. It would be too much to hope for an open platform that was curated by some decentralized voting mechanism via community / contributors.
the app store is such a mess. Even finding something as simple as a good running app that stores and shows your weekly mileage is a huge challenge. All the top apps are terrible or missing the crucial weekly mileage feature or aren't free. Google search is equally terrible because they only show reviews from sites with super high "domain authority", or whatever, all i know is i get the same damn site results over and over and just gets worse after 3 pages, and I can never find the reviews I'm really looking for.
Am I the only one having these sorts of problems over and over again? or I am i just an outlier?
Ok? I feel like Apple is free to promote whatever they damn please on their own platform. Are we seriously criticizing a company for promoting their products ahead of 3rd party products on their own platform? and I mean, how much money do you think Apple is making from someone having their compass app downloaded? Seems like an inflammatory and in-genuine story.
It's an antitrust issue. If I own the market and some of the fruit, I'll clearly put myself in a better position to attract customers, and thus make sales. The rest of the fruit vendors are 2nd class.
Not to mention Apple employees are banned from making apps outside of company time, since they are aware of the issue with insiders having power to make apps that out compete the rest.
How can it possibly be an anti-trust issue for a minority player in a competitive market to choose which products to display in their own retail store?
This is markedly different then, for example, Google altering search results to promote their own products, because Google owns something like 90% of Search.
The app store is not a retail store. That's one of the major factors in the antitrust analysis.
In the retail/wholesale model, the retail store buys the third party products and their own store brand products, and sells them both. It might favor the store brand with more promotion or better shelf placement, but both products appear on the shelves, and the third-party has generally already been compensated for their goods (or is contractually owed compensation). In uncommon situations, such as with new products, compensation may be contingent on products sold through (to end customers), but that is not the norm.
In the appstore model, third-party app makers sell apps in Apple's store. Apple sells apps in Apple's store and promotes its own apps ahead of competing apps. It even promotes unrelated apps ahead of competing apps in a blatant attempt to push competitors off the first 2 pages of search results (i.e., off the shelf). Apple also frequently bans apps that compete with Apple's own apps or features, even if such competing apps existed for years before Apple's own apps.
Any one of the aforementioned acts by Apple could be treated as an antitrust issue. And that's not even a comprehensive list.
An Android app and an iPhone app are not compatible goods. You cannot replace one with the other. Try installing an APK on the iphone and let me know how that goes.
The "market" is smaller than you think. A classic way to determine alternatives to a product is by asking "if I raise the price of all apps, how many people will buy something else?" Iphone owners are kinda stuck eating the increase, aren't they?
Apple controls 100% of the iPhone app market. An iPhone owner made a $1000 investment into their phone and cannot just switch to Android. Apple takes advantage of that fact for their own benefit.
Every manufacturer controls their own supply chain, and can choose what to put in or take out of their own product.
And everyone makes a choice when they purchase a product— you could say invest in a product—if they want to buy into that.
Of course it costs money to buy something different. The salient point is that there is a obvious and competitive choice before you buy, that Apple does nothing to restrict you from making that choice before you buy, and that you can switch if you feel like it, which makes it not a monopoly.
Monopoly is not defined as the lack of compatibility between two competing products. Monopoly is also not defined as having a closed ecosystem.
I think it’s fair to argue if you think it should be illegal to have closed ecosystems. Personally I strongly disagree because there are clear trade-offs involved and the market should be able to decide if it wants a closed ecosystem product offering from Vendor A or an open ecosystem offering from Vendor B.
The problem with a closed ecosystem is when it is combined with a monopolistic market. In this discussion I believed the two points have become conflated, but while Apple certainly has a walled garden, there is compelling evidence the smartphone market is highly competitive.
I don't agree with this notion that you can't engage in anticompetitive behavior without 80%+ marketshare.
Imagine a world where Apple continues to clamp down on 3rd party services that compete with their own offerings, like Spotify. Apple could completely ban Spotify from selling subscriptions outside the App Store, and raise their fee to 70%. Google, wanting to push their own Google Play Music service, eventually adopts similar rules on Android, or perhaps implements them in a theoretical successor like Fuchsia.
This would basically mean you cannot build a music streaming service without also building your own mobile platform. That in turn would effectively mean we can only ever have as many streaming services as we do mobile platforms.
Even though neither Google nor Apple have 80%+ marketshare, this behavior strikes me as deeply anti-competive. It's not a world I want to live in.
The Venn diagram of things that you are capable of doing, and things that are legal to do, changes when you either are or are not a monopoly.
Offering rebates for using your product and not using someone else’s, for example, may be illegal if you are a monopoly but not illegal if you are not.
There are innumerable things a given company could do that harms its competition. Up to a point, that’s kinda the whole idea! It doesn’t become illegal unless it is done by leveraging a monopoly market position.
I'm arguing the law (or our interpretation of it?) should be stricter than it currently is, in light of how much power modern technology gives platform holders, and the situation I outlined above.
I think as long as Apple does not have a monopoly, history has shown us that competition will take care of this.
If Apple clamps down on 3rd party apps to the point where it is no longer serving its user-base, the user base has many good alternatives, and Apple would lose business.
I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that. Apple might love the idea that only Apple Music should exist on their iPhone (in fact they was kinda Steve’s original vision) but they can’t get away with it specifically because they would be clobbered by the competition if they tried.
Even as (if) Apple’s reputation shifts away from “walled garden that protects you from junk and malware and spyware” toward “overlord trying to control what you can buy” this causes some users to leave.
As long as there’s viable competitors, I’d rather let users vote with their wallets. This is actually the best way to give people the choice of which system you would prefer using. If the fully open system is preferred by most users then most users will choose that product. But because there are actually huge trade-offs and very hard unsolved problems with a fully open system, it’s important to provide consumers both options.
> I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that.
We'll never know unless/until it happens, but I think you are 100% wrong on this point—most would just switch to Apple Music. Phones are much too expensive to switch immediately, and while some users might initially want to switch at their next upgrade cycle, they would need to sign up for Apple Music in the interim, and then they'll become accustomed to it.
iPhone users are a captive market. The costs of switching are too high, both economically and in terms of inertia.
I'd agree if you were searching for a Compass app.
But the take that I got from reading the article is if you say "Podcast" in the search box, you'll see pages and pages of Apple's own apps, unrelated to podcasts, before you start seeing podcast apps.
It should work forever, as long you own the field, and people want to use said field because that gives them access to a huge marketplace of devices that you've built and sold.
You lost me with your analogy. Let me extend the pigskin thought exprement a bit.
If I own the football team, and the field, and the city (hell, why not), then sure I can choose who plays QB, so I choose my son. Maybe at the start he's even not that bad of a QB, and our team wins some games. Everyone is happy.
After a little while though, people realize there's no sense trying out for QB on my team. My son, now left without anyone gunning for his job becomes complacent. We start losing games more and more.
With enough control over the market (like Apple has with the App Store), there become less and less QBs to choose from, and it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league.
Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls.
Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them.
They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing system.
Apple is not obligated to advertise those third party stalls over their own.
If they don't like the arrangement they can always go somewhere else (there is an even bigger stadium in town that has available food stalls).
Yes, and that's part of why you pay $10 for a domestic beer, and $5 for a hot dog.
So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.
But what if you’re not selling food, but merchandise targeted at this particular team’s fans. You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium - you have no choice but to suck up the fact that on the vendor map of the stadium, where it says merchandise, is actually Apple’s food court. Nobody is going to find your t’shirt stand.
For starters, nobody forces you to sell merchandise for this particular team's fans...
But the analogy breaks down here, because merchandize such as t-shirts is not dependent on the stadium to be used. You could sell it outside the stadium.
Whereas iOS software leverages the fact that the iOS is being sold, maintained, having the necessary APIs, and so on, and that iOS devices are being made and sell decently and lure people willing to pay for apps.
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
The physical analogy (i.e., stadium) doesn't work at all for the appstore, because aspects of the physical world actually matter in terms of analyzing retail monopolies in ways that are irrelevant to a fully digital marketplace.
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
A privately owned stadium is not be required to open up its space to third-party sellers. But once it does, it cannot then abuse its position as the landlord to interfere with the market activities of those third parties. That's the part you're missing in your fervent defense of Apple's antitrust activities--Apple didn't have to open up the app store to third parties, but having done so, they must now act in a non-abusive matter.
> it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league
I don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion.
I figured that it'd mean nobody tries out for QB on your team, all the best QBs go to other teams, eventually your team starts to suck and lose fans and therefore revenue, and the market forces either force you to get a new QB or your business in the team suffers and maybe folds. Problem solved either way, eventually.
I said "With enough control over the market ...", which is basically a way of saying I'm making these QB choices for not just my team, but some large enough set of the QBs in the NFL.
It's as if you're the one selling all the tickets to the only stadium in town, and you make it so that when your team plays, tickets are cheaper, more abundant, and more visible.
Another local team wants to play too, but their ticket prices are outrageous, there's no promotion of the event either, and they might actually be banned from the stadium unless they use ONLY your equipment.
Your analogy also isn't very good, your town has lots of other stadiums: The Samsung Galaxarium, The Googlplexel, The LG Centre, The Huawei Dome. Sure the Apple one is pretty fancy and the rules are onerous but there are plenty of other places to do business.
An iOS app/ticket/whatever wouldn't work/get you into the other "stadiums." Ergo, the market for the iOS thing does not include those other "stadiums."
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them. The antitrust issues are related to Apple's actions within the iOS app market. Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
>Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them.
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that you can't sell iOS apps on them. Selling iOS apps is not a basic human right, nor a market right. As long as you can still sell apps, there's no judge who cares if you can specifically sell iOS apps.
You can't sell your physical products at Costco either unless they accept them, and even if they do, they are always free to promote and prioritize their own brand over yours...
>Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
Only for authorities that's not a meaningful distinction...
For the authorities it's not just a meaningful distinction, it's the basis of their antitrust investigations, namely that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive practices in the iOS app market.
The EU fined Microsoft six hundred million dollars just for including Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player in Windows by default. Apple's behavior is much worse than that.
How many times this old wives tale will have to be repeated till people understand what went on then, and how it's nothing like it's now?
Microsoft then had a monopoly on desktop OSes at the time, at 95+ (close to 97%, in fact).
Apple has a paltry sub-50% share of mobile OSes.
The "But they have 100% share on their own products" is not an argument, as far as the law is concerned, as monopolies are not judged this way. That's the same reason why you can't legally force McDonalds to also sell Burger King burgers, or GAP to sell Banana Republic clothes...
And even MS monopoly position wasn't the issue (having a monopoly naturally is not illegal). The issue was it used its monopoly position to threaten and bribe OEMs to not work with competitors.
Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices. An iApp only runs on iOS, so it's irrelevant that Apple is a minority of the mobile market because that's not the market being analyzed for the antitrust issues.
Nintendo is a monopoly with respect to Nintendo games (but not Nintendo devices, since you can buy those all over).
Monopolies aren't inherently illegal. See e.g., patents and copyrights, which are legally granted or protected monopolies.
What is illegal is anti-competitive practices. This doesn't require a dominant or even majority market position--authorities in the US and EU have gone after companies with relatively small market shares that engaged in anti competitive actions (though they haven't done so in many years).
Yes it is. Nintendo is a monopoly with respect to licensing games for sale on Nintendo consoles. Monopoly is market-specific under US law, and the regulators can get very specific.
Regarding the first element, it is "settled law" that the offense of monopolization requires "the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market."(5) As discussed in chapter 2, monopoly power means substantial market power that is durable rather than fleeting--market power being the ability to raise prices profitability above those that would be charged in a competitive market.(6)
Which is not relevant. Monopoly is defined on a market, not on income segments (and even if it mattered, still on the high income individuals iOS is hardly above say 70%).
Someone could sell cars for $5K and have 99% of the car market in a small city of 1000 people, while another one sells a single car for 100M and has 20 times the other's revenue. It's still the cheap car guy that has the monopoly.
Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses. Apple pulls in 2/3 of the revenue in the mobile app ecosystem and gets to act as a gatekeeper between most consumer startups and their potential customers.
Microsoft never had a monopoly in the OS market. Plenty of businesses large and small used competing OSs like Apple, Unix, Linux, Beos, OS/2, DOS, etc.
Microsoft had a dominant market position, and anti-competitively leveraged that market position in operating systems to muscle its way into the internet browser market.
No. Just because something was done in the past doesn't mean it doesn't have repercussions to this day. For example, the search result issue might have helped Apple get it's products into the hands of more users who settled for their apps rather than using a competitors apps that would have been found instead.
If you are going to continue this discussion, please do so in good faith and don't continue to misrepresent what is being said.
> Spotify complained to European regulators in March that Apple was abusing its role as the gatekeeper of the App Store. By April, all but two of Apple’s apps disappeared from the top results for “music.”
Tech companies are some of the largest and most influential companies in the world, and people are just now starting to understand what it means to have their lives influenced by wide-reaching algorithms. Sounds like a great topic for journalism to me.
Regardless of the motivation, NYT's recent algorithm-centric investigations (like the YouTube one a month or two back) are really interested and well-researched.
Whole Foods stacks their stores with their 365 brand products. In some cases, competitors to certain products aren't even sold.
Of course, there are other grocery stores you can shop at. Just like how there are other mobile platforms you can use. (well: there's another mobile platform, singular. that's a problem).
I don't understand the argument for the App Store being a monopoly. Apple can do whatever they want in their store, just like Whole Foods can sell whatever they want in theirs, or Walmart, or Target, or whoever. If an argument can be made that they're actively trying to destroy the competition in the market of mobile platforms, then we should be much more concerned.
Beyond that: there's a very unique argument that the "platform" (iOS) and the "store" (App Store) are separate entities in a capitalistic market sense. If this is the case: the onus is NOT on the App Store being more open, but rather on iOS for supporting multiple different storefronts. And, again, I think that's not a very interesting argument unless iOS itself is being anti-competitive in the market of all mobile platforms, which doesn't seem to be the case.
It's hard to explain from a mobile, but in a nutshell generally retail stores buy the goods they are selling, whether store brand or third party, so they can differentiate the products in store how they like.
Suppliers can and do use leverage like withholding popular brands from stores that go too far in favoring the house brand.
Apps however have no such leverage, and due to the way the store is set up, the retail defense doesn't apply.
I'm not convinced that its so different, at least from a "we should be concerned about it" angle.
Yes, retail stores have inventory that they, generally, have to purchase and hold before the sale. This is a natural limitation on the amount and variety of goods they can offer.
By comparison, app stores don't have inventory. But they do have natural limitations. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.
Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.
When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.
. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.
This is false. Payment transactions cost under 1%, especially at Apple's scale. In the case of many of the competing apps like Netflix and Spotify, only a de minimis value is provided by iCloud hosting (i.e., the mandated iOS app) because the majority of the content is hosted by the third party on external (non-Apple) platforms. If we're using Apple's costs as justification for the 30% cut, they definitely aren't providing services worth 15-30% they're charging for the vast majority of App Store transactions.
Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.
I don't know what sort of weird grocery aisles you shop in, but in the real world grocery aisles are two-sided, with multiple levels, and every product fronts the aisle so that customers can see all products at the same time (though some products are easier to see than others). This isn't even remotely the same as the ordered, multi-page list that the app store provides, in which many competing products can't even be seen until you take further action.
When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.
It's the same issue that Microsoft had with bundling IE. They're abusing their market position in one market to interfere with another.
If anything it seems to have gotten better since they started doing their study. Also I suppose Apple puts their apps on top to make it easy to re-install. Imagine if you removed the Music app and then were unable to find it again...
Maybe I misread it, but I see that it's talking about how if you say "Podcast" in the search box, you'll see pages and pages of Apple's own apps, unrelated to podcasts, before you start seeing podcast apps.
If you search for podcast now you see an ad, then apple podcasts, then a story about creating podcasts, then apps. In my case I have Spotify on 3rd place after 2 popular local radio apps. The article conveniently omits a history chart for 'podcast' search to push their agenda.
Merits (and anti trust possibilities) of Apple doing this aside, just a shout out that it’s another anti tech article on the NYT. They have a daily piece against one of the FAANGs. It’s at the point where I could start plotting this data over time and plastering it in its own thread.
Just remember folks - NYT directly competes with many of the FAANGs. Its awfully convenient to do reporting questioning your directly rivals, especially when you never preface your articles mentioning the conflict of interest.
In what business segment? Does the NYT offer streaming TV/movies? An online retail presence? Cloud infrastructure? Computers and phones?
As reported in the article, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow an anti-trust case to move forward on this issue. That's newsworthy, and IMO the article does a good job in showing the general consumer what anti-competitiveness looks like in practice, while getting comments from both Apple and companies who've been affected by these policies.
It’s a privately held platform. The apps created by Apple should be on top if they want them to be. There’s no right to equal access such as with Net Neutrality, it’s not a publicly owned or subsidized platform. The only way this could possibly be wrong is if we nationalize Apple. I’m definitely left of center economically and I have no problem with Apple placing their apps on top. It would completely align with current rules, regulations and economic expectations. At 40% market share in the US, they’re not even a monopoly, not that it would matter anyway. That’s without mentioning that on a personal level I would prefer to do business with Apple rather than giving my information to many of the third parties. They’ve earned a reputation of being trustworthy and deserving of our money.
>At 40% market share in the US, they’re not even a monopoly
Can someone confirm my understanding that there is no percentage like 90% and if you are over that you are a monopoly . Is more about if you abuse your dominant position to screw the competition and consumers, and in this case Apple is screwing the application developers that they compete with by abusing their dominant position.
There's a whole host of anticompetitive and restraint-of-trade business practices that are illegal whether a company has 90% or 40% or 2% market share.
Just some question so is clear in my mind what your idea is
Why more then 80% ? why not 50% + 1
IS 80% of smartphones ? or smartphones+tablets , or all phones , or 80% of capital/financial of all mobile app stores ?
What if I say that Apple has 100% monopoly on the iOS? you would say but what about Android ? I would say if I am Netflix,Spotify,Bank X, etc I have no REAL choice as a developer not to make iOS apps similar how some people have no choices where to get their Internet, they get the expensive good internet or if they don't like it they have some subpar choices if their are lucky and you telling them not to use Internet if they don't like it is not a REAL choice even if it is a possible choice. (I am referring mostly at developers but screwing with developers yous crew your users like you have less choices on iOS as a user because you can't use GPL apps)
> What if I say that Apple has 100% monopoly on the iOS?
That'd be a silly argument. By that logic, Ford has a 100% monopoly on F-150s.
> why not 50% + 1
Because the "mono" in monopoly means "one", not "two".
You can accurately say that Apple and Google enjoy an oligopoly in the mobile operating system market. You cannot reasonably say either one holds a monopoly.
>That'd be a silly argument. By that logic, Ford has a 100% monopoly on F-150s.
And if Ford would not allow me who can enter in my Ford, won't allow me to replace the original Ford mirror with a cheap working one then I would also be pissed at Ford and ask the government to fix this.
You can push the bad argument you brought in the other direction, Microsoft does not dominate the PC , what about servers ? but desktop and server users differ? so iOS and Android users differ and it is not about Apple dominating Google is about Apple having a leverage position over developers and abusing it.
>Because the "mono" in monopoly means "one", not "two".
But we were talking about dominating and abusing, but if you missed it, then I will repeat, you do not need to be a monopoly do dominate and abuse, you can have 2 or 3 companies sharing a market and abusing their dominance, so stop posting same comment of "Apple is not a monopoly on smartphones" someone was smart enough to think about more the duopoly case and the laws covder that too.
That'd be a silly argument. By that logic, Ford has a 100% monopoly on F-150s.
It's a very appropriate argument, and Ford does have a monopoly on F-150's. As I've noted elsewhere, monopolies are not by themselves illegal.
The trucks are like the iPhone, so in this context we would be talking about truck parts (i.e., apps). Ford doesn't restrict or attempt to control the market for F-150 parts. If you damage your car, the mechanic can buy parts from Ford or any one of dozens of auto parts makers. In contrast, Apple does restrict and artificially control the market for apps, even to the extreme of drowning out competing apps with irrelevant search results, and Apple is the only market for getting iOS apps.
Since you all like car analogies,
then you would have only 2 car producers Ford and Toyota,
Ford does work cars and Toyota city cars, so your choices are limited to the extreme. Then say you buy a Ford and want to put a cat sticker on your car, you can't do it yourself and you go to a Frod store, then when you want to buy the cat sticker the store people direct you to buy dog stickers made by Ford, you insist you don't want the Ford sticker but a cat sticker so they send you to search in the back where the lights are dim because only Ford products get illuminated and put n the front of the store.
The people that make stickers don't like it at all when you want to buy a cat stickers but Ford are not showing them to you but instead pushing you to get the dog ones made by them. Then you ask some respect from Ford and they say if you don't like it don't use it you have so many choices (in fact just 1),
I'm sure you've seen endless comments on this website about how Apple has an outsized amount of "profit share", and that it matters a lot more than market share for app developers.
This is true. But antitrust law doesn't require that you have a mnonopoly or a dominant market position. It's simply that the analysis is more complex and significantly more contextual if you don't have a dominant market position.
This is because antitrust laws are not specific to solving the problem of monopolies. Your point is an obvious one and borders on argumentative without a point.
Yes, but the article isn't objecting to Apple listing its own Podcasts app at the top of a search for "podcast". It's objecting to it then listing Compass, Find Friends, Tips, and 12 more Apple apps that aren't related to the search query before any non-Apple app is listed. (Which issue they have since fixed.)
The article is about "Apple made a mistake in its search algorithm", not about competition per-se.
The article uses the term "stacked". It refers to a complaint to the EU about the abuse of their position as owner of the App Store. It refers to a Supreme Court anti-trust case. It repeatedly frames the discussion in terms of what Apple gained vs competitors.
1) Apple's apps come preinstalled on every iPhone.
2) Apple's apps have permission to do things that 3rd party apps cannot.
If I search for "Web Browser" on the App Store... well, technically I'll get results from third parties, but every single one is just a UI skin around Apple's own browser. That strikes me as a much larger problem.