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Really at this point Apple control over app store is anti-competitive (and Google over play store), having to rely on community outrage to get stuff like this turned is ridiculous.
They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking - force app stores to treat all apps equally according to store defined guidelines (including store owners apps) - any submissions have to be reviewed in a reasonable amount of time and if declined must receive specific violations of the guidelines on which the denial is based. Also make the "no outside payment inside of apps" illegal.
Suddenly the value add of the store streamlined experience has to be justified vs. other payment options - and you'll see the fees drop significantly closer to market level (and it will still be profitable for store owners and they will still invest money in developing/maintaining it).
One of the biggest issues with Google play store review is they won't actually tell developers which rule they're breaking, as you point out.
This is so incredibly developer-hostile that the fact developers keep using the play store pretty much helps make the case they're acting in an anticompetitive manner.
It certainly is interesting to note Google removed the title "Non-competition" from clause 4.5 of their developer agreement some time ago. It's still in the archived version on archive.org though, from back when it was called the Android market... Removing the title but leaving the clause intact doesn't mask the anti-competitive behaviour!
There are definitely some benefits. If people are trying to sneak stuff past you if benefits you to not explain what you found or how you found it when you reject things. If someone submits an app containing shady things X, Y and Z and you just respond "no dice", now they have to either remove all of the shady things they were doing, or try to guess which one(s) were detected. They can proceed by trail and error, but in the process they will reveal a lot of their secrets because Google can compare the diffs of the submitted apps to learn about other shady things that the developers think might have triggered the rejection.
Just a WAG but I think it allows them to maintain total control over the playing field. They get to choose which apps best suit their interests in their market and apply the rules inconsistently to apps that somehow don't align with their interests.
I absolutely agree that from a developer point of view, this is awful, but just to play devil's advocate here, the reasoning generally given for these is that bad actors tend to tweak their apps to bypass rules a lot faster and efficiently if you always tell them exactly what to fix to get unbanned. I agree developers shouldn't be treated like this, but it still is true that malicious apps are a real problem and bad actors continually try to break things and minmax ways to get around the rules.
As users and developer, that's a side that we don't really get to see, so it's hard to judge how justified these techniques are. What alternative solution do you propose that would help developers without at the same time making bad actors lives easier.
This is basically the "security through obscurity" argument that has been so heavily criticised and largely shown to be false. If they (and apple etc.) Open sourced their approval algorithm and allowed pull requests people with an interest in having a high quality app store could try and poke holes in it and make it more robust. I know there are humans in the mix making judgements, but those judgements are largely of the "does the app meet this tick box criteria" type.
The argument is that the review process gets away with being crappy due to the monopoly position, not that it is leading to the monopoly. It’s a symptom, not a cause.
Also it’s possible that specific clauses in the guidelines are anti-competitive. Fir example a guideline that simply disallows any app that competes with one of Google’s Apps might be seen this way.
So those are coherent arguments I think, I just don’t agree with them. The Play Store is a google product, with features developed and maintained by a Google. Other stores exist that compete with it, with features developed by other companies. The reason customers went with Google Play is simply because it had momentum and scale, and customers don’t want multiple stores. They want one store with one set of rules where all the Apps are, that will be on their next phone. Customers benefit from a one stop shop.
If someone wanted to develop a better store, with libraries better than ‘play services’, what stops them? If you want to inter operate with and use the services of the Play Store, you need to make a deal with a google, and the terms of that deal are standardised by Google. There’s nothing obviously illegal or a abusive about any of that, as long as the contractual relationships are fairly administered under the law.
>The reason customers went with Google Play is simply because it had momentum and scale, and customers don’t want multiple stores.
The reason customers went with the default is mostly because it's the default. Given the choice, we'd see a lot more competition.
>If someone wanted to develop a better store, with libraries better than ‘play services’, what stops them?
The anti-competitive google behavior where they forbid you to sell any android phone with Google Play if you sell any android phone without it? IIRC there was a lawsuit/fine in EU a few years back regarding this.
Yes Google was found in violation of Antitrust regulations and corrected that behaviour. I'm not here to sing Google's praises, but that issue has been resolved.
Google only gets to decide what the default store is on Google's own phones. Samsung's phones come by default with their own store for example.
Customers only want choice if it gives them value and benefits. Choice without value is confusion and drudgery. A one stop shop that has everything at reasonable prices and vets out the rubbish is, by itself, a good thing for customers. Of course there is scope for abuse, the EU ruling is an example of that, but to me I don't see anything wrong with the basic approach. These are their products, I don't see that anyone else has much of a right to dictate how they design them.
That's not what they said. They said that the fact people keep using the play store despite all of the shitty practices by Google (e.g. the review process) should be proof enough that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior, otherwise people would go to a competitor.
Which is debatable but not as absurd as you make it out to be.
> any submissions have to be reviewed in a reasonable amount of time and if declined must receive specific violations of the guidelines on which the denial is based
Competing app stores solves this 100% because there would definitely be a market for a developer friendly app store.
Competing app stores would raise another problem though.
One that occurred with certifying agencies in the financial crisis of 2008.
In a world with competing app-stores, if a store does its scrutiny properly, and is seen as too strict, then the apps will flock to get listed in other less-strict app-stores. Thus all stores are incentivised to relax the scrutiny to retain apps for their own survival. Sometimes to the point of simply rubber-stamping their approvals on crappy stuff.
Thus the end-users lose the benefits of proper curation.
This doesn't happen on Android where 95% of applications are listed at the app store (excluding China), despite the existence of alternate stores. Why would it happen anywhere else? The main app stores have too much of an head start to lose their primary role, unless they screw up massively.
If app availability is the only dimension users care about, then sure, there will be a race into malware infested low quality stores. And what's the problem? It's the best for everybody here.
But your comment really points out that not everybody wants that. So your scenario won't happen on practice.
> Thus the end-users lose the benefits of proper curation.
But Apple are obviously not doing proper curation. They might be good at keeping viruses out, but what they have done to Wordpress and HEY was not proper in the least.
Agreed, I think legislation should just force Apple to allow for competing app stores. At the end of the day, the users make the choice. Epic for example made their own store on PC to rival Steam's 30% cut. And they could do the same for iOS and Android, but on iOS that isn't even an option.
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
You have a lot of faith in 60+ year old (mostly tech-illiterate men) to fix technology they don't understand. Government isn't the solution to this problem. Developers leaving the app store is probably only what will get Apple to change.
Sure they understand. Did you hear all of the insightful questions that the representatives asked Zuckerberg? Especially when they asked Zuckerburg about Twitter’s policies.
You have users who has iphones, and those users want you to develop an app. They can't switch phones. Buying a new phone is expensive. They use apps that only currently exist in iphone. There is sunk costs. Their social circle require them to use iphone. The phone was provided by the job and they can't use something else.
Should the developer spit in the face of those users and refuse to develop the app? No. They might not like apple. Might not support what apple is doing. The app might be horrible crippled and overpriced. Sadly the choice will still likely be to develop an app for the iphone because the small signal it would send to apple is microscopic compared to the major harm to your users.
I have faith that politicians can task experts to come up with legislation. Politicians are of course not experts in all subject matters and one should not expect them to be.
Developers leave the app store for which alternative on iOS?
Compared to the entire set of countries, the US government is extraordinarily high-functioning, and this was all created by mostly 60+ tech-illiterate men.
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
I agree that the situation is really bad, but I do not trust that governments would be able to set laws and regulations to control such specifics of app stores.
Im not really into congress defining how apps get reviewed. I’d rather see it just get broken up in some way. Either you can’t have a phone and an app store (like the studio/movie model) or they at least have to support other app stores.
Side note: my iPhone autocorrected app store to App Store, which I think is another example of overreach.
Sure, it autocorrects other brand names. But I think it puts its own brands on uneven footing. App Store corrects. Google play store does not, even though the latter is less generic.
I wonder how familiar the people espousing an expansive view of antitrust law here on HN are with the actual administrative and judicial state of antitrust enforcement.
Well looking at the loss of fake internet points. Plenty. I even got a downvote for posting the fact above...
That the consent decree was lifted.
It’s strange because every time that the government has done anything with regard to tech, HN users are in universal disagreement - rolling back net neutrality, a DMCA, COPPA, trying to weaken encryption, finding out everything the government was doing based on the Snowden leaks, etc.
But yet they still for some reason want the government to be more involved.
Also if the app store is the only way to sell or distribute apps to customers using a specific device for which it's customary to only own one device in that category (such as a mobile phone), or it's otherwise impossible for others to create a fully equivalent app store (e.g. because the OS doesn't expose APIs to install apps), then the fee must not exceed the money required to do payment processing, and all apps must be accepted.
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
Thinking a bit wider, the same legislation should affect e.g. how Amazon can treat people who sell on their platform. They are all monopsonies:
“In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers.”
I think it's interesting that this story hit the front page at the same time as the one about Facebook's fact-checking shenanigans, which concluded that leaving this in the hands of a private company wasn't working.
Are FAANG (well possibly not 'N') about to face nationalisation? Or United-Nationalisation given that they're all global organisations and having them run by the completely dysfunctional US government isn't a result anyone wants?
Can government really step in to control the workings of the Apple Store and change the rules without drastically effecting Apple's business? If so, what responsibility does government have if that drastic effect stops the business from being profitable?
Can government enforce fact-checking on Facebook (or Google) without affecting its advertising business? Again, if so, what responsibility does it bear if that business collapses?
Can government ignore it and allow the tech giants to continue uncontrolled? That doesn't seem to be working either.
> what responsibility does government have if that drastic effect stops the business from being profitable?
If the business relies on anti-competitive behavior to stay profitable, then any regulation that improves the situation will necessarily affect that business' bottom line.
I wouldn't be surprised if FAANG and their dominant positions in the market are considered important to "national security", in an economic sense of the term. (And perhaps from surveillance/intelligence perspective, and control of information access.)
In that case, it would be in the national interest to support - or at least let continue without disruption by pesky regulations - their anti-competitive behavior that ensures that dominant global position.
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
I assume by "they" you mean "each of the 175+ countries that the app stores operate in, most with slightly different rules that a software developer would need to understand?"
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
as long as there are alternatives, it's the user choice to get into the walled ecosystem. people enjoy the ease of mind of it, and while I'm not among them, I can say I find the play store and the 'apk downloaded from somewhere' experiences both grating compared to the apple store.
a curated store has it's appeal, and it's value. is it 30%? that is for the customer to decide, not the legislator.
> as long as there are alternatives, it's the user choice to get into the walled ecosystem.
Coercive bundling should warrant anti-trust scrutiny, whenever it occurs. It may only seldomly warrant action, but the very ability to coerce counter-parties appears to be a strong indicator that the traded good is not inherently fungible with another offering.
> that is for the customer to decide, not the legislator.
It's not clear to me what basis this claims factual authority beyond your personal understanding of the world.
Alternatively, and equally glib,
That is for society to decide, not the individual.
> It's not clear to me what basis this claims factual authority beyond your personal understanding of the world.
likewise. that why you argue the argument, not the authority behind for a healthy discussion on anonymous forums.
> and equally glib
except I provided an argument for the benefit to the individual, while the whole of your post hinges on appeal to (un)authority
another case in point: all the pc stores exclusives. imagine having to have to install 5 different stores for accessing this or that publisher games on a phone. how can you argue that is pro-customer?
we already know that it is what is going to happen, because it has already happened. and it was not for the better; there was no reduction of prices (if anything, aaa went from 49$ to 69$) and a constant fight for user attention by undercutting each other stores with exclusives. so the price cut reduction did not materialize, and we have to fight against a tide of software spying each other on top of it.
> Coercive bundling should warrant anti-trust scrutiny
fair enough, but it still doesn't mean it has to be incorporated in law, where it gonna stay for a long time and likely used as hammer in all kind of unexpected ways.
> the traded good is not inherently fungible with another offering
or the consumers are happy with the locked platform. those who aren't, after all, can already sideload to their android. this seems more of a case of a minority wanting a cake and eat it too, not a real issue with predatory behavior.
> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking
The same could be said by taxi drivers about Uber.
It's the exploitation of the platform-economy that is the problem, really.
An extra problem is that this platform-economy is a pretty new concept. I don't even know if economists have good models for it. From this, it's no wonder that governments are lagging far behind, and we shouldn't expect much change in the near future.
Uber is a different story, competition is a lot easier and it already exists all over the place (Uber isn't even that profitable which proves this, meanwhile app store is printing cash)
I am amazed at the default reach to legislative solutions as if this has been consistently successful in the past.
At one point not too long ago, Microsoft controlled everything. They didn’t control retailers, but they would put ISVs out of business regularly. You could charge what you wanted, but were always at the risk of a “predatory pricing” attack when Microsoft would clone your feature for free in the latest version of their products.
There was a consent decree formed about product tie-ins to stymie this activity circa 1994.
Then the Web Browser came along and threatened Microsoft’s regime. We had a way to run software anywhere without Microsoft’s involvement!
And of course they tried to tie their own Browser into Windows, because that’s how they competed in the past. They were found guilty of violating it with in their 1998 trial, forming a new consent decree with penalties in 2001.
Did this actually matter when mobile took over in 2007? Google Chrome also now has vast majority browser share. Did this help there too?
What Apple and Google are doing is nowhere close to this in terms anti-competitive behaviour, it’s not even in the same league. You throw terms around like “rent seeking” without understanding what that means. Rent seeking is about expanding one’s share of wealth without also broadening the base of wealth. A retail cut is ... not that.
But even more so... why are people so devoid of knowledge of tech history or imagination that we must reach for legislation rather than building a better mousetrap?
This isn’t about consumers, it’s about ISVs wanting higher margins without putting any of the work in. It’s not likely going to be successful.
So now you expect Congress to force Apple to sell you an iPad at the same price it sells to a corporation that buys 1000s? Of course Apple is going to make a deal with Amazon when Amazon can offer it another sales channel.
> So now you expect Congress to force Apple to sell you an iPad at the same price it sells to a corporation that buys 1000s?
I honestly expect the congress to remove Apple powers as gatekeeper
If the Apple Store is the only store for iOS devices, they have to allow any app in and let the authorities handle misbehaviour
Apple is not a National State, so it shouldn't act as the ruler and dictator of the State.
I expect congress to force Apple to remove control over what's inside the box.
If I buy a product on Amazon when I open the box I can find a lot of promotional material put there by the manufacturer and sometimes even discount codes for affiliated businesses or coupons for other online stores, Amazon can't tell them to remove it or go elsewhere
Apple should allow promoting the product inside the apps as well
That's what I expect from the country that sell itself as the land of the free (and champion of free market)
I honestly expect the congress to remove Apple powers as gatekeeper
So you expect the same government that passed DMCA, COPPA, that is trying to get rid of end to end encryption, did the things that came out via Snowden, warranties wiretaps, buying location data from carriers, dismantled net neutrality, etc. to actually not do something malicious with more power and control?
If the Apple Store is the only store for iOS devices, they have to allow any app in and let the authorities handle misbehaviour
So Apple should have allowed the Facebook VPN so that spied on users? You really want the government controlling which apps can go on your phone? Have you been paying attention to the government over the past two decades? You really want to give it more power?
That's what I expect from the country that sell itself as the land of the free (and champion of free market)
So more government control is your definition of a free market?
> Government forcing companies to sell other company’s products is a terrible policy and completely contrary to the free market.
Really?
Amazon was born and is still a company that __literally__ sell other companies' products!
Apple is not forced to sell other companies' products, Apple should be forced to not block them from distributing freely the software users want.
The point is exactly that they shouldn't be selling other companies' products (apps) but the companies making the apps should be selling them, the way they please.
The problem I have is that you make it sound like you have a right to release software for their platform. They opened their platform for devs to make apps. You accepted that offer, read their terms, agreed to those terms, and are now complaining about those terms? I get it that you want to make 100% of the price made from each sell, but that's not realistic. If you sell your product at a brick&mortar store, you don't get full amount of the sell. They buy it at wholesale. Rarely is that wholesale price only %30 of the retail price. Nothing about the App Store seems pretty reasonable.
But in the brick & mortar scenario, the negotiation happens on more of a level playing field. Both parties have a reasonable alternative if an agreement isn't reached -- the manufacturer can find another retailer, and the retailer can find another supplier. In this case there's no such competitive market.
Granted, 30% would be low for retail, but surely digital marketplaces would charge less if competition was allowed. To get a sense of what pricing would look like in a competitive market, we can look at Steam, Epic, etc. for app distribution, or Stripe, Braintree, etc. for in-app purchases.
Ever tried to negotiate to get your product sold on a shelf? It is very much not a level playing field. WalMart is infamous for beating sellers down to such a low per unit price with the promise of making it up on quantity. Target, BestBuy, and any other big box retailer only follow WalMart's lead. Then there's the fact that if your product doesn't sell well according to their metrics, you are forced to buy it back from them. Now you're hoping Ross will buy it from you!
There are costs of doing business. They can all be negotiated or at least attempted, but at the end of they day you want your product where the consumers are, so you have to ultimately play within their terms. You can make 70% or make 0%.
There's a saying in economics that "in a perfectly competitive market, nobody is making a profit - because if they are, someone is losing customers". In a perfectly competitive market, everyone lowers prices to the point they can't lower them anymore, and that tends to be the same price for all competitors.
In a market where someone is making billions in profit, it's almost de-facto evidence of a lack of competition. Not a priori, obviously, but it gives you a basis for measurement that where you're looking is somewhere on that spectrum.
For big box stores, that razor thin margin is exactly what you would expect from a very competitive market and so it's fair to say that it is one.
Who else can charge 30% on every sale just because?
> Who else can charge 30% on every sale just because?
Every physical product retailer charges > 30%. This is what I'm suggesting is the confusion point. If an app developer sells an app for $0.99, then the dev gets $0.66 per transaction. If a physical product producer sells something with an MSRP of $0.99, the retailer will be purchasing the item at a wholesale price of closer to 50% of the MSRP (if not a higher percentage) leaving at max $0.50 per item. This shows how much easier the software dev has it.
No one said retail was easy! Thin margins are just the natural result of competition. Retailers have thin margins too. Walmart's net profit margin was 4.7% in Q2, and that was a major outlier. The playing field might not be completely level, but at least competition exists on both sides.
Arguably Apple should have nothing to do with this. Someone buys a phone from Apple, and now owns that phone. He wants to use his property to run some software. What should Apple have to do with this decision any more than Chevy should tell me what neighborhoods I should drive my car into?
The point is that Apple continues to make decisions FOR YOU after you buy the phone - and we aren't talking about where the settings screen is or the color of the icons, we are talking about who you are allowed to do business with -- and that is anticompetitive.
Just because you want to punt and say it's between the developer and Apple doesn't make it better. The point is that it shouldn't be.
It is your computer; you have a right to that hardware. But they only licensed you the OS and the hardware only supports that OS (which you acknowledged and agreed to when you bought it) so you can call it what you want, but you can’t force another entity to do what pleases you. The courts will decide that and it will set a pretty significant precedent.
You're arguing for a future where you own nothing and rent everything. Look at how many industries are using the idea of software licenses to retain control over your devices after you buy them so they can render them useless, or at least less useful, unless you pay for a subscription of some type.
EULAs have existed since the 80s, with no clear distinction on when software must be considered a product equivalent to a physical good, vs when it must be considered a service. The internet did not help with the ambiguity around this distinction.
I've always felt the start of a proper solution would have been to have the author distinguish whether they were selling products or services - choosing between copyright, patents and first sale doctrine for products, and trade secret protection only for services.
Now that the global economy is based on computer software, it would be a long and difficult process to make changes.
The answer to this is to build a better iPhone and better iOS and make it open. Not legislature - this is assuming all the users are for this (at best it seems they don’t care much about the developers). All this is difficult to accomplish. Epic should try this instead of feeding their attorneys the billions of revenues they collected from their users.
30% of the app price is high, but not insane. They're handling 100% of the distribution, installation, verification, and payment processing. 30% of recurring revenue is highway robbery, because they offer NOTHING to subscription content.
30% cut from one-off payments is highway robbery. On top of that...
> They're handling [...] payment processing.
That has a tone-deaf shade. This piece of news is particularly volatile because Epic and Apple are now going to court over Apple expressly forbidding a developer doing their own payment processing. These are mafia-like tactics.
I've said it before: 30% is way, way too much. A very good agent gets 15%, and they actually arrange their clients with profitable opportunities. The app stores have set themselves up as gilted gatekeepers, demanding a commission twice as high.
> 30% of recurring revenue
During feudalism 1.0 the peasants were raked for 10%.[0] In this brave new world of 2.0, that would apparently give the monarch an insufficient profit margin.
Since tithes are paid to the church and not the state, this immediately implies the peasants were paying more than that.
Historical tax rates are low, and so is historical productivity. For example, you can read old instructions to tax collectors saying "take everything they don't need to survive -- but no more than that".
So this becomes a question of whether today we're measuring up from the tax rate, or down from the rate of confiscation of surplus.
In a way we associate tithes only with churches, but as the first sentence of that Wikipedia page states: "[...] paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government."
However, I think you bring up a much more important point, which deserves highlighting - the confiscation of surplus. The feudal lords at least understood that a starving peasant is not going to produce much surplus. Whereas we live in our respective modern societies and see concepts such as "working poor" as perfectly normal.
IMO the world is seriously bent when people who work their arses off still have to rely on charities to sustain themselves at all. Something is being confiscated but it sure isn't surplus.
I agree with you that it's high, but can be argued except for teh recurring subscriptions, which they earn zero part of. I agree there should be third party in-app processing.
I find the group think here to be incredible, and you all will likely be very disappointed when the legal system winds up supporting Apple.
Regulating retailers because you don’t like their cut is price controls, which is completely contrary to a free market, and ultimately undermines the end user experience of having a trusted, secure store. Perhaps Google or Apple’s power is so strong as to warrant regulation - but It must be applied fairly, or else it’s just politically corrupt wielding of power against a successful corporation because a part of the supply chain wants a bigger share of the pie.
Apple’s behavior is not anti-competitive by any historical measure, as the courts will show when Epic loses both their Google and Apple cases.
Antitrust law is always political. Do you really think the Trump or even Biden administrations will punish their most successful company, given the other problems in the economy? Convince them this will lead to more growth and you’ll get your wish. Right now it just seems like grousing.
Edit: I could see Europe doing something more intrusive, as is their tendency. However I still think it would have to be legislative and not legal, the arguments are too weak.
What Apple and Google is doing is in many ways effectively price control and inhibits free market dynamics.
For example Apple demand that app developers price their apps in the app store similar to the same service in other stores (website, Google play store, etc), even though they are taking a huge 30% cut. So Spotify can't price their product 30% more expensive in the app store, which makes the app store appear competitive and effectively kills incentives for the app store to reduce their fees, while devaluing products sold through the app store.
I do agree with you though about the political side of the matter.
Those pricing tactics are standard retail practices when dealing with large chains (“we will not be undersold”). This is why most items have an MSRP: to provide transparency across all retailers.
With software it’s of course easy to say that it’s a different product in different platforms. Which is why Apple used legal licensing to make Apps feel more like traditional products.
Arguably this makes easier for consumers to compare platforms and make a buying decision based on the underlying platform and not transitory deals on top of it. We can assume that all smartphone platforms are equal for their 3rd party software prices. Competition therefore isn’t on partner discounts or formations of cartels, it’s on the strengths of the underlying platform itself.
This does stop a form of competition, but I’m not sure price opacity is a form that has traditionally been viewed as a net positive.
Perhaps this leads to a legislative regime similar to US auto sales where dealers/shops and manufacturers must have separate ownership. To me Apple’s policies aren’t directly trying to emulate some aspects of this to avoid having to give up running the store.
Lets stick to the ‘no lower pirce than apple store’. This is very and clearly anti competitive tactic. Only side (apple) with significant leverage can use it. In every other situation it is not possible.
And to make it clear: this point is anti competitive, while you re completly skipping this topic concentrating on apple vs developer, because it harms (increases of price) consumers.
Multiple datapoints on this available, the best one is the very own of apple: mac os store. It is a ghost town.
Ios store would be instantly the same ghost if there existed even one ios app store alternative.
P.S. reminder: im addressing your mistake of ‘this is not anticompetitive’.
“No lower price” is not anti-competitive, it’s a common retail policy, and traditionally has been viewed as pro-competitive as it stops predatory pricing tactics.
It also implies the existence of a marketplace of dealers for iOS apps: there is none. The marketplace is among two different platforms vying for users.
ISVs are free to exclusively support one platform or the other. Google could lower their cut to 15% as incentive. The fact that they don’t do this is testament to Apple’s platform ability to attract customers that actually spend money.
Fundamentally this is about retailer policies and a reseller has every right to reject your product if it doesn’t want to represent it. 30% markup isn’t unreasonable when looking at actual retailers with a mix of products that have markups that vary from 5-100%.
What you want is Google and Apple’s platforms to be declared utilities where their platforms are state-regulated businesses that are forced to create a marketplace of retailers and are forced to have a 3rd party agency determine app admission guidelines across stores. This is far beyond the reach of antitrust law and will require legislative solutions.
Two tiers of completion would now exist: among retailers and among platforms. The cut % in some cases will go down. It is however debatable this will lead to overall lower consumer prices or a better consumer experience. The platforms are now entrenched for a generation and can’t make major changes except by 3rd party permission. All these new agencies need to be funded, and this raises the supply chain cost. The new admission guidelines might be worse or better. The retail experiences will be confusing as none will be default. The MSRP of software will be confusing (unless it’s mandated that ISVs publish one).
All of this to solve the problem of ISVs that want to build and sell the same product on two platforms and want to be able to take more of the retail margin for themselves?
Hard pass. I’d much rather see time, energy, and capital be allocated to entrepreneurs that may topple this regime by making a better alternative.
> For example Apple demand that app developers price their apps in the app store similar to the same service in other stores (website, Google play store, etc), even though they are taking a huge 30% cut. So Spotify can't price their product 30% more expensive in the app store
False. You can price your app/IAP higher, you just can't tell the user it's cheaper elsewhere.
There is a difference between information asymmetry existing and deliberately creating one.
I don't think anyone should be allowed to use their market position to do that.
With regards to typical retail, I think that's a bit of a wonky analogy as it's not a competitor in this case, it's the company themselves. That being said, things like that have been done. Not exactly the same but in the same spirit is printing the "retail price" on the box to prevent 3rd party sellers from just charging whatever they want.
> Apple demand that app developers price their apps in the app store similar to the same service in other stores
Where did you read that? I don't think that's true; for example YouTube Premium costs more through iOS IAP compared to the website. And Spotify did the same for years too.
Honestly heard it more than once from smaller players. I can see how the bigger players gets away with this based on all the other things they get away with that we know about.
Completely agree. Unapparent effective price fixing is standard. The modern governments has dropped the ball on trying to understand the modern markets.
> Regulating retailers because you don’t like their cut is price controls
That's not the point though
The point is that if Apple Store (or Play Store) is the only way to ask for money to users, Apple cannot decide who's in and who's out on their whim, they have to allow anybody and only act post-facto on the apps that misbehaved
In real life you are not arrested for attempted homicide because you carry a knife with you 'cause knives can be used to kill people
They have two choices: relax the rules of the store or accept other stores that can apply different rules, giving more choice to developers, publishers and users
The other point is that Apple cannot control what's inside an app, if the developer wants to promote their own product, website, other ways of buying a subscription, they should be allowed, in the same exact way the manufacturer of the blood pressure monitor I bough on Amazon have put inside the box a 5 euros coupon to buy OTC drugs online on their e-store.
Amazon doesn't have a say on that.
> I could see Europe doing something more intrusive, as is their tendency.
As European I love that Europe protects me as citizen of Europe instead of Apple, which is not even European and evades taxes using tax heavens
Apple absolutely can decide who is in or out: it’s their platform. Governments with even regulated markets generally don’t force stores to carry certain products.
Amazon absolutely has a say of what they carry in their store, and most consumers hate the terrible curation of their marketplaces lately.
If what Apple runs is not a product, it’s a utility. I think people underestimate what it means to declare the App Stores a utility: freeing up the App admission rules likely might not be one of the outcomes.
> They have two choices: relax the rules of the store or accept other stores that can apply different rules, giving more choice to developers, publishers and users
Or they have a third choice: status quo. It is currently a fantasy to think otherwise.
> Apple absolutely can decide who is in or out: it’s their platform.
The HW device is not theirs.
> Amazon absolutely has a say of what they carry in their store
They have no say of what's inside the box.
If inside the box there is a sticker that says "buy from our store, it's cheaper" they can't be forced out
Maybe Amazon can find other ways of kicking products out, but not that one
Apple wrote that rule inside their agreements
Which is clearly unfair competition
Apple competes directly with publishers on the store, being both entities that make the software that people can buy on the only store available, Amazon does not compete directly, they don't manufacture what they sell, they simply resell.
> It is currently a fantasy to think otherwise.
again: EU exists and take this matters seriously.
China could find itself in a digital war with US and it's the third most important market in the World for Apple.
Things can change very quickly
> most consumers hate the terrible curation of their marketplaces lately.
Considering how many posts I've seen about broken or fake products sold on Amazon, it's quite clear that the real fantasy is thinking that a marketplace where only one decides what's good and what's not doesn't produce a better curated and more secure experience
The software is theirs. It’s already been legally established that they’re allowed to create HW that only runs their software.
> [Amazon] have no say of what's inside the box.
That is untrue. If amazon doesn’t like a supplier, or what’s in a suppliers box, they can and will cut that supplier off from being able to sell on their store. They have done this before at their own whim.
> Apple wrote that rule inside their agreements... Which is clearly unfair competition
No. It’s simple contract law. Their software, their rules.
There is no competition here to be anticompetitive, there is only a singular retail channel to a singular platform. Anyone is free to walk across the street to Google, or any one of the Non-Play-Store Androids. Taking a cut of retail sales isn’t rent seeking, its normal business practice.
As soon as a government decides it doesn’t like private contracts and wants to create a disintermediated market - which is the most logical way to get close to what you’re asking for, a free market of stores and suppliers where it’s more likely that ISVs will be less restricted , that’s interfering with the market arrangement and the iOS platform’s approach to security and quality control.
It is almost unimaginable that the government would force Apple to lift all admission restrictions on the platform due to security and quality concerns , but even if they did, they couldn’t force Apple or any other retailer to resell software they don’t want to, short of heavy regulatory injection.
So let’s say they they found a way to make this work. It’s either via a market of many app stores, or its by making Apple an agent of the government Itself in curating the App Store.
My overall point is “Be careful what you wish for“. The unintended consequences of this interference are vast. The likely outcome is entrenching Apple and Google as an extension of government, rather than just removing restrictions for ISVs. Apple gets regulated, but now keeps making trillions of dollars/euros by law.
The case against Apple is based on three principle
- first sale doctrine: when I buy something I have the rights of redestributing it. Apple disallow it
- Any dependency on the future versions and upgrades for a proprietary software package can create vendor lock-in, entrenching a monopoly position.
- they have the rights to make software that only run on their hardware, the opposite is not implied, hardware is not theirs, they have no legal framework to make hardware that only runs their software. To be more explicit: iOS can be Apple only, but there's no right to make Apple HW iOS only. The hardware is not theirs.
> Their software, their rules.
False, again
Rules are not above laws.
If I make you sign a contract that in exchange for goods and services asks you for a testicle, I can't enforce it, even if you triple signed it with your blood.
> “Be careful what you wish for“. The unintended consequences of this interference are vast
I'm usually very careful
I'm sure they would be for Apple or for US economy
But I am Italian and don't rely on Apple existence, I don't care if they both burn into flames
(spoiler: they won't, they will be just fine, psychological terrorism don't work on me)
In my country many companies already make billions by law, that means they are forced to supply the service at a reasonable price and can't refuse it for any reason which is not approved by a judge
It would be a very welcome improvement regarding US companies behaviour outside US
What's more interesting for me is that if I say "in Italy we all pay for public healthcare so it's almost free for everybody" they scream "communists"
If I say "the State should own a sufficient number of public buildings to give homes to those who can't afford it" they scream "communists"
Same when I say that in Italy insurance companies can't make their own prices and prices can't be discriminatory
These are all traits of modern welfare state that is widespread in Europe, despite not being communists
But when a company abuse of its powers acting like a real communist dictator, showing those behaviours that in US they imagine as being a communist, making rules and forcing everybody to obey them, even when they are debatable, many in US applaud
Well, all I can say is “good luck”, you have expressed limited understanding of how software licensing and related contract law works in Europe or the USA.
For example there is no first sale doctrine in software as you never bought the software, you an acquired a license. “redistribution of software” is forbidden called “software piracy” and usually against any commercial software license agreement. Free software and copyleft were created as an alternative to this.
People can do what they want with the HW, and jailbreak the SW (which runs afoul of the iOS EULA and the DMCA in the USA but this isn’t enforced heavily by Apple).... but Apple has no legal obligation to make it easy for 3rd party OSes to run on the HW, or 3rd party app stores.
There has been a 3rd party App Store on iPhone for 12+ years (Cydia) but the Jailbreak dance made it hard to gain mainstream attention.
> I find the group think here to be incredible, and you all will likely be very disappointed when the legal system winds up supporting Apple.
You partially addressed it in your edit, but I'm pretty doubtful that the legal systems of every major state support Apple forever. It's really just a matter of time before some country gets the critical mass of popular opinion and legislative support for the idea that app stores should be treated as public goods and require regulation as such.
Many locales have regulated interchange fees for payment processors, or have threatened regulation to force voluntary reductions and caps on interchange fees. The legal arguments here are similar - I'd place Visa/Mastercard/Amex on a similar level as Apple/Google app stores in terms of competition.
I’m all for people convincing their governments to enact legislation in the public interest. I think there are huge misunderstandings with the current case, however:
1. People are suggesting there is no need for new legislation, that current antitrust law covers Apple’s behavior. I think this is, politely, wishful thinking.
2. People really underestimate the consequences of government intervention in the form of a consent decree or industrial regulations. They can be very good or very bad, and it usually takes many years of tinkering to figure it out.
Like: once you regulate the app stores, you’ve effectively enshrined them as a state-sponsored enterprise for a generation or longer. The %cut might get lowered, but now adjusting it is like fighting over taxes, and is wrapped up in all the other ideological problems of the day.
3. People underestimate the unintended consequences of breakups or forced arrangements.
Say the stores are forced to be spun out of their parents. How do we know this will lead to a lowered cut%? If you regulate that cut, what does the company get in return? Indentured servitude isn’t generally looked upon with favor. What about mergers and acquisitions, like, could the spun out google and Apple stores eventually merge, creating an actual monopoly? If not, why not, and for how long? Now we are back to enshrining a business as a state-sponsored enterprise.
Of course I’m sure that some kind of regulatory arrangement in the public interest could be dreamt up, but let’s remember that the AT&T split took 8 years to sort out into a consent decree. Microsoft’s trial and second consent decree took 3 years - finalized in 2001. If the antitrust law isn’t enough to tackle Apple and Google (and I doubt it is), crafting the legislation alone could take up to 5 years or maybe longer. The US communications act took 60 years to get revisited. Are we so sure there’s not some kind of alternative on the horizon that will disrupt Apple and Google in the next 10 years? The web browser disrupted Microsoft once, maybe some successor with WASM and other goodies will make native apps a moot point? Doesn’t seem that way now but 10 years is a long time.
This is the trouble with antitrust law or new industrial regulatory law: unintended consequences, or being too late to be effective. The better way is to promote entrepreneurs to topple this regime. It’ll take 10-15 years either way, but I think the latter approach has the chance of a better overall consumer experience.
> Convince them this will lead to more growth and you’ll get your wish.
There's actually a good case to be made in that favor.
Letting Apple strangle thousands of app developers and prevent business cases that would actually find customers from being implemented because of restrictive app store rules does not result in a single additional employment at Apple, but only in a few more billions of revenue at Apple and maybe a few more billions of fantasy market cap.
However, doing the opposite would strengthen these thousands of market participants, allow them to implement business cases that aren't feasible with a 30% Apple tax or due to other arbitrary store restrictions, and to do that, lots of people must be employed. High-skilled people with high salaries.
If the primary goal is to strengthen your actual, real economy, not pushing the stock market, I would root for the latter approach, not the former.
The problem is that vertical integration and market penetration has really changed what it means to be anti-competitive in the modern world.
Apple has built a vertically-integrated flywheel. Customers do not have choice. Their choices are between iOS and Android, which isn't much choice at all.
And if you already have bought into either ecosystem, you have even less choice without resulting in significant cost to you, the consumer.
This is assuming that iOS and Android are “permanent platforms” and should be regulated + enshrined as utilities by a new generation of anticompetitive law.
As a former Atari, Commodore, and IBM user, I find this to be an argument that doesn’t understand the history of tech platforms and the dynamics of competition.
People really forget that the world existed prior to 2008, and are convinced “this time is different”. It really isn’t.
I personally don't think 30% is particularly high in normal app selling scenarios. The two bigger issues with Apple's system are
1. The complete control over the ecosystem, which is gated and opaque. No alternatives to bypass the App Store.
2. 30% is fine for single app sales, but when you're an app that sells monthly subscriptions or tons of in-game content, it just doesn't scale the same.
How is that a problem? Then Apple could just start charging for actual distribution – i.e. actually charging at the point where they claim to be delivering value, rather than inserting themselves into a transaction where they add nothing.
The argument against that is then generally "but what about free apps?", to which I say: unmonetized apps get distributed by Apple for free. Monetized ones pay for distribution + a fee (maybe 30%).
So if it costs Apple $300 to deliver your app + updates to X devices every month, they charge you $390.
Yes. Realistically I think Apple could then charge anyone they want, where if you're under a certain usage or if you're a genuinely free-type app (the Wikipedia app) that don't charge you. The point is at that point it is more about Apple providing freebies in order to enrich their ecosystem than it is about Apple extorting platforms which are valuable mostly without Apple.
are you serious? Historically you are on the wrong side of the argument. MSFT lost their case in the 90s, of 'other' but not that much different reasons... to their core they are anti-competitive.
Also we have the break up of the original Bell system and several companies were formed out of it.
Microsoft’s case was about parlaying their monopoly in Windows to the browser space by making Internet Explorer an intrinsic part of Windows.
This is completely different from the #1 and #2 smart phone marketshare players charging a 30% cut as the exclusive software reseller to their own platform.
The original At&T was allowed to be a monopoly for 80+ years because it was in the public interest. The 1982 breakup was 8 years in the making due to poor management decisions in the 1960s and eroded that trust. Unfortunately the breakup was a failure. The Baby Bells maintained their regional monopolies, grew massively, and got their restrictions removed in the 1996 communications act, and now we have Verizon (2 of the 7 baby bells), AT&T (which is the original monopoly plus 4 of the 7 baby bells) and CenturyLink (the remnants of US West and other independents). The only real competition has come from foreign entrants like T-Mobile.
I think you need to take a closer look at the history of antitrust cases. It hasn’t been particularly successful.
There is so much misremembering of the Microsoft antitrust case, especially by people who didn’t follow it closely at the time, and you’re very right to remind everyone that the core issue was asking the government to intervene to maintain the viability of $40 closed source browser licenses.
MSFT “lost” the case but the remedies amounted to a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile the market in its broadest sense innovated in ways that no court or legislator could have reasonably predicted in the late 90s. Not just innovation in terms of superior technology, but in intellectual property (open source), culture (the web standards movement amongst devs), and organization (W3C getting its act together).
Beyond browsers Microsoft’s expected dominance on internet server business ran up against Linux, which like gecko and webkit, won out not because some Kommissar deemed it worthy, but because competitors to Microsoft were incentivized to think way outside of the box.
If App Store policies truly are as untenable as half of the people posting in this thread believe them to be, then the desire to solve the problem by bringing the coercive power of the state to redistribute some revenue seems more like a lack of imagination than anything else.
What would have happened if Microsoft only allowed Apps to be installed through a store instead of side loading. I don't think you could have gotten open source browsers and open standards especially if it had terms like that of Apple. Microsoft could have made arguments like security risk or against their policy to shut down community projects in early stage.
> MSFT “lost” the case but the remedies amounted to a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile the market in its broadest sense innovated
That is true, but there is the argument that some of this innovation was possible because Microsoft restrained its behavior while the case was pending.
> Microsoft’s case was about parlaying their monopoly in Windows to the browser space by making Internet Explorer an intrinsic part of Windows.
Nope, they have been accused and sentenced of abusing their dominant position by forcing OEMs to pre install IE on Windows, before the integration started.
The way MS force them was with restrictive licenses that practically threatened OEMs to do what MS ordered or face legal consequences and risk to go out of business.
The second accusation was that MS used internals secret API for their product not available to third parties giving MS an unfair advantage.
Those API were also shared among few OEMs that helped MS secure its dominant position.
> Law professor Eben Moglen noted that the way Microsoft was required to disclose its APIs and protocols was useful only for “interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product”
The third of their anticompetitive behavior was to pay some OEMs to not install (or offer to customers) other operating systems on their hardware (including BeOS, for example)
"Microsoft's true anticompetitive clout was in the rebates it offered to OEMs preventing other operating systems from getting a foothold in the market."
The cases are not even close to being in the same league.
Microsoft didn’t force OEMs to preinstall IE: it came with the Plus! pack in Win95 which was optional. IE shipped preinstalled on the OSR1 distributions in late 1995. OEMs couldn’t uninstall it. MS saw IE as a feature, nor a product. The DOJ disagreed. And yes, the API arguments were the other factor of the consent decree violation.
Apple:
- has no consent decree to violate
- is not being anticompetitive by taking a retail cut on a store for its own platform (ISVs are free to go exclusively Android); Google is free to drop its retail cut, 3rd party stores on Android exist, and also the browser exists and is arguably completely unrestricted.
- should be allowed the freedom to admit apps on its platform to better the consumer experience.
Interfering with this collapses the whole security and curation value add of the App Store, or relegates it to a 3rd party with different incentives, or declares that Apple’s store is the only one where ISVs make money and therefore must become a utility because ISVs want more margin.
Good luck with arguing this. It will take 5+ years or more to legislate properly, and I suspect parliaments have bigger problems to deal with.
If one wanted to chase Apple for anticompetitive behavior it would be to do some amazing stuff in-browser with things like WASM, streaming, etc. and argue that Apple is blocking those innovations with its Safari mandatory policy to force people to use its App Store and native APIs. That’s the closest where I can see this argument holding water.
> When Apple starts OEMing iPhones, get back to me.
> The cases are not even close to being in the same league.
- MS was sentenced for making the software, not the hardware
- MS was abusing the dominant position to be the only OS on the HW, just like iOS is the solely possible OS on Apple HW and Apple store is the sole possible distributor of iOS apps, because Apple is abusing of its dominant position in the Apple ecosystem market (which is IMO a separate market from Android). If there were OEMs there would be at least competition in the HW space, like there was in the pc that drove down the prices for end users.
> Microsoft didn’t force OEMs to preinstall IE: it came with the Plus! pack in Win95
I firmly believed on HN arguments were not thrown around without backing them up with facts
It all started before Win95 was even around...
> In 1993, Novell claimed that Microsoft was blocking its competitors out of the market through anti-competitive practices. The complaint centered on the license practices at the time which required royalties from each computer sold by a supplier of Microsoft's operating system, whether or not the unit actually contained the Windows operating system. Microsoft reached a settlement in 1994, ending some of its license practices.
> The DOJ disagreed.
That's the US case
You know Europe has over 700 million citizens, you should remember that thing happens over here as well sometimes...
> - is not being anticompetitive by taking a retail cut on a store for its own platform
nobody has said that
Apple is a monopolist on a closed platform that they refuse to open up to third parties while at the same time acting as gatekeeper by allowing or disallowing apps on the store at their whim
that's clearly an unfair advantage for Apple the software company exactly like MS using secret OS Apis of their operating system to write their software had an unfair advantage (and was sentenced for that)
> argue that Apple is blocking those innovations with its Safari mandatory policy
It's the same circular argument
[1] Apple is blocking third parties from distributing their software freely AND [2] is hindering user's freedom by not allowing to replace certain parts of their system (like for example the browser) even though they allegedly are a source of vulnerabilities because [1]
That's the same thing MS did by making IE undeletable
Microsoft had 90% market share in the operating system market and that is why they lost their case. Apple has less than 50% market share in the United States and it's unlikely the courts would view them as having monopoly power. The case is even weaker in Europe where Apple only has 25% market share.
It does not make sense to point to Microsoft and declare "these situations are the same" when there is a key difference in the amount of market power each company wields.
> Microsoft had 90% market share in the operating system market
only in the consumer market...
it is not the same argument people use right now for Apple?
"Buy Android" they say
People could buy Sun, SGI, IBM with OS/2, Macintosh computers etc. etc.
in 1993 even Amiga was a viable option
The point is that the alternative is not really an alternative if switching is expensive or straight impossible (it's very hard to switch from iOS to Android)
> It does not make sense to point to Microsoft and declare "these situations are the same" when there is a key difference in the amount of market power each company wields.
Microsoft in 1995 was ranked below place 250 in Fortune's 500 list
Apple is 3rd in 2020 and the company with the highest capitalization in the history of the stock market
I think that makes for pretty important key differences too ...
Market power is a specific term used in economics relating to how much control a company has over the price of a good or service. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power)
It does not have anything to do with stock market rankings.
Microsoft had a very large amount of market power in the operating system market, high enough that it was considered monopoly power, and that is why they lost their case.
What you fail to understand is that money is power
Especially when money can be used to
- buy competitors
- put them out of business
- sue them on the most insignificant detail
- sue other small companies just because they use a different fruit in their logo. Why? Because you have money and you can! (see prepear logo fight for reference)
- stall job market to keep workers from going to competitors (see Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees)
- abuse your market position, fines in the range of billions are peanuts for you (see French antitrust authority fined Apple for 1.2 billions)
etc etc
- did we forget that they have a monopoly in a luxury brand used mainly by managers and very powerful people that involves handling their private data and can exactly "control the price of good and services" on that platform at their will?
Companies that make yachts have no monopoly on means of transport, but they make boats for people like Paul Allen and have much more power than Fiat/Chrysler
Last but not least
You are wrong again
Microsoft lost their case because they ABUSED of their dominant position, that's exactly what Apple is doing in the iOS market
And it's much worse because MS was an outsider at the times, Apple is the richest company in the World
US is not dominating the World because they are better - the contrary is probably true - or have a larger market influence, but because they have more money than anybody else and spend more than anybody else on military budget (also used to spy on allies on civil matters, see USA spying Angela Merkel)
> Microsoft lost their case because they ABUSED of their dominant position, that's exactly what Apple is doing in the iOS market
Microsoft used their monopoly power in the operating system market to forcibly acquire market share in the web browser market. The case against Microsoft was based on their monopoly power.
Apple has no monopoly power so you cannot claim the situations are the same, sorry.
I've made my point. You seem more interested in off-topic ranting rather than engaging in good faith so I'm going to move on.
What ultimately made me pull out of the Mac App Store was the fact that publishing with Apple meant “app with customizations to accommodate stupid rules”, and $EVERYWHERE_ELSE meant “upload and be done with it”. If you haven’t checked lately, the Mac App Store is a pathetic ghost town for the most part.
On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store.
Also, since Apple loves to compare its grand scheme to how physical stores used to behave, let’s examine that: there isn’t a single physical store that demands to have complete control over everything in the boxes on their shelves. If you open a product box and it contains a card with information, such as a link to the company web site or other stuff, then that’s what you get. If apps followed this sane model, Apple would just let apps put whatever they want “in the box”, including sensible things like INFORMATION about account sign-ups and other products, and links.
I have an allergy to tech analogies in general, but Apple's brick-and-mortar retail analogy is one of the worst.
In any locality other than rural towns served by a single Dollar General, consumers have a choice between multiple retail outlets. If they don't like the choices at one store, they're free to shop at another.
"But Android!" one might say, and once again, the analogy falls completely flat. The switching costs of going between iOS and Android are obviously not remotely comparable from the switching costs of going between Walmart and Target. When you move into iOS town, the only store within a thousand miles is the App Store.
> "But Android!" one might say, and once again, the analogy falls completely flat. The switching costs of going between iOS and Android are obviously not remotely comparable from the switching costs of going between Walmart and Target. When you move into iOS town, the only store within a thousand miles is the App Store.
The analogy actually works quite nice, and you already hinted at how: the Android alternative is akin to permanently moving from one place to another because that one place you were in did only have one store with very restrictive rules and opening others is forbidden. Accepting such a monopoly and arguing that "people are free to sell their houses, leave their friends and family behind and move elsewhere if they don't like it" doesn't really make it a monopoly is ridiculous.
> Accepting such a monopoly and arguing that "people are free to sell their houses, leave their friends and family behind and move elsewhere if they don't like it" doesn't really make it a monopoly is ridiculous.
If only. CON laws and their analogues form monopolies in the true sense - businesses who are protected from competition by law. But hey, what's wrong with that?
I am pretty sure that comparing the economics of healthcare and the economics of a hypermarket is like comparing apples to oranges. Same with comparison of healthcare and a virtual store selling smartphone apps.
Comparing a hypermarket selling all the physical stuff for everyday needs and a virtual store on a smartphone selling all the apps for everyday needs though...
> If only. CON laws and their analogues form monopolies in the true sense - businesses who are protected from competition by law. But hey, what's wrong with that?
CONs are a tool - and they can be used for good, or used for bad. Obviously cases where they're misused will attract media attention and no-one thinks about why CONs exist in the first place:
I understand that CONs exist to prevent over-supply of medical services in one area to the detriment of another, or to prevent the inefficient - or inhumane - distribution of medical resources given the US' healthcare system and hospital builder's and operators motives.
In an economic sense: in poorer and rural areas you'll find higher rates of people being uninsured, which means the hospital will have to deal with more indigent patients which can be very expensive - without having enough wealthy patients effectively subsidizing the poorer patients. In the case of emergency care, federal law requires ER departments to treat everyone regardless of ability to pay or insurance which will be hugely expensive - and in non-emergency care you'll simply have fewer paying patients overall - meaning less revenue for a hospital - this means that even the most altruistically run non-profit hospital would rather set-up shop in a wealthier area than a poorer area. This then leads to poorer areas being under-served, which then leads to greater disparities in socioeconomic and quality-of-life outcomes. This is not good for a well-functioning society.
The other reason concerns the negative consequences of having hospitals competing with each other. I assume we all know that (and why) having two hospitals in the area will not result in lower sticker-prices for services or will necessarily improve the quality of the patient-experience (besides bigger marketing budgets...) - competing for patients is one thing, but when they start competing for staff, doctors, specialists - and competing for limited resources (e.g. Covid-19 test kits, medical supplies, etc) that pushes expenses up sharply. This is also not good.
So yes - just like the New York Taxi Cab Medallion system, the Certificate-of-Need system can also be used to artificially restrict supply for the worst reasons - but it has its place, and provided it's well-administered it will be essential to ensure certain efficiencies until the US gets its act together on healthcare like most of the developed world already has.
(If my understanding of the nature of CONs is incorrect, please let me know in a reply - I understand there's an increasing general consensus in academia and public-policy against CONs lately, but I'm also suspicious that people may conflate CON systems in some states that so-far appear to be working well with CON systems in states with a history of regulatory-capture and legislative abuse. Obviously I'd prefer non-CON to a poorly-run CON system, but from what I can tell a well-run CON system is better than non-CON).
> The switching costs of going between iOS and Android are obviously not remotely comparable from the switching costs of going between Walmart and Target.
True, but you knew that very well when you bought iOS device (and it might've even been exactly because of the strict review). Same if you moved to that town with the single Dollar General - you knew what you were getting into.
Don't get me wrong - I don't like the situation. But people buy iPhones (at the very least) despite the strict guidelines and developers still put apps in the store despite the strict rules. If either of those components would miss, Apple would not be one of the highest value companies in the world right now. And Apple does not have the market force to simply crush everyone else.
the equivalent would be that you can only use an apple car to go shopping in the apple store, and you can't use that apple car to go shopping anywhere else.
so in fact what we have here is a vertical lock-in. lock-in is just as bad as a monopoly, as it removes the ability to choose competitors.
i believe the EU has a law for interoperability, it only applies to API's as far as i know, but one could see the phone as a device with an API that allows apps to run on it. it could therefore be considered that now allowing any app to run on the phone is a violation of that law.
That's an interesting point. They forced the end of every manufacturer using unique charging cabled for their phones, forcing a universal app API would be a great step. The phone would literally just become a platform and you could have a healthy competition about who builds the best platform.
the API would not have to be universal, because that would mean android support on IOS. the API would just have to be open, in that neither apple nor google can act as gatekeepers for who gets to use it.
this also includes that apple can not disallow duplication of existing features.
The equivalent would be that you can only use an apple console to go shopping in the apple store, much like only using an Xbox to shop in the Xbox store ... so the analogy does work and the marketplace is fine with it, and clear.
// FWIW, I wish I could play Horizon Zero Dawn on that Xbox, but it’s not in the Xbox store.
see my comment below. it's a vertical lock-in. and just because the market tolerates it, that doesn't mean it is healthy and good.
for each case we need to look at how that store is managed and who gets access to it under what conditions.
it is my impression though that microsoft acts like a publisher for the games on the xbox, iaw they take responsibility for the games being published, picking carefully who they work with, whereas apple simply sells access to the market for a 30% cut. so xbox is a private club that you need to get invited to, whereas apple store is claiming to be an open market, except that it isn't.
Except if having the choice of more than one app store was important to you, why did you buy an iPhone in the first place? You could have bought something else and and avoided the problem entirely.
Because some of us bought into the ecosystem early on when we believed it was going to be much more open based on what the company said. Switching now would require a large investment, and I think their is some element of wanting Apple to be true to its past promises.
You bought your iPhone before 2008 and are still using it? If so, I'm impressed. Otherwise, Apple has been clear since the very beginning of the App Store that third-party apps require approval and can only be installed via the App Store. Why did you believe otherwise?
Third party iPhone and iPod touch applications must be approved by Apple and will be available exclusively through the App Store.
In the US, iMessage is the most important app for lock-in. I wonder how much of the reason for lower iPhone market share outside the US is down to the fact iMessage is far less widely used by Apple users, who instead use cross platform apps like WhatsApp or Facebook messenger. It's hard to untangle cause and effect, but I do see a lot of iPhone users saying that iMessage is what prevents them from switching. The stigma of the green bubble is real.
(I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee to have them on Android. As is, I just do without, and deal with ridiculous workarounds like having my Android phone save my photos to OneDrive and them manually copying them over to Photos on my Mac.)
Really? I’m an iPhone user and even I admit that Google Maps, Google Photos and whatever Google is calling their voice assistant today are better. If I were serious about photos I would use Lightroom.
Well I've got some specific points for each of them:
Maps: Google Maps is drastically better from a POI standpoint, particularly for reviews, as it's become the de facto standard for restaurant reviews in my locale, while Apple Maps just imports the graveyard of Yelp reviews, and GMaps is mildly better for routing. That being said, Google Maps has ads, which is enough for me that I'd preferentially pay for Apple Maps to avoid ads for anything other than restaurant reviews. As is, I use a Garmin GPS in my car in large part because of my annoyance with Google Maps.
Photos: For desktop software, Photos on macOS is fine for my use, and significantly improved over the past few years. (I abandoned Lightroom after Adobe's previous macOS file-deletion snafu a few years ago.) I have no interest in a web-based photo editor/management software rather than a desktop one. Apple's photo recognition stuff is generally done on-device, which is preferable to me over a cloud service.
Voice assistants: They're pretty much all equivalent in terms of accuracy for my use. (Setting timers, setting alarms, controlling my lights and music.) The killer feature of Siri/HomeKit is that it processes commands locally, so my lights respond instantly rather than needing to bounce my requests to Amazon/Google HQs for processing.
Hm, seems you're right - I think what I must have been remembering was comparing control of home automation products via Alexa/Google (voice and app are similarly responsive) to non-voice HomeKit control. (But even Siri voice seems more responsive than e.g. Alexa voice for Hue, presumably because commands just bounce to Apple and back to me, rather than to Amazon, then to Philips, then back to me.)
I don't actually use voice control on phone, so I guess what I actually want on my Android phone is just HomeKit, and not Siri. (Would also let me switch my camera to HomeKit Secure Video, which I can't practically use with my primary carry being an Android phone, despite owning all of the prerequisites.)
I agree with you on every point except the last. Now might be a bad time to recommend Lightroom given their last update permanently wiped people's photos[0].
Having agreed with you, there is a non-insignificant switching cost (in time) for photos, especially if something is your primary photo store.
App availability isn’t the only cost in switching. Even if so, a duopoly is still a concern as a consumer.
Having to chose between only AT&T and Comcast for cable because they are the only providers to your area is not a fair choice. Sure, nothing stops me from moving. I can get power, water, and commute from elsewhere too. But it’s a pain and sucks.
>When you move into iOS town, the only store within a thousand miles is the App Store.
A thousand miles?
I've switched between iOS and Android multiple times over my smartphone life (Android to iOS to Android to iOS). The switch is trivial. Yeah, it is like going between Walmart and Target, and not knowing the aisles layouts or having the loyalty card, but it's a pretty easy barrier and you'll figure it out quickly enough.
All of this moping and crying speaks as if Apple drew everyone in and then suddenly changed the rules of the game -- some master bait and switch -- and now everyone is finding the gates locked. Yet it has been the same rules for the entire ascent. Everyone who has bought an iPhone in the past decade+ knows that there is one app store, it's curated, etc. None of this is new. Every developer who made an app knew the way the store works, the rules, Apple's cut, etc.
Apple is on the wrong side of history with some of their current positions (cloud gaming as a big example of Apple being wrong), but this whole thread feel like people who want to force their way by grossly exaggerating their grievances and opposition. Many of these comments read like an absurd parody.
In popular culture they “suggest” things in the component list to get price down to what they want. The iOS comparable would be Apple suggesting refactoring for performance.....Walmart is much more aggressive
"On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store."
This earned a serious out loud laugh. Are you actually being sincere?
An app store that is widely trusted, and that has been the most successful, most profitable venue for independent developers in history (by a magnitude) is going to be abandoned because you, the developer, find it a hassle? Epic Games, as one example, has made far more from the App Store than any other platform...yet it's their target? LOL.
Uproarious stuff. Reading through these various absurd, fully detached from reality comments (I most like the highly upvoted fan fiction nonsense - "I have a super successful app on the App Store and I'm abandoning it because the Android Play Store is such a greener pasture" -- everyone pretends that the Play Store doesn't have virtually the same policies)
Some developers of fringe stuff might abandon it, and every other developer would welcome your departure. The rest of us will enjoy a trusted, lubricated, very successful platform.
Sidenote - everyone always goes on about the 30% cut. Right now my Costco has iTunes cards for 85 cents on the dollar (e.g. $85 for $100 gift cards, and clearly Costco is getting a cut of that amount). This deal is fairly regular, and gives buyers a sense of "value", and fills up lots of grandparents storage until birthdays and Christmas roll around. And then another few billion appear in developer accounts. What a crime.
My experience with Apple's subscription/payment system in the app store is pretty awful, and I'd much rather buy from a vendor directly, like I do with Spotify/Netflix/Amazon. The refund system on the app store is terrible. Apps you've paid for get updated automatically to something unusable with no recourse. As a software vendor being at the mercy of an unaccountable review process is a nightmare.
> On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store.
Yes, I certainly would, and the only reason I haven't already is I have no other way to get my app into the hands of users who own only Apple phones and tablets.
> the Mac App Store is a pathetic ghost town for the most part
This definitely resonates with me. If you want to see what a good app store could look like, check out SetApp [0]. They charge a monthly fee for access to a curated list of paid apps, they offer a 7-day trial IIRC. I initially subscribed for their two email clients, then stopped using them as they were both shit (slow, glitchy, poor UX, etc.). I am still subscribed just because I like the idea and just how many apps they offer.
That's more on the nerdy side, I was thinking more in the sense of the fancy/fun/quality feeling the Mac app store selection should evoke, instead it's just a ghost town with expensive bullshit and ass UX (at least based on what I remember - I haven't opened that damn app in ages lol).
An issue I haven't seen previously discussed is Apple's enforcement of their "Business" guideline (3.2) which effectively prevents certain b2b apps from making it onto the App Store because the app is supposedly not available to a wide enough consumer audience.
This is a very subjective policy because popular b2b apps such as Slack, Zendesk, etc which have a wide reach are allowed, but more industry specific b2b apps are rejected even if our theoretical user base spans 10s of thousands of people simply because only clients of the business are able to use the app.
And btw this policy is not actually encoded in their rules[1] but 3.2 is the code they cite when rejecting your app. The rejection wording is as follows [2]:
"During our review, we found that this app was designed for a specific business or organization and not for general distribution on the App Store. Business apps available on the App Store are meant for use by a wide variety of external customers around the world.
As this app is not intended for general distribution, it cannot be made available on the App Store. We encourage you to review the other ways to distribute your business app and choose one that better meets your business needs."
Wow that's mind boggling. It's possible that's a whitelabeled app developed by a different company which has greater overall reach.
But yes, this is exactly why Apple's subjective enforcement of invisible policies is so enraging - it's like you need to negotiate some secret backdoor deal just to get your app into the store.
In the past several years I have used half a dozen apps that were "designed for a specific business or organization" including a VPN app that only works for a large California software company, an account management app that only works for a company that does software contracting (different than the other), among others. The distribution audiences of these are comparatively tiny. So why were they allowed?
Huh, I wasn't even aware of this. My business has an app that's only usable by our B2B customers. (Which are low in number, but high value.) It would cause significant consternation if Apple decided to reject it.
As an app developer myself, with apps on both the Google Play Store and the App Store with over 250K monthly active users, I have become so frustrated with Apple's arbitrary and capricious enforcement of its App Store regulations, its bullying and coercion of developers, its extortionate fees, and its monopolistic anti-competitive practices, that I have stopped updating my apps on the App Store. I wonder how many other developers are in a similar position. As a consumer, I now know that if I want the latest, up to date apps, I'm better off turning to the Play Store or one of the many other app stores that can be used on Android devices.
I've also given up on the MacBook line, tired of the touch bar, the slate-like keyboards, and (now) the transition to ARM. My next laptop will be a Thinkpad or Dell. Most of my development these days is done under Windows using WSL2, and my primary focus is on Android.
It used to be that my apps made more money on Apple devices, but now I actually make more on Android. The Google Play review process is a breeze compared to Apple's laborious and stifling rules (although it is not perfect either by any means), and at some point, it's just not worth the hassle.
It's sad, I was an enthusiastic endorser of Apple products just 7 years ago, but can no longer recommend them. This is the first year I won't be buying a new iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, too - I'm looking to switch to the Pixel or Samsung Galaxy line and Wear OS.
I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank). The law should make illegal restricting developers to any specific payment processor(s), too.
I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank).
I'm pretty sure that will have massive opposition, because they are deathly scared of opening their devices back to the general-purpose computers they actually are. However, I remain hopeful that people may finally wake up to the "security" excuse and stop sacrificing their freedom.
> I'm pretty sure that will have massive opposition, because they are deathly scared of opening their devices back to the general-purpose computers they actually are.
Who's the opposition coming from? Apple? They can fart around and waste time and money on appeals, but if they get hit with an antitrust ruling there isn't much they'll be able to do about it.
> So tell me again when an “antitrust” ruling has ever been applied to a company with less than 50%?
50% of what is the issue, though. Some arbitrary descriptive market the target company preferred to be used for the antitrust analysis, or the actual market in which substitution, and thus actual competition, occurs as found by the court hearing the case?
Because defining the relevant market is not infrequently a contentious point in antitrust.
So can I define Epic having a monopoly on being able to buy things in Fortnite? What if I want to sell my cool “Scarface dance” next to the “Carlton dance” within Fortnite without paying the “Epic Tax”?
I upvoted your comments based on a good faith belief that you're open to learning more about how antitrust law works. It has little to do with market share, and everything to do with a concept called "market power."
Market power is the ability to coerce people into paying more for something via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service. A textbook example which most people would agree is bad is a trust/cartel situation where a few players artificially limit supply, and then can raise the price on consumers because there are no competitors. But if a firm is able to drive up prices with impunity for any reason, it's likely they possess market power.
When a firm possesses excess market power it's good for that firm, but bad for the market, consumers, and society. By definition a firm with a lot of market power has very little competition, so even as their margins grow, product quality will decline and price will increase. (Sound like Apple in 2020?) And new firms will find it difficult to compete in that market even as the firm with market power grows very rich, which exacerbates the problem of wealth inequality. (Sound like America in 2020?)
A society which doesn't place some sort of checks on a firm's ability to acquire market power ends up being a place where the way to get ahead is to find an unfair advantage, abuse it, and screw everyone else. (Again, sound familiar?)
At this point it's almost certain that Google is violating antitrust regulation by abusing its market power (proven in the EU, and the US looks poised to start filing lawsuits this year). Apple, Amazon and a few others are up for debate and it's also fair to say that antitrust regulations should evolve to address the tech industry more effectively. The antitrust problem isn't limited to tech however, anti-competitive behaviors of questionable legality have proliferated all over the US since the 80s due to a lax regulatory environment.
If you want to learn more about this topic, Matt Stoller's newsletter "BIG" on Substack is a phenomenal place to start.
> Market power is the ability to coerce people into paying more for something via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service.
How exactly does Apple "coerce people into paying more for their phones via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service", and what is that mechanism?
> But if a firm is able to drive up prices with impunity for any reason, it's likely they possess market power.
How is Apple actually able to "drive up prices with impunity for any reason"? It seems to me, the more Apple raises iPhone prices, the more people are priced out and decide to switch to a cheaper phone instead.
The matter under contention is the pricing of in-app purchases, not the pricing of phones. By disallowing app stores other than Apple's App Store, Apple is coercing users to pay an inflated price for in-app purchases, since it takes a 42.8% price hike to negate Apple's 30% fee.
Both are relevant, because in order to successfully win an antitrust tying claim under US law you need to prove the seller had sufficient market power in a tying product in order to coerce buyers into buying the tied product.
In this case, once you buy an iPhone, you're forced to use Apple's system to make in-app purchases. The tying product is the phone, and the tied product is the in-app purchase.
So you need to show that Apple has sufficient market power in the smartphone market, and that is where the question of the ability to control prices of phones comes in.
Epic's lawsuit does not accuse Apple of tying App Store sales to phone sales. Two of the nine counts are about allegedly tying in-app purchases to app sales, and the rest don't involve tying.
But since you mentioned it, I'm not really sure that Epic will succeed with their argument that the "iOS App Distribution" market is the relevant tying product market absent an analysis of the overall smartphone market.
So what’s the true value of those cool Carlton dance moves I can get on Fortnite? How much less would the coins and loot boxes cost? Just imagine the overhead that Epic has to charge to reproduce the $18 billion of virtual goods it sales.
This article is about WordPress, not Fortnite. For WordPress.com to cancel out Apple's 30% fee, its monthly prices for its paid plans would need to increase from $4 to $5.71, from $8 to $11.43, from $25 to $35.71, and from $45 to $64.29.
I'm not sure that they are. I did say that something smells rotten (products getting worse and prices going up), but this alone is not justification for punitive measures.
The government playbook in this sort of situation is normally to start subpoena'ing emails, execs etc. and look for hard evidence of actual anti-competitive practices. They're not only interested in a business model as it's described in the media, they want to know what company execs actually did. If they find something they file a suit.
> Wouldn't an antitrust claim against Apple likely fail if the plaintiff cannot establish they actually have market power in the smartphone market?
Well, assuming it is one based on abuse of market power and not the other kinds of antitrust violations (e.g., combination in restraint of trade, etc.), it would fail if the plaintiff couldn't establish that Apple had market power in the market for the product for which they allegedly abused market power. If that was iPhones, for instance, that would be the market for iPhones plus whatever products empirically people substitute for iPhones in response to pricing changes. (Of course, if Apple has market power, there is some range in which the “plus...” part is “none”, since market or pricing power is the ability to raise prices without driving sales to a competing good.)
IANAL, but if the lawsuit was about selling smartphones, then yes I think so.
If the lawsuit was about selling some popular class of app in which Apple leveraged its monopoly over app distribution, I think the plaintiff could have a pretty strong case.
Do you think that a court will permit a plaintiff to claim Apple has a "monopoly" over app distribution without an examination of its market power in the greater smartphone market?
Keep in mind that even if Apple only had 1% market share in the smartphone market they would still have a "monopoly" over app distribution on their own phones.
> So can I define Epic having a monopoly on being able to buy things in Fortnite?
If price increases for Fortnite IAP don't, empirically, drive people to stop buying them in favor of alternatives of some kind, yes. Or, rather, you can't define the market that way, but if there is no substitution effect a US court considering an anti-trust claim is likely to see that as the relevant market, not some broader, say, battle royale game IAP market in which price-driven substitution does not occur.
I guess that’s the value of evaluating on a case by case basis. Depends on what you define as a market worth pursuing antitrust issues for. I would also argue this informally happens when people start to talk about antitrust as it’s usually applied to markets that are general enough that more or less everyone participates in (or feels consequences from) them.
So the government should make decisions on a case by case basis? Isn’t that what everyone is whining about Apple doing - treating small developers and large developers differently?
I’m much more worried about the government deciding what happens to people randomly than a corporation. I don’t have to buy Apple products. It’s a lot harder for me not to have to deal with a capricious government.
I’m with you, I’m simply stating the upside. My further point was that it is already treated somewhat case by case by the selection of antitrust cases to pursue.
You might be able to do just that after this Apple/Epic ruling. That's kind of why NFTs/digital ownership is so exciting. You might be able to buy or sell your dances on any store you want to and use them in the game.
I wish I could be on the other side of a bet against most of HN, betting against all of the wannabe lawyers who don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and posting examples of market collusion showing how Apple/Google could be charged based on the App stores.
The below took me about a minute to find through Google.
U.S. v Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S 150 (1940); United States v. Sealy, Inc., 388 U.S. 350 (1967); United States v. Topco Associates, Inc., 405 U.S. 596 (1972); Craftsmen Limousine, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co., 363 F.3d 761 (8th Cir. 2004), Northern Pac. Ry. Co. v. US 356 US (1940); Agnew v. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, 683 F.3d 328 (7th Circ. 2012); or In re Flat Glass Antitrust Litigation 385 F.3d 350 (3rd Cir. 2004), National Soc. of Professional Engineers v. U.S. 435 U.S. (1878); In re Insurance Brokerage Antitrust Litigation, 618 F 3d 300 (2010); or In re Southeastern Milk Antitrust Litigation, 739 F.3d 262 (2014).
Your argument, if you can call it that, is completely incoherent.
You seem to be under the impression that anti-trust is isolated to monopolies, when clearly it is not. Apple and Google do not need to have a monopoly for the government to decide that their app store business model is anti-competitive, and there doesn't need to be precedence.
Is that how the law works?Apple is not a monopoly because you can choose Android. This is an awesome loophole.
Visa is not a monopoly because there is also MasterCard.
At&t is not a monopoly because you can choose Comcast.
It’s a “loophole” that it isn’t a monopoly because you have a choice? That’s kind of a the definition of a monopoly. It’s even in the first two syllables of the word....
I love my choice of AT&T over Comcast. $70 all fees included gigabit up and down.
Your argument is based on a lay-definition and not a legal definition. It's good to know your etymology, but that doesn't get far in court. From the wikipedia article on us antitrust law:
> When enterprises are not under public ownership, and where regulation does not foreclose the application of antitrust law, two requirements must be shown for the offense of monopolization. First, the alleged monopolist must possess sufficient power in an accurately defined market for its products or services. Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way. The categories of prohibited conduct are not closed, and are contested in theory. Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing.
Apple is exercising exclusive control over the market of apps made for the phones they make, so it looks to me like they satisfy the first requirement. The second requirement is murkier, but several of the examples listed sound quite similar to how apple operates its store. IANAL but the more I read about their behavior, the more I become convinced of their monopoly status. Having a monopoly is not a crime. Abusing monopoly power is.
The article literally spells out the legal definition, summarizes numerous actual antitrust rulings, with plentiful citations to relevant laws and case law, many with full and well researched articles. Maybe give it a read. You might even find an example where 4 tobacco companies, each with less than 50% market share, were found to be abusing market dominance.
You're conveniently ducking that they 100% control the market of software for their phones. And anyway, I didn't say that case was equivalent. You asked for a case where a company with less than 50% was subject to an antitrust ruling and I provided one.
And I'll remind you, I'm not a lawyer. Technically, zero lawyers is a good number of lawyers, so I must insist that makes me a good lawyer. Just, I'd suck in court.
A company that was subject to antitrust because it colluded with other companies in the market has nothing to do with what’s going on in the app market. Collusion is always illegal -except for the sports leagues.
Yes and consoles makers have control of their consoles, Roku has control of their platform, as does LG with their WebOS based TVs.
Yet and still when you were challenged to come up with an analogous example, the best you could come up with is multiple companies colluding.
I can't speak for what other people have posted, but there's, to my mind, a quite analogous case for this situation: Kodak v. Image Technical Services.
The case involved Kodak refusing to sell parts for its copiers to outside repair shops, and they were sued by the shops who claimed this was anticompetitive behavior.
Kodak made a claim that since there was robust competition in the market for copiers, they couldn't have market power in the aftermarkets for "Kodak copier parts and service." The Supreme Court rejected that argument, holding it was possible to show that there was market power (and therefore antitrust liability) in a secondary market even if the primary market is competitive.
The key point in the Kodak case was that Kodak changed their policy on selling repair parts after people bought the original product, and the change in policy is what led the Supreme Court to decide that the market for repair parts was a separate and relevant aftermarket, because the people that bought Kodak copiers lacked information at the time of purchase about Kodak's repair policy and therefore were locked-in to buying repair services from Kodak after the fact.
Subsequent cases since Kodak have continually narrowed the scope in which Kodak is applied, and it likely would not apply here because people who buy iPhones have known since the App Store launched in 2008 that the App Store is the only place they'll be able to install apps from.
Yes, the specifics of the case don't match up perfectly, but the context of the question was "show me a case where a single company had antitrust liability without a majority of the market," not "prove with a single citation that Apple will lose."
Do you realize that I said "if apple gets hit with an antitrust ruling"? I'm not certain of the outcome; I see room for argument on both sides of this. You've apparently picked this 50% hill to die on. I wish that you were taking a curious approach to this conversation, because we might both learn something. Instead, I regret responding to you in the first place.
I recognize your username and I recall seeing good and thoughtful comments from you. I hope to meet you again in a more productive conversation.
I think it’ll be interesting if Apple loses control of the App Store but still combats anti-practices through evolution of the APIs. It could become a consumer win.
I hope someone will officially propose a law that requires all hardware to be re-programmable by its owner (i.e. hardware should come with a fully documented and accessible interface); one good reason for this is the reduction of e-waste.
I'm a libertarian. I believe in personal choice and freedom. But you have tons of freedom here.
Instead of using an OS (iOS in this case) with 25% market share that forces you to go through their AppStore, you can choose to use Android (which has 75% market share) and side load apps to your hearts content.
You don't get to choose if you're a developer. For mobile apps a prerequisite for success is to have an app for both Android (via the Play Store) and iOS. With iOS you're forced to deal with Apple. With Android you're forced to deal with Google.
Yeah, you can opt to target only one of them, but you're (usually) going to get out competed by a company that targets both.
There are plenty of indy iOS app developers who won’t go near Android and are doing quite well. I’m sure there are some Android only indy developers making a good living. I just don’t follow that market.
There are plenty of markets and Technologies I won’t touch with a ten foot pole.
Libertarianism is d̵e̵a̵d̵ * slowly dying, because it fails to recognize that corporations can exert a similar amount of oppressive force as governments. Your platform of choice is now your country, and the software that platform runs is your government.
I wouldn't say libertarianism is "dead" but rather is quick to fall prey to logical contradictions justifying totalitarianism, similar to the two prime time political teams.
You're right that there is little difference between a corporation that one is de facto forced to interact with, and a bona fide government. For example, one can easily reframe USG as a corporation that you form a contract with by owning land, renting, or being on a public way. This does not mean that our current society is a libertarian paradise.
Turing completeness shows us the ouroboros of expressivity with programming languages. It's unfortunate people let their guard down in other areas.
Libertarian thought is complex, non-static, and (importantly), non-monolithic. This is especially true for the relationship between people, government, and corporations. The generalizing statements in this thread reject vast swaths of ideas for no reason at all; even ideas that generally agree with the ideas in the thread. My guess is most people hold in their minds a caricature of libertarianism informed either by "that one libertarian guy from college" or social media postings. That's somewhat deserved, but also a shame.
Many people associate the word "libertarian" with right-libertarianism, which is the predominant form of libertarianism in the United States. Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism is right-libertarian.
On the other hand, left-libertarians oppose capitalism while supporting personal property rights. Left-libertarians and right-libertarians find common ground in rejecting authoritarian governments.
Libertarianism comprises a diverse collection of views that aim to advance individual freedom, and anyone who is not an authoritarian is likely to agree with some libertarian principles.
Can a corporation reach into my bank account and take my money via civil forfeiture without a trial? Can a corporation in prison me? Can a corporation break into my house without identifying themselves and shoot me? Can a corporation stop me while driving down the street for “fitting the description”?
I'm an independent app developer too, and I share your frustrations. Sometimes I wish I had the luxury of walking away from the App Store -- but with ~80% of my revenue coming from iOS, I can't do that.
Similarly, I can't give up on owning a Mac because you need one to develop for iOS.
On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.
I feel your pain. I would encourage you to grow and develop your audience on Android. There is a big market there to be tapped, which with some effort could equal or exceed your revenue from Apple. It's much easier to write cross-platform apps now than it was five years ago, thanks to frameworks like Flutter.
Of course, Apple would like to have us all believe that app developers couldn't make a living by writing and selling apps before the Invention of the App Store, and that they have done us all a great favor, one that warrants us paying them 30% of our income.
However, the reality is, this has always been possible. As early as the beginning of the 80s, indy developers made millions writing games for the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Amiga, and so on. You just had to work with a publisher or distributor, of which there were hundreds and it was a free market. In the 90s millions could be made from DOS and Windows apps in the same way. In the early '00s, it became possible to self-publish on the web and our apps would be indexed and marketed for us by search engines; we didn't even need a publisher, but could still choose to go through one if the value add merited the cost.
So there has been no radical innovation, no Invention that has changed what is possible for us to achieve as app developers. It's arguably a little bit easier to get our apps to market than it used to be, but given how onerous Apple's "guidelines" have become, I'm not even sure that is true. Writing websites serving apps and integrating with checkout engines just isn't that difficult... and most apps still need marketing to succeed because being listed in the App Store is not by itself sufficient.
The only thing that has changed, now that the mobile computing revolution has almost reached saturation point and the majority of screen time by consumers is on mobile devices, is that we are now all forced to publish through a single store on each platform, and we are permitted no alternative if we want to reach our customers. Equally, our customers are permitted no alternative way to obtain our products. There is no competition between publishers on Apple's platform, because there is only one publisher, Apple, by fiat of Apple; and we are now forced to pay a 30% tax, a figure which is not challenged by the usual mechanisms of competition, and supply and demand, which make markets efficient.
> and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along
Isn't that more a result of mobile devices opening up a new market? I agree the app stores made a lot of difference initially when they provided a lot of visibility (ie: free advertising) to small developers, but those days are over aren't they?
> On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.
I wonder how many apps actually are ramen-profitable on the App store. I often think that the dream of becoming rich (or even making a living) through the App store is just a myth perpetuated by Apple to attract developers; and nonsense from a statistical point of view. Do we have any numbers?
Getting out of iOS dev was the best career decision I’ve ever made. My baseline level of stress and frustration has plummeted. I also enjoy using my Samsung Note much more than I ever did any iPhone. It feels like the training wheels have been taken off my phone.
As developers I think we should all do what we can to nurture the open web. It’s the last truly developer friendly platform.
Apple more than anyone is hostile to the web. I still have a recurring iCloud charge I tried to cancel today. But I literally can't as it's not doable on any Apple website. You must use an Apple device or iTunes, neither of which I have.
I agree. There really is nothing more frustrating than spending months working on an app, to get it either rejected on some really minor issue or have to go back and forth with Apple for weeks explaining how things work from a customer and business perspective, constantly on tenterhooks as to whether they will give it the OK nod.
Then you go through the same thing each time you push an update, even for a minor bugfix like amending some foreign language strings, get a different reviewer who hasn't read the case notes (I'm guessing these must exist) and decides to do a deep-dive, or maybe a quick rubberstamp in a matter of hours. It seems like a total lottery from my experience. Maybe they just suddenly added a new clause that requires something being done differently and you aren't up on the latest app store guidelines... It really is so frustrating from a developers mental health perspective.
That's your choice to make, but pretending that developing web apps is all sunshine and lollipops and developing local apps for distribution via an OS vendor's store is fire and brimstone, is not realistic.
I don't know because you started off by making claims about "broken ecosystem".
The App Store may have undesirable qualities for some parties but to claim that it is a "broken ecosystem" just tells me that you're looking to exchange ridiculous hyperbole.
An ecosystem where one reviewer having a bad day can destroy your business meets just any useful definition of broken. And that's not even considering that most of the real money to be made in the app store is fleecing whales with scammy IAP.
It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone. Yes, there is a simulator available which you can run on Mac OS in a VM or on a Hackintosh, but you still will need a real device at the end of the day. Certain features like in-app purchases can only be tested on real devices. Furthermore, the App Review Board has the power to reject your app at any time until you provide them with a demonstration video which must be screen recorded on a real physical device, and on this ridiculous and unnecessary hoop to jump through I am speaking from personal experience.
Of course, you could always have a personal Android device and an iPhone solely for development purposes. Apple tries to force you to own a Mac and at least one iOS device (be it iPhone or iPad) to develop apps for the App Store. This is yet another example of their corporate greed. You can develop Android apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there's no need for a physical device.
> It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone
This applies to all platforms. I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that doesn't own the device they're developing for, we learned that lesson with Blackberry thank you.
$94 million income. RIM was definitely in decline by then. Both the iOS and Android market were very much mature 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.
"At its peak in September 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide."
I never said that they made more money but that the platform was generally better for executives
In 2012 I had a blackberry because clients that had strict security rules (one of them was in the diamonds business) allowed blackberrys but not other smartphones in their offices
>I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank). The law should make illegal restricting developers to any specific payment processor(s), too.
Not the same kind of regulation you describe, but still one that may solve a big chunk of your issues was covered here roughly a month ago[1], In which the EU plans to make those kinds of platforms more transparent, especially concerning bans and sudden refusals. But I see how that may not go far enough.
Thanks for the link, it's great to see the EU regulators starting to tackle these issues with actual regulations. I agree that it does not in its current form go far enough, but it's a good start.
Another shout out for WSL2. Feels good to have real Linux not Apple's kind of close but not quite, plus wide range of hardware to choose from and compatibility with commercial GUI apps.
(a). WSL is just a Linux VM. You can do this on any desktop OS. If you're not using WSL, you can even do it with multiple hypervisors at once if you so wish.
(b). macOS isn't, and has never tried to be, "Linux". It's POSIX.
There's a little more to wsl2 than just a VM. It's lighter and partially integrated. More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
> More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
It's not like that, it literally is that, because to enable WSL2 you end up running Windows itself on top of Hyper-V, and the Linux VM as a parallel VM.
> It's lighter and partially integrated.
I don't know what you think it's "lighter" than - it's a VM running on Hyper-V.
Given that with WSL/Hyper-V you'll be running Windows in a VM permanently, and WSL.. whenever it thinks you need it (maybe always too?) while Vbox you can just stop when you wish, it seems weird to refer to one as "lighter".
They're very different approaches with different tradeoffs for each.
Yes it's fantastic. Even the small things make a difference - for example, it's really nice to be able to use the same package manager on my local machine as I use on my Google Cloud servers, on which I'm running Ubuntu, instead of having to use brew. I can use GNU variants of CLI utilities like ps, head etc. rather than the quirky BSD variants found on Mac OS X. iTerm2 was binding me to Mac OS for a while, but Windows Terminal Preview is getting quite good, and IntelliJ itself has a very good built-in terminal that works well with WSL2.
This is off-topic, but your comment on your user base caught my attention.
Do you think Android app development can be monetarily worth the time investment for individual developers who would be just starting out?
I made two apps years ago and greatly enjoyed it, much more than any development I've done since. At that time, the markets were dominated by the big players. Only the big apps made any $$. Is that still the case making individual development a hobby with the occasional bit of $$?
Absolutely, yes, but if you are writing your own apps rather than being paid to write apps for other people, there's a strong luck element as with any entrepreneurial activity. I have six apps out right now, of which just one accounts for 90% of my revenue. Rather than setting out to write apps, I think it's better to think about an app as merely a vehicle to deliver a service, a product, some unit of customer value, from you to your customers. If you have something to offer that is of high value, you can definitely make a lot of money from an app. If you don't, no matter how well designed and built the app is, it is likely to fail.
Since being apartment-bound due to COVID, I've switched to doing most of my development on my desktop machine, so there hasn't been any urgent need for me to have a new laptop. I still have my late-2013 MBP, one of the last non-Butterfly / non-Touchbar laptops Apple made, which I use on rare occasions.
I've looked at the Windows laptops extensively though, and will likely get a ThinkPad X1 Extreme G2 or G3, or a Dell XPS 15, when the time comes. They both seem very good, with superior keyboards, displays, performance, and value compared to Apple's current lineup.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of those Linux laptops, and will definitely check them out. I hadn't seen the Zephyrus G14 either. How great to have so many choices!
Their fees are not so high as to be extortionate. They're not close to being deserving of that hyperbolic label.
The Apple and Google fees are a dramatic improvement over the model that they gradually replaced over the past decade.
Want to get on a retail shelf? Nope, you can't. One in a zillion odds you find someone to publish your box to retail - congratulations, now you get to keep less than 20% of the sale price.
If Apple's fees were 1/2 what they are, developers would be saying exactly the same thing about them. That's because the fees will always be too high unless they're close to zero, and in that scenario Apple is carrying an unfair burden.
And if you forcibly open up more app store competition, and then Apple decides to drop their fees below other competitors, it'll kill the store competition and Apple can sustain that indefinitely thanks to their device margins. They don't need to make money on the market. Then everyone will bitch about that being unfair competition, despite Apple serving up the low fees that were demanded. And on the complaining will go forever until we have a hyper regulated market with pricing set by bureaucrats. Why? Because Apple is really big, that's the real reason why. People hate big corporations almost universally, Apple is in the can do no right group; no matter what they do, a lot of people will bitch about their choices. The end result will be massive, stifling regulation, which everyone will then bitch about the consequences of.
> now I actually make more on Android. The Google Play review process is a breeze compared to Apple's laborious and stifling rules (although it is not perfect either by any means), and at some point, it's just not worth the hassle.
You should be making more on Android, it's a larger market. It's good that that former imbalance has corrected itself. Fortunately you're not entitled to an easy review process. It's a great thing that Apple adds friction to their store. It's their market, they should be able to set the rules. If it's not worth the hassle, then it's not worth the hassle, you've solved your own problem: give up on the Apple store.
I don’t know where to start with this. Antitrust is specifically about big corporations, that’s the whole point. We treat them differently. You’re saying if the market was opened up, prices would drop due to competition, so that means it shouldn’t be opened up? You think Apple’s in a situation where it has an unfair burden despite being one of the largest companies in the world?
> [..] and its monopolistic anti-competitive practices,
iOS owns 25% of the market. How is that a monopoly? You might not like their policies, but as you mention, you have a choice to move to a competitor with a vastly larger market share.
> I'm better off turning to the Play Store or one of the many other app stores that can be used on Android devices.
Doesn't this demonstrate that the Apple AppStore isn't a monopoly? That you have a clear alternative with 74% market share.
> I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices,
...but why would they do that? There is healthy market competition between Apple and Google. I'm old, so I remember when Windows dominated everything. That was 2007 (or '98 if you wanna talk IE anti-trust case). 13 years later and Microsoft has 0 market share in mobile devices. In another 13 years it is likely a new competitor could supplant the Google and Apple dominance.
“ A cartel is an organization created from a formal agreement between a group of producers of a good or service to regulate supply in order to regulate or manipulate prices. In other words, a cartel is a collection of otherwise independent businesses or countries that act together as if they were a single producer and thus can fix prices for the goods they produce and the services they render, without competition.”
Do you have any evidence that Apple and Google are conspiring illegally to set prices? Are they talking to each other to agree on price?
I was worried about this. I'm small potatoes but we make an open source app that can connect to self-hosted or paid-hosted services. So if they could have forced WP, they could have easily forced me too, now there is a baseline set.
To even get approved we had to make sure the App doesn't offer any sign-up or even billing info at all. And still went round and round for approval explaining how paid services, if any, are completely outside Apple realm.
This is so weird. I've removed and added in-app subscriptions to my app multiple times and never had any problems getting it approved. Even now my app is redirecting users to my website to purchase subscriptions, and never had an issue getting past the review process.
Your post here exemplifies why apple's behaviour is so problematic - you're left trying to adhere to a set of rules that even Apple can't manage to enforce consistently and correctly, facing the risk of having to pay an unexpected 30% tax on sales (and effectively have to raise prices accordingly).
Hopefully this logic is enough to get Apple in bother during their antitrust suits and Investigations - it seems quite ironic they are getting into scuffles 2 days before the first hearing in the epic case is scheduled (iirc - for the restraining motion).
It would be nice if small businesses and innovators could get on with innovating, rather than ensuring they comply with arcane rent seeking behaviour by a giant that won't let you distribute your app without offering them their cut.
Google is little better though here - their old Android market terms even titled a clause "non-competition". Unsurprisingly this has disappeared - I assume this doesn't comply with their "avoiding antitrust" dictionary of banned phrases.
It is not a tax on sales. It is the cost of using their channel to market.
If you host the app yourself on your website then how are people going to discover it. For most developers they would buy ads or invest in content or influencer marketing. Those marketing costs are your channel to market and obviously aren't a tax.
It's hilarious watching so many people on HN discuss this topic who are completely naive and ignorant to the realities of customer acquisition. Apple and Google hand you customers on a silver platter for the bargain, consistent price of 30%. Whereas as a startup I have to pay much higher to Facebook and Google for PPC ads.
How so? The only "help" that an app store can give you is that your app can show up in search result in the app store.
But that's only a problem because customers are used to searching in that app store (and that's because it's the only one on the platform).
If there was no app store, customers would search on the web, and it turns out that Google Web Search and Bing don't refuse to link to sites that don't give them 30% commission on sales.
Of course PPC ads cost money, but obviously app stores don't let you be a top result on arbitrary searches for free (since obviously that's a limited resource, so it's impossible to do that), so that seems a spurious comparison.
Because it doesn't work by you creating a web page and then it instantly appearing in the 1st SERP. It requires significant amounts of capital in content marketing and SEO. And for competitive categories e.g. most apps you would need tens to hundreds of thousands of investment to rank.
And Apple and Google publicise a lot of the well made apps either via their promotional articles or via app groups. And their search is just for apps so you aren't competing with all of the non-mobile apps like you do with Google.
> Apple and Google hand you customers on a silver platter for the bargain, consistent price of 30%.
30% is not a bargain, particularly when you're a small developer. And just because your app is approved doesn't mean that they're handing you customers on a silver platter either. There have been complaints for years over Apple's App Store search functionality, which they also have complete control over. It's wild to see someone cast so many passionate developers as naive and ignorant to the reality that 30% doesn't leave much room for any kind of profit. And all Apple did was give you as a developer permission to run your code on their devices. They're not guaranteeing you customers. They're just playing gatekeeper and adding little value beyond access to the market.
There are millions of app developers and you are saying that most of them are doing customer acquisition external to the App Store ?
Because I just did various searches for note taking and productivity apps on my phone and no one is buying ads. From my experience only the larger app developers invest in their own customer acquisition whilst the rest all rely on app discovery.
> There are millions of app developers and you are saying that most of them are doing customer acquisition external to the App Store ?
They can't do customer aquisition external to the App store because Apple prevents them from doing so.
Thats the very problem. Apple won't allow other app stores to compete, and you can't just download an app from someone's website, and install it.
Apple prevents you from doing so. They don't even offer some hidden setting which says "Allow 3rd party apps, warning, warning, warning, this could make your device less secure".
If the app stores are such a great deal then why do the alternatives have to be prohibited or purposely made into a disastrous user experience in order to get developers to use the app stores?
Hey, if I could use anything else apart from the App Store, I'd do it in a jiffy. But as it currently stands, you cannot distribute your app at all unless you have a developer license and you either publish it on the app store or buy a separate business deployment certificate (which only works on in-house devices and let's you MITM the devices basically)
> It is not a tax on sales. It is the cost of using their channel to market.
> If you host the app yourself on your website then how are people going to discover it. For most developers they would buy ads or invest in content or influencer marketing. Those marketing costs are your channel to market and obviously aren't a tax.
How can you distribute an app for iPhone on your own website?
The majority of the cost is simply for being able to participate in their market of 1B+ credit cards which lets ISV's frictionlessly sell Apps direct to consumers globally, it's not for the direct tangible benefits the App Store otherwise they wouldn't outlaw competing services that would handle the same services for a reduced royalty %.
Although what's not being discussed are negative consequences of allowing multiple App stores vs Apple's single unified curated UX. The UX for searching, purchasing, managing payments/subscriptions would be more fragmented & confusing. Being able to bypass curation by installing Apps from another App store which could install malware, scams, privacy violating & other undesirable Apps would hurt Apple's brand as a simple, secure & safe platform parents are confident in using themselves & giving to their kids (which for example allows us to manage/disable IAP's).
At 2M+ Apps your App isn't going to magically appear in front of all consumer devices, you still have to do the majority of the marketing yourself, unless you're lucky enough to be listed in editor picks or some curated list, but you're not paying for exposure or discoverability as the % royalty is the same regardless.
With that said 30% seems fair & standard across most platforms [1]. I don't really understand why 30% is unfair for iOS which has created the most lucrative & accessible market for ISV's. It's simply a cost of participating in a market. Just like you don't get free shelf life in shops (virtual or physical) if you make a product, free access to Game consoles if you make a game, free top search placement if you make a website, etc.
Makes me think that at some point showing a restaurant menu with prices is soon going to get the ire of Apple for suggesting an offline monetization that they aren’t a part of.
Apple collects 0.15% of all credit card transactions made through Apple Pay for US-based cards. The percentage is higher for the Apple Card, of course.
Of course they’ll take 0. You do realize that Google is in the business of harboring as much data about you as possible. It’s much more worthwhile for them to know what you’re buying than for them to take a cut from using Google pay.
They take a cut from the banks (which may or may not be passed onto the retailer, I'm not sure).
Individual retailers do not form an agreement with Apple. Hell, retailers often don't even explicitly and individually support Apple Pay, it just comes through accepting standard contactless payments.
Lots of people don't think "digital" things are real, which lets Apple get away with putting 30% tax on an increasingly large part of the economy.
You can sell a paper book, but an e-book gets 30% Apple tax. You can sell a CD, but an MP3 gets Apple tax. You can sell Carcasone game on cardboard pieces, but an app version must give Apple a cut.
"The App Store guidelines ensure a high-quality, reliable, and secure user experience. They are transparent and applied equally to developers of all sizes and in all categories." - tim cook
i can envision a scenario where apple legal, in preparation for their battle with epic, gave that statement a critical look. after realizing the myriad of exceptions and omissions they have in app store enforcement, they decided they need to run a clean up campaign immediately and the WP app simply ended up a casualty of this process.
> What’s more, Mullenwag told us that he had previously offered to strip other mentions of the paid plans out of the app (even workarounds like when a user views a preview of their own WordPress webpage and then navigates to WordPress.com), only to have those suggestions rejected by Apple.
Having to remove those kinds of work-arounds is part of what bugs me about apples control over the app store.
Well, we’ll never know if it would have turned out differently at another time. They can be stubborn, but they can also recognise mistakes and correct them.
That said, there is no comparison: forcing a developer to add features to an app is nothing like enforcing the TOS the developer agreed with and is trying to subvert.
Yes, we know. Ask any iOS developer friend of yours and you'll know that Apple never backs down, until the incident gets publicity.
And the non-malicious explanation for that is simple. The majority of the million apps in the app store are small fry to them, and they can't scale support to that level in any empathetic rational manner.
My wishlist for legislation is:
1/ Apple has to allow side loading of apps (make it an advanced developer setting, with plenty of warnings and periodic reminders, that's fine).
2/ Apple cannot force usage of Apple pay and apple sign in.
3/ Apple cannot force developers to hide any options or even information about alternative mechanisms to pay for content, or sign up to a service.
Yeah it certainly is perfectible. I’d just like to retain decent security at the platform level. We know that if sideloading can be enabled, at some point Adobe will require it because they won’t be bothered.
I am conflicted about Sign In with Apple. It’s heavy handed, but I clearly benefit by not having to trust Google or Facebook for this. There should be a standard with several providers, like FIDO, but somehow I don’t see this happening as long as Facebook and Google are utterly dominant.
We've seen dozens of situations like this over the years and often we find out that Apple and the developers were discussing behind the scenes way before it was public.
Calling that an apology is a bit rich. It wasn't "confusion" that was the problem, it was forcing monetization that was the problem. They basically say it was all WordPress's fault.
I think given the nature of modern multi-nationals with vertical integration and hugely diversified product spaces, we need to rethink anti-trust in general.
My test is fairly simple: are you generating value and capturing some portion of it at the point of generation, or are you doing something else? Anything that is "something else" should at the very least be questioned. Questions 10x if the party doing "something else" is trying to encourage information asymmetry as part of this. e.g. Apple telling app developers that not only can they not integrate another payment option in their apps, they can't even inform users that such an option exists elsewhere.
Arguably the main issue in this case is that Apple is not just requiring themselves to be the payment gateway in transactions where they are involved (getting an app onto your device), they also want to insert themselves into transactions where they provide no value (e.g. subscriptions). In the case of my Spotify subscription, Apple is not paying for bandwidth, payment processing costs, or anything else, but they still get a cut.
If you're capturing value from a transaction you're not directly involved in, I think that's a problem. Apple's argument is that they are enabling such things by building the device/operating system, and historically that has been a valid argument, but I think we've come to the point where that just isn't enough anymore. You need to either directly be providing value in that particular transaction, otherwise it's problematic. You just end up with too many cases like this.
Is running the App Store expensive? Then charge for actual costs. But this sort of bait and switch of "we're providing distribution but are inserting ourselves in subscriptions we have no hand in" is only possible due to their market position.
Apple is being too ridiculous at this point. Devs need App Store but Apple also need devs. Being so hostile is going to hurt them pretty bad, both for Apple and for Google.
I use F-Droid everyday to install and manage apps outside the Play Store and it works out fine for me. Android is also open source. If I don't like the way something is done then I'm free to change it, and there are multiple ROMs that I can choose from as well.
Because Google had scary warnings that downloading Fortnite from outside the App Store my lead to security vulnerabilities. Where did they ever get that idea from?
The only effective way to deal with apple is to vote with your wallet and your development machine. Nothing else will help. They can do with their platform what they want. Start developing for other platforms and take your users with you.
We should have a GNU like alternative for the mobile. Mobiles are the primary computing devices now, and we should give liberty to the developers to distribute their products as they wish.
Not exactly GNU like, but you could use LineageOS without the Google apps installed. There are other open app stores like FDroid, and you can sideload as well.
I would really love to see more open source applications on the app store like:
scummvm
Dosbox
iSh
I imagine that app store issues prevent these publishers from publishing to this platform. That's pretty sad especially since there are working builds for iOS for these applications.
It would be nice if Apple supported open source a bit more than it has on these platforms.
iPads and iPhones are fairly powerful devices. My iPad would replace my laptop for many usecases if I could download a CSV file and edit it in a text editor without safari blocking the download and if I had a bash terminal and the ability to download and build source code without jumping through hoops.
This is what we would have if AOL won in the 90's. That round of walled gardens failed, but this round is much better funded.
We need protocols not platforms. The longer this goes on, the more they will ratchet up the pressure. The open internet has always won out in the past, but this round of walled gardens has a strangle hold. More people conflate Facebook with the internet than ever did AOL or CompuServe.
This behavior looks like anti-developer in many cases.
On one hand, Apple will lose some ability to say they are protecting consumer privacy if they open their phones to any software, android is proof of that. Someone else’s freedom is always someone else’s constraint.
I know many consumers benefit from being able to hand their grandparents a phone that will work smoothly and be updated for 5 years.
google killed my first app on which i worked for a year for copyright claims by rockstar games take two! it was in fair use with no commercial usage. free. it was an interactive map. all i used were the map and added my own icons and locations. since it was completely free it was under the fair usage right. i referred to the dozen other apps that had ads in them and all they said was just that one app is allowed doesn't mean another is too.
i was buffed at that statement. its a disgrace. my app had 120 k downloads in a year and people were loving it because no ads and useful. this is the state of app development. how long will we tolerate this!
This should be an unpopular opinion but I kind of respected Apple's previous stance, and I'm in a way a bit disappointed they've backed down, but I think they've needed to because they are moving too quickly.
5 years from now we'll likely see Apple Silicon powering Apple's entire new product lineup, and Swift developers will be deploying software across the entire product lineup with minimal effort. Swift is both quick and safe, so we can hope these new softwares will be both fast, secure and free of critical bugs.
This to me is a really interesting and appealing alternative to the frustrating world of slow web apps that invade your privacy and fill your computer with bloat. I don't see Apple's previous stance as being greedy about obtaining a 30% cut, rather it is about trying to bring to fruition a vision of the future where users can perform their computing needs with fast and secure native apps. I hope we don't legislate away such a reasonable opportunity for people to be freed from Google and Facebook invasion.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. "Boo $BigCo", "yay $BigCo" fan-v.-antifan cage matches are not curious conversation. We want curious conversation.